Heavy armor in 120 degree heat over rocky terrain. Have you been drinking? Plus, how does that protect one from mines?

I'm talking about brief actions in house-to-house fighting. I'm not talking about having these guys have this armor on all the time. They would put it on just before they're about to enter combat.

As for the heat-- again, part of the idea is giving them LOTS of machines to move them around, as well as their armor. Keep them off their feet as much as possible. You could even have a refrigerator on a cart to fill the armor with cool air periodically. Not a perfect solution, but enough to cool them down for a bit.

Hmm, interesting idea, though I'm not sure if I'd want to ride a trike ;) We already have a wonderful vehicle to get us up close to buildings before clearing them : the M2 series Bradley. It wasn't designed for warfare in dense urban areas, but it acquitted itself well (see Sadr City April 04-Oct 04).

What makes the Bradley so good in close urban terrain? First, its armor makes anything short of an armor-piercing RPG useless. Second it's not so big that it can't move down most streets. And, if it needs to turn around quickly, it's a tracked vehicle (unlike the Stryker) and can pivot itself without any forward or backward movement. Third, the superior thermal sights on the Brad can let the gunner see everything. Trust me, these sights are the shiznit. Fourth, the weapons on the Brad work well in this terrain : a 7.62mm MG and a 25mm cannon (which can fire high-explosive rounds). I only wish they'd make a modification to the smoke dischargers to allow them to fire flechette (like the old assault mortars on the German Mk VI Tiger). Lastly, the Brad can comfortably carry five fully equipped men - double that number for short trips.

Combining your "shock trooper" idea with the delivery vehicle we already have might work. I'd have to hit the gym a bit more to wear a blast suit, but hey, not getting shot is cool!

PS:

One thing the Brad needs is a fucking AC unit.

That is all.

Ace,

If the Army's "Future Warrior" technologies work as intended, new nanotech fabrics will provide the protection you're thinking about--without the weight of body armor. The first phase of the Future Warrior system is scheduled for 2010.

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jul2004/n07272004_2004072705.html

In order to get full protection from a reasonalble range of handheld weapons the soldier would have to be encased in a medival style suit of armor made of ceramic plate. Kevlar could be used to handle the joints (it won't stop rifle rounds though) but that sets up weak points a smart or lucky enemy can exploit.

There are serious problems with this kind of unpowered armor system, and they've been with us since the beginning of the eternal armor vs bullet battle.

Mobility would be the largest initial concern. A soldier could not go for cover or easily climb around obstacles, not to mention they'd have to spend their time widening any doors they hope to go through by a foot. Even with vehicles to assist, these shock troops would not have an easy time of getting around, and once off of their mounts would be extremely vulnerable to being swarmed by jackasses with knives.

Overheating and exhaustion would be next greatest concern, unless the armor suits had some kind of powered cooling system. That might buy you a few minutes, but the sheer weight of the whole thing plus whatever other supplies the soldier would have to carry would tire even a SEAL.

If you want a good idea of what the storm troopers like to wear for protection while doing their storming take a look at the Delta Force guys (Black Hawk Down did a good job at hinting to the armor issue from the fighter's POV) who live by the principle that speed is its own armor.

Even if it's extremely short term, as you've speculated, the unpowered suit just doesn't seem to be worth the trade-off for mobility.

We don't have the technology for this right now (or we do, but it's still in the lab). Briefly: you need active armor that undergoes state-changes -- piezoelectric ceramic, certain carbon polymers, even an aerogel substance. The problem is that for every armor you can devise, there's a countermeasure to defeat it.

With current body armor, we have protection against small-arms rounds and shrapnel. Rifle rounds can penetrate, and they do little to protect against explosions.

The military is actually trying to get away from the idea of "pervasive armor" as a force-protection mechanism (see the Future Combat Systems link I provided in the previous thread). The idea is not to survive getting hit; the idea is not to get hit in the first place. That's why most of the R&D these days is going into "networked warfare" and "battlespace control". The idea is that you make every troop a node in a large and highly-parallelized network; that way, you are rarely taken by surprise and consequently you can engage your enemy from standoff positions where your armor doesn't need to be as robust. Plus, the US military has the best close-air support and combined-arms tactics of any military in the world -- our troops can depend on precision firepower against a multitude of threats, so they are able to bring more to the fight than just themselves.

