$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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