Of powered armor, mechs and feasibility.

[PeZook]

And all of those measures also work on lightly armored infantry, only about a thousand times better, so powered armor is still going to be more survivable. It is a jump in quality if you can't kill an entire squad with a couple of cheap shells, having instead to expend a single Copperhead per man.

Don't Copperheads cost something ridiculous, anyway, like half a million per shell?

You'll just see shells that dispense guided bomblets be developed and deployed to counter the power armour. Such things already exist to kill AFV's in any number of forms.

So...have AFVs suddendly become laughable useless pieces of crap because of those? I'm asking because people are acting as if the very existence of countermeasures means PA would be worse than useless.

[Norade]

And all of those measures also work on lightly armored infantry, only about a thousand times better, so powered armor is still going to be more survivable.

The question is survivable enough to be cost effective compared to the costs of equipping soldiers to defeat it?

It protects one soldier and let's say that it costs $100,000 for a first generation suit after economy of scale kicks in, if you would like to insert another cost I would be willing to look at that as well. To equip 5% of America's ground troops in armor that will stop some weapons, but not other only slightly rarer weapons will cost you around $2.7 billion. Though I would expect new models to be out well before the 27,000 odd suits are available. Doing some quick number crunching that is about 6% of the Armies procurement budget. That is before we tack on the training costs, say $500,000 per soldier after creating a new training program, and staffing it as well as procuring training equipment. So in the end we get 16.2 billion spent to get this new force started. That would make it one of the most expensive programs running if we use my middling numbers.

If we assume that the suits can be defeated by specialist 7.62mm AP rounds, a likely thing, as well as grenades and other support weaponry commonly available to the US and her enemies I would have to call the money spent on the program a waste.

I know I assume a lot of things here, but it is hard to speculate on a future weapons system without doing some assuming. That said, I am open to hearing other ideas for how it could be used.

[PeZook]

If we assume that the suits can be defeated by specialist 7.62mm AP rounds, a likely thing, as well as grenades and other support weaponry commonly available to the US and her enemies I would have to call the money spent on the program a waste.

I actually agree with this, hence my original reservation that it's only going to be this way if the suits are actually decently protected from small arms, and the enemy would need specialized weapons like .50 cal sniper rifles, autocannons or laser-guided artillery rounds to defeat the armor. It's not unlikely materials technology will advance to the point of making light and cheap armor good enough to do that, at least for a while. We've been seeing some amazing things done with materials lately.

[Ritterin Sophia]

And all of those measures also work on lightly armored infantry, only about a thousand times better, so powered armor is still going to be more survivable. It is a jump in quality if you can't kill an entire squad with a couple of cheap shells, having instead to expend a single Copperhead per man.

I don't think you actually understand the awesome might of 'The King of Battle'. First of all we would use Time on Target (like we do on hardened structures or unpressurized vehicles anyhow) to increase the effectiveness of the rounds. What time on target means in this particular case is with a single howitzer we can fire at three different angles in such a way that all three arrive at the designated target simultaneously, in doing so it allows us to overlap the overpressure of the blast waves (imagine you're in your bath tub or pool or whatever and you send two relatively equivalent waves crashing into the other) to shatter reinforced concrete. Even if the power armor were to miraculously survive intact, the occupants most certainly would have not and would have suffered the unfortunate experience of feeling their hearts and lungs explode.

Don't Copperheads cost something ridiculous, anyway, like half a million per shell?

About a tenth of that. In 2005 they cost $45,000 dollars, for comparisons sake an M4A1 SOPMOD will cost about $30,000. The Excaliburs costed use $85,000 a round and full production rounds are estimated to cost us $50,000.

So...have AFVs suddendly become laughable useless pieces of crap because of those? I'm asking because people are acting as if the very existence of countermeasures means PA would be worse than useless.

No people are acting like countermeasures already exist to combat any realistically hypothetical power armor and are only going to continue to get cheaper as the technology proliferates and with the exception of very specific cases their costs outweigh the benefits.

[Sea Skimmer]

The biggest protective advantage I see in powered armor is against chemical weapons all the time, and nuclear weapons in a wide range of situations.
You would have much better sealing, and the suit would naturally have a powered blower for air that would suck through a bigger filter. This would remove a lot of the vulnerability a modern infantryman has even with the best modern protective clothing. In some future war in which nerve gas is chucked around with abandon normal infantry operations could simply become impossible. A major downside though is the armored solider may have trouble riding inside anything like a normal sized armored vehicles, which would provide much better NBC protection in turn.

So in the end we get 16.2 billion spent to get this new force started. That would make it one of the most expensive programs running if we use my middling numbers.

I think your likely overstating training costs, but the suits themselves will easily cost 1 million dollars each even before you factor in maintenance costs to keep them operating years on end and all the extensive specialist field support equipment they'll require. An MRAP or a cruise missile is about a million dollars. A powered armor suit is lighter then a cruise missile, somewhat, but its much more intricate in the number of moving parts and scope of the computer systems, and would require much more expensive materials. For the power source... who knows.

Still even a a million each, if 5,000 were bought a year and each suit could be kept going for 10 years that would sustain a force of 50,000 powered armor infantrymen. A typical US mechanized division only has around 3,000 rifle and grenade launcher shooting infantrymen so 50,000 suits could equip 16 divisions. The current US army only around 12 active duty divisions worth of troops, some are separate brigades, so we'd already be able to fully equip those guys. Spending rates like this would not be out of reason if we had a powered armor suit that truly worked and really could take a big chunk out of combat losses. But in reality I think any powered armor suit would cost hundreds of dollars a mile to operate in the field, and breakdown so much it would need to be deployed in additional specialist units, rather then saving any expensive manpower.

[Norade]

If we assume that the suits can be defeated by specialist 7.62mm AP rounds, a likely thing, as well as grenades and other support weaponry commonly available to the US and her enemies I would have to call the money spent on the program a waste.

I actually agree with this, hence my original reservation that it's only going to be this way if the suits are actually decently protected from small arms, and the enemy would need specialized weapons like .50 cal sniper rifles, autocannons or laser-guided artillery rounds to defeat the armor. It's not unlikely materials technology will advance to the point of making light and cheap armor good enough to do that, at least for a while. We've been seeing some amazing things done with materials lately.

