Weekend Pundit reminds us about several weapon systems in the Pentagon's pipeline. Each offers a piece of the technological puzzle represented by the term "transformation." Each has strengths and limitations, too, which will be hotly debated. Still, it's a good introduction. As WP puts it: "prepare to be amazed."
Still, each weapon will also have to find its way into practice and changed doctrine before it can make a real difference. In that critical respect, it's no different than the new technology you sometimes see at work. What matters is how it's used, how it matches needs on the ground, and how it fits into new and more effective ways of doing things. Otherwise, it can easily become a waste.
What does that mean for a military, exactly? For a very detailed (and sometimes quite technical) look, you'll want to read this set of after-action reviews by the U.S. Marines in the wake of Gulf War II. How their gear performed, what they need, what worked, what didn't.
UPDATE: Maj. Donald Sensing (ret.) looks into the Marines' AAR and focuses in on infantry rifle combat in Gulf War II. How has it changed over the last 50 years?
The orginal PDF can be found at:
*HERE*
it's the first report of many such
A professional assessment from Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS):
*HERE*
it's quite extensive
IF you want a genuinely WOW weapons system, the *small diameter bomb* (SDB) is the one that astonishes me no end. It is a 250 lb bomb with the lethality of a 2000 lb bomb. Hence you can start doing things like the bastard offspring of carpet bombing and precision bombing. A B-2 is set to carry from 64 to 192-216 SDB on a single sortie - that's right, from 64 to 192-216 targets on a single sortie. An F-22 will carry up to 8.
So, let's say that this munition gives planners the ability to hit roughly 8 times as many targets per sortie as we can now. During the 1991 Gulf War each carrier hit an average of 162 targets per day. By Operation Enduring Freeedom this number has risen to roughly 700 targets per carrier per day. (*SOURCE*
This should give, approximately, up to another 8-fold increase inside of 5 years. That's right, each carrier could hit as many as 5600 targets in a day. By way of comparison, the heaviest day in Gulf II was 1,200 targets in a day. When planners spoke of shock and awe, they had originally envisioned something like hitting 10,000 targets on the first night. That may soon be possbile.