To the town of Agua Fria rode a stranger one fine dayHardly spoke to folks around him, didn’t have too much to sayNo one dared to ask his business, no one dared to make a slipFor the stranger there among them had a big iron on his hipBig iron on his hip

-The beginning of Marty Robbins’ 1959 song “Big Iron”

As with the stranger that rode into town, having “big iron” matters at all levels. The lowly street thug fears armed victims the same as a nuclear-armed dictator like Kim Jong Un fears assured annihilation should he threaten the United States badly enough. But, it’s not enough to simply have enough gun. These days, being smart with guns of all sizes is just as important as how powerful it is.

This fact is clearly not lost on the United States military. Even at the infantry level, the upcoming XM7 and XM157 weapons are going to be smarter than ever. The optic will have enough on-board computing and sensor power to do things like automatically adjust the reticle for distance, wind, temperature and other factors, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The optics, along with planned augmented reality goggles, are going to be connected to a secure (hopefully) military cloud.

Data from soldiers on the ground, battlefield planners, satellites, drones and platforms like the F-35 and B-21 can all be shared. One soldier can use an optic to put a pin on the map for someone else with better line of sight, with the target lit up right in the other soldier’s scope. An F-35 pilot can pick up signals from a missile launcher or radar installation and send that location to soldiers on the ground or a navy ship for targeting. Situational awareness and coordination could give everyone almost psychic-level abilities.

While not 100% accurate, it’s often said that, “There is no cloud. It’s just someone else’s computer.” All of that “big iron” computing power has to come from somewhere. An optic can’t carry that much computing power, nor can a tank, truck or bomber. There has to be servers somewhere using advanced software to swallow a firehose of data being provided from all of the sensors and people in the field, make sense of that data and then give people the information they need to make decisions and execute them.

Like little Joe Miller from Weird Al’s movie VHF, no human or even group of humans can safely drink from the firehose. So, processing all of that data is going to require a lot of automation. To really process heaps and heaps of data from the field, analyze it and disseminate it, artificial neural networks and other forms of machine learning will be needed. That means some serious “big iron” computing hardware will be needed. Put in wheel gun terms, we’re talking about a warehouse full of .500 S&W Magnum revolvers.

To even get to that point, though, even bigger computers will be needed. Self-driving cars under (endless) development are a great way to understand this. You can fit a computer in a car that can drive it, like a Tesla or a Waymo van has onboard. But, the computers that train those AI models are giant clusters of servers all working together. For example, Elon Musk had some controversy recently over redirecting an order of 12,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs for AI training! We’re talking about some serious computing power.

Alarmingly, this is an area where the United States is beginning to fall behind China. If you believe Chinese propaganda, they’ve been the high tech hub of the world for years, but this is often highly exaggerated if not downright false. Despite limited access to the best computer chips (Taiwan makes those, and they’re not about to give those to China), Chinese researchers have done things the way communists always do: substitute quantity for quality. By just cramming in more and more older chips into a cluster, they’ve managed to build supercomputers that can outrun America’s biggest big irons.

This, of course, comes with significant drawbacks, like higher costs and far higher electricity consumption. But, China doesn’t need many more powerful training computers to get ahead. By having a few dozen or a few hundred inefficient training computers making better AI models with brute force, it’s possible for the Chinese cloud to start outperforming the U.S. military’s cloud infrastructure at intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), command and control and information sharing tasks in the near future. This could enable crappier local hardware to perform better, saving significant money.

So, it’s high time for U.S. supercomputing to catch up. The Pentagon and contractors need to get serious about outperforming the world in supercomputing, AI training and building a smarter defense cloud to power upcoming hardware that’s designed to be part of that ecosystem that will make our men on the ground with the guns in their hands true super warriors.

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42 COMMENTS

  1. Computing power or no computing power cackles is no match for the nuclear-armed dictator Kim Jong Un.

    TRUMP/VANCE 2024.

    • Sorry, exactly why are we in Korea over 50 years since the Korean War? It is about time South Korea took care of themselves. I’m sure North Korea won’t launch any more missiles because they are afraid of Trump. What planet did you just come from? Certainly not the reality of earth.

  2. Man, I wish I could find an image of that old editorial cartoon by MacNelly (I believe). It showed a tank, with dialogue that had fancy targeting lingo, while this guy with a rock runs over and smashes the end of the gun barrel. Then the line, “…or we could just go out and smack that sucker with a tire iron.”

    All this funky tech is cool when it works, until it doesn’t.

    • Luckily we have shown to be almost as capable without most of the higher tech solutions it just takes a higher toll WIA/KIA wise. Finding time to mixhigh tech with dumb grunt training is a bitch with all the DEI nonsense they were pushing even a decade ago.