Even so the cost of the suit is greater than the cost of a common solution to defeat it. Especially considering how common under barrel weapons packages are today. Adding a small under slung 50. cal weapon with a small magazine would be a cost effective way of neutering such armor.

The biggest protective advantage I see in powered armor is against chemical weapons all the time, and nuclear weapons in a wide range of situations.
You would have much better sealing, and the suit would naturally have a powered blower for air that would suck through a bigger filter. This would remove a lot of the vulnerability a modern infantryman has even with the best modern protective clothing. In some future war in which nerve gas is chucked around with abandon normal infantry operations could simply become impossible. A major downside though is the armored solider may have trouble riding inside anything like a normal sized armored vehicles, which would provide much better NBC protection in turn.

The issue is that we have other systems that can do this for less and we can issue hazmat type uniforms with blowers and cooling gear if NBC issues become common enough.

So in the end we get 16.2 billion spent to get this new force started. That would make it one of the most expensive programs running if we use my middling numbers.

I think your likely overstating training costs, but the suits themselves will easily cost 1 million dollars each even before you factor in maintenance costs to keep them operating years on end and all the extensive specialist field support equipment they'll require. An MRAP or a cruise missile is about a million dollars. A powered armor suit is lighter then a cruise missile, somewhat, but its much more intricate in the number of moving parts and scope of the computer systems, and would require much more expensive materials. For the power source... who knows.

Still even a a million each, if 5,000 were bought a year and each suit could be kept going for 10 years that would sustain a force of 50,000 powered armor infantrymen. A typical US mechanized division only has around 3,000 rifle and grenade launcher shooting infantrymen so 50,000 suits could equip 16 divisions. The current US army only around 12 active duty divisions worth of troops, some are separate brigades, so we'd already be able to fully equip those guys. Spending rates like this would not be out of reason if we had a powered armor suit that truly worked and really could take a big chunk out of combat losses. But in reality I think any powered armor suit would cost hundreds of dollars a mile to operate in the field, and breakdown so much it would need to be deployed in additional specialist units, rather then saving any expensive manpower.

I was using the cost to train a soldier, including costs for the instructors and support staff, as well as the need for training suits and likely target suits. However if we raise the cost per suit to where you have it than it hardly matters anyway.

This assumes an industrial base able to produce five-thousand suits a year which isn't a given. Even assuming so, you're spending $5 billion a year on buying new suits, then you need to train on them and of course, as with fighters and the like you need enough spares to keep up with the failure rate so add at least another 50% to the cost to compensate and leave some room for error. Then you also need enough suits to destroy in live fire training, and likely some training suits so you don't have shortages in the field. So lets say $10 billion year one, and $6 billion per year after that purely in buying new suits. When we add in even a training cost of $100,000 per soldier expect to use these suits, and say an additional $250,000 to maintain the suits outside of fuel cost we end up spending $13.5 billion year one and $9.75 million per year after that. All to save a few soldiers. It hardly seems cost effective as there is a large pool to draw recruits from and you can likely train 3 soldiers for each soldier who would be saved by these suits.

In short, a poor option.

[Sea Skimmer]

The issue is that we have other systems that can do this for less and we can issue hazmat type uniforms with blowers and cooling gear if NBC issues become common enough.

Using normal NBC gear or Hazmat moon suits in a chemical warfare environment means the slightest wound will be fatal, nerve gases now exist for which we have no antidote. The point of a powered armor suit in that situation is that it takes all the cheap kills an enemy would get from wide area fragmentation tearing the suit out of play. It also in general forces precise target location by enemy weapons, which is easier said then done if GPS out of play which a big game changer. It also could provide real protection against nuclear flash and thermal pulse, which a plastic moon suit sure isn't going to manage, that'd be an awful way to die, trapped inside burning plastic. Radiation protection would be limited, but even very thin titanium sheeting would deflect a lot of gamma rays you get from fallout.

This assumes an industrial base able to produce five-thousand suits a year which isn't a given.

I don't see what could possibly hold back suit production below such a low figure, except a critical world shortage of a rare element. The bigger issue is going to be that 5,000 suits might not be enough to really sustain the kind of factory we'd want to be able to economically produce them. If the suits are somehow bottlenecked then it'd mean they cost way more then we are talking about, which who knows could be the case since this is assuming some future materials breakthroughs. But at that point no one would even consider deployment of more then a few hand built prototypes.

Even assuming so, you're spending $5 billion a year on buying new suits, then you need to train on them and of course, as with fighters and the like you need enough spares to keep up with the failure rate so add at least another 50% to the cost to compensate and leave some room for error. Then you also need enough suits to destroy in live fire training, and likely some training suits so you don't have shortages in the field. So lets say $10 billion year one, and $6 billion per year after that purely in buying new suits. When we add in even a training cost of $100,000 per soldier expect to use these suits, and say an additional $250,000 to maintain the suits outside of fuel cost we end up spending $13.5 billion year one and $9.75 million per year after that. All to save a few soldiers.

It could be a very large number in some situations, like the entire dismount element of an infantry battalions saved from a mass nerve gas and DPICM rocket barrage. But in any case, do know how much money the US spent on armored hummves and MRAPs for Iraq? At its peak in FY2008 it was over 16 billion dollars a year just to buy new ones. Those didn't save that many lives in the long run either, they basically kept pace with the bombs, but the money is still pouring out for them today. We spend a million dollars on a cruise missile, and closer to 4 million dollars for surface to air missiles. A million dollar suit isn't so bad if its a big increase in small unit capability. An MRAP cost about 1 million dollars too. If one guy in a powered armor suit can accomplish a mission that we needed a couple guys in an MRAP to do before, then this is a big saving. The other guys don't have to exist or can at least be back in a base area which is much cheaper to sustain. A smaller force has a smaller footprint, and it can be much more mobile without wasting all its time escorting its own logistic pipeline.

It hardly seems cost effective as there is a large pool to draw recruits from and you can likely train 3 soldiers for each soldier who would be saved by these suits.

