Category: war

High Cost of Force Protection

Cheat Sheet, Guide, Military, Quick Reference, Technology, war

From My Confined Space. This post was just supposed to be for fun, but it inspiredBrian Wang, and now me, to think about futuristic warfare a little more seriously.

I don’t think the future of warfare (if there is one — world peace is possible) lies in mechs either, unless they are extremely fast (supersonic). I would favor a mix of 1) distributed fairyfly bots and 2) massive force projection, 3) the ability for the entire army to run away very quickly when threatened.

Flying machines inspired by insect biomechanics could be very small — fairyflies are 140 microns across. A microgram of botulinum is enough to kill ten people. If you could manufacture trillions of these, your army would be extremely hard to stop. You can’t seal every soldier in a completely airtight container. Advanced (5-10+ years after MNT, if MNT is possible) bloodborne nanomachines could theoretically combat this, but they’d have to respond very quickly. A fairyfly bot could merely fire a flechette deep into the skin, and would be very difficult to locate the toxin quickly.

 

force protection.thumbnail1

(via)

Military Spending Worldwide [Infographic]

Economy, Map, Military, war, World

Military spending by various countries all over the world can be measured as each country’s spending percentage of that country’s gross domestic product. A country’s GDP is a total of the value of the services provided in a country and the products that are made there. It does not include the value of items that are imported into that country, but it does include items that are made in a country and exported out of it. The GDP of a country is often considered to be a good indicator of that country’s standard of living.

In general, the Middle East has the highest amount of military spending when compared to the GDP of the countries in that region. Africa is a mixture of countries that spend little and countries that spend nearly as much as the Middle East when compared to their own GDPs. Europe and the Americas spend in the mid range with Mexico and most Central American countries spending the least of these countries when compared to its GDP. Australasia and East Asia are also in the mid-range with Japan spending little compared to its GDP.

 

ve military spending2

Source : http://www.visualeconomics.com