With advances in new technologies, the traditional eight to fifteen inches of high quality steel, to protect warships, armored vehicles and troops via a vest, is just about now obsolete.

This is so, as the rate of delivery of some projectiles, is over fourteen thousand feet per second, in velocity.

This feature allows the traditional army tank and armored personnel carriers, to have their hulls pierced from above by an airburst projectile, or below, by ground based remote activated mines.

Newer concepts, such as use of very heavy metals, sandwiched in between layers of Kevlar and other new synthetic materials, plus ceramics, have made a challenge to the anti-tank rocket.

This shift in thinking, may eventually out phase the average battlefield soldier, as the battlefield might be made so lethal, that near to one hundred percent troop causalities, can be sustained, during the first engagements.

What it boils down to, is remotely authorized vehicles, looking for humans, probably on both sides, which made make humans a very scarce commodity on the battlefield, in a hurry.

With this new technology coming about, as what would be the base of technical prowess placed on the advanced battlefield, the concept of a human troop mixed with a newer type of high mobility robot, seems almost a certainty.

That's been the trend for at least the last decade, and something I've been trying to promote (from the inside) for the last three decades, getting our guys out of the warzone.

The better-armor/better-warhead trend has been going on for millenia. Armor used to be leather, then arrowheads got made out of bronze that could be sharpened to pierce the leather, so they added metal rings to the leather armor...

I think it's premature to declare the trend to be over and that the warheads won, we now have "reactive armor" that blows the warhead to bits before the shaped-charge detonates completely, making a "blowtorch" to penetrate the armor. It's only a matter of time before "reactive armor" becomes "proactive armor", sensing the incoming projectile and shooting it out of the air before the warhead gets within lethal range.

The trend has been continuous for thousands of years, I don't see any end coming soon.

I do... THE end

IMO war must be outlawed, otherwise the end is near

Soldiers, governments will not stop, madness has infected the whole Earth... and they will still be fighting when the snow is 3 km above your head

pathetic earthlings

Man's propensity to fight will end when we engineer the man animal's
eyes around to the side of the head . . . as they are in a rabbit . . . .

Geopolitical struggles are based in chaos, and are governed by Chaos Theory.

A chaotic political environment is characterized by unequal distributions of resources and populations growing at exponential rates. So long as us "earthlings" live in countries with governments that are looking-out for the welfare of their own populations more-so than the "overall good of mankind", then wars will happen. It's like our (US) policies regarding fighting forest fires. We eradicate all small forest fires to protect the threatened trees/houses in the forests adjacent to the small fires, and congratulate ourselves when we "contain" the small fires preventing them from wiping out the whole forests. It's hard to argue for the counter-position of letting everything flammable burn unchecked, and if I owned a house surrounded by pine trees, I'd be all in-favor of the current policies.

The problem is that it's natural for trees to get to a point where they're all in a state where they're ready to burn to the ground, but the current policy has the effect of setting up all forests so that they're right on the very edge of one single catastrophic forest fire and keeping them there at that state. It's like every tree is a domino set up next to another, and hoping that nothing ever knocks any single one of them over.

Geopolitics is the same. We avoid/suppress/halt all small wars from breaking out with the best of intentions, but the net effect is that all countries approach the point where every country's government is so p!ssed at its neighbors that, given an opportunity, they'd wipe each other off the map if they had a glimmer of a chance of getting away with it. That's just Chaos Theory in-action.

The solution is, in some peoples' minds, worst than the problem itself. We need one world government that would have nothing to gain from a local war, as all wars would, by definition, be civil wars, like you had in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was not a place that most people would want to live in, with Serbs and Croats hating each other but being forced by the government to get along peaceably. As soon as the government of Yugoslavia weakened, wars between blood enemies broke out and "ethnic cleansing" (genocide) ensued.

Likewise Iraq was held together by tyranny under Saddam Hussein, and when he screwed-up and went after Kuwait's resources by force, it triggered a war that weakened his regime and now there's a civil war there with the US trying to force people who hate each others' guts to get along with each other, the only problem being that you can't simultaneously wear white hats and instill sufficient fear in the populace to keep them from taking opportunities to car-bomb street markets full of innocent people that one side or the other hates irrationally over differences of interpretation of the vagaries of the Koran.

War is something to avoid, for obvious reasons, the problem is that the only effective means of avoiding wars is the establishment of a "New World Order" that includes Secret Police spying on individuals and suppressing the Free Will of the people.

The trick to making this less necessary is to integrate the various cultures of the world's population, and that can be surprisingly easy, once you get the killings to stop on both sides. It involves television and music. I knew that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse when I saw a TV documentary about the teenage girls in Moscow dressing like Madonna and passing around pirated videos copied from MTV broadcasts. "The Material Girl" was incongruous with the philosophical foundation of socialism, where everyone was supposed to work hard for everyone else's benefit. Madonna was cool in Moscow, and that made materialistic Western values cool, too, in a country where it wasn't acceptable to be materialistic. The Soviet-raised kids weren't buying the communist ideology. The collapse of the system was inevitable from that point on. It wasn't Reagan or Star Wars that ended the cold war, IMO, it was MTV, especially Madonna reveling in materialistic decadence.

I doubt that the historians will ever give her the credit she deserves, but that's how I see it.

Likewise, once reruns of our current TV shows get translated into the various languages of the world and become available to everyone via satellite TV (as is happening now), you'll see people everywhere wanting to live like Americans do, materialistic and decadent and lacking any entrenched ideology (other than acceptance of differences). When China and Iran get the Playboy Channel via satellite TV, we've got a sound foundation for a unified world culture where the people will adopt our way of looking at things, and maybe then we can stop worrying about WWIII.

and then world coups

QUOTE

We need one world government