Manpower is more expensive then new hardware for the US military at over 150 billion a year, and any military which seeks similar capabilities is going to end up much the same way. You don't want manpower intensive solutions, you want ones that reduce the number of men you have to support in the field. You might also notice the US military has had trouble recruiting, its met its goals, but not easily and often by lowering standards. For someone like China that's less of a concern, but then China has almost no capability for land warfare outside its own territory anyway.

In short, a poor option.

I wouldn't say its a great option, but its one which will be worth funding if it can be made remotely practical. Powered armor is a way to counter several different kinds of threats to which we have no real good solution. Artillery, mines and automatic weapons. It really depends on the details, sometimes we don't really need regular infantry at all. But in other situations it would be invaluable, such as patrols in Afghanistan where much of the terrain cannot be traverse by any kind of armored vehicle at any price. That means you land from land from helicopters, which are very expensive to operate in large numbers, and then walk dismounted with very high exposure to even small landmines, grenade attacks and random small arms fire. Modern body armor saves lives, but you still end up with large numbers of wounded you are then stuck evacuating.

Even a powered suit which just stands up to 7.62mm from an AK-47, basically extending existing Level III body armor on the chest to the whole body, would greatly reduce losses. If we can ever invent a material to let a person have that kind of protection with very good coverage in a non powered armor suit, which can be integrated with an NBC suit or worn on top of one, all while keep weight sane and the solider cool, then we'd have no real reason for powered armor. But I don't think a super material like that is any more likely then the powered suit itself becoming feasible.

[Norade]

The issue is that we have other systems that can do this for less and we can issue hazmat type uniforms with blowers and cooling gear if NBC issues become common enough.

Using normal NBC gear or Hazmat moon suits in a chemical warfare environment means the slightest wound will be fatal, nerve gases now exist for which we have no antidote. The point of a powered armor suit in that situation is that it takes all the cheap kills an enemy would get from wide area fragmentation tearing the suit out of play. It also in general forces precise target location by enemy weapons, which is easier said then done if GPS out of play which a big game changer. It also could provide real protection against nuclear flash and thermal pulse, which a plastic moon suit sure isn't going to manage, that'd be an awful way to die, trapped inside burning plastic. Radiation protection would be limited, but even very thin titanium sheeting would deflect a lot of gamma rays you get from fallout.

That all makes sense if we think we're going to face that in the near future. It would be bad to not be prepared for such a thing, but to spend so much on being ready for it now seems a waste. Of course if we have them and need them it's money well spent, if we have them and don't need them they may have prevented an attack simply by existing, and if we don't have them and need them we're in deep shit.

Of course that goes for anything and we need to weigh the risk versus the cost, and I can't say I know enough to do that. I will say that I think we'd be overpaying at this stage.

This assumes an industrial base able to produce five-thousand suits a year which isn't a given.

I don't see what could possibly hold back suit production below such a low figure, except a critical world shortage of a rare element. The bigger issue is going to be that 5,000 suits might not be enough to really sustain the kind of factory we'd want to be able to economically produce them. If the suits are somehow bottlenecked then it'd mean they cost way more then we are talking about, which who knows could be the case since this is assuming some future materials breakthroughs. But at that point no one would even consider deployment of more then a few hand built prototypes.

I was thinking of it as if we just suddenly got a leak about a break through allowing such suits today. Realistically it would be years to get the lines made to produce the suits on a scale that would be needed. There could also be other unforeseen bottlenecks to be dealt with as well.

Even assuming so, you're spending $5 billion a year on buying new suits, then you need to train on them and of course, as with fighters and the like you need enough spares to keep up with the failure rate so add at least another 50% to the cost to compensate and leave some room for error. Then you also need enough suits to destroy in live fire training, and likely some training suits so you don't have shortages in the field. So lets say $10 billion year one, and $6 billion per year after that purely in buying new suits. When we add in even a training cost of $100,000 per soldier expect to use these suits, and say an additional $250,000 to maintain the suits outside of fuel cost we end up spending $13.5 billion year one and $9.75 million per year after that. All to save a few soldiers.

It could be a very large number in some situations, like the entire dismount element of an infantry battalions saved from a mass nerve gas and DPICM rocket barrage.

When have such attacks ever been common place and how likely is such an attack to occur?

But in any case, do know how much money the US spent on armored hummves and MRAPs for Iraq? At its peak in FY2008 it was over 16 billion dollars a year just to buy new ones. Those didn't save that many lives in the long run either, they basically kept pace with the bombs, but the money is still pouring out for them today. We spend a million dollars on a cruise missile, and closer to 4 million dollars for surface to air missiles. A million dollar suit isn't so bad if its a big increase in small unit capability. An MRAP cost about 1 million dollars too. If one guy in a powered armor suit can accomplish a mission that we needed a couple guys in an MRAP to do before, then this is a big saving. The other guys don't have to exist or can at least be back in a base area which is much cheaper to sustain. A smaller force has a smaller footprint, and it can be much more mobile without wasting all its time escorting its own logistic pipeline.

That Hummer can preform multiple rolls, it can be a troop transport, support platform, escort vehicle, supply transport, and likely be made to do other things that escape me at the moment. That suit is only on person and no matter how good that person can't do everything so you still end up needing transports anyway even if only to get your PA trooper to where he needs to go. While I can't disagree that to US spends money on other specialized units, and weapons they serve a roll nothing else can. This suit may excel at a role, but normal soldiers can do it so it is a cost versus gain situation and until such suits exist it will be tough to say where that line falls.

I would also think that there are minimum numbers for some jobs, such as a patrol or a breach and clear simply because you need to cover multiple paths and need more eyes on target. At minimum you need to have a patrol of two and that just cost you more than your MRAP with four guys in it who can kill a PA trooper. They can also put out fire on more targets at once.

It hardly seems cost effective as there is a large pool to draw recruits from and you can likely train 3 soldiers for each soldier who would be saved by these suits.

Manpower is more expensive then new hardware for the US military at over 150 billion a year, and any military which seeks similar capabilities is going to end up much the same way. You don't want manpower intensive solutions, you want ones that reduce the number of men you have to support in the field. You might also notice the US military has had trouble recruiting, its met its goals, but not easily and often by lowering standards. For someone like China that's less of a concern, but then China has almost no capability for land warfare outside its own territory anyway.