I think the biggest need among the infantry right now is not body-armor, but better weapons: our current combat arms (M16A2 and the 9mm Beretta sidearm) are just too weak for the one-shot stops that we need in this kind of fighting. I've heard that the Army might go back to the venerable .45 Colt, or to a new 10mm pistol.

In infantry fighting, the old saw is still true: the best defense is a good offense. Armor will always have a place, but US doctrine will (rightly, I think) focus more on mobility and lethality than up-armoring.

The problem isn't mobility getting to the battle, it's mobility in the midst of battle.

Mobility is most important when the action starts. If someone is weighed down by too much equipment, no matter what it is, they move too slowly and are too vulnerable. Increasing armor is a distinct tradeoff: you are less likely to die if you're shot, but the increased weight drastically increases your chance of being shot.

Meanwhile, it also makes you more vulnerable to things like grenades, which can hit you with shrapnel where the armor ain't.

As has been stated by others it's always a trade off between mobility and protection. By becoming less mobile, they increase the amount of time they are targets and give the enemy more time to take you out. Just standing there covered in all that stuff hurts at those temperatures, even if you do have something carrying you everywhere. It hurts to breathe with that much shit on.

Given Steven's love of anime, maybe he can help me here: wasn't there some Japanese manga/anime series awhile back about a full-body armor-suit? They even made a (crappy) live-action movie out of it later. I want to say Gundam Wing, but I don't think that's it....

Ace, it isn't that the guys in the DOD working on this stuff haven't read their Heinlein and such, it's that this is real life. Hard realities keep creeping in.

They are trying. There have been plenty of lab demos of interesting technological improvements for improving battlefield survivability but... major BUT here, vast numbers of great lab demos never become viable products or do so only after decades of slow refinements. There are all too often reliability issues or bugs that could be easily exploited. The battlefield equivalent of a single-day exploit means a lot of dead or maimed soldiers. soldiers are under these threats already but at least are trained to best handle the known behavior of their equipment. Any great improvements that are ready to go from lab to field testing today will still take years typically to reach the guys in hot zones because nobody there wants to be a beta tester on top of everything happening to them.

I touch on this tangentially.

We are doing things that increase the overall armor capability of the individual soldier. Using just the reasoning you discuss. Even though it's available, the troops in the field just aren't clamoring for it. The comments are along "well that's nice, but it weighs how much ??"

Rusty

wasn't there some Japanese manga/anime series awhile back about a full-body armor-suit?

It's kind of a staple in anime (a sub-genre known as mecha). There are bio-armor suits and giant mechas, as well as normal-sized suits, as in Macross. Gundams are super-sized versions.

While heavy armor might block small arms fire at close range, the kind of protection to make someone invulnerable would be impossible to fight in. In normal suits, a shot to the arm or leg can take someone out of a fight. Armoring up everything would weight hundreds of pounds and have no flexibility, and armoring up the torso and head would just make them harder to rescue when they are wounded.

Secondly, flexibility and speed is important because hand-to-hand combat has never disappeared from the battlefield. If you can't move and fight, all the armor in the world won't save you from some guy with a knife and some determination. In house-to-house storming, booby traps and hand to hand would be impossible to beat with that kind of restriction.

I'm all for armor, but we can't do it right now. Kevlar doesn't block rifle rounds, and ceramic inserts to do it are too heavy.

Heh. The EOD unit on my FOB just got a Segway so they could move around more easily while wearing their bomb suits. Turns out, it's pretty easy to fall over while riding the damn thing in a bomb suit, and they can't really use it.

The truth is, the armor we're currently wearing is pretty damn bulky. I challenge the pompous blowhards calling for "better armor" to try shooting and moving with 60+ pounds of gear on. If they gave us more armor, you can bet we'd be required to wear it.

(However, I would be willing to try to adjust if it meant I would get to patrol in a Storm Trooper uniform. That would be so cool.)

SGT Jackson
Baghdad, Iraq

Next generation assault weapon . . .

http://www.atk.com/AdvancedWeaponSystems/advanceweaponsystems_xm25.asp

Better infantry better armor better weapons dont go into batle on a bicycle with a slingshot againsta whole bunch of T-72 tanks you will get blwn away before you have time to put your first stone in your sling

In F.E.A.R. the pc game, there were shocktroopers of that sort, but of course their uber-armored suits also had increased exoskeleton strength.

That would be so cool.

Sgt. Jackson,

What's cool is hearing from you guys in Iraq--now that's REALLY cool.

Sorry the Segway didn't work out well for you. Was it the civilian model, or the new one they've been developing for the military? I saw a picture a few weeks ago of the military model. It looked like it might be useful.