  4. We don’t want to generate the power needed or at least we don’t want to admit to wanting to.

    Our current crop of tech employees are rats trained to push a button for a pellet and with a few exceptions cannot troubleshoot on the fly or create anything new.

    First world nations are tearing themselves apart between a high-tech fantasy and a policy driven return to the stone age.

    We’d be better off stockpiling high yield dumb bombs and steeling the will to use them.

    • ……yeah the tech shortage of talent seems to have gotten worse as we opened up immigration for qualifed workers somehow. I don’t want to think we disincentivized actual talent and creative thinking but it does seem to be the result intended or not.

  5. Sorry, general, the 187th battalion is out-of-commission. Their weapons were hacked….

    • Yep! And how much AI does one need in a short range battlefield under 1 mile? I’m sure my son who’s at the pentagon would know but then again the whole DoD apparatus was clueless about the so-called “Arab Spring”. Yeah under Barry Soetoro’s pathetic reign🙄

  6. There has to be servers somewhere using advanced software to swallow a firehose of data being provided from all of the sensors and people in the field, make sense of that data and then give people the information they need to make decisions and execute them.

    Hence the major weak point that will defeat the system. Can a soldier who has come to rely on a computerized system be able to compensate should the system crash?

    • Purpose of basic training really, some shit really doesn’t change regardless of tech involved.

      • There is always a benefit to analogue back up. Iron sights can’t be jammed. An important aspect of the war in Ukraine is the competition to invent and/or defeat the other guy’s tech.

        • Would love to see how to jam an acog or the aim point. Almost no point to irons with what those two routinely survive but if they fit on why not.

  7. Electrical power will be a big differentiation in the longer term. I wouldn’t be surprised if the porta-nuke-reactor stuff done in the 50s makes a come back in an updated form. It’s critical for datacenters and an area the US is falling short in right now honestly.

    I am of the personal opinion that the computer revolution will repeat the horrors we saw when the industrial revolution was applied to warfare. Everyone will fight a new war with old methods and the new equipment will change things a lot. We’re already seeing it in places with drones, and we’re really at the infancy of what they can do. Stuff like drone v drone will become a thing as will automated drone swarms. This will make computers yet juicier targets for attacks. That says little of how civilian (and probably even military) computers have been allowed to wallow in their atrophy and decadence security wise, just awaiting geopolitical circumstances to get clobbered. Stuff like the bridge in MD (IMO it was probably a hack, but even if it wasn’t it could be replicated as one arguably,) the Colonial Pipeline, the hospital ransomware etc. are the tip of the ice berg. I could easily see a return of privateering or piracy (depending on who you want to phrase it as) online at some point especially if things go hot. Groups of mercenaries who are allowed to keep whatever funding, IP, ransom etc. they can come up with as they get it from countries like China.

    Now then, China’s compute power? They have tons of assets they can throw against us sure. The problem is that inefficient use of assets takes away from other areas. All resources are finite. Power plants use essential and basic material like concrete and metal. Large amounts of it. So do data centers and computers. So does power distribution The same things that are needed to drive war machines and make food. Being an insular country with lots of access controls, they at times make it very challenging to know things about them. Their technology is somewhat rare to see in the western world and to truly benchmark what they really have. Also, how much of it was stolen from the west. Then again that doesn’t matter if they have it quite honestly.

  9. The optics for the Army’s new rifle doesn’t actually matter. it’s a $10k optic that will never be allowed to leave the arms room or be put on some random E-3’s rifle.

    the rifle may get rechambered and issued to some troops as a.308 DMR, but the optic will never see the light of day.

    • Same was said about thermals back in the 90s and early 00’s then we started doing shit. Probably will see something similar with these optics. As to chamberings……..the logistics and bureaucratic laziness favor your assessment but sometimes things change and get pushed through anyway (see 5.56) so I will say you are likely correct with the possibility of having a surprise upset.

      • If our military is going to spend some money on technology, they should spend it on durable high-quality AND COMPACT binocular imagers for our infantry. And those imagers should be able to provide daylight, starlight, and thermal imaging.

        • Different optics for different tasks is fine especially for quick deployment and switching under stress. Now the binoculars with laser rangefinder, GPS, and onboard computer to split out coordinates for what you are lasing were awesome for artillery and airstrikes. Adding a NV component to that may be worth it but thermals eh nothing you can’t use a scope for.

  10. High density portable data centers and the power to run them are going to be critically important in the short to medium term. This is in part because power distribution in the US is incredibly fragile. A crude nuke fifty miles above central Connecticut would take out power to the Eastern US almost all the way to Charleston, South Carolina. That would wreck most data communications over the same area as well. High tech falls apart without the power to run it and the data networks to distribute incoming information and outgoing solutions.