I understand that, however even with suits you still need numbers so your costs may still end up going up net anyway. If you have to cut back bodies for gear then you run the risk of putting too many eggs in one basket so to speak.

In short, a poor option.

I wouldn't say its a great option, but its one which will be worth funding if it can be made remotely practical. Powered armor is a way to counter several different kinds of threats to which we have no real good solution. Artillery, mines and automatic weapons. It really depends on the details, sometimes we don't really need regular infantry at all. But in other situations it would be invaluable, such as patrols in Afghanistan where much of the terrain cannot be traverse by any kind of armored vehicle at any price. That means you land from land from helicopters, which are very expensive to operate in large numbers, and then walk dismounted with very high exposure to even small landmines, grenade attacks and random small arms fire. Modern body armor saves lives, but you still end up with large numbers of wounded you are then stuck evacuating.

Even a powered suit which just stands up to 7.62mm from an AK-47, basically extending existing Level III body armor on the chest to the whole body, would greatly reduce losses. If we can ever invent a material to let a person have that kind of protection with very good coverage in a non powered armor suit, which can be integrated with an NBC suit or worn on top of one, all while keep weight sane and the solider cool, then we'd have no real reason for powered armor. But I don't think a super material like that is any more likely then the powered suit itself becoming feasible.

You make good points, if that suit can do all that for cheap then it is good, however we're leaving out key things like fuel, keeping the suit running, operational time/range per fuel load, reliability. Any real world suit that I can see will be too expensive to be more than a shiny toy to be run through test program after test program until either we see that we don't need it or it is no longer cutting edge.

[PeZook]

Even so the cost of the suit is greater than the cost of a common solution to defeat it. Especially considering how common under barrel weapons packages are today. Adding a small under slung 50. cal weapon with a small magazine would be a cost effective way of neutering such armor.

Uh...how? The thing would have pathetic range, even more pathetic accuracy, and if you want to use the full-sized .50 cal round, would be impossible to use by a human.

I don't think you actually understand the awesome might of 'The King of Battle'. First of all we would use Time on Target (like we do on hardened structures or unpressurized vehicles anyhow) to increase the effectiveness of the rounds. What time on target means in this particular case is with a single howitzer we can fire at three different angles in such a way that all three arrive at the designated target simultaneously, in doing so it allows us to overlap the overpressure of the blast waves (imagine you're in your bath tub or pool or whatever and you send two relatively equivalent waves crashing into the other) to shatter reinforced concrete. Even if the power armor were to miraculously survive intact, the occupants most certainly would have not and would have suffered the unfortunate experience of feeling their hearts and lungs explode.

You said it yourself: it's already being used on unpressurived vehicles and bunkers. So essentially, killing a squad in powered armor requires similar amounts of firepower as a mechanized unit or dug-in infantry ; Only they're smaller and can't be as easily pinned in place for the arty to work its magic. I never claimed PA made the soldiers immune, just that it increased survivability, by a factor dependant on its exact specifications. If we posit a battlefield full of nerve gas and bioagents and nuclear fallout, like Skimmer did, it suddendly becomes the only practical option to have infantry at all.

About a tenth of that. In 2005 they cost $45,000 dollars, for comparisons sake an M4A1 SOPMOD will cost about $30,000. The Excaliburs costed use $85,000 a round and full production rounds are estimated to cost us $50,000.

So you need to fire three 45 000 dollar rounds to take out a squad with overpressure instead of three 120$ dumb rounds to do the same with fragmentation. Becomes worse when the terrain is rugged and the PA infantry isn't just standing there perfectly spaced for time-on-target fire to kill them.

I purposefully discount Excalibur rounds, since GPS isn't going to survive very long when you're fighting somebody capable of deploying sizeable numbers of powered armor infantry.

No people are acting like countermeasures already exist to combat any realistically hypothetical power armor and are only going to continue to get cheaper as the technology proliferates and with the exception of very specific cases their costs outweigh the benefits.

The same thing could be said about man-portable anti-tank missiles in the 60s: they proliferated a lot, became very capable and reasonably cheap, yet they haven't made tanks obsolete, since they carry their own drawbacks with them: just like removing an automatic rifle from a squad in favor of a .50 cal rifle.

And, of course, technology used for tanks advances, too.

[Aaron]

My point was that I doubt they'll be the game changer everyone thinks they will be. I can see a variety of uses for them; places like Afghanistan and other dense terrain for example.

[Raxmei]

Even so the cost of the suit is greater than the cost of a common solution to defeat it. Especially considering how common under barrel weapons packages are today. Adding a small under slung 50. cal weapon with a small magazine would be a cost effective way of neutering such armor.

That's true of pretty much everything. It's the argument that has been used to argue that tanks are useless almost since they were invented and shows up often whenever some clever person wants us to abandon some big expensive vehicle. What matters is whether this gives you capability that you wouldn't have otherwise.

How exactly is an underslung .50 cal going to work? If we're talking about firing the full power round then you run into the reasons why our .50 cal rifles are 4-5 feet long.

[Norade]

Even so the cost of the suit is greater than the cost of a common solution to defeat it. Especially considering how common under barrel weapons packages are today. Adding a small under slung 50. cal weapon with a small magazine would be a cost effective way of neutering such armor.

Uh...how? The thing would have pathetic range, even more pathetic accuracy, and if you want to use the full-sized .50 cal round, would be impossible to use by a human.

That was a shitty idea, but adding a slug option to underslung shotguns, anti-PA grenades, even purpose built perpetrator rounds. If it costs $20,000 for a weapon to defeat million dollar armor then one side clearly wins, it gets even better when you just issue battle rifles with AP rounds for cheap.

I don't think you actually understand the awesome might of 'The King of Battle'. First of all we would use Time on Target (like we do on hardened structures or unpressurized vehicles anyhow) to increase the effectiveness of the rounds. What time on target means in this particular case is with a single howitzer we can fire at three different angles in such a way that all three arrive at the designated target simultaneously, in doing so it allows us to overlap the overpressure of the blast waves (imagine you're in your bath tub or pool or whatever and you send two relatively equivalent waves crashing into the other) to shatter reinforced concrete. Even if the power armor were to miraculously survive intact, the occupants most certainly would have not and would have suffered the unfortunate experience of feeling their hearts and lungs explode.

