In the future, I can say with very high degrees of confidence, the American Army is probably going to be fighting in urban areas. We need to man, organize, train and equip the force for operations in urban areas, highly dense urban areas, and that’s a different construct. We’re not organized like that right now.
– Gen. Mark A. Milley, Chief of Staff of the Army.
The wars of the future will be fought in megacities around the world by soldiers connected — and possibly even augmented — by neural implants and AIn this episode, we examine how military leaders are preparing for a radical shift in combat.
Looking for more episodes? Find them wherever you listen to podcasts.
Subscribe.
Pew pew o.o
“High energy laser weapons have been a system that the United States has wanted to add into their defense portfolio since the invention of the laser,” said senior VP of contracts at Dynetics Ronnie Chronister in a press release.
The system was designed to defend against missiles, rockets and artillery, according to Defense News. It could also prove useful against military drones and other unmanned aircraft.
The news comes after luxury automaker Rolls-Royce unveiled a new hybrid power source intended to continuously power 100-kilowatt laser weapons earlier this week. According to today’s statement, Rolls-Royce will provide the power source and thermal management system for the HEL TVD.
The scenario military thinkers propose would double the number of jet fighters in a typical battle formation from four to eight. But instead of the additional aircraft being identical to an F-35 joint strike fighter, or F-15E Strike Eagle, they are low-cost, unmanned jets.
One might carry extra air-to-air missiles. Another may only have a sensor suite to boost situational awareness for the pilots in the traditional aircraft.
Whatever their payload, the enemy has to contend with double the number of targets on their radars. They have multiple “dilemmas” in front of them, giving U.S. forces an asymmetric advantage.
A new Li-ion battery technology developed by the US Army has piqued the interest of Jeff Dahn, Tesla’s main battery research partner.
In the latest issue of the journal Nature, the CCDC Army Research Laboratory (ARL), which is an element of the U.S. Army, released a study demonstrating a new battery technology based on a new cathode chemistry.
They claim that the chemistry is “completely free of transition metal and delivering unprecedented high capacity by reversibly storing Li-ion at high potential (~4.2 V).”
With the rise of enhanced being the world will change at a fast pace similar games such as black ops 3 are a proper representation of possible outcomes in warfare. Like for instance sentient warfighting robot beings or cybernetically enhanced humans. The extremes of these also are seen in wetware which can essentially not have many limits so increased strength intelligence really anything you can imagine. Really sci-fi games such as halo are not far off at the possibilities of warfare. Really we are only limited by our imagination.
The author of “Ghost Fleet” has some guesses — and some questions that U.S. defenders will have to answer.
Robots, artificial intelligence, cyberwar, 3D printing, bio-enhancements, and a new geopolitical competition; the 21st century is being shaped by a range of momentous, and scary, new trends and technologies. We should also expect them to shape the worlds of insurgency and terrorism.
With so much change, it is too early to know all that will shake out from these new technologies in the years leading toward 2030 and beyond. But we can identify a few key trends of what will matter for war and beyond, and resulting questions that future counter-insurgents will likely have to wrestle with. Below are three, pulled from a recent New America report on what the tech and wars of 2030 might portend.
Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) and US Army Research Lab (ARL) have taken a critical step on the path to high energy batteries by improving their water-in-salt battery with a new type of chemical transformation of the cathode that creates a reversible solid salt layer, a phenomenon yet unknown in the field of water-based batteries.
Building on their previous discoveries of the water-in-salt electrolytes reported in Science in 2015, the researchers added a new cathode. This new cathode material, lacking transition metal, operates at an average potential of 4.2 volts with excellent cycling stability, and delivers an unprecedented energy density comparable, or perhaps higher than, non-aqueous Li-ion batteries. The authors report their work on May 9 in the journal Nature.
“The University of Maryland and ARL research has produced the most creative new battery chemistry I have seen in at least 10 years,” said Prof. Jeffrey Dahn of Dalhousie University in Canada, an expert in the field not affiliated with the research. “However, it remains to be seen if a practical device with long lifetime can be created.”