  11. Troop: “ENEMY RIGHT! I’M ENGAGI…awwww crap…I got that BSOD thing again in my scope, says Its collecting data to send to Microsoft.”

  12. I came to share many of the same thoughts and concerns reflected in other comments.

    I happen to know a thing to two (or eleventy billion) about electricity, networks, electronics, and computers. They are fantastic when they work properly. They are also incredibly fragile and vulnerable–and surprisingly easy to sabotage. We would be fools to rely on such whiz-bang technology for effective warfare.

    Aside from the drawbacks that I mentioned above, I foresee another ginormous problem coming soon to a theater near you: self-directed micro-drones. Imagine a micro-drone (roughly the size of a humming bird) which autonomously seeks, recognizes, and kills (via tiny explosive charge or even poison) any human target. Now imagine that a hostile foreign government unleashes thousands of them onto a battle field–or millions of them onto population centers. What the Hell good is some advanced data, imaging, targeting, and weapon system against thousands/millions of micro-drones? Answer: none, worthless.

    Rather than distributed super-computing, we must have distributed people (in copious quantities) with old school firearms which have iron sights or simple scopes. I don’t say that as a luddite or curmudgeon. I say that as someone who knows how easy it is to defeat sophisticated contraptions which use electricity and electronic components.

    • So you’re going to defeat the bad guys technology with drone technology? Drones can be easily defeated just like any other technology.

      • Cato,

        There is a distinct difference which is huge.

        The technology which this article described (electronic imaging, targeting, networking, computing, Global Positioning System, etc.) involves huge amounts of CONTINUOUSLY OPERATING TECHNOLOGY. Autonomous micro-drones only require sophisticated electronic technology at the outset to develop their programming. Once you figure out the programming and build them, ongoing technology is no longer needed. Thus a government could build countless thousands of them, store them in metal containers (Faraday enclosures which ensures that electromagnetic pulses cannot damage them), and deploy them at any time in the future without any dependency on any currently operating technology.

        Nuance alert:
        Yes, autonomous micro-drones have sophisticated technology in their own right. Having said that, their only obvious mass failure mode would be if someone unleashes an electromagnetic pulse while they are in flight/operation. Note that autonomous micro-drones–once deployed–do not require a functioning electric grid (or generator), network, Internet access, wireless link, real-time targeting data, Global Positioning System, or server cluster. On the other hand, next generation combat platforms require all of those things–all of which are far more vulnerable and any one of which can take down the entire combat ability.

        • Bullshit.

          Ongoing technology is always needed or it becomes obsolete.

          There are effective anti-drone technologies that do NOT require EMP. They are simple to deploy and easily mass produced. They can be mobile, surfaced based or airborne.

      • SAFEupdateFML,

        Yes, our current population minus gun control.

        Our nation’s Framers knew exactly what they were doing. They knew that centralized anything (political power, finance, manufacturing, national defense, command-and-control) always has been and always will be vulnerable to failure for a multitude of reasons. The key to ongoing freedom and true security is DISTRIBUTED everything.

        Of course we are all intimately familiar with the saying, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” Centralized (fill in the blank) is always more efficient and less costly–at the expense of being hugely more vulnerable to disruption / failure / corruption. Distributed (fill in the blank) is always less efficient and therefore more expensive, although far more impervious to disruption / failure / corruption.

        • Well centralized banking would be the first thing that would need to go and hold to it through whatever real and manufactured chaos it would bring.

  13. remember…all this computer power in those data centers will be manged by the lowest bidder contractor employees who voted left wing and get all upset if they think they are suddenly having a gender identity crisis.

  14. A Military-Industrial-Complex advertisement is not needed here. It is time the American Empire was pulled back before it starts WWIII.

  16. The Houthis use a $5k drone. We retaliate with a $1.5millon missile.
    They are going to win by fielding more drones, faster and cheaper, then we can build more missiles at a cost.
    How much of a learning curve is there? Or are they going to dumb it down to video game playing like level? The military has not been recruiting the best and brightest if they can recruit.
    Then try to instruct that grunt how do all that while in a firefight at the same time.

  17. Who has not heard of armed FPV drones that seek radio emissions? All this chatty radio crap will definitely get you detected…then shelled or grenaded. The only radios which should be allowed are frequency and power agile PRCs that make it hard to radiorange and direction find. We are preparing to fight peers, not cavemen.

    More short pants, ponytail, techno incel engineering inspired by Mom’s basement video games…Goggles are from Microsoft, where all real warriors work.

    Grimm was a Crow, so he knows…

    • Judging by the videos making the rounds it can work from close ambush for a drone or two until the shotgunners location is known. After the person is identified……not so much. I would guess vehicle born lasers and/or some form of smaller CIAS and radar would be more likely near term solutions. My bigger concern is how easily could some non state actors get variations for use on civilians.

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