You said it yourself: it's already being used on unpressurived vehicles and bunkers. So essentially, killing a squad in powered armor requires similar amounts of firepower as a mechanized unit or dug-in infantry ; Only they're smaller and can't be as easily pinned in place for the arty to work its magic. I never claimed PA made the soldiers immune, just that it increased survivability, by a factor dependant on its exact specifications. If we posit a battlefield full of nerve gas and bioagents and nuclear fallout, like Skimmer did, it suddendly becomes the only practical option to have infantry at all.

Yes, however a PA squad of say five suits costs around $6.5 million using the numbers Skimmer and I have. Plus they may also have a vehicle of their own so you get a good value back by killing such a squad and eliminate more firepower than killing an infantry unit. Once again it is risk versus reward and it seems that it is cheaper to kill suits than it would need to be to make them viable.

The battlefield you describe seems highly unlikely.

About a tenth of that. In 2005 they cost $45,000 dollars, for comparisons sake an M4A1 SOPMOD will cost about $30,000. The Excaliburs costed use $85,000 a round and full production rounds are estimated to cost us $50,000.

So you need to fire three 45 000 dollar rounds to take out a squad with overpressure instead of three 120$ dumb rounds to do the same with fragmentation. Becomes worse when the terrain is rugged and the PA infantry isn't just standing there perfectly spaced for time-on-target fire to kill them.

I purposefully discount Excalibur rounds, since GPS isn't going to survive very long when you're fighting somebody capable of deploying sizeable numbers of powered armor infantry.

Those rounds also kill about $6.5 million of enemy equipment, that is without a vehicle. This as opposed to killing much cheaper infantry which with training costs might be worth around $4 million a unit with a vehicle, the ration is worse. But you still cost the enemy more in the end, and you gain virtual attrition by making the enemy spend more per soldier.

Also Excalibur could be run off of drones, so I wouldn't count it out so easily.

No people are acting like countermeasures already exist to combat any realistically hypothetical power armor and are only going to continue to get cheaper as the technology proliferates and with the exception of very specific cases their costs outweigh the benefits.

The same thing could be said about man-portable anti-tank missiles in the 60s: they proliferated a lot, became very capable and reasonably cheap, yet they haven't made tanks obsolete, since they carry their own drawbacks with them: just like removing an automatic rifle from a squad in favor of a .50 cal rifle.

And, of course, technology used for tanks advances, too.

Still cheap weapons are forcing us to buy more expensive tanks to fight them with. So in a way that is an issue.

Even so the cost of the suit is greater than the cost of a common solution to defeat it. Especially considering how common under barrel weapons packages are today. Adding a small under slung 50. cal weapon with a small magazine would be a cost effective way of neutering such armor.

That's true of pretty much everything. It's the argument that has been used to argue that tanks are useless almost since they were invented and shows up often whenever some clever person wants us to abandon some big expensive vehicle. What matters is whether this gives you capability that you wouldn't have otherwise.

How exactly is an underslung .50 cal going to work? If we're talking about firing the full power round then you run into the reasons why our .50 cal rifles are 4-5 feet long.

Se my post above where I concede this point, I also address the point about the tanks as well.

[adam_grif]

Needing to call in MRSI strikes to reliably kill the PA would be a huge victory for those using it.The fact that 50,000 dollar arty shells can kill a 1,000,000 PA isn't really all that relevant, since such things can also conceivably kill a variety of other vehicles, and it requires the enemy to have 155mm Howitzers plonking on your head. When was the last time American soldiers in Iraqistan had to charge batteries of such guns? Isn't artillery suppression somebody else's job?

Frankly, I'd be more concerned about IEDs, although soldiers in PA are going to be far more likely to survive such devices going off than your typical G.I. Still, it's the far more realistic concern in this case, and IEDs are even more cost effective than the aforementioned shells.

Against first world armies in hypothetical conflicts, we're looking at 40mm's and hand grenades as more regular threats to PA. I'm doubting they could survive a close range blast, let alone a direct hit from one, but they won't get shredded by the fragmentation at a distance if it's a sealed, armored suit. Maybe.

[Coyote]

The problem is, the same advances in robotics that will make a powered armor suit or a mecha feasable will be more handily applied to better robots in conventional mode.

For example, a powered armor suit worn by a man? Or a mecha used for infantry support? Why not just make a robot tankette?

In fiction you can do what you want, of course, but I have to say that giant walking humanoid robots have always looked stupid to me. I liked some of the Battletech designs like the Marauder because that looked like a piece of military equipment instead of a 700-foot tall Samurai, but it is still too big to be truly practical-- it's more rugged, purpose-built appearance just lessens its silliness footprint.

Infantry support robots to carry packs and ammo, or possibly to schlep heavier weapons, are possible, but again you'd have to come up with a reason why those are walking instead of just carried on helicopters (which is why schlepping heavier weapons isn't done by mule teams any more, but by helo).

I suppose some powered armor applications can be had, but I agree that it'd be limited-issue for purpose-dedicated troops. I can see powered armor used for field medics (retrieve under fire) and combat engineers (building/demolishing under fire) and maybe for airborne or special ops demolition raids but universal, all-army issue would probably be impractical.

[Sea Skimmer]

That all makes sense if we think we're going to face that in the near future. It would be bad to not be prepared for such a thing, but to spend so much on being ready for it now seems a waste.

Well near future we are not going to have such suits. Suit design isn't likely to cost as much as designing a jet fighter, but it will take a similar amount of time since you have so much component testing to do and so many safety issues at stake. So what that means if we can't expect to design a suit to counter a specific, near term threat. A program would have to be aimed at a full spectrum of future threats.

Ironically suits seem to be best for very low intensity, and very high intensity warfare. Counter insurgency on one end, and a massive WW3 nuclear-chemical holocaust on the other. They'd probably be least useful in a mid ground scenario, in which you have purely conventional fighting between similar mechanized forces. However scenarios in that mid ground (Gulf War would be one example) are becoming ever less likely because air power is so dominating, and the shear cost of deploying the forces required is epic.

