You get a new generation of consumer tech almost every 2-3 years.
A new generation of Military tech takes about 30 years now.
We can already see that most US military tech orgs are filled with seat warmers related to politicians by this point in time.
The US military keeps improving there is no doubt about that, but the US consumer wing is improving at a far more rapid pace.
A large part of this is mega corporations that grow at a faster rate than military budgets ever could hope to.
The only reason we think US military tech is far more advanced is because there is a military technology monopoly right now. I bet any trillion dollar company could come in and eat their lunch if they were so inclined.
If mega corporations would freely participate in military weapons development the US military would likely be obsolete in 20 years time.
The Future of modern warfare will be letting mega corporations develop military tech for major world governments.
I bet apple could build a better tank than the A1 abrams within 10 years if it started now.
Lockheed Martin today is only worth 100 billion USD.
There should be a new weapons manufacturing company that should come out to replace Lockheed Martin like what Elon Musk did with SpaceX to all the other space companies.
If the US would legalize the purchase of tanks and fighter jets for the US public, it would open up multiple companies to race to build ever better products for the market.
Lockheed Martin was founded in 1995.
Boeing is even older. An ancient dinosaur that needs replacing with a more modernized competitor.
Currently the world is being run by companies that were all founded in the 1990's.
Hopefully soon these dinosaurs will be replaced by companies that were founded in the 2000's and the 2010's.
Today, of the top 10 companies from the year 2000, only 1 is still in the top 10, that is microsoft.
Of the top 10 from the 2010's, only 4 still remain.
By the 2030's, it will be fun to see only 1 remain once again, supreme over all the others.
I am betting on microsoft remaining the world's most valued company in the world by 2030.
Which company are you nerds betting on being the greatest in 2030?
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Military tech isn't slow, it's just that we hit cost-effective and technical limitations. Advanced tech is veeeery expensive, so there's a lot of focus in building durable military hardware to keep around for decades.
Take WW2, it was much easier to come up with new planes, test them and mass produce them when they were simple subsonic piston engine planes with no missiles nor electronics.
Then there's the “if it ain't broke don't fix it” mentality. Just to give an example, the USAF still has B-52 bombers in service but with upgraded avionics, and they'll continue in service until 2050 because they're still useful, they were designed for strategic nuclear bombing over the Soviet Union so a stealth plane like the B-2 would perform better on that regard but the B-52 is still great for conventional bombing missions.
!engineering
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Can't until the military adopts a new rifle in 2050 that is totally not just another AR derivative.
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Aren't they adopting the sig spear with a new height pressure cartridge round and advanced long range optic. Sounds kinda high tech.
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No, it just made it to the next round of testing. Its best hope is to be like the SCAR-H, adopted on paper but no one out side special forces will use it.
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It's already being issued to the 101st airborne. The first Batallian was issued them and they're being trained to train the rest of the 101st airborne.
It's not going to be a special forces gun but a front line gun. No support elements are currently slated to get it, but all major combat units are.
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That's what they've said about several other things that after testing ended up being in the Special Boys arsenal only.
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No the scar was purchased on a contract for special forces procurement. This is being purchased on a contract for army wide procurement and the purchase numbers reflect that.
I don't know who told you this skewed version of events but it simply isn't true. Unless a major change happens the army is already set to procure a large number of these rifles and a shit ton of ammo.
556 simply can not reliably penetrate level 4 plates and the army is acknowledging that. They need a rifle that can hit and wound people in armor. This is in no way similar to "oh look the scar-l is a much nicer m4" which is a hard selling point.
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They've done this song and dance several times. To replace 5.56 or increase lethality of 5.56 for body armor.
Special Purpose Individual Weapon: A program that sounded like someone was on coke, it was canceled and lead to the ACR program.
ACR Program: 1986 canceled after spending $300 million
Objective Individual Combat Weapon: its where the XM8 was submitted, this program spent money and at least produced some novel results. This is where the Mk 47 got started.
Individual Carbine: 2011 canceled after ~$375 million, here they were even soliciting alternative rounds to 5.56 and 7.62. Here is where the ACR which was in 6.5 Grendel was submitted and eventually found its way into SF armories. FN, whom already designed the rifle and was fielding it under a program with SOCOM, submitted the SCAR L and H for regular infantry duty.
The SCAR-L was canceled in 2010 by SOCOM, but SOCOM did adopt the SCAR-H.
History would have it that most of the things submitted here were either actual trash or ended up in SF Armories.
And that brings us today the Next Generation Squad Weapon.
