Could Space Marines Really Happen?
Could Space Marines Really Happen?
On the current military revolution
Granted, this photo may not look like a “military revolution” in progress, but it shows just one of a constellation of emerging technologies that are transforming the soldier in the 21st Century. This will not happen in a single moment. Nor will this be restricted to a single branch of arms, e.g. an “infantry revolution” or “artillery revolution.” Also, those are not jetpacks those soldiers are wearing. Sorry.
No part of the existing toolset — small arms, tanks, jets, helicopters, etc. — will just disappear, either. Rather, US Army basic training will integrate technologies such as small drones and shoulder-fired missiles into the standard skills package of every soldier, with knock-on effects for every branch of arms. New technologies that expand the possibilities of older, more mature technologies will be preferred to “visionary” ideas. Nevertheless, a military revolution is underway.
Some favorite toys of futurism are very unlikely to appear on a battlefield. For example, a jetpack would not help much for lifting heavy equipment; in fact, it would be a logistical burden on a soldier 99.9 percent of the time, to say nothing of the shipping, maintenance and fuel tails involved. The same is probably true for a “powered suit” that would enhance human strength and endurance. Complexity is undesirable.
However, the “soft, light, unpowered exoskeleton” soldiers wear in these photos is eminently feasible for mass mobilization because it is simple to wear and actually lightens the load on each individual soldier.
The research and development of the soft, lightweight, unpowered exoskeleton, called the Soldier Assistive Bionic Exosuit for Resupply, or SABER, has moved from the Pathfinder team to the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center, or DEVCOM SC. The DEVCOM SC team is preparing the suit for manufacturing and robust field trial use by the Army.
In plain terms, SABER works so well that the US Army is testing it out at scale for “strenuous lifting tasks like ammunition resupply and reducing injury and fatigue” which are “critical to readiness over sustained periods.”
A strap-in tech that takes the load off my back? Yes please! In fact, this old, aching lumbar would like to be notified immediately when these become available through the Department of Veterans Affairs, please.
To be clear, SABER is not the powered armor of your fictional space marines. Instead, systems like SABER will make it easier to wear the body armor that state actors increasingly provide their soldiers in the 21st Century.
Dr. Karl Zelik, associate professor of mechanical engineering, Vanderbilt University[:] “We didn’t try to create Iron Man — a complex, full-body, rigid, unrealistic suit. Instead, we started by deeply understanding Soldier needs to develop a lightweight, low-profile, non-powered wearable tool that helps provide much-needed assistance without slowing Soldiers down or interfering with other operational tasks.”
This is a very new thing in the world. Generals are normally much better at weighing men down than easing their lot and the basic combat load weight has not changed much since ancient times.
“It is conspicuous that what the [war] machine has failed to do right up to the present moment is decrease by a single pound the weight the individual has to carry in war,” Gen. S.L.A. Marhsall wrote in his 1950 essay, “The Soldier’s Load.”
He is still as heavily burdened as the Soldier of 1000 years B.C. This load is the greatest of all drags upon mobility in combat and I submit that it is not due to unalterable circumstance. It comes mainly of the failure of armies and those who control their doctrine to look into the problem.
Exoskeletons are the first item on my short list of new technologies in the current military revolution that reflect the broader pop culture category of “space marine,” but a caveat is necessary. I am using the term generically here, and not solely as reference to any single intellectual property.
Perhaps the best-known example of the genre is the imperial space marines (“Astartes”) of Warhammer 40k, but authors in the “military science fiction” subgenre such as Elizabeth Moon make generous use of the idea, too. So have filmmakers. Tropes about “space marines” are as old as the Cold War “space race.”
With that all said, here are three more trends I am watching.
Reflecting the return of armor to the battlefield in our time, small arms are getting heavier. Systems that lighten load will naturally invite soldiers to wear heavier armor.
That’s the underlying logic of the US Army’s recent decision to replace their longtime standard 5.56 millimeter small arms — the famous M4/M16 family of rifles as well as the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon — with heavier 6.8 millimeter weapons made by Sig Sauer.
The XM5 and XM 250 will “allow soldiers at the squad level to deliver improved target defeat at higher energies to advance threats at extended ranges,” according to Brig. Gen. William M. Boruff.
