In civilian life no one is questioning the fact that we are constantly connected, measure everything around us or on our body or our position. This is not so common in the armed forces. Or we may put it that it is none-existing.
There is an old saying that we can’t connect soldiers due to the risk of being detected through radio waves revealing your position. There is another old saying that the first things that will stop working in a war is the communication infrastructure and access to electricity. The war in Ukraine has shown this old saying to be wrong. So one obstacle down, one to go.
What about the first saying? About the risk of being detected using too much radio equipment. It is true that you risk revealing your position by using radio enabled equipment. But the situation won’t get worse by connecting the soldier using modern equipment. It will instead improve things. And the reason for that is that we already are using radio equipment for short and long range communications. The difference is that we use standards for communication and encryption that actually can lower the risk of being detected, instead of using radio equipment developed in the late 80’s or 90’s.
But what does the connected soldier mean? There is an article published by the Swedish organisation SOFF (see link below) that tries to define one meaning of the connected soldier. We believe that it is a fairly good description, even if it brings up AR (and others do also bring up VR) as a viable technology for the connected soldier.
We don’t believe that AR/VR is a technology for the connected soldier active on the battle field. Not today at least, if we want to create useful tools for the contemporary soldier that help him or her win the fight, deliver intelligence and increase likelihood of survival if wounded. Here we believe there are much more current technologies that should be made available to soldier.
This is what we are working on. Current technology that may help the soldier TODAY, not within 10 years. Stay tuned!
