What Has The Economic Cost Of The Ukraine War Been?

What Has The Economic Cost Of The Ukraine War Been?

The relatively direct economic costs of the Ukraine War over the last 27 months have been roughly $2,250 billion U.S. dollars. 

This includes the economic value of deaths and physical injuries to civilians and military personnel alike, damage to civilian property, relocation costs for displaced persons, psychological care costs for war related trauma, losses of income and economic production, operational military costs, and losses of military equipment to Russia and Ukraine combined from the war and related economic sanctions. 

It also includes the cost of foreign aid that other countries have given to Ukraine in connection with the Ukraine War, and increased military spending by other European countries over the last two years that has been incurred in response to the Ukraine War and what it indicates about the threat of Russian aggression.

This estimate excludes global macroeconomic effects of the war on countries other than Russia and Ukraine, apart from the costs that governments other than Russia and Ukraine have incurred to provide foreign aid to Ukraine and to strengthen their own defenses in light of heightened Russian aggression. These macroeconomic costs are almost certainly non-zero, and almost certainly amount to many billions, tens of billions, or hundreds of billions of dollars. But the indirect global macroeconomic effects of the Ukraine War outside of Russia and Ukraine are exceedingly difficult to credibly disentangle from myriad other macroeconomic impacts on the global economy. 

Perhaps those macroeconomic impacts were $450 billion over 27 months (less than $17 billion per month), which is only a very thinly supported guess, but is in the right economic ballpark. If so, then the Ukraine War has cost the 8 billion people who live on Earth, as a whole, about $100 billion U.S. dollars a month so far, about $12.50 U.S. dollars per person per month, for everyone in the entire world.

This analysis also ignores the existential global threat to humanity's survival caused by Russia's threats to escalate the conflict into nuclear warm, and the global impacts economic and military that have flowed from Russia brining us closer to World War III.

Details regarding how this was determined in each category are summarized in the remainder of this post.

Whose Fault Is This Immense Economic Cost?

This immense cost to the world as a whole, can reasonably be considered the personal responsibility of Vladimir Putin, Russia's President, who authorized the invasion of Ukraine and has been the driving force Russia's continued prosecution of the war. 

There were no significant political factions within Russia pushing to conquer Ukraine before Putin initiated the war, and he did so with very little consultation with, or preamble directed at, the Russian general public, Russian elected officials, or Russian economic elites (the so called "oligarchs"). 

Even many key members of the inner circle of Putin's cabinet and advisors, and many senior military officials in parts of the military that weren't involved in the invasion in 2024 were kept out the loop in the process by which Russia decided to invade Ukraine.

This war is one of the clearest cases in history of an international war which was unequivocally started unilaterally by the aggression of a single country, in violation of international law, pursuant to an international law obligation which it expressly recognized in a treaty not long before the first stage of the war in year 2014, when the Russia purported to annex and took de facto control of Crimea and most of the territory in eastern Ukraine which it controls now. There had been a de facto cease fire in the wake of the 2014 stage of the Ukraine war for a decade, before Russia began a far more expansive effort to conquer the entire Ukrainian state on February 24, 2024.

The Ukraine War aptly illustrates the fact that a handful of highly culpable rogue national leaders account for an outsized share of the geopolitical threats and misery in the world. 

Yet, this seems like a problem that it wouldn't be impossible for some future international institutions to address in a manner that could gain a wide global consensus from non-rogue nations, to the enormous benefit of the world as a whole, and without fundamentally upsetting the parts of the current world order that work well enough.

Combined Russian and Ukrainian Military Losses

Neither Russia nor Ukraine disclose their own military losses in the current Ukraine war between them which started when Russia launched an all out attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. But they do make claims about the military losses that they have inflicted on the other side in the war. 

These may be used as upper bounds on the severity of the losses inflicted, but independently verified numbers, which are admittedly incomplete since not all losses can be verified independently, and credible third-party estimates, do suggest that each side's claims made by losses inflicted are in the right ballpark. Ukraine's claims, in particular, are close to accurate (although Ukraine words its statements about losses of Russian soldiers as if they were all were all killed, when in reality most personnel losses on both sides are injuries not mortal, soldiers captures as prisoner's of war, and desertions).

Ukraine has suffered fewer military losses than Russia, but has suffered the lion's share of civilian casualties and civilian property damage in the conflict, because Ukrainian territory has been the site of the vast majority (although not all) of the fighting, and because Ukraine has taken more care to not indiscriminately target civilians than Russia.

Combined, the combatants claims that more than 630,000 Russian and Ukrainian troops have been killed, injured, been taken prisoner, or deserted in 27 months. Of these, perhaps 90,000 troops have been killed, while 540,000 or so have been seriously injured, taken prisoner, or deserted. 

The military equipment losses of Russia and Ukraine combined in the 27 month long war include up to 27 Russian warships (including one Russian submarine) and all of Ukraine's meager pre-war navy which it destroyed to prevent its ships from begin captured, 962 warplanes, 600 military helicopters, far more than 26,992 aerial drones and cruise missiles, 1,339 anti-aircraft systems, 24,353 multiple rocket launchers and artillery systems, 38,814 tanks and armored vehicles, and 39,942 unarmored military vehicles. 

The General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces posts figures on Russia's troop and equipment losses as part of its daily update on Moscow's full-scale invasion of the country, which began on February 24, 2022. 

It said Russia lost 22 armored personnel vehicles in the past day, bringing the total number to 14,913. Both Moscow and Kyiv have lost significant amounts of personnel and equipment amid a recent ramped up push by Russia in Ukraine's east to seize territory. Kyiv said this month it had stabilized the situation on the front line after the Kremlin's forces kick-started an offensive in the Kharkiv region on May 10, seizing a number of villages on Ukraine's northeastern frontier. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that Russian losses during its Kharkiv offensive were eight times higher than Ukraine's.  

The General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces also said Russia lost 1,160 soldiers over the past day, bringing the total to 506,260. Moscow has also lost a total of 7,710 tanks, 13,101 artillery systems, 17,849 vehicles and fuel tanks, 815 anti-aircraft warfare systems, 2,222 cruise missiles, 357 military jets, 326 helicopters, and 27 warships in the war. . . . 

A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessment leaked in April 2023 said that Ukraine had suffered 124,500 to 131,000 casualties, including 15,500 to 17,500 dead.

Russia's Defense Ministry said in its latest update on Wednesday that its military has so far destroyed 605 Ukrainian aircraft, 274 helicopters, 24,770 unmanned aerial vehicles, 524 anti-aircraft missile systems, 16,191 tanks and other armored combat vehicles, 1,322 combat vehicles of multiple launch rocket systems, 9,930 pieces of field artillery and mortars, as well as 22,093 units of special military vehicles.

