Land Warrior

With growing concerns of urban warfare and dismounted infantry actions, the U.S. Army recognized the need to upgrade an individual infantryman.

The Land Warrior program drew upon many wearable computer concepts, and maximized existing technologies to correct most infantry soldier limitations in the short term.

Due to limited resources, and issues with the overall weight of the system, Land Warrior was cancelled by the Army in February 2007, but restarted in July 2007.

Despite the initial system's cancellation the 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team (SBCT) was deployed to Iraq as part of the spring 2007 "surge" of U.S. forces, and used the Land Warrior, on which they had trained for the previous few years.

Internationally, there are several similar development programs, these include IdZ (Germany), FIST (UK), Félin (France), Land 125 (Australia), MARKUS (Sweden), Soldato Futuro (Italy), IMESS (Switzerland), Projekt TYTAN (Poland), FINSAS (India) and ACMS (Singapore), Ratnik (Russia), SARV (Iran).

The original Land Warrior program, under a different name, was undertaken by General Electric in Moorestown, New Jersey in approximately 1989, as a prototype having intent to eventually reduce size and weight in future phases.

[6]) Early demonstration versions of the LW system used software written in the Ada programming language running on a Unix platform.

Approximately 100 proof-of-concept Land Warrior units were built and successfully demonstrated in September 2000 by a U.S. Army platoon that was air-dropped into a large war-fighting exercise at Fort Polk, Louisiana.

These initial prototype units, designated Land Warrior v0.6, were built around a PC/104 computer platform running Microsoft Windows.

This version, designated LW-CIDS, was successfully demonstrated in interoperational tests with several other CIDS-equipped units at Moffett Field, California.

As the Land Warrior program matured, it became clear that its successful deployment would hinge significantly upon the key factor of batteries.

This was one of the driving factors behind the decision to move away from an earlier plan to initially equip airborne Army units, as in the Fort Polk exercise, and to focus instead upon those using Stryker ground vehicle systems.

It integrated a GPS receiver and a Dead Reckoning Module (DRM) that maintains accurate location when Global Positioning System signal becomes unavailable.