I was thinking of it as if we just suddenly got a leak about a break through allowing such suits today. Realistically it would be years to get the lines made to produce the suits on a scale that would be needed. There could also be other unforeseen bottlenecks to be dealt with as well.

The biggest bottleneck I think, is sizes. Right now the US Army has to have something like 8 different sizes of body armor vests to fit everyone in the army. A powered armor suit is going to be a minor nightmare of sizing. Even if strict physical standards are adapted for the users to keep them all roughly the same shape, its going to be impossible to avoid custom fitting each one to some degree. But given a sufficiently advanced factory and refined enough design, that might not be as difficult 30 years from now as it would be today. If however we can't adapt the design to each user, and need to field the suit in a large number of specific models with a lot of custom parts each, then this could quickly become cost prohibitive for mass use.

As a lesser issue, its also a big problem as to how you treat the wounded. Modern body armor gets in the way already, which is why the latest vests have a hidden pull code that makes the vest fall into peices for easy removal. But that wont work so well with a powered armor suit. Heinlein thought of that in Starship Troopers and mentioned a can opener to open up the suits... but this never struck me as being a very good solution.

If technology just changed overnight to allow power suits, we'd have no choice but to begin a very large program of emergency spending. The technology that would allow powered armor suits would also apply to just about every other kind of weapon allowing all sorts of upgrades, and the US sure wouldn't be alone in exploiting it. Lucky for us life doesn't work that way and in reality a powered armor suit program is going to be a 20 year design cycle minimal. I've been surprised myself how fast they came up with some 'working' technology demonstrators in the last couple years for DARPA, but so far they are still a long way away from being able to field even a simple 'load supporting' kind of powered frame, which would not be armored but would allow someone to carry more weight, or move as if they had no weight in the backpack.

When have such attacks ever been common place and how likely is such an attack to occur?

The US sure wiped out a shitload of units with DPICM in both Gulf Wars, and Iraq used so much nerve gas at Al-Faw in 1988 that Iranian troops with NBC gear actually suffocated from it clogging the mask filters. Conventional artillery pinned them in place in trenches and bunkers, were the gas would be thickest. In the same situation a powered armor force would be able to move in the open to get away from the gas without just being sliced to pieces by fragmentation.

In a real war situations like that are going to be occurring more then once an hour (rocket launchers need around 10-20 minutes to reload) event. Artillery has been the biggest killer on the battlefield for as long as it has existed in its modern breach loading-quick firing form and we've yet to be able to do much of anything to protect a infantryman from it.

Right now the hope is some day lasers will just be able to shutdown most artillery and force the use of more elaborate weapons and ammunition. Trouble is, if both sides have lasers, then both sides will defend there own artillery above defending infantrymen. That could mean normal counter battery just doesn't work, and we have WW1 like situations in which knocking out a single enemy gun takes hundreds of shells. Meanwhile life just sucks to be in the infantry as the frontlines are as exposed as ever to bombardment.

The world simply hasn't seen any big wars in a while in which both sides were on anything like an even level so artillery has not been quite the king of battle it normally is in the last 20 years, but the US certainly didn't skimp on using it in 2003. About half of all US dead and wounded during the invasion came from artillery and mortar fire too, despite total US dominance of the air and a very high degree of superiority in artillery.

That Hummer can preform multiple rolls, it can be a troop transport, support platform, escort vehicle, supply transport, and likely be made to do other things that escape me at the moment. That suit is only on person and no matter how good that person can't do everything so you still end up needing transports anyway even if only to get your PA trooper to where he needs to go. While I can't disagree that to US spends money on other specialized units, and weapons they serve a roll nothing else can. This suit may excel at a role, but normal soldiers can do it so it is a cost versus gain situation and until such suits exist it will be tough to say where that line falls.

Those armored hummves have no payload margin left to do anything but be patrol vehicles, the MRAPs are a little better but still very limited vs. normal soft skin trucks. Of course powered armor would still need transport and some numbers for certain roles, but because the powered armor solider can do more, a larger portion of the total force could be helicopter mobile, and landing from a helicopter would no longer mean being poorly protected.

I would also think that there are minimum numbers for some jobs, such as a patrol or a breach and clear simply because you need to cover multiple paths and need more eyes on target. At minimum you need to have a patrol of two and that just cost you more than your MRAP with four guys in it who can kill a PA trooper. They can also put out fire on more targets at once.

You can never send out one MRAP alone though; its too hopelessly easy for it to become disabled because its road bound and thus easily ambushed. A small bomb might not kill anyone inside, but if it leaves them stranded then you've got a bad situation. So you end up with a whole convoy to do anything at all which, gets real expensive real fast. Both in terms of money since those things suck down fuel and it takes a whole lot of escorted truck convoys to keep them supplied and in operational terms, the larger each group is the fewer groups you have deployed. A lot of that convoying work has to be done by contractors too because the military simply does not have manpower to do it all while still having anyone else left for actual combat missions.

The advantage of powered armor, it lets you take your armor protection into places you could not before. A few guys in powered armor suits can for example walk across a farmers field without crushing all his crops like trucks would, making it far harder for the enemy to predict the paths they'll use and then lay several dozen IEDs per day along them. If you crush the crops with your MRAP... well then that farmer will hate you and support the insurgents which is bad.
They can also interact with the locals a lot more directly and with much less risk, since now getting close to someone doesn't mean a concealed handgun can be the end of your day, or a frag grenade thrown into the room. One of the big problems in Iraq was quite simply that Americans would not get out of their hummve or MRAPs to talk to anyone, so the insurgents successfully isolated them from the population, even if they continued to drive patrols down the streets. A lot of patrol work in an insurgancy is just about showing presence , and that's largely a matter of appearances. Frankly I think even one US solider in a powered armor suit is going to provide more effective presence then a whole squad in two or three MRAPs simple because of his superior contact with the local population. That advantage certainly doesn't work all the time though.

As for the need for more eyes, that's why you mount cameras on the suit, and give the suit user a two way video feed to interface with UAV support, unmanned ground units and unattended ground sensors. Then someone back in Nevada can literally watch the users back for him. More and more firepower is going to be indirect as well.