Via a May 30, 2024 story in Newsweek.

Valuing military lives at a fairly standard figure used in cost-benefit analyses in civilian life, of $5 million each, and other military casualties at $100,000 each, the combined loss of life and injuries to military personnel can be valued at about $500 billion U.S. dollars.

Major warships and submarines cost perhaps $1 billion each, and lesser warships cost at least $100 million each. Warplanes cost perhaps $20 million each and military helicopters cost at least $10 million each. Anti-aircraft systems, multiple rocket launcher and artillery systems, tanks, and armored vehicles each average something on the order of $1 million each. Unarmored vehicles, aerial drones, and cruise missiles average at least $100,000 each. The replacement value of the combined equipment losses in the war appears to be in the ballpark of $100 billion U.S. dollars.

Thus, Russia and Ukraine combined have suffered about $600 billion U.S. dollars of military losses in the last 27 months of the Ukraine War.

Combined Russian and Ukrainian Military Operational Costs

Russia has spent about $530 billion on fielding military forces to conduct the Ukraine War. Ukraine has spent about $150 billion on fielding military forces to conduct the Ukraine War (basically its entire military budget of $65 billion a year since its entire military is devoted more or less exclusively to fighting this war).

Thus, Russia and Ukraine combined have spent about $680 billion U.S. dollars to field military forces to conduct the Ukraine War.

Ukraine's Civilian Losses

According to Oxfam, as of 22 February 2024 (the latest data available), 10,582 civilians have been killed in the conflict and 19,875 civilians have been wounded in the conflict. Valuing civilian deaths and serious injuries on the same basis of military deaths and serious injuries set forth above, the economic value of civilian deaths and injuries in the last 27 months of the Ukraine war can be valued at $55 billion U.S. dollars.

In addition to all of these other costs, probably at least 25 million civilians (about 40% of the population of Ukraine) have suffered psychological traumas and/or minor injuries that will require at least some medical care or psychological care during their lives as a result of the war. Even valued at a modest $1,000 per person, representing a few months of psychotherapy or some urgent care treatments, the economic cost of this psychological care and treatment for minor injuries to people not classified as civilians wounded in the war, is not less than $25 billion U.S. dollars.

One of Ukraine's universities has estimated that Ukraine has suffered about $155 billion U.S. dollars of property damage in the war. 

Ukraine's GDP has taken a roughly 30% hit (i.e. $60 billion per year) as a result of the war from a prewar starting point of about $200 billion per year. For a total hit of $150 billion over 27 months.

About 10 million people have been displaced by the Ukraine War, about a third internally, and two-thirds of whom are refugees. The cost of internal displacements is probably at least $10,000 U.S. dollars per person, and the cost of fleeing the country and living abroad is probably at least $20,000 U.S. dollars per person. On this basis, the economic cost of these displacements is on the order of $150 billion U.S. dollars.

Thus, Ukraine has suffered a total of about $535 billion U.S. dollars of civilian economic harm.

Russia's Civilian Losses

As a very crude estimate, based upon the relative proportions of civilian deaths, civilian injuries, and property damages to Russia and Ukraine, Russia may have suffered $15 billion U.S. dollars of military action caused civilian deaths, injuries, and property damage in Russia itself. 

Civilian property damage in Russian annexed parts of Ukraine dating back to 2014 (mostly parts of eastern Ukraine which it controls and a lesser amount in Crimea) is probably on the order of $100 billion.

Sanctions have cost Russia about $30 billion. Other war related harm to the Russian economy has been more or less offset by increased wartime production and rising oil and gas prices. Russia's GPP has declined about 2% of a prewar $2,240 billion U.S. dollar annual GDP, which is about $50 billion U.S. dollars. But $30 billion of this amount is double counted as Russian losses due to economic sanctions.

Thus, Russia has suffered a total of about $165 billion U.S. dollars of civilian economic harm.

Economic Harm To Countries Other Than Russia And Ukraine

European governments other than Russia and Ukraine have also felt the need spend about $100 billion U.S. dollars to strengthen their own military defenses as a result of the heightened threat to their security that the conflict has made evident over the two years sine the Ukraine War started.

Ukraine has received about $170 billion U.S. dollars of foreign aid, mostly from the U.S. and Europe, during the current Ukraine War.

In both cases, I have converted Euros to U.S. dollars at about $1.10 U.S. dollars per Euro, roughly the exchange rate, at the time of this post, between these currencies. 

It appears that while Russia has sold goods to countries that support, or at least do not oppose it, in the Ukraine War, and has been able to find some countries like North Korea and Iran, who have been willing to sell weapons to it, in fair market value transactions, that it has not received any meaningful amount of foreign aid in connection with its Ukraine War effort.

Thus, the Ukraine War has caused about $270 billion U.S. dollars of direct economic harm to countries other than Russia and Ukraine.

Do Covered Roads Make Sense In Urban Areas?

A Kaiser Permanente parking lot near the Denver-Aurora border near Alameda and Havana.

Imagine a street in a urban residential neighborhood covered with structures similar to those of the parking lot shown above.

Snow removal wouldn't be necessary. The street would stay free of ice. The diversion of snow and ice from the road and the lack of a need to put salt or sand on the road would make potholes and other forms of road surface deterioration that requires maintenance less common. 

Summer shade would also reduce road deterioration and reduce the extent to which the street contributes to a heat bubble, cooling the neighborhood. 

Light pollution from street lights at night to the larger community would be reduced. Solar panels atop the covers would power the street lights and perhaps return power to the grid as well.

These structures probably aren't terribly expensive to build, and maintaining a traditional tree canopy over urban streets that serves a similar purpose, can be challenging in the arid west.

Technocrats

The progressive movement of the late 19th century and early 20th century was rightly concerned about corruption in technocratic governmental positions. They came up with several widely adopted response to this problem, some of which were good solutions, and some of which were at best only marginally improved and at worst, exacerbated the problem.

One solution, which largely worked, was the establishment of civil service systems which hire based upon merit and adjudicate promotions and employment terminations for employees in the civil service system. This is how the lion's share of employees in federal, state and local governments with significant numbers of employees are selected. It insulates government agencies from Jacksonian and machine politics style political patronage in lower level positions.

A modest variation on the civil service system, the Missouri Plan for selecting and removing judges which is used in Colorado, has similarly been quite successful.

Another approach which has been far less successful and arguably made things worse, is to have multiple state and county level elected executive branch officials.

For example, in Colorado, we elect not just a Governor and Lieutenant Governor ticket, but also a Secretary of State, a state Treasurer, an Attorney-General, a state school board which in turn elects a state superintendent of schools, and CU-Regents who in turn select a chancellor for the University of Colorado public university system. Most counties, in turn, elect not just county commissioners (who have a dual legislative-executive role collectively), but also a sheriff, a coroner, a treasurer, an assessor, a county surveyor, and a clerk and recorder. Between the county level and the state level, there are elected District Attorneys.