There is always a price. I've had pian in my knees since '96 because of my time in the infantry and the weights we carried. I made sure that when we stopped on marches I was near a tree or something I could use to lever myself back up again.
Knee deep in snow in Bosnia, the armor of the day was hot. In Iraq it gets quite painful... The hottest temp I officially saw was 132.
Not to mention that when you are fighting in a built up environment just about all movement is at a run. It is painful to think about what it would be like to do so in full body armor. It would kill soldiers due to heat both directly by heat stroke and indirectly as they were short handed because some were left behind on the way due to heat exhaustion and cramps.
Then there is the other issue. What nice stuff would we not have because the money was buying this new armor?

SSG Graves

Turn in your geek hat geoff.

Stateside, the giant robot genre is called mecha, though properly that refers to any machine/machine heavy environment.
Macross had ~15m or so tall mecha- giant transforming planes (based on the F-15). Most Gundams are about the same size.
You might be thinking of Genesis Climber Mospeada/Robotech: The New Generation which had transforming motorcycles that would become personal body armor.
For full body armor (in anime, where there is no weight or heat to worry about) you could look at Jin-Roh or Cerebrus

Please keep all comments by people who use the equipment and delete the rest, including mine. Thanks

Blogrolled you.

Actually - quite a few armies maintain bicycle hussars. It's an amazing way to haul a bunch of kit at decent sustained speed over almost any terrain, with no need for a fuel train.

Hussars can carry nough nasty surprises in a fairly sneaky way to give them real good odds against a whole bunch of T-72 tanks.

Off the top of my head, the Chinese do this, allowing every bicycle infantry squad to have a towed heavy MG and ammo, plus full field packs and still manage twice marching speed.

Bikes can tow mortars, heavy antitank rockets, or multiple light AT weapons.

And of course, you could choose to up-armor the hussars, since they could carry the weight and remain mobile.

More thinking aloud on my site regarding the topic of armor.

Y'all might be thinking of the "hard suits" in Bubblegum Crisis. But let's not derail this thread, OK?

Even when the armor works the soldier will still probably get knocked on his ass from the impact. (Remember that video of the medic shot by the sniper?) And how would a slow-moving shocktrooper do in a combat situation like this?

One problem is that there is no such thing as a front line when it comes to MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain). Shock troops might be useful for a specifc raid on a specific target, but then again, we've got those already in the form of SEALS, Delta Force, Recon, etc.

Having a special armor set for a select group of troops gets to be problematic from a supply point of view as well. Two sets of gear you have to maintain/replace.

The other intangible here is the hard reality of the fact that in combat, people die. The best way to "shock" the enemy is through speed and mobility. High op-tempo, don't give them time to react or adapt. This means very little in the way of rest periods. Mobility is often more important than heavy armor. The ability to duck, dodge, and dive is much more likely to keep you alive in many cases than a SAPI plate.

Other considersation: first aid. When you do take hit, if it takes a crew of 5 just to get you out of your body armor, you could bleed out before they could get to the wounded area.

The best idea was the active/reactive armor. Adaptive state-change gels or composites, especially if the can return to the original state after deformation. Or maybe some graphite/ceramic/kevlar combo.

Take the M1A1. Very survivable. Heavy armor. 71 tons. Takes a lot to kill one, but there are a lot of place it can't go.

Maj B-

MAJ B almost made the point. We already HAVE "super-duper heavy-duty" armor in the system. It's called the M-1 Abrams. And in it, you can go most places -- you just can't ever use that house again afterwards....

A couple of bank robbers tried something like this in LA in 1997. They died.

http://www.emergency.com/lapdbank.htm

Maybe it's the geek in me, when but I hear "Infantry Body Armor", I can't help but think of this this.

Feh. heavily armored space marines always get the cute nerd chicks.

About the only useful purpose for the kind of armor Ace has in mind would be bomb-disposal, and they already have a suit like that. I've tried one on -- it's heavy as hell and you can barely move, and even in an air-conditioned facility I was sweating buckets after about two minutes. Not something I'd want to have to move around in while being shot at.

Ace, good idea. My guess is that the military is working on various concepts right now. Just as SWAT teams have heavier armor than do patrol officers, you could have specialty soldiers.

One approach might be to have a secondary set of armor for members of Delta Force for the secondary stage of battle.

I think this is about the nineteenth post on body armor.