The purpose of infantry is to seek out and find the enemy in all the small human scale places he can hide, but nothing says the infantryman's own weapons always have to do the job of killing what is found. Netfires for example was just canceled, but the basic concept will come back and would be ideal for this. Its a remote controlled pack of VLS missiles, which can be mounted on a truck or simply set on the ground. Range is 40km and it has the same kind of firepower as a Hellfire on an Apache gunship or a Predator UAV.

I understand that, however even with suits you still need numbers so your costs may still end up going up net anyway. If you have to cut back bodies for gear then you run the risk of putting too many eggs in one basket so to speak.

I agree, net costs are going to go up. However if capability also goes up, then the cost-capability ratio may improve. If we can afford it at all, then that is good. Weapons becoming more expensive is just reality, because we keep demanding more capability. We may find in the future warfare transforms to the point that we simply do no deploy massed infantry or armor for any purpose except occupations and security. At that point we might just say fuck that, and ditch those units completely. An armored division costs about 5 billion a year just to pay the personal and training costs in peacetime... so its easy to see how mega bucks could be saved if we could even just reduce the number of them we needed.

Also the fact is, that infantry is currently the place were technology means the least in warfare. Few people can match the US in say air power or even in tanks, but dozens could match us rifleman for rifleman. Some kind of full body protective suit is just about the only way to change that. Otherwise everyone is still equally mortal which is annoying.

You make good points, if that suit can do all that for cheap then it is good, however we're leaving out key things like fuel, keeping the suit running, operational time/range per fuel load, reliability. Any real world suit that I can see will be too expensive to be more than a shiny toy to be run through test program after test program until either we see that we don't need it or it is no longer cutting edge.

I'd expect it to take several generations of prototypes before anything could be operational, and then one or two generations of 'short life' suits which are only used for niche roles. They might literally plug into an APC that transports them so they can keep the batteries charged; though some kind of microturbine (or more likely a pack of microturbines, only as many as you need at that moment would be turned on) is more realistic for providing the kind of power a suit would need. After that then we might see a proper suit which can actually go a day or two (ideally 72 hours, after that most people will hallucinate from lack of sleep) without more then simple servicing and thus be fit for wider issue.

But yeah, that'd be a long way off from now, and I don't think its unrealistic that by the time (if ever) the supporting technology is ready to make a powered armor suit possible we really will not be thinking in terms of 20th century massed mechanized warfare anymore. The less of that we do, the more and more value a powered suit would have, no matter what it actually costs.

[VF5SS]

In fiction you can do what you want, of course, but I have to say that giant walking humanoid robots have always looked stupid to me. I liked some of the Battletech designs like the Marauder because that looked like a piece of military equipment instead of a 700-foot tall Samurai, but it is still too big to be truly practical-- it's more rugged, purpose-built appearance just lessens its silliness footprint.

You mean the robot they stole from Macross which is really an alien battle robot for giants?

[Coyote]

Uh, I guess, whatever. It doesn't look like a giant Samurai warrior or skirted chickbot, so... yeah.

[castlebravo]

If I remember, in WW2 about 60% of the casualties were due to artillery, while 30% were due to small arms. Power Armour would be near immune to both of these factors. In other, words PA would fucking revolutionize warfare.

Power armor might be immune to small arms, but it would not be immune to artillery. Furthermore, it would not be immune to the weapons available to a modern infantry squad, especially once you start factoring in man portal anti-vehicle weapons like the Javelin which is going to render your PA so much scrap metal and fleshy bits.

Today air power is more important, but most of the killing is still done by artillery. Indirect fire artillery, the kind of thing that would kill a soldier in PA if it hits directly the men, with happens once in 1 thousand times.

This is where things like improved convention munitions come in.
See: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ ... s/m483.htm

They already have shaped charge sub-munitions that can home in on infrared signatures.

So the real issue becomes can power armor do something that leg mobile infantry or AFVs can't do, or do they make certain missions more cost effective or feasible (CQB / assault). There may be particular roles where they will be useful, but it's doubtful they will revolutionize warfare.

[CBG]

It would not be immune to artillery, but it would be significantly more resistant to it than ordinary infantry. And, just like normal infantry, they can still hide in buildings, making guided submunitions a lot less effective. Anti tank weapons would work, but then, hitting a large man sized target with infantry mobility is probably much harder than hitting a tank or IFV. And to kill an PA infantryman, you need to haul around a missile that is worth a thousand $, weigths a few kilos, and uses a heavy, single shot launcher, instead of a rifle round worth less than 1 $, weighting a 1 kg a 20-30 round magazine, that is fired from an automatic rifle. It would be similar to taking a squad of modern infantry, equipping them with modern muskets, giving 5-10 rounds to each, and sending them to fight another modern squad of infantry with ordinary weapons.


About abilities - what ordinary infantrymen don't have, there would be 3 things -
1.Always being ready for a NBC strike
2.Being able to carry a lot heavier equipment without much effort.
3.If the suits would be heavy enough, they would give some additional stability for infantryman's weapons, and let the wearer withstand more recoil without being hurt or losing control of the weapon. I such case, we could see GPMG's being used instead of assault rifles, anti material rifles used as designated marksman weapons, automatic grenade launchers on squad level and other usually a bit too heavy weapons used by single PA squad members. They would also be able to carry more\heavier ammo.

As a lesser issue, its also a big problem as to how you treat the wounded. Modern body armor gets in the way already, which is why the latest vests have a hidden pull code that makes the vest fall into peices for easy removal. But that wont work so well with a powered armor suit. Heinlein thought of that in Starship Troopers and mentioned a can opener to open up the suits... but this never struck me as being a very good solution.

I think there would not be many wounded to be treated. I think that most of weapons strong enough to pierce such armor would still carry enough power to massacre whoever is inside.
Still, suit based medical abilities would be nice. At least something that would stop bleeding from limb damage, like a tourniquet. With that, wounded PA infantrymen could be transported to rear areas and be "unarmored" there.
There is another thing about wounded\killed PA infantrymen - except for overkill weapons like HEAT submunitions or AT weapon direct hits, a lot of parts could be salvaged from a damaged PA, and with anti material rifle hits, they would be pretty much repairable, even if the wearer is not.