The trouble is that some of these positions should involve ministerial, technocratic execution of laws in a manner that provides a neutral broker between competing political factions or simply because a job needs to be done, and a partisan elected official is arguably the worst kind of person to fill such a post.

At a minimum, the technocratic label should apply to the secretary of state, the state treasurer, coroners, the county treasurer, the county assessor, the county surveyor, and the clerk and recorder's office. For example, a partisan secretary of state and clerk and recorder, as chief election officers, is a recipe for bias in a post that needs to be unbiased.

Moreover, these down ticket races are hard for the public and the media to meaningfully supervise and monitor.

One possible solution would be to give both the Governor and the runner up for that office a statewide elected office. The Governor would appoint the Attorney-General and judges pursuant to the existing plan. The runner up would lead an "Accountability Council" of that runner up's appointees that would include the secretary of state, the state treasurer, a state independent counsel's office, the state auditor, the state water engineer, and the public defender's office, and would appoint for each county coroners, treasurers, surveyors and a clerk and recorder, possibly subject to veto by a unanimous county commission.

Another possible solution might be to have a Council of Technocrats made up of the State House Parliamentary, the State Senate Parliamentarian, the Clerk of the state Supreme Court, the Lieutenant Governor, and the runner up candidate for Lieutenant Governor. Or, the Colorado General Assembly could send a representative of the speaker/President of each body and a representative of the ranking minority member in each body. This body might make up the Accountability Council that would also appoint some or all of the technocratic posts and handle as much as possible of the redistricting process and the process of approving initiatives and recall petitions. I like the idea of not using the top person in each house of the general assembly and lieutenant governor candidates rather than governor candidates, to tame the egos involved.

But, the basic idea is that some posts should be technocrats appointed on a bipartisan basis.

For what its worth, economies of scale in the state like Colorado with many very low population counties, would be better served by locating the office of coroner at the judicial district or state level, rather than at the county level.

A Crazy Idea

"Bleeding hearts" want to reduce the suffering that animals experience in feedlots and the like.

Other liberals think we should reduce meat consumption because it is bad for our health or has too large of a carbon footprint.

Men who are "brutes" want more opportunities to engage in violent activity that sports can only partially handle, and enjoy hunting large animals. But, trophy hunting is problematic as it hastens extinction of wild megafauna.

The solution?

Meet both concerns by providing a larger share of meat on a "free range" basis in which food animals roam free and wild in natural comfort, while people pay money to hunt those animals.

This is a far less economically efficient way to produce meat, if producing more meat is your sole objective. But, this inefficiency is reduced when the process not only improves animal welfare, but also provide a recreational outlet for lots of people. Yet, since this would still be a more expensive way to produce meat, the price of meat would rise, and this would cause people to eat less of it, improving public health and reducing our carbon footprint.

This would basically be a true "paleo" solution, rolling back the clock on herding to replace it with hunting to a significant extent (while still parting with tedious "gathering").

Skyscraper Economics

Elevators create a particular problem. On one hand, adding more floors to the building will produce more space from which the developer can collect more money. But at some point, a new shaft and set of elevators need to be added to handle the additional traffic. This then eats into the rentable space….Do the additional floors on top generate enough rents to cover the loss of new space from the elevators? 

…skyscrapers must devote about 30% of the total space to elevators, including their shafts, hallways and machine rooms.

Via Alex Taborrok.

A technological breakthrough that could overcome this issue, it seems to me, would be an elevator that could "switch lanes" passing other elevators that are letting passengers in and out, or going the other direction in the same shaft, along the way.

But, as telecommunications and the Internet make location increasingly irrelevant, I'm not sure that there is enough of an economic incentive to develop that kind of technology.

A Modest Proposal For Health Care Economics

A committee in the Colorado House of Representatives has passed a bill, on a narrow party line vote, that would require stand alone ERs to disclose their charges so that people utilizing a stand alone ER as opposed to an urgent care facility where charges are much lower for the same treatment, make an informed choice.

I would like to see a law that would make disclosure of all health care provider charges with and without insurance, before providing treatment, and condition precedent to collection of such charges. 

There could be an exception if the patient was incapable due to a health condition of comprehending the charges and there was no other responsible person to whom disclosure could be made who could be located before treatment was necessary, in which case only the average amount paid for insured patients could be charged.

One of the biggest problems with health care economics is that there is rarely meaningful disclosure of prices in the industry, which renders impotent the market forces that usually control prices through competition.  There is really no other industry in the U.S. economy that I can think of which operates in this way (e.g. while lawyers aren't required to provide firm estimates of the total charges in advance, they are at least required to disclose their hourly rates and any standard additional charges to clients in advance as a matter of professional ethics and are also subject to reasonableness requirements that are not infrequently enforce by the courts).

This consumer protection reform would be a good first step towards putting the health care industry on an economic footing that even remotely resembles a rational one.  As it is, there is no real rhyme or reason for the charges for particular health care services in the absence of binding health insurance contracts between insurance companies and their provider networks.

A Very Bad Invention And A Good Idea

The really bad invention

An assault rifle that automatically uploads a point of view version of its shooting sprees to You Tube.

* If you are in the military, this no doubt leads to critical security breaches and potentially tips off your enemies.
* If you are 98% of people in law enforcement, you don't need an assault rifle.
* If you are a crazed mass shooter, we don't really want to encourage you or make your job easier, and from a purely economic perspective, the market made up of affluent crazed mass shooters (these cost $7,500+ each) is not a really big one.

The good idea

Buildings in places where it snows tend not to be flat for good reason.  You want gravity to cause snowfalls to slide off the roof.

But, motor vehicles of almost every shape and size have roofs that are very nearly flat on the left to right axis of the vehicle.  Yet, most models of motor vehicles are sold in places where it snows sometimes and cars are parked outside sometimes.

Why not design car roofs so that they naturally allow snow to fall off to either side of the vehicle?

Now, you probably need a different shape than a building roof because motor vehicles are routinely exposed to much higher winds and aren't so firmly attached to the ground.  You don't, for example, want a concave curve on each side of the vehicle into a thin, tall dorsal fin running down the middle of your car, which could blow you out of your lane in high winds.

But, a car whose top half of the chassis was in the smooth convex shape of half a jelly bean, or half an egg, or half of a rugby ball, would allow snow that fell on the roof of the vehicle to slide off much more readily to the sides of the vehicle, without impairing the ability to stay in a lane or navigate.

