- Ever since they tangled with the Red Coats, American
generals have been giving their grunts more and more and more gear to lug
-- from rations to radios, body armor to batteries. Now, for the first
time, the Army has decided to junk the old uniforms and start from scratch.
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- "We're stripping the soldier down to his skin, and
building out from there," said Jean-Louis "Dutch" DeGay,
an equipment specialist at the Army's Natick Soldier Systems Center, which
is supervising the seven-year, $250 million overhaul, dubbed Future Force
Warrior, or FFW.
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- In their current get-ups, American soldiers often jump
into battle carrying more than 100 pounds of gear on their backs. Hauling
the equivalent of a small fridge probably isn't the best idea for troops
under any circumstances. But what makes today's equipment particularly
maddening is how clumsily all that gear fits together. Night-vision goggles
sit on top of the helmet so awkwardly that GIs have to take them off way
more often than they should, DeGay said. Body armor is clunky, which makes
it hard to duck and roll.
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- That won't work in the urban fights soldiers are now
facing in Iraq -- and are likely to face for years to come. In these battles,
infantrymen need as much mobility, and as much protection, as possible.
And the equipment needs to be, to use a buzzword, integrated. That couldn't
be done with a piecemeal upgrade. It needs a complete system wipe, like
FFW.
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- Caught in street-to-street fighting across Iraq, U.S.
troops can't get these upgrades soon enough, said John Pike, director of
GlobalSecurity.org.
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- "Once you're in an urban environment, it strips
out a lot of (America's) technology advantages," he said. "It
puts you in a fair fight. And you don't want to be in a fair fight."
Radios don't work as well in concrete canyons. Spy planes can't see as
well. And big guns are often too indiscriminate. By making American troops
"more lethal, more survivable," Pike said, FFW "restores
to our infantry the same technological superiority that the rest of our
military has."
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- The Army has tried to tweak its uniforms before. There's
a clunky upgrade that has been stuck in the Pentagon's bureaucratic muck
for years. And let's not even discuss the Power Ranger-motocross-ninja
thing that the Defense Department trots out for TV cameras now and then.
But FFW is supposed to be ready for full-scale deployment in 2010. And,
if the war in Iraq doesn't suck up the Pentagon's last dollar, the project
has a decent chance of hitting its deadline, Army insiders and independent
analysts said.
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- Guys like Dutch DeGay are one reason why. He's in a team
of 20 Natick specialists working on FFW, and riding herd over 26 contractors
-- including a funky Brooklyn design shop. An 11th-generation infantryman,
DeGay's ancestors have been carrying guns for the United States since the
American Revolution. Before that, he said, they were Scottish highlanders.
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- "We have a warring disposition," growled DeGay,
a former Ranger, infantry officer and armored platoon leader. "All
we do is soldier."
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- He's making sure Natick's geeks and engineers keep the
grunt in mind. But he's not the only one. Infantrymen and paratroopers
at Fort Benning, Georgia, and at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland
have already rolled around in the mud wearing FFW prototypes.
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- The tests have produced a series of small, but needed,
changes over what soldiers now wear. For one thing, the new uniforms are
now unisex. The zipper has been extended, and the uniform's butt flap has
been expanded, so GI Janes aren't literally caught with their pants down
if they have to pee. A bag has been attached to the inner thigh, for an
easier time going No. 2.
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- The body armor is probably the biggest improvement, however.
It sits on a series of foam pads around the rib cage, so there's a 2.5-inch
gap between the harness and the body. It keeps the GI cool. And it's almost
imperceptibly light -- unlike today's bulletproof vests, many of which
are about as comfortable as that lead apron the dentist makes you wear
during X-rays. But the scarab-like shell can take five to seven direct
hits from a machine gun, and it doubles as a holster for ammunition and
grenades. DeGay and his fellow Future Force Warriors call it a "load-bearing
chassis."
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- It also protects the computer that future infantrymen
are expected to rely on. Instead of the bulky cables that ordinarily connect
the computer to a PDA or a helmet-mounted display, FFW is supposed to use
"e-textiles" -- durable cloth, with wires woven in. The helmet
will integrate night vision into a built-in, half-inch monocle, and bone-conduction
microphones will replace radio headsets.
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- At first, the sensors were metal. But tests showed that
"some people's heads were literally too thick for that to work,"
DeGay said. Now, the metal has been replaced with a gel-based sensor that's
sensitive enough to transmit pulse and breathing rates back to base, too.
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- There's still a slight whiff of vaporware in the air
at Natick. Powering all these doodads, for instance, won't be easy. The
Army wants to keep the total "power budget" for FFW down to 15
watts or so -- a quarter of what a typical light bulb takes. "We don't
even know where to begin," sighed Kalish Shukla, FFW's power-management
chief.
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- They have at least one idea, though. "Avoid the
use of Microsoft Windows operating systems," a recent memo on the
subject directed. FFW is going open source. Cleaner software needs less
energy to run.
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- To cut a soldier's load back to 50 pounds, FFW designers
plan to dump a whole bunch onto a robotic "mule," yet to be designed.
Even if this robo-Sherpa isn't ready by the 2010 deadline (and it's looking
increasingly likely that it won't), the FFW crew intends to push ahead.
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- "If we had to push all this out the door right now,
the soldier would still have a system that didn't feel like he was lugging
all this gear," DeGay said. "He doesn't have to waste brain matter
moving from this rock to that one. And that's going to make him fight better,
in the end."
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- That is, if the Pentagon will let it happen. Stretched
thin by commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department withheld
some of FFW's money for the current fiscal year, Army sources said. Some
goals set for 2006 have been pushed back to 2007, although the 2010 deployment
date for Future Force Warrior is still intact. For now.
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