These included Future Weapons and Tactics and their timelines, and the following are interesting examples:
Advanced sensing with unmanned vehicles
For: Battlefield, rapid response, insurgency, counter terrorism
Technology Timeline: 2013, 2018, 2020
The use of unmanned vehicles has grown quickly since the late 1990s.
The most remarkable application may be in monitoring trace minerals found when the planet ‘breathes' and expels gases into the atmosphere.
These minerals can reveal all kinds of weaponry, nuclear materials, explosives, fuel sources, and buried ores.
Recent advances make sensing possible not only at and above the surface, but in topsoil, underground, and under water.
This allows for continuous and close-to-real-time mapping of environments, even in hostile environments or enemy territory.
Within the next 20 years, the intelligence available from this approach will remove a lot of the ‘fog of war'.
On the civilian side, energy reserves, precious metals, useful minerals, and so forth will be located more cost-effectively.
Initial findings from such sensing in parts of Afghanistan show there are large mineral deposits that could be excavated profitably and improve the national GNP if government corruption and insurgents such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda were brought under control.
On the military side, search and destroy missions, unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency, counter-terror, and special operations could be greatly enhanced.
Artillery-Delivered EMP
For: Battlefield
Technology Timeline: 2011
Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) bombs have become a staple of military forecasting.
By reputation, they are cheap, easy to build, and highly effective in taking down all but the most effectively hardened computers, communications, navigation, and control systems.
Set one off in a city, and there will not be a functioning computer, cell phone, GPS, or automotive electrical system working for blocks around.
And if they require more expertise and cash to build than internet sources would have us believe, they should nonetheless be within reach of many governments and non-state actors.
Discussions of EMP weapons generally focus on large bombs delivered by aircraft or trucked into position and designed to take down the electronic infrastructure over a wide area.
Yet, small EMP weapons may deserve equal attention.
A miniature EMP bomb might be delivered by artillery.
This would make it easier to target precisely those installations or systems that need to be taken down without damaging infrastructure that will be needed once you own the territory.
Such weapons might even be deployed on the battlefield.
Combined with effective hardening of American electronics, their short effective range would make it possible to disrupt enemy communications and targeting while leaving our own intact.