Rubik's Cube, Faces and Language

Rubik's Cube

My colleague at work likes to use the Rubik's Cube as a metaphor for the difficulty of solving hihgly interrelated problems.  I'm personally fascinated by a quite different element of the 1980s fad toy.

A Rubik's Cube is virtually impossible to solve at all, let alone solve in a reasonable time, without instruction from a book, video or teacher.  Maybe one in a million people are capable of solving it, and the people who did so the first time were mostly graduate students in mathematics who spent weeks or months figuring out how to do it the first time.

Yet, with instruction, almost anyone with average or above average spatial ability and intelligence can solve it (I'd guess that at least 25% to 35% of the population, and quite possibly twice that percentage, are capable of learning to solve it).

Indeed, not only can someone solve it with instruction, but just about anyone who can learn to solve it can do so in a matter of a few minutes or less.  I learned how to do it when I was tween in small town Ohio with a little time on my hands and an illustrated pamphlet about 40 to 60 pages long.  It took a week or two to learn, and a month or so to get to the point where I was able to do it quickly enough to solve it in competitions where I had a fighting chance of at least placing against others who had mastered it.  I was never that great at it, but with less than 100 hours of instruction, my personal record for the amount of time it took me to solve it was within 30 seconds or so of the world record at the time.

For me, the Rubik's Cube is type case for problems that are virtually impossible to solve without instruction, which are easy for very unexceptional people to solve with only modest amounts of instruction.

Another important aspect of the skill of learning to solve a Rubik's Cube is that one of the keys to doing it is to learn a specialized, highly logical language with a dozen or so symbols with which particular manipulations of a Rubik's Cube are described.  Then, the solution consists of learning a dozen or so "sentences" that can be put together using that language and learning when to use each "sentence."

For what it is worth, it is a skill that requires regular practice.  I couldn't solve one if you handed it to me today, several decades after my Rubik's Cube solving hey day, but I could probably relearn the task now in a few hours on a long weekend.

Other Rubik's Cube Tasks

There are other tasks that are similar to the Rubik's Cube although not quite so impossible to master without instruction, and not quite so easy to master with instruction.

One is riding a bike.  Another is doing an inward dive from a diving board or platform.  Two far less specific tasks which have a linguistic or quasi-linguistic element to them are reading music well enough to sight read, and learning to make realistic free hand drawings.

Maybe 25% of people who play an instrument in high school, and maybe 10% of people who sing in organized choirs, can sight read music, even though again, the number of symbols involved is modest and almost everyone who is regularly involved in playing music know what the symbols mean in principle.  But, it is certainly a skill that can be taught and doesn't take many thousands of hours to master.  Many musicians who haven't already mastered the skill learn to do it in college in a single course for a semester or two.

The vast majority of people are not functionally literate in the written language of music, even though a very large percentage of people are quite capable of singing music that they are learned by ear, even though most people know what all of the common symbols used in musical notation mean in principle.

The counterintuitive thing about realistic free hand drawing, which can be learned in a year or two or less depending on how intensively you work at it and the quality of your instruction, is that it has very little to do with manual dexterity.  If you can type, print clearly, and trace an image using tracing paper, you have sufficient manual dexterity to do realistic free hand drawing.  The skill is almost entirely mental and basically involves nothing more than drawing what you actually see, rather than what you conceptually think that you are seeing after processing the image.  If you can shortcut the image analysis circuits in your brain, you can do realistic free hand drawing with only modest additional instruction in techniques like shading and attention to lighting.

But, being able to do realistic free hand drawing is an uncommon skill, I'd guess that fewer than 5%-10% of the population can do it at the high end, in part, because we erroneously tend to think of realistic free hand drawing as an inherited talent, rather than a skill.

The vast majority of people are not functionally literate, or even barely literate in expressing themselves in writing though realistic drawings.

Literacy is a good frame for thinking about this because it captures the power of the idea.  Once you have a vocabulary for describing something, you can think about it in much more efficient and powerful ways.  One of the biggest examples of this comes from deaf people who were not taught sign language as children.  They simply cannot do things like think about what other people are thinking until they learn a sign language that has words for these concepts.  Then, suddenly, those ideas blossom and their minds are opened to whole new categories of understanding and experience.

I think that expanding literacy and vocabulary into other areas could produce similar revelatory discoveries for average people.

Faces and Language

Almost everyone, easily more than 98% of the population, is very, very good at recognizing faces and interpreting facial expressions.  For example, almost everyone who isn't physically blind, or neurologically face blind can pick their own face and the faces of their friends out of group portrait or a crowd of people waiting to greet people leaving an airport in a matter of moments.  Even with a fairly brief chance to see someone's face clearly, the average person, even if they can't remember that person's name, could pick them out of a lineup of pictures.

We've learned from forensic cases that people are less accurate in identifying strangers and people of different races than they are at identifying casual acquaintances and in general people of the same race.  But, we're still very good at it and many humans are better than any computer system in existence at this task.

What we are not at all good at is communicating faces accurately to others in an efficient manner.  As noted above, the ability to communicate a face in writing by drawing it is uncommon.

Most people can say some rudimentary things about a face that they have seen, many of which are in the form of conclusions reached after analyzing the face rather than in the form of a description of the face that they have seen itself.  They can say that face looked happy or pleased or disgusted or sad. They can identify the race and gender and approximate age of most faces. They might be able to distinguish between someone who is fat or thin, chiseled or baby faced.

But, very few people can actually affirmatively describe a person's face with sufficient specificity, for example, to pick it out of a picture of a bunch of kids of the same race, gender, and age in a group portrait of the kids of a school sport's team or club.

There are people who work for police departments who specialize in helping people to communicate a face that they recognize in their mind's eye by sketching according to the observer's description and adjusting the sketch until they get it approximately right over a period of hours.

But, virtually no one, with the possible exception of experienced police sketch artists, physical anthropologists and medical doctors who work with faces regularly, can verbally communicate a face in even a few sentences in a way that someone else can understand well enough to identify that person in a crowd of demographically similar people without seeing a sketch drawn from those instructions.

While we almost all have the inherent ability to recognize faces with a high degree of accuracy, something like 99.9% of people are incapable of articulating that information verbally in an efficient manner without reference to sketches, and something like 90% of people are incapable of communicating that knowledge in writing without expert assistance.

My intuition is that the fact that people are so inarticulate is low hanging fruit that is a Rubik's Cube problem that could be solved by developing a logical language with which to describe faces precisely that could be taught as easily as sight reading music, free hand drawing, mathematical notation, the International Phonetic Alphabet, or a variety of similar tasks, in tens or hundreds of thousand, rather than thousands or tens of thousands of hours.