[Artemas]

Except, of course, if whatever pierced the armour hit a limb or other non-vital part of the body. Casualties would be a problem. But with suit-based abilities, or the fast release cords to quickly dismantle the armour, the problem would be somewhat mitigated.

[CBG]

I think that fast release cords would be quite hard to implement into powered armor, with assisted joints etc. In addition to anti bleeding systems, more advanced medical systems could include medical condition meters and automatic drug injectors. Such systems, if reliable enough, could do most of medic's job without anyone's action and without taking off armor. At least as long as they are not amongst the damaged parts.

But there is an even better solution to this problem: Remote control.
If anyone would get technology to make power armor, it would be easy to modify into remote controlled humanoid combat robots. They could do pretty much everything a PA infantryman could, while the person steering it would be sitting somewhere in a safe bunker, be replaced when tired, and if "killed", could be linked with another robot without loss of life, training and experience. Such robots would also be inherently more damage resistent than human operated PA. A leg got ripped off by an explosion? What the hell, it still can crawl and shot almost like before. They also couldn't be used for any kind of psychological ops that humans can be used for (imagine the taliban threatening to behead an infidel robot). It would be like having fearless, almost tireless PA soldiers who can be "resurrected" at cost of replacing or repairing the armor. And they can't feel pain. Beside potential vunerability for EM warfare, reduced dexterity and slightly worse reaction time, it has only advantages. In a low intensity\guerilla style conflict, such robots would be clearly better than human PA soldiers.
In combat against more hi tech opponents, eliminating the possibility of an enemy hacker reducing the unstoppable terminator company into a statue garden to be captured and used against their former owners might offset the problems caused by putting a human inside.

[Scorpion]

If I remember, in WW2 about 60% of the casualties were due to artillery, while 30% were due to small arms. Power Armour would be near immune to both of these factors. In other, words PA would fucking revolutionize warfare.

Power Armour immune to artillery? Pah! Not even tanks are immune to artillery, much less PA!

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Who+says+ ... a097722805 (EDIT: Damn URL tag doesn't work...)

According to the article I linked to, which details US Army studies on the effectiveness of artillery when faced with conflicting Soviet reports, normal "dumb" artillery is quite effective at killing enemy armour. Airburst rounds were especially effective, the shrapnel destroying engines and gun barrels alike. Point-detonating shells were also adept at destroying vision ports, tracks and roadwheels, all of which result in a mission kill. One of the conclusions of the tests is that an impact of a shell within 30m of an armoured vehicle is enough to cause "considerable" damage, of the type I described above. And we're talking about 50-ton tanks here, vehicles that carry more armour than PA can hope to carry and remain practical (and not a mech) at the same time. Not to mention the humanoid figure is full of shot traps...

Let me just transcribe the "5 Artillery Myths" from the article for the benefit of the audience.

Because the databases in force-on-force simulations/models have not accurately portrayed the effects of artillery fires for a number of years, several myths have arisen. The SAE results dispell the following five myths.

Myth #1--It requires a direct hit with an artillery round to damage or destroy an armored vehicle. Not true; 155-mm rounds that impact within 30 meters cause considerable damage (Figure 5). Air bursts using VT or dual-purpose improved conventional munitions can strip away communications, sights, vision blocks and anything stored on the outside of the vehicle. These air. bursts are especially effective against soft targets such as multiple-rocket launchers (MRLs). (See Figure 6.)

Myth #2--It takes 50 artillery rounds to destroy or damage a tank. Not true. It takes one round (Figure 7). If an artillery battalion engages an armored formation (54 rounds), more than one tank will be destroyed or damaged.

Myth #3--Artillery cannot engage moving targets. It is difficult, but it can be done. The issue is not lethality, but the tactics, techniques and procedures to hit the moving target. Units must train to shift fires.

Myth #4--Modern armor cannot be defeated by artillery. Tanks are designed to kill tanks, and most of the armor is designed to protect against direct fire. HE rounds. with VT or delayed fuze and DPICM are very capable of defeating "modern" armor (Figure .

Myth #5--Armored vehicles can button up and drive through artillery fire. Yes, they can. But as soon as they button up, their ability to see is reduced by approximately 40 percent. And as they drive through the artillery fire, there is a high probability they will have mobility and firepower damage or that the formation will change its direction of attack. The results are delay and suppression of armor.

Sorry for the delay, I have allot of backlog to clear.

Scorpion

[Batman]

Err-we are still having not inconsiderable trouble making bipedal robots work right (Not that I see why combat mecha, autonomous or remote controlled, need to be bipedal if we decide we need them at all). Or did last I checked. I guess you could have the remote operators use something like motion capture gear to pilot the remotes but I'm not sure that's enough to fight the inherent instability of a humanoid biped.

[CBG]

One of the conclusions of the tests is that an impact of a shell within 30m of an armoured vehicle is enough to cause "considerable" damage, of the type I described above. And we're talking about 50-ton tanks here, vehicles that carry more armour than PA can hope to carry and remain practical (and not a mech) at the same time. Not to mention the humanoid figure is full of shot traps...

50m is the lethal radius against infantry for 6 inch howitzer shells. 30m figure would mean that 50 ton tanks are just a bit more artillery resistant than ordinary infantry.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... 2805/pg_2/
The article "5 Artillery Myths" article states that the "modern tank" used in the test was a M48 Patton. Which is hardly a representative of modern tanks. And the damage was limited to vulnerable parts like gun sights and tracks, and other parts not covered by armor. In power armor such parts would be considerably much smaller than in a post WW2 tank.

[Scorpion]

The article "5 Artillery Myths" article states that the "modern tank" used in the test was a M48 Patton. Which is hardly a representative of modern tanks.

However ancient the target vehicle may be, it still has more armour than any suit of powered armour can ever hope to have. Any humanoid mechanism weighting 50 tons would bog down under it's own weight. (Specific pressure issues. Happened to the Tsar tank and the Maus.)

And the damage was limited to vulnerable parts like gun sights and tracks, and other parts not covered by armor.

Actually, from the article:

"The model predicted 30 percent damage to armored vehicles and tanks; however, 67 percent damage was achieved. Fragmentation from the HE rounds penetrated the armored vehicles, destroying critical components and injuring the manikin crews."