Which is still an incredibly small number compared to the number compared to what they'd need to actually field the weapon, ie its under going Phase III testing.
Correct, yet the Russians and Chinese can't reliably field Level 4 Plates, yet, so the possibility that Congress gets uppity and the program gets cut isn't zero.
So far the IAR program has been one of the only programs to accomplish anything, and the Marines aren't even touching the XM7.
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I don't know why you listed a bunch of programs that never got anywhere close to this point but ok.
But they can equip their close combat troops with them and we would have no answer to them at the squad level outside of explosives. The reality is that for the first time in history the doctrine of "any hit with a rifle takes someone out of the fight and the best way to get a hit is volume of fire" no longer works. Therefore we are going to see a change in caliber.
This was not true during any of the other tests you brought up.
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The optic is the only truly "hi tech" bit. Back in the 50s the Spanish experimented with an ultra-high-performance high pressure 8mm for the original CETME, and the British wanted a .270 caliber for the new NATO rifle before American turbo boomers forced the .308 down everyone's throat then didn't adopt the FAL in favor of the shittiest western battle rifle that they immediately dumped.
However, a ballistic compensating optic makes any gun perform much better IRL, and there's no need for a fancy cartridge
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It's to drive their new penetrator design which is classified. It's the successor to the advap round and there's no information available on this bullet.
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The CETME design was way too violent on the cartridge.
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The obvious gap is that the US has kinda shitty lower end tech. Something like a Javelin, AIM9X or SM3 is always going to be expensive, and those are fairly reasonably priced, but the lack of cheap drones is massive gap. You can't really make do with a cheaper air-to-air missile, but a $300k switchblade is really only 3-4x as effective as a $500 fpv drone. Even the Israelis are now using cheap Mavics to drop grenades because even though they are low tech, they are darn effective and super cheap. If the US doesn't invest heavily in cheap but effective drones the next conflict is going to be an absolute mess
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The politicians and military contractors seem invested in high cost, high margin products
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b-b-but the US military is the strongest in the world, so the only way it can improve is by developing new generations of armaments.
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@gigachad_brony enjoyed you're comment.
US drone waves when?
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That's more of a case of mission change, B-52 aren't expected to fly over enemy territory as primary means of delivering nukes anymore. Now they stay way outside enemy territory in a peer fight to lob cruise missiles, or drop bombs on towelheads that lack air defense larger than MANPAD in low intensity fights.
Even better example of this is well memed M2 Browning. Developed in WW1 as an infantryanti tank weapon with some anti air capacity, by WW2 it was painfully obsolete in anti tank role, but became useful in air to air role since aircraft were now sturdy enough to carry it. While also still keeping some use in anti air role, this time mounted on vehicles. Afterwards it stayed in use as a vehicle mounted air defense weapon (meant to dissuade strafing / dive bombing, not kill planes), but as that too was becoming obsolete it was discovered its really handy in anti material mounted vehicle weapon, and that's where it stays for now. So it really became obsolete multiple times, just found itself a new job each time.
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wouldn't modern Russian anti-air defenses just blast B-52's out of the sky?
Ditto for any country Russia sells their air defenses too ofc
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Yes, that's why stealth is so important and why the B-2 is currently the main bomber for nuke delivery as they can enter Russian or Chinese air space undetected.
The B-52 is for conventional bombing nowadays, they were used in Iraq and Syria in recent years. As for enemies with russian anti-air defenses the strategy would probably consist in using fighter bombers to destroy ground defenses and clear the space so the B-52s can pass without harm.
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I was under the impression that modern doctrine was to basically merge fighter and bomber roles. I mean you can either use stealth fighters to try to bomb air defenses (primarily radar stations and launch sites) to clear the way for bombers, or just bomb the targets w/ stealth aircraft directly and not have to worry about "oh they had an extra set of SAM sites that they held in reserve without revealing on our initial sweeps and now our bomber squadrons are gone".
I guess once you go beyond "try to win the war from the air" and need to provide ground support, you'd need other aircraft, though.
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There's always going to be a role for a big butt plane that can carry truckloads of bombs and missiles while tooling around for 18 hours
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Pretty much, there's not much use for old fashioned carpet bombing anymore considering what fighter-bombers can do, plus, guided bombs provide accuracy, no need to flatten an entire city to destroy a few factories like during WW2. Russia, China and the US are the only countries with traditional bombers in their air forces (France has the fighter bomber Mirage 2000 for nuclear bombardment). But judging by operations during the Syrian it seems like they're useful.
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How'd that LCS go for the navy? Some didn't even manage a decade (singular).
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