This is a mind hack waiting to be invented that would have wide utility, but which no one has really articulated and put their mind to, and it really is a "hack".  The key to developing a vocabulary that would communicate information from the facial recognition centers of our brain to others efficiently is to gain a good understanding of how the facial recognition centers of our brain actually "code" and process that information so that the vocabulary of facial identification would track that approach as closely as feasible.

On one hand, this seems doable.  You don't need a general vocabulary for describing all visual input accurately, just one sufficient to describe one highly specialized kind of visual input.  And, almost all of us already have the intuitive, if inarticulate, ability to understand and process this kind of input accurately and quickly.

On the other hand, I suspect that the vocabulary needed to describe faces accurately may be larger than the vocabulary needed, for example, to describe colors or music.  Teaching computers to do this has been a very challenging task and computers very likely process this information in a much different manner than the facial recognition centers of our brains do.

But, it is a worthwhile task to take on, and one that a small interdisciplinary team of investigators, with a modest budget, and some good insights could probably tackle the challenge of creating a good working vocabulary with which to describe faces precisely in a couple of decades.  And, if they were successful, the practical payoffs could be huge.  This is a project that is worth throwing a few tens of millions of dollars at to see what can be accomplished.

In time, learning the vocabulary of facial recognition, learning to sight read music, learning to make realistic free hand drawings, could all become nearly universal aspects of a basic education for someone who is considered a functional literate normal adult, just as learning to ride a bike, to speak and write and read in one's native language, and driving a car are today.

Concepts For Military Technologies

There are lots of perfectly plausible and workable weapons systems, military vehicles and the like that are not currently in U.S. military service because these approaches were never proposed and championed by the right people in the military procurement process.

I outline some of these roads not traveled below.  Some of the ideas below have been implemented in other countries or at other times.  Some have had advocated in the military procurement process, but either weren't adopted, or were only adopted on a limited basis.  Other ideas have never been tried to my knowledge.  Few of these ideas are original, although I cannot always easily source where I came across the ideas.

This list is not complete by any means.  Options involving drones have been omitted and some ideas have been noted and not filled in unless this post is later edited to keep the idea afloat.

Manned Aircraft

Homeland Defense Interceptor

The ATG homeland defense interceptor proposal.

The basic concept in this and a number of other of the ideas below, is that a solution to a particular mission can often carry out that mission just as well or better than a multi-purpose solution, at a lower cost, because it is detrimental to devote resources to capabilities that aren't plausibly a part of the mission that needs to be carried out.

The homeland defense interceptor would be a fighter aircraft designed to be operated by the Air National Guard to replace F-16 fighter aircraft (and ultimately F-35A fighter aircraft) in U.S. territory from 9-11 style attacks and misconduct by civilian aircraft, possibly with improvised armaments.  Essentially, they serve a Coast Guard type role patrolling U.S. airspace.

These aircraft would have no air to ground bombing capability, no stealth features, no short takeoff and landing or vertical takeoff and landing features, and no aerial refueling capabilities.  It would have sophisticated sensors, but light air to air combat capabilities and defensive systems (perhaps machine guns and a couple of air to air missiles), that are adequate against an unsophisticated opponent.  It would be faster than almost all commercial civilian aircraft (perhaps Mach 1.6), but not "hypersonic".

It would be designed to be cheaper to acquire, cheaper to operate, easier to maintain, lighter, and easier to operate for a part-time National Guard pilot, than an F-16 or F-35A.  A proposal in 2004 by firm ATG would have cost $6 million each (v. $26.9 million for each F-16 and more than $100 million for each F-35A), and $950 per flight hour to operate v. $3,600 per flight hour for the F-16.

Small Intra-Theater Fixed Wing Transport Plane

This would be a fixed wing, short takeoff and landing plane suitable for operating on primitive field airstrips over short to moderate distances for cargo loads smaller than those of a C-130.

They would offer higher speeds, longer ranges, greater fuel efficiency, and lower acquisition costs and maintenance costs than comparable transport helicopters, which the U.S. Army has developed so that it can control its own intratheater logistics.

The C-27J Spartan aircraft was proposed to fill this role and reached an advanced state of development with a few actually purchased, but was ultimately quashed by the Air Force fighter mafia and opponents of foreign military purchases.  These planes cost $53.3 million each, are sold to many countries, and about half of the 22 ton payload of a C-130J which costs $67 million-$120 million each.

A C-27 Spartan is depicted above.

A-10 and AC-130 Replacements


In the existing military, there are two kinds of aircraft used primarily for close air support, both of which are no longer being produced and have Vietnam era designs.

One is the A-10, a fighter aircraft designed for close air support.  The other is the AC-130, a modified intra-theater transport C-130 aircraft with a howitzer artillery piece and heavy machine guns that can be used to support ground troops.

Both designs are conceptually sound and have proven useful in warfare. But, both are unpopular with the fighter mafia, which wishes it didn't have the mission of close air support at all, and have aging aircraft currently in service because replacements were not authorized for several decades based upon the false promise that the F-35A and F-35B would be suitable replacements for the A-10.

One design that could replace the AC-130 (each of which is now more than 40 years old) is the AC-27 gunship with a 30mm cannon, rather than the 105mm howitzer of the AC-130.

An Artists conception of the AC-27

The time has also come to design a new manned close air support aircraft in the tradition of the A-10, but taking advantage of the technological advances that have taken place over the last forty years. Such a design might take the basic concept of the A-10 (low speeds, armor for the pilot, high levels of redundancy, a canon designed for air to ground fire on small targets, etc.), and simply update them with modern materials, electronics, and weapons. One candidate considered about six years ago is the significantly smaller but similarly CAS optimized SM-27J (see also here).

Airliner Sized Transport Bombers

The B-52 Stratofortress was a good design.  It has a top speed of 650 miles per hour and no stealth whatsoever.  Yet, we are using 53 year old B-52s in active duty military service.  Most recently, the plane shown above built in 1962 from a design that entered service in 1952 was returned to service after being sent to the Boneyard in 2008, because a B-52 in active service broke down.  Even with upgraded electronics, the B-52 is due for a replacement.  The planes are just plain old and need to be replaced.  No trucking company would maintain a fleet consisting primarily of 1962 delivery trucks.

A transport bomber would replace the B-52 in mission of delivering large payloads of bombs, cruise missiles and supply drops over long distances without stealth or exceptional speed in circumstances where air superiority has been accomplished.  Mostly likely, they would use commercial off the shelf technology found in air freight jets adapted from commercial airliners.  Conceptually, this is a B-747 or a B-777.

In U.S. Navy service, this role is partially fulfilled by the P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft (based on the Boeing 737-800 airliner), shown below, which entered service in 2012, replacing the P-3 that entered service in 1962.

