National Defense Magazine - Top 10 Disruptive MilTech for the Future

Hypersonics was at #5. I would have put EMP weapons and cyber warfare in there somewhere.
 
There is growing concern in the Pentagon that the U.S. military is in a technology rut.

Bullcrap. I think we have many one off "silver bullet" classified advanced weapon programs. The problem with these are that taking them out of "special access" status removes several layers of security and instantly makes them a target for foreign espionage (if they aren't already). The Russians and Chinese have not spent trillions inventing as we have, and are perfectly content to wait it out and steal our R & D as soon as it is feasible to do so.

It may very well be a crying shame that we drag our feet on hypersonics, but should we go full throttle into it when the Russians and Chinese don't have anything better? When our adversaries have 1/100th the UAV's, 5th gen fighters, and a railgun, I might get a little concerned that we are in a rut....
 
Good that they included nuclear fusion and solar power satellites, but they were rather limited in their vision of the military utility of these things. The big "disruption" isn't that these would make military bases energy independent... it's that they would make many of our enemies financially impoverished due to the resulting collapse in oil prices.
 
sublight is back said:
Bullcrap. I think we have many one off "silver bullet" classified advanced weapon programs. The problem with these are that taking them out of "special access" status removes several layers of security and instantly makes them a target for foreign espionage (if they aren't already).


If they're "one off silver bullet" weapons, they aren't very useful. You teach commanders how to use them, you can't participate in training exercises, you may not be able to deploy them in a conflict for logistical or other reasons, etc. The F-117 program had these problems, and this was a primary justification for acknowledging the program.


The "one off" programs, if they exist, are more likely demonstrators used for risk reduction.
 
I have doubts that such things will lead to major changes in warfare... they might be useful against crowds or two-bit pirates, but against actual military forces? Seems unlikely, at least on a meaningful scale.
 
Orionblamblam said:
I have doubts that such things will lead to major changes in warfare... they might be useful against crowds or two-bit pirates, but against actual military forces? Seems unlikely, at least on a meaningful scale.

I can't think of an instance where they would change warfare at all. (Peacekeeping shouldn't be confused with "war".)
 
sublight is back said:
There is growing concern in the Pentagon that the U.S. military is in a technology rut.

Bullcrap. I think we have many one off "silver bullet" classified advanced weapon programs. The problem with these are that taking them out of "special access" status removes several layers of security and instantly makes them a target for foreign espionage (if they aren't already). The Russians and Chinese have not spent trillions inventing as we have, and are perfectly content to wait it out and steal our R & D as soon as it is feasible to do so.

It may very well be a crying shame that we drag our feet on hypersonics, but should we go full throttle into it when the Russians and Chinese don't have anything better? When our adversaries have 1/100th the UAV's, 5th gen fighters, and a railgun, I might get a little concerned that we are in a rut....

The Russians and Chinese learn from us even when they don't actually steal information. Watching what we do tells then what directions are successful, and equally importantly, what not to do.

That said, they are not complete copycats. In a number of fields they have shown themselves to be more advanced than we are, sometimes because we didn't go there, and sometimes because they were just better. Examples that come to mind are the ability to rework and form titanium, high energy physics, rocket/ramjet propulsion (although in that case part of their advantage was sheer ingenuity) and the ability to think "outside the box" as we viewed it. For example we made fun of the MiG-25 and the "crudity" of its construction. But what we overlooked is that produced a M2.8 capable craft that could operate from a semi-prepared field and be built in a truck factory by semi-skilled labor. The Alpha submarine was dangerous as hell to its crews, but it had a level of automation as well as performance that we couldn't match. Heck, we couldn't have built one if a "Red October" scenario placed one in our hands. IIRC correctly, after the Yom Kippur War, we got SA-6 missiles for analysis. At first, not only could we reportedly not duplicate the missiles, we couldn't even duplicate the kids of tools that built the missiles!

At the fall of the Soviet Union, they seemed to be ahead of us in non-acoustic maritime detection, and while there were certain problems with the Shkval torpedo we haven't been able to (at least publicly) field anything to match or reliably counter it.

They may not be 10 feet tall, but neither are they midgets. They may not have many UAVs that can operate in areas where there is more than minimal air defense, but neither do we (check out USAF's own statements on the usefulness of our current crop in the Pacific or other areas). That's why we need to continue research. We shouldn't be too complacent looking down our noses at others contenting ourselves with the feeling that, "The best they have isn't as good as what we haven't got" (wanted to use that for a long time)
 
F-14D said:
sublight is back said:
There is growing concern in the Pentagon that the U.S. military is in a technology rut.

Bullcrap. I think we have many one off "silver bullet" classified advanced weapon programs. The problem with these are that taking them out of "special access" status removes several layers of security and instantly makes them a target for foreign espionage (if they aren't already). The Russians and Chinese have not spent trillions inventing as we have, and are perfectly content to wait it out and steal our R & D as soon as it is feasible to do so.