Boruff, the joint program executive officer for armaments and ammunition, made those remarks at the Pentagon when he announced the change, the first of its kind in 65 years, this April.
The phrase “target defeat” is an oblique acknowledgement that body armor is everywhere now. Advanced materials engineering has replaced steel with plastic and composites that render the smaller ammunition rounds less effective at ranges that are too close for comfort.
Like bolter pistols in Warhammer, or the 10 millimeter pulse rifles of the Colonial Space Marines in Aliens, the most obvious solution to harder targets is a bigger bullet. The enemy doesn’t have to be tyrranids or xenomorphs. Humans can be hardy and dangerous enough by themselves.
Laser guns are everywhere in science fiction: Star Wars storm troopers, Star Trek phasers, you name the franchise. As practical weapon systems go, however, directed energy weapons have only just begun to reach deployment threshold. Lasers have mainly been used for guiding precision weapon systems to a target and countermeasures against surface-to-air missile seeker warheads. Some secure communications applications have also been explored, but lasers have still not broken through as weapons on their own — until now.
The United States is now set to spend tens of billion of dollars this decade developing actual, tactical lasers. These systems are already deploying on US Navy ships and land-based platforms.
The tech has been limited by lack of a clear mission for it. China has reportedly fielded a “laser rifle,” for example, but it is not obvious what kind of infantry mission requires a way to set something on fire at a distance when greater damage can be accomplished by existing means.
Undeterred, the US Army pushed ahead with development. In 2016, Mary J. Miller, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for Research and Technology told the House Armed Services Committee that lasers can meet a range of tactical threats, such as incoming artillery rockets, shells, and mortars.
Miller also mentioned drones. If we can take one lesson from the war in Ukraine right now, it is the role of small, unmanned aerial vehicles, even consumer-grade microdrones, by both sides. Some of these directly drop small munitions on the enemy below, or spot targets for destruction by indirect fire. Others are used for situational awareness, for example to see the direction of incoming fire. Quadcopter designs are particularly good at loitering — that is, staying still in the sky, watching the same spot over time.
By this point, I have watched hours of Ukrainian drone videos of Russian soldiers scrambling around, seemingly looking up in awareness of the threat, without any means to do something about it. The Pentagon is watching the same videos. So if laser rifles do appear on the 21st Century American battlefield, they will probably have the same initial counter-drone role for infantry as the US Army’s vehicle-mounted HiJENKS system.
Whereas shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles are plentiful in Ukraine, they are not really built for shooting down tiny targets a few hundred feet overhead. A laser rifle will not destroy a tank or a bunker, at least not yet. But it can definitely damage or destroy the sort of small, plastic UAV threat that America’s enemies will buy with free shipping from Amazon.
Like the tricorders of Trek, or the auspexes of Warhammer, or the “motion detectors” (actually handheld radars) of Aliens, a range of consumer electronics is putting the electromagnetic domain of war in the hands of individual soldiers.
Software Defined Radios (SDRs) are one of these. An experienced SDR operator will have a battlefield awareness that is not available to the common soldier today. So-called “HackRF” devices herald a day when advanced jamming and spoofing abilities fit in a warfighter’s hand. Range-R radar devices already allow police teams to see through doors and walls in urban environments. System complexity can be overcome with artificial intelligence, or “cognitive software,” to simplify learning and use.
The US Army largely abandoned electronic warfare after 2001. A new threat then emerged from radio electronic devices, such as garage door openers, used to trigger improvised explosive devices against convoys, and so electronic weapons have returned to the inventory. Expensive Cold War era, purpose-built platforms are no longer necessary for this fight. This revolution will instead be a set of add-ons.
It will all be on the battlefield in a decade, and it will put a premium on brain power over muscle power.
Although he did not use the term “space marines,” Robert Heinlein deserves credit for popularizing the idea of “airborne” forces arriving from space as “hard” science fiction in his 1959 novel Starship Troopers. The opening pages of that book inspired this writer to learn more about radar and missiles in middle school, beginning a lifelong fascination with the fourth dimension of warfare. In this area, the soldier of the present already surpasses that fiction of the future.
“Space marines” are already sort of happening right now. Just don’t set your hopes on them descending from the sky on jetpacks any time soon.