Fighter Sized Transport Bombers

A similar concept, in place in many military forces of the world with small budgets, for use in situations where air superiority has been accomplished and precision guided bombs are available, is to use small commercial aircraft or training fighter aircraft, with little or no air to air combat capability, no stealth, and no supersonic flight capabilities, to deliver precision guided bombs from altitudes higher than enemy anti-aircraft weapons can reach.  These aircraft can cost a fraction of what a multi-purpose fighter aircraft like an F-16 or F-35A would cost, and yet carry out its much narrower mission in much more limited (but common) conditions, just as well.

This might be particularly useful in supporting small Army or Marine units in a theater if they need to call down air strikes occasionally on enemy positions, in a counter-insurgency action where skirmishes and ambushes, rather than major battles, are anticipated.

For example, the post-Iraq War military of Iraqi currently has a number of Cessna general aviation aircraft which have been outfitted with modern avionics and air to ground weapons that it uses in this role.  The U.S. military could use something more sophisticated than a Cessna as a platform for a small transport bomber, but certainly wouldn't need to use something as expensive and sophisticated as the F-16s used in that role today by the U.S. military.

Iraqi Air Force AC-208 Cessna Caravan launches a Hellfire missile

via Wikipedia article on AGM-114 Hellfire

The A-67 Dragon, pictured below, is another aircraft in this class.

Seaplanes

Seaplanes can land lots of places without needing true and hugely expensive aircraft carriers (and perhaps could be winched from sea into hangers without the need for sophisticated takeoff and landing facilities).  Similar uses have been made of them in the past, but none are currently in U.S. military service.

There are far more small bodies of water where a plane could land in much of the world than they are field air strips.  Helicopters can land almost anywhere but are slower, have shorter ranges, and are less fuel efficient and are less reliable than fixed wing aircraft.

Seaplanes are well suited to search and rescue missions in the open sea (where helicopters have shorter range), and to resupply naval ships other than aircraft carriers while they are at sea.  One can also imagine seaplanes supported by a chain of resupply ships or submarines, which are much cheaper and easier to keep in continuous service than air tankers.

A seaplane the size of a C-27 carrying a Marine amphibious armored personnel carrier could land in a lake or a large river or near a coast, deploy the amphibious vehicle, and depart (reversing the operation to retrieve an amphibious vehicle).  This would allow us to deploy medium weight U.S. forces in all sorts of places in the world where it would be more difficult to deploy ground forces that heavy by other means.

Transport Airships


A key weakness of the U.S. armed services is an insufficient investment in the high speed transport resources needed to deploy a credible military force quickly.  Air transport is the state of the art when it comes to speed, but the U.S. Air Force's logistics capacity is quite modest.  Moreover, many key Army vehicles and military systems can't be carried by anything other than large C-5 and C-17 transport aircraft, and C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft can't land at unimproved field airstrips.

A transport airship concept

An airship that achieves some or all of its lift from lighter than air vacuums or gases that it encloses, can carry loads ten times larger than the largest transport aircraft (in the U.S. military, the C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft), and as large as a smaller transport ship.

An airship can takeoff from a loading point on land and deliver its cargo to another loading point on land, without having the shift cargo from rail or a truck to a ship at a port and back at coastal areas, without having to have intact bridges over rivers and canyons, and without having to have a functional or IED free road infrastructure.  It can reach roadless areas or areas where control of the ground is contested, with only minimal infrastructure at the destination.

A transport airship uses about the same amount of fuel per pound of cargo per mile as a truck or efficient transport aircraft, although more than shipping by boat or rail.  An airship is comparable in speed to rail or a truck, but can travel on "as the crow flies" paths, and is three or four times as fast as a typical military transport ship.

Transport airships travel at lower altitudes than aircraft and aren't stealthy at all, so they are not well suited to supplying cargo over contested territory.  But, they are relatively fast and efficient ways to get large volumes of cargo from U.S. territory or a U.S. base to the allied controlled fringes of a regional conflict zone, without straining the resources of scarce, heavy transports like the C-5 Galaxy.

Transport airships would also be useful for moving men and material within U.S. controlled territory and to U.S. bases in peacetime.  For example, to promptly ship tanks or tank parts to Japan from the U.S. when there is not currently military action in the Pacific theater, or deliver supplies from New England or Hawaii to Fairbanks, Alaska.

Another possible way to deploy airships in conflicts where the opposition lacks any naval resources, would be to deliver cargo to landing ship docks off shore and over the horizon from opposition forces, and then having the cargo that is delivered deployed to shore from the ship as if the ship had carried its cargo there itself.


Ships and Submarines

Reallocating Responsibility From Surface Combatants

The almost 10,000 ton Arleigh Burke class destroyer is the most common major surface combatant in the U.S. Navy's fleet and new ones are still being built.  It entered service in 1991 and has a unit cost of $1.84 billion. It is a multi-purpose surface combatant mostly used to escort aircraft carriers.

U.S. Navy destroyers, and until recently cruisers and frigates (which are no longer in active U.S. naval service), serve primarily as floating bases from which sea to land missiles, anti-surface combatant missiles, anti-submarine missiles, and anti-aircraft missiles are launched.

Destroyers are large (typically just under 10,000 tons and hundreds of feet long), slow moving (under 50 miles per hour at top speed and much slower at cruising speed), and are home to several hundred crew.  These ships must carry not only weapons systems, but long term room and board facilities for their entire crews.

Naval exercises and a handful of actually naval encounters in the post-World War II era, have revealed that surface combatants are a high risk of suffering massive casualties from attack submarines, hypersonic missiles, aircraft launched cruise missiles or suicide aircraft attacks, or attacks by swarms of small, fast missile boats.  Their deployment can also be substantially slowed with sea mines. No amount of armor can protect them from powerful missiles, and active defense systems are not 100% effective.

These ships also pose a logistics problem in a larger conflict.  It can take months for a surface combatant to redeploy from one theater, for example, the East China Sea, to another, for example, the North Atlantic Ocean.  Typically, about a third to two-thirds of the surface combatant fleet is in port between deployments, at any given time.

But, the same missiles that are launched from surface combatants can also be launched from heavy bombers (the P-8, the B-52, the B-1, the B-2 and possible future aircraft), as autonomous cruise missiles from based on the ground, and from submarines outfitted to the task (as some Ohio class submarines have been).

Only about 5% of the total crew for an aircraft is on the plane when it is deployed on a sortie, while the room and board for the flight crew and the support crew remain out of harms way at a remote base.  Typically a heavy bomber crew will have a few of two to a dozen people on a flight, compared to about 300 on a destroyer.  Surface combatants are also very expensive (while the $1 billion cost of bombers like the B-2 were exaggerated because R&D costs were spread over a much smaller number of aircraft than anticipated, and is still less than the cost of a destroyer) and surface combatants can be difficult to resupply promptly as sea.