It may very well be a crying shame that we drag our feet on hypersonics, but should we go full throttle into it when the Russians and Chinese don't have anything better? When our adversaries have 1/100th the UAV's, 5th gen fighters, and a railgun, I might get a little concerned that we are in a rut....

The Russians and Chinese learn from us even when they don't actually steal information. Watching what we do tells then what directions are successful, and equally importantly, what not to do.

That said, they are not complete copycats. In a number of fields they have shown themselves to be more advanced than we are, sometimes because we didn't go there, and sometimes because they were just better. Examples that come to mind are the ability to rework and form titanium, high energy physics, rocket/ramjet propulsion (although in that case part of their advantage was sheer ingenuity) and the ability to think "outside the box" as we viewed it. For example we made fun of the MiG-25 and the "crudity" of its construction. But what we overlooked is that produced a M2.8 capable craft that could operate from a semi-prepared field and be built in a truck factory by semi-skilled labor. The Alpha submarine was dangerous as hell to its crews, but it had a level of automation as well as performance that we couldn't match. Heck, we couldn't have built one if a "Red October" scenario placed one in our hands. IIRC correctly, after the Yom Kippur War, we got SA-6 missiles for analysis. At first, not only could we reportedly not duplicate the missiles, we couldn't even duplicate the kids of tools that built the missiles!

At the fall of the Soviet Union, they seemed to be ahead of us in non-acoustic maritime detection, and while there were certain problems with the Shkval torpedo we haven't been able to (at least publicly) field anything to match or reliably counter it.

They may not be 10 feet tall, but neither are they midgets. They may not have many UAVs that can operate in areas where there is more than minimal air defense, but neither do we (check out USAF's own statements on the usefulness of our current crop in the Pacific or other areas). That's why we need to continue research. We shouldn't be too complacent looking down our noses at others contenting ourselves with the feeling that, "The best they have isn't as good as what we haven't got" (wanted to use that for a long time)

I agree we should never underestimate our adversaries but China and the former USSR, now Russia, don't seem to restrict military technology development meaning they can work on anything damn the people or the environment the US cannot do that. Has there been a single public demonstration or public outcry in either of these countries that ACTUALLY stopped or greatly curtailed production of future weapons.

The US had a similar outlook in the 1950's when we believed that the, now nuclear, USSR was an existential threat. Plus I look back on the 60's when the US stopped so many strategic weapons programs that, IMHO, it set military technology back decades in this country. The US was producing leap ahead tech that was leaving the USSR well behind technologically. McNamara, LBJ, Vietnam, Nixon, et al. ended that.
 
The US military is still obsessed with swarming robots...


They may not be in a technological rut, but they are definitely in a conceptual rut.
 
Re: Russians, et.al., I think that the challenge for the US is the toxic ideology of Technological Overmatch. That ideology (which is false) separates the technology from the operational concepts behind the technology and places the US on a false pedestal of technological excellence. It seems to be more correct to say that the US is technologically superior on certain areas. And, other countries may accept technological inferiority as the price of low cost development.

I thought the list had too many "Science Fiction" items whose military application are narrowly focused on the political-military problems:
1) Holograms for Training and Inexhaustible Power Sources - directly reflect present funding difficulties, aren't really disruptive military technology by themselves. (Unless it is miniaturization of power sources)
2) Cheap Warships and the emphasis behind Swarming - Heavy focus on defeating swarm attacks, but that threat is primarily focused in the Straits of Hormuz and is very limited. Defeating this threat isn't a 'disruptive' technology, because the swarming threat only exists in a limited space.
3) Printable Drones and Big Data - deal with the need for high quality persistent ISR presence over a battlefield. This is more for low-intensity conflict, where ISR is plentiful and analysis is difficult.

What I'm surprised it missed was:
1) Directed Energy - Lasers and Electromagnetic weapons, completely changes the attack and defense equation for weapons and invalidates a massive range of UAVs.
2) Low Cost Autonomous Weapon Systems and Wide Area Surveillance - The final step towards the reconnaissance strike complex on land warfare, completely changes large ground force combat.
3) Underwater UAVs
4) Long Range UAVs - Carrier Launched (2,000nm) and VTOL dispersed ground operations (500nm) start to shift tactical air support away from fixed and vulnerable airbases
5) Weaponizing Upper Atmosphere / Space Craft
 
F-14D said:
That's why we need to continue research. We shouldn't be too complacent looking down our noses at others contenting ourselves with the feeling that, "The best they have isn't as good as what we haven't got" (wanted to use that for a long time)

DARPA. We never stopped research, and we never will. The difference is what we make public. If we have invented the almighty widget blaster, we'd be better off leaving it in the basement so the opposition doesn't make one.

Nuclear weapons are the perfect example of this. It sure would be nice if nobody else had them. If we superseded those weapons, nobody will know about it until Armageddon rears its ugly head.
 

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