Near Future Military Tech (Twilight 20XY)
 

This thread is for folks who might like to use a more up-to-date timeline for their T2k campaign. v1 came out in 1984. That means the designers were projecting military tech 16 years into the future, more or less. So, for those interested in starting a campaign in 2036...

https://gizmodo.com/the-armys-new-ni...ogy-1846799718

Please share any other relevant near-future military tech info you might run across here.

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Sensor fusion in its many forms will be the next big step on individual soldier and combat vehicle capabilities. The current thermal imaging/digital night vision fusion systems are just scary - in the future we may have goggles, that are so good in classifying what the sensors see that you can use them even in broad daylight.

Along with that I imagine a whole lot of other systems which will make being an infantryman absolutely no fun at all. Smart munitions for every conceivable platform. Micro-missiles. Ubiquitous thermal/millimeter wave radar imaging on platforms everywhere. Drone swarms. Widespread hacking with systemic effects on entire nations and global systems. All sorts of stuff that will may well make the normal human ability to act or react close to meaningless, or shift more and more "combat" away from anything like what we know today and closer to a ubiquitous strategic/deniable warfare that is global at all times... even more so than today because the possible scale of impact is much larger.

$1m OD Paperweight
 

I just wonder how a lot of these high-tech personal electronic devices will hold up under sustained combat conditions- desert dust and heat, tropical damp and heat, arctic cold, etc. What's the service life of some of these new systems? If a $50,000 per soldier system only lasts a year or two under field conditions, what nation can really afford that?

I imagine that many of these next gen devices will end up being prohibitively expensive for most militaries. I suspect that most first-world militaries might be able to outfit their SOF and maybe one or two brigades of conventional troops with all these cool electronic gizmos and that will be about it. The tech is going to have to mature for several years, and go commercial, to get closer to being affordable on a larger scale and, by then, there will be even more cutting edge tech just over the horizon. In a full-scale modern war, these "tech troops" would quickly be outnumbered by draftees lacking all the bells and whistles.

And data-linked systems- a military "internet of things", if you will- sounds great in theory, but I imagine that networked systems would be quite vulnerable to enemy electronic warfare/hacking. All those fancy doodads are going to be next to useless when they get bricked by some Chinese or Russian virus. And the Chinese and Russians seem like they've got a more developed hacking corps than the US and its allies. Also, stuff like Blue Force Tracker's been around for quite some time now, and it hasn't had the game-changing effect that its designers promised.

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Maybe, but on the other hand there's plenty of low-cost nightmare tech that will probably proliferate rapidly. See: Saudi drone attack

Of course there's also this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4yOOBITha4

The Chinese and Russian hacking corps are certainly more visible. The open question is whether that means they're more developed or less skillful.

All of the Above?
 

I hadn't really thought about it like that. I suppose both propositions could be true at the same time. Operation Solar Winds was, by all accounts, very successful at harvesting a wealth of high level intel from numerous US gov't agencies, but it was ultimately detected (mostly by chance). A recent 60 Minutes report, however, claimed that even though the virus had been identified, it might not be possible to eliminate it completely. It will continue to lurk in US data systems, potentially providing our rivals with fresh intel and/or disrupt our IT capabilities.

On the other hand, one rarely sees reports of successful US hacks of rival nations*. Does that mean we're not doing it, or are we so good at it that no one's found out yet?

*The only one I can recall that the US might have had some hand in was the Stuxnet virus that disrupted the Iranian nuclear program several years back, but most reports credit the Israelis with developing and deploying it.

Third option: it's not in the interests of Western media to report on it.

I'm just going to leave this 2014 BBC article about someone who violated myriad agreements regarding access to classified information, right here:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-ca...%20the%20truth.

US 'hacks China networks'
After fleeing to Hong Kong, Edward Snowden told the South China Morning Post that the NSA had led more than 61,000 hacking operations worldwide, including many in Hong Kong and mainland China.

He said targets in Hong Kong included the Chinese University, public officials and businesses.

"We hack network backbones - like huge internet routers, basically - that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one," Mr Snowden was quoted as saying.

I'd kind of forgotten about Snowden. It's been a while since he was making headlines. I wonder how much his efforts helped our rivals identify and plug gaps in their systems.

I guess I kind of fixated on just the last few years, during which all of the digital espionage traffic seems pretty much one-way.

That's definitely a possibility, but the US media doesn't have the best track record when it comes to voluntarily refusing to break/report major stories that have the possibility of compromising US intelligence OPSEC (see Snowden).

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If what Snowden said about the the NSA having led more than 61,000 hacking operations worldwide, the digital espionage traffic definitely does not seem pretty much one-way. All the major powers engage in espionage and always have, it's just how the game is played. There's just whole new vistas of espionage possibilities now in the digital age.

I had a coworker who was a system architecture genius. He built supercomputer clusters for Fermi Lab and was deeply involved in Amazon's first major expansion. This was in addition to a 17 year career at ATT/Lucent(US phone company and their tech division).

Onetime a group of us were talking and the subject of the NSA came up. He was totally silent on the conversation except for going deadly serious for one single statement. "You cannot fathom what the NSA is capable of." Given his skill set and past, I knew he KNEW what he was talking about but could not say more. I have never worried about US capabilities since then.

Loitering Munitions
 

These would likely be out of the picture after a TDM-like escalation (as would most high tech systems), but they would probably influence how the world got to that point in near future Twilight War.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...nced-war-games

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The M-8 lives again. Two Light Tank Prototypes Battle for the Future of Army Firepower

Uh-Oh
 

Near future PLA naval [stealth] aviation:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...er-testing-rig

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So China's gotten enough data to make a ripoff of the F-22?

Maybe this stealth aircraft will actually work, since the J-20 turned out to be a bust in the 5th Gen department.

Where are they getting the engines for this new one?

Jet packs, as they stand now, don't have the range to be militarily useful, for the most part. Maybe as part of a raid, though.