Aircraft move at least ten times as fast as surface combatants, are much smaller targets and can employ stealth technology in many cases, stay in the active combat theater for just a few hours rather than continuously for weeks, and take days rather than months to redeploy from one theater of combat to another.  Airborne refueling can address the range limitations of aircraft.

Submarines are large, crew heavy, and slow like surface combatants, but are much harder for even a sophisticated enemy to locate and destroy.  Yet, they can be just as effective as surface combatants in many roles.  For example, submarine launched missiles were just as useful as surface combatant launched missiles in the bombing campaign against Libya during its Arab Spring uprising.

While there are niches (e.g. the diplomatic usefulness of threatening force by deploying surface combatants in the vicinity of a potential conflict area, or providing a base for Marines where no land base is available), it makes a great deal of sense to shift a large share of responsibility for anti-surface combatant warfare, anti-submarine warfare, and launching missiles at coastal land targets, from war ships to submarines and long range heavy bombers and patrol aircraft and cruise missiles.  Neither submarines nor aircraft are nearly as vulnerable to enemy attack as large surface combatants.  This is one reason that many nations have refrained from purchasing large warships.

Automation

The Zumwalt class DDG-1000 destroyer

Modern ships, like the Littoral Combat Ships and the Zumwalt class destroyers (DDG-1000), operate with crews of about a third of the crews of comparable Oliver Perry Frigates, Arleigh Burke destroyers, and recently retired classes of cruisers.  Simply automating replacements of these ships from the bottom up would allow crews to be reduced from 200-300 sailors to 70-100 sailors.

Carrier Escorts

One of the main responsibilities of frigates, cruisers and destroyers in the U.S. Navy is to escort aircraft carriers which have few missile batteries, anti-missile/anti-aircraft weapons, and anti-submarine sensors of their own.

Most replacements for today's destroyers, in addition to being automated, should be designed narrowly for the purpose of escorting air craft carriers by providing defensive capabilities it cannot provide itself (like the Aegis sensor network and anti-submarine warfare sensor network of the carrier group as a whole, extended over many miles at sea, defense from swarm attacks of small missile boats, and anti-missile firepower), while ceasing to be bases for sea to land missiles, or playing a central role in destroying large enemy warships or submarines.

Carrier escorts might be 3,000-5,000 tons rather than the 10,000 tons or so of a modern destroyer or cruiser, and have a crew of 80 sailors or so.

Missile Defense Cruisers

The San Antonio Class Marine Amphibious Transport Dock (LPD-17) Hull is one design that has been considered for a ballistic missile defense cruiser.  The Zumwalt has also been suggested as a template for a ballistic missile defense cruiser. 

One niche where a surface combatant might be useful is in a ballistic and cruise missile defense role against missiles launched by rouge states like North Korea or Iran.

In this role, having a ship present on task at all times close to the expected launch location of the missile where it is not possible to secure a local military base would provide an opportunity for a prompt launch of an intercepting missile.  The Navy has shown success with this kind of missile defense technology, while similar programs in the rest of the armed forces have not been nearly as successful.

This ship might be nuclear powered, since it would need to spend long, uninterrupted tours on task in distant locations where resupply is not easily available or commercial shipping has been disrupted.

Transport Submarines

The military would often like to be able to covertly deploy significant numbers of ground troops and heavy equipment (like tanks and trucks) by surprise or in blockaded coastal areas.  It would also like to be able to resupply allies whose access to commercial shipping has been disrupted (something that doesn't necessarily take a very sophisticated naval force, or even any naval force, to accomplish as aircraft and artillery can also disrupt shipping), or to evacuate troops or civilians from an area where surface cargo ships are at high risk of being sunk.  A concept drawing of one can be found here.

The military would also like to have the capability to deliver cargo under ice sheets, such as those found in the Arctic, to reduce shipping times.

One sensible way to achieve these objectives would be with large (Ohio class sized, for example) transport submarines.  These submarines would not have to have the sophisticated and expensive weapons of attack submarines, without the ability to function at the depths of existing U.S. Navy submarines, and could probably manage with air independent propulsion systems which allow submarines to stay submerged for weeks instead of months or years.  They could be more automated than existing attack and nuclear missile submarines, both because of their more modern designs, and because they would have fewer crew intensive military capabilities.

A variant on the transport submarine is the Littoral Warfare Submarine concept designed for inserting troops with stealth in coastal environments.

Submarines As Command Ships

Submarines are also attractive alternatives to surface combatants as command ships, i.e. a base for executive and intelligence staff and support personnel for a military unit (e.g. a field hospital) that does not engaged directly in combat as part of a naval group.  Since command ships almost by definition have reduced offensive and defensive capabilities relative to primary combatants, it makes sense to put these functions in a less visible and difficult to determine location to the extent feasible.

One obvious way to create a submarine command ship would be to adapt a submarine transport ship for the purpose.

Combat Boats and Missile Boats

China's Houbei class missile boats are just 225 tons v. 10,000 tons for a U.S. destroyer and carry 83 small missiles.  They do not include living accommodations for the crew and can reach high speeds. They are designed to mount "swarm" attacks on larger conventional warships.  In blue sea operations, a missile boat would have to be supported by a mothership that would house the crew and provide supplies for the missile boats.

Seven countries including the United States which has six of them for military engagements on rivers use the Swedish CB90-class fast assault craft which cost about $3 million each. It is the fastest and most maneuverable military boat currently in service anywhere of which am I aware, and can operate in water less than three feet deep.

It has a crew of three, three machine guns, a grenade launcher, and a small number of small mines, and can be mounted with a Hellfire missile or armor.  It can also carry up to 21 troops and has been converted for use as a rapidly responding water based command post, ambulance, search and rescue craft.

It is well suited for addressing piracy, smuggling, and delivering troops to island destinations.  The U.S. military all to often uses far more expensive and slower and less agile destroyers for this missions, which may win every battle, but will ultimately lose a war of attrition.  It also represents the kind of basic frame that make might sense for a close fire support boat.

Close Fire Support Boats

The X-18 Fire Support Vessel concept known as the "tank boat".  See also here.

Perhaps one in six or seven Marine landing craft could be converted to a close fire support role.  It would be armed with a main gun the size of a tank's main gun, and/or a battery of short range missiles powerful enough to destroy fortified gun nests and armored vehicles on the shore that are engaging the landing group, in lieu of soldiers and supplies of its own.  It would have armor comparable to that of a main battle tank.  This should be technologically feasible because if a landing craft can carry a tank to shore, it ought to be able to integrate what is essentially a tank stripped of its treads and engine.