I tried to be serious, offered reasonable comments on the various trade-offs involved, and threw in relevant references to Saladin's light cavalry and the heavily-armored Crusaders.

But damn! I miss bbeck.

When are we going to start talking about hooters again?

The IBA comes with a kevlar neck and throat protector(as well as a kevlar groin protector) but I never wore them. They were uncomfortable and restricted my movement. In fact, nearly every Soldier I knew went without them. The same can be said about the deltoid protector. Few Soldiers wore them and fewer wanted to. It's one thing to be riding an Uparmor as a gunner, in which case I would wear whatever I could, it's another to be on foot conducting patrols through urban areas. And I was a medic!

Turn in your geek hat geoff.

The one I was thinking of had this super-advanced powered body armor that was in a box that fell off a truck. Some kid (natch) gets in and is chased everywhere by the baddies trying to recover the armor. I'm pretty sure that it started with an "M," which is why "Macross" came to mind. But yeah, Macross is a Robotech offshoot. I've seen the Genesis Climber Mospeada series, but that wasn't what so much what I had in mind.

Geoff, that sounds like "The Guyver". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101988/

HowardDevore, yah Robotech was da shit! :-D

Wasn't "The Guyver" bio-armor? I'm thinking of a climb-in mecha suit.

Yah, Guyver was some sort of alien bio-mecha thingy, so probably different from what your thinking. Same plot though.

guyver shot LASERS out of his BOOBS wut is up with japanimation?

But yeah, Macross is a Robotech offshoot.

And not to stink up the thread further, but wasn't Robotech the Macross offshoot, technically? I preferred Robotech anyway, but if I recall it was just a bunch of different shows repackaged in one universe for US audiences, and Macross was the first series.

The Guyver! That's what I was thinking of!

...and holy God what a piece of shit movie that was...got it on a whim while at the video-rental place, paid a buck for it, and still felt cheated.

Your thinking of Gasaraki (climb in mecha) I bet. As far as an anime (and live action movies) with wearable armor, Jin Roh (anime) and Stray Dogs: Kerberos Panzer Cops; Red Spectacles (live action)

The Dept of Defense funds many many researchers around the country to continue with cutting-edge research. Some of it is very very cool, some of it is wacky-sounding too, and a lot is both. I get to hear about some of it. Imagine that your tent produces photovoltaic energy, and your roll-up battlefield map is in fact a flexible display screen capable of recieving signals (=dynamically-changing map, also remotely destructible).

Lots of money being spent on ultra-high-tech armor, folks. They really are working on it.

Gasarki is still larger than the one I saw - I bought the one I'm thinking of 10 years ago from The Right Stuf on VHS. It wasn't episodic, and I'm still pretty sure that it started with an "M." I gave it to a friend: I'll give him a call tomorrow and see if he still has it.

The Guyver! That's what I was thinking of!

Complete with Mark Hamill and Jimmie Walker. A stinker of Brobdingnagian proportions.

The DoD is working a number of different projects that would make better armor possible. Here's a few:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/03_exo.shtml

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,49828-0.html

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-03/jhu-rsb030503.php

I ran across this yesterday as I was trying to figure out what was possible right this second.

Warwick Mills

It's actually a facinating site - Warwick is the firm that made the mars lander "balloons" that allowed the mars rovers to bounce to a soft landing.

And their Special Ops gloves would very likely make an excellent gift to anyone in the field. At fifty bucks, not at all expensive, considering what they do. You can get sleeve style protectors as well. Just the thing for diving for cover or doing breakfalls on concrete covered with shards of glass.

They make specialty body armor for industrial water-blasting which, if you adapted the design to combat, would actually work, more as heavy-duty scuff-proofing, so that the wearer just didn't need to be concerned about falling on sharp things.

That would be my primary concern in an urban combat environment - sharp things, ankle-busters, catching the edge of a blast, all of the tiny things that can make you vulnerable to an aimed shot.

It's pretty clear from paging thru this and other resources that stopping an aimed rifle shot is unrealistic.

But it's not a common thing, either. Not statistically, compared to bullets fired. But people are injured all the time in evading direct fire, or from richochets, sharp glass, frag and sharp sticks. In an urban environment, you can add in every potential wound contaminant known to man.

So a "scuff-resistant" soldier is achievable, and at a realistic cost - and the effect in reducing injuries is very high. Trying to make them bullet-resistant all over the body - not so easy.

And if weapons like the XM25 airburst assault weapon become standard, such "scuff-proofing" will become vital.