Ares: A Defense Technology Blog

Top War Tech #1: No Tech

The best weapon in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan isn't any armored truck, flying robot or radio jammer. It's the squishiest, most amazing technology of them all: the human brain. I return to blogger Jason Sigger's recent assertion:

The guys in the field always want more gear to execute the mission. In the words of Colonel John Boyd, the military needs to invest in people, ideas and equipment -- in that order. It's our tendency to flip that into reverse, not because it's correct but because it's easier. Maybe we ought to be smarter and develop better concepts before defaulting to overly expensive technological solutions.

Top War Tech #2: Tough Trucks and Tiny Drones

The #2 spot in my series on the best war techs is a tie between blast-proof trucks and small aerial drones: two life-saving technologies that, despite their proven capabilities, have been neglected by a Pentagon bureaucracy that prefers to grow its own super-expensive programs than to invest in existing systems that the troops know, love and want more of.

Top War Tech Reader Suggestion #3: M-2 Machine Gun

"I’d like to nominate the Browning M-2 .50-caliber machine gun, in all its incarnations," Dutch reader Bart van der Schoor writes in. He praises the ubiquitous heavy machine gun, which sees daily combat use in Iraq and Afghanistan, for its:

low-tech, vehicle-mountable firepower and historic value. And you can't deny 1.27-centimeter-thick lead fingers eating up your cover. It doesn’t need batteries and every idiot can fire and clean it -- albeit not that precisely, but that makes it even more dangerous! In 14 years it will be 100 years old. And the thing that would be replacing it, the Objective Individual Combat Weapon -- with the complicated high-tech airburst stuff -- I haven’t heard of for a while. Scrapped?

Top War Tech #3: Targeting Pods

Five years ago, tactical air power was in danger of becoming irrelevant, unbeknownst to the tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel who fly and maintain the Pentagon's roughly 4,000 attack jets, fighters and bombers. While the Air Force -- and the air components of the Navy and Marine Corps, too -- were still mostly equipping to bomb fixed, pre-determined targets deep behind enemy lines with big formations of mutually supporting airplanes, the bad guys were up to something else entirely. They were ditching the heavy equipment, organizing into small cells and planning on disappearing into cities and mountains when the U.S. airplanes appeared overhead. Fighter pilots just didn't have the right tools to find and swiftly hit tiny, fleeting targets in cluttered, chaotic environments.

Top War Tech #4: Jammers

Roadside bombs have killed around 2,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it could have been much much worse. Thanks to better training, better tactics and some choice pieces of new tech, U.S. forces evade, block or destroy 90 percent of Improvised Explosive Devices. One of the most important bomb-defeating techs is the Warlock radio jammer, which scrambles the signals -- from garage door openers or other simple radio transmitters -- that detonate many IEDs. Warlock is my pick for the #4 most successful war tech.

Top War Tech #5: Talon Robots

Improvised Explosive Devices are the biggest killers of U.S. troops in Iraq ... and one of the biggest killer of IEDs is Foster-Miller's Talon robot.

"It's an excellent robot, and I would rate it as being the best one in theater," ordnance disposal Airman Robert Wester told an Air Force reporter. But how does the Talon compare to other robots -- say, the bestselling iRobot?

Ares' Top War Tech: Handheld Computers

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen the first rollouts of handheld computers meant to give troops on patrol the kind of processing power once reserved for division command posts. This perhaps represents the vanguard of a sweeping revolution in the way wars are fought.

Handheld computers are part of the Defense Department's long term vision for network-centric warfare, where every soldier is connected to a seamless supply of real-time information. Such devices already being used in Iraq and Afghanistan include language translators, logistics and medical tracking, and terminals for displaying live video being captured by nearby drones.

Top War Tech #6: Global Positioning System

I'll let Danger Room pal Robot Economist handle the latest nominee in our Top War Tech series:

The idea for GPS originally came from a Navy program designed to provide navigational data to Polaris missile submarines to ensure the accurate delivery of their doomsday payloads.  Since then, GPS has enabled a number of enormous changes in military operations and tactics in three ways:

Ares' Top War Tech: Precision Munitions

One thing that the U.S. has learned is that the "Shock and Awe" strategy of overwhelming force, tried out on Iraq in 2003, does not always work. It left shattered infrastructure, lots of rubble to provide cover for the enemy and, worst of all, dead and injured civilians. Out go 2,000-pound bombs; in come weapons one-quarter and one-eighth the size. But with neither the time nor the money to invent all-new weapons, the goal is to solve problems with off-the-shelf technology and components.

About three-quarters of targets for U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are mobile, according to Defense Department officials. At the same time, as combat operations  become a fixture of ongoing life in those countries, U.S. officials eagerly look to refine and restrict bomb explosions to allow their use in populated areas.

Top War Tech #7: Hot Chow

The U.S. military does a lot with very little. It took 15 million U.S. troops to fight World War II for just four years. We've been at this globalterrorwarthingy for six years now with a force of 2 million, counting reserves. For the average trooper on the ground that means long tours: up to 15 months for Army soldiers. And the only way such lengthy service is possible is with plentiful, regular hot food.

That's right. Food is my pick for the seventh-best war tech.

I should know. I've eaten a couple hundred meals in military chow halls in Iraq (and Lebanon and Timor, too), and they always made me feel better about the shootings, bombings, riots and run-ins with fussy Frenchmen in baby-blue U.N. berets. The best food I've ever tasted was at a base in Baqubah on January 27th, 2005, the evening after I got blown up by a suicide bomber. Fried chicken. Mac and cheese. Peace of mind.