Essentially, close fire support boats would provide artillery support to landing parties.  They would be deployed from a landing ship dock or amphibious assault ship, just like other landing craft, and would not have long term accommodations for the crew on board.

It might also have heavy machine guns for anti-personnel purposes, anti-small craft lasers, light anti-aircraft missiles primarily to address fighter sized transport bombers and helicopters and armed drones, and active point defense resources similar to the Navy's Phalanx close in weapons system to address incoming missiles and artillery rounds.

These boats could also be used in patrol roles to interdict and regulate shipping, to support operating bases near the coast, to intercept and destroy armed small craft, and to deploy fire power up major rivers.

High Speed Transport Ships

The HSV-2 Swift

The USNS Spearhead JHSV-1

Ships can carry much larger loads than aircraft, but are incredibly slow.  One way to bridge that gap is with high speed transports such as the HSV-2 Swift retired in 2013 and the JHSV-1 introduced in 2011.  But, because sealift capability serves the Army, another military service, it has rarely been a popular program with naval procurement officials.

The Swift, for example, can travel up to 3500 nautical miles at 45 knots while carrying 605 tons of cargo.  The loaded ship is about 1668 tons, about one-sixth the size of a destroyer.  It has a crew of 35.

The Spearhead with a crew of 22 can berth 150 passengers, transport another 312 troops, and can serve as a base for a medium sized helicopter while traveling at 43 knots.

A variant on this concept is the concept of "distributed lethality" which includes the notion of placing more powerful weapons on ships such as the LCS and high speed transports that traditionally have had only minimal standard armaments, such as in the concept of a JHSV-1 outfitted with a railgun shown below.

Military Systems For Ground Troops

A Medium Grade, C-130 Transportable Missile Tank, Manned or Unmanned

A British Army Light Missile Tank

An Anti-Aircraft Missile Variant of the 13-15 ton Turkish ACV-15 Infantry Fighting Vehicle

An Anti-Tank Missile Variant of the 13-15 ton Turkish ACV-15 Infantry Fighting Vehicle

A C-130 transport aircraft can only carry 19 tons.  One Army vehicle designed to conform to that limitation, which makes it much easier to deploy rapidly, is the Stryker armored personnel carrier.

The Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle weighs about 35 tons (but half of the 70 tons of an M1-A Abrams main battle tank which has heavier armor and a crew of three or four) and holds a similar number of infantry to the Stryker, but with heavier armor and anti-tank missiles in lieu of a central tank gun.  Despite having anti-tank missiles rather than a main gun, the Bradley was just as effective at destroying Iraqi tanks in the Iraq War as U.S. M-1A tanks.

It would be useful to have a vehicle with a tank sized crew, rather than an infantry carrying role, anti-tank missiles rather than a main gun, and armor closer in strength to the Bradley than to the Stryker, yet within the 19 ton and dimensional limitations of the C-130 transport aircraft.  This would provide the most heavily armored and armed rapidly deployable armed military vehicle in the U.S. military and would rival comparable vehicles anywhere in the world.

Simply eliminating the infantry crew capability from the existing Bradley design, shrinking it in length, would go a long way towards trimming the necessary 16 tons from the weight of a regular Bradley to fit this role.

This lighter narrower missile tank could also be used in urban and mountain areas where passages are too narrow for a full sized main battle tank without considerable engineering work on the passage, and it could be used in places where civilian bridges are not U.S. military grade using existing infrastructure.

In a more radical version of this concept, weight could be reduced by removing all crew in a remote controlled drone version of this medium grade missile tank, rather than just reducing the size of the crew.

The 13.5 ton British Stormer would be an example of the system in this class, as is China's 13.75 ton HJ-9.  A smaller 4.5 ton Ferret, Mk5 Scout Car has a similar role.  A concept using Hellfire missiles is realized here and loosely based on a prototype M-113 Hellfire missile launcher.

A Next Generation Combat Patrol Vehicle

The Oshkosh L-ATV won the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle contest to replace the Humvee

This vehicle would replace the armored Humvee and smaller interim MRAP vehicles to provide transportation for four soldiers and their gear on patrol in hostile territory where small arms fire and IED attacks could be expected.  As a purpose built armored vehicle, it could avoid the problems of associated with aftermarket armor that the vehicle wasn't designed to bear which plagued the Humvee.

A program to design and produce this vehicle already exists and the winner is shown above.

Long Range Sniper Rifles With Assisted Aiming And Guided Exacto Bullets

Advanced sighting systems can allow a novice to shot a sniper rifle with the precision of an expert.

Smart bullets (0.50 caliber) that swerve in flight to hit targets in motion or around corners or behind walls further ups the ante.  Combine the two and the lethality of a sniper using this advanced weapon system is profoundly increased.

Short Range Grenade Launchers With Range Control

The XM-25 was proposed to give U.S. soldiers a short range grenade launcher with "smart" grenades that can detonate at a specific distance (e.g. above an enemy position in a trench or foxhole). Prototypes were tested in Afghanistan starting in 2010, but the non-experimental version is not scheduled to enter service until 2017.  It has a range four times as great (600 meters) as the M203 grenade launcher (which uses "dumb" grenades) that it replaces.

Each weapon costs about $35,000 and the rounds cost about $55 each.

Carbines That Can Shoot Around Corners With Video Sights

An accessory called Corner Shot allows soldiers to shoot around corners with video sights, thereby eliminating the need to expose themselves to enemy fire in order to shoot at them from behind cover.

Mobile Point Defense Vehicles

The Army's Centurian C-RAM system puts a Navy Phalanx point defense system on a semi-trailer that can be trucked to provide active point defense to a military base or other potential target.

A prototype Army high energy laser mobile demonstrator (HEL MD)

This would be a glorified flatbed truck or semi-trailer with either a modified Phalanx close in weapons system or active defense laser weapon that could be moved to a location to provide point defense to a small military base or a civilian facility from air to ground missiles, artillery shells, and armed drones.

Active defense laser weapons are becoming standard on U.S. warships, even though land vehicle based and aircraft based laser systems have largely been duds so far.

Rapid Response Forward Observer Vehicle

The Dutch Fennek Armored Reconnaissance Vehicle is a forward observer vehicle in current military service that also has an anti-aircraft missile bearing version.

A fictional prototype vehicle called the Tumbler from the movie Batman Begins captures the concept well.

The concept here is that it is sometimes no longer necessary for the military system that is used to order a strike with a guided bomb or missile to a target to carry the ordinance itself.  Instead, it merely needs a targeting system and some means of communicating the coordinates of the target to an artillery battery, aircraft with bombs, cruise missile battery, or ship or submarine with sea to land missiles like the Tomahawk, which would launch their missile or smart bomb at the target.

This would allow the vehicle itself to be small and fast, although protecting the occupants would remain a priority.