In a nuclear battlefield, the concentration of forces into a spearhead would present a perfect target for the employment of tactical nuclear weapons. A single well-placed weapon could break up the attacking forces before they even had time to properly prepare, causing enough casualties to make them ineffective even in the defence.
This is the type of equipment it was expected an infantryman attacking an irradiated zone might need to push forwards after the employment of a tactical nuke on an enemy formation.
https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/army-soldier-future-1959-video/
Jeep mounted Davy Crockett tactical nuke:
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attacking an irradiated zone … after the employment of a tactical nuke on an enemy formation.
You’re not wrong, but holy mackerel we were insane in the early nuclear age.
The crazy part is how much thought was put into it. There’s a few good YouTube videos on the pentomic concept. They’d established a whole doctrine.
in the early nuclear age
The US Army still has radioactive environment recon vehicles.
And as recent as ‘05, troops are still taught to advance toward the blast after the shockwave passes. So….yeah, “were insane.”
were insane
1959 concept: perfect for short engagements in decent weather in North Africa and Europe
Vietnam: Xin chào
It makes sense. Every major war the US had been involved in was either that, or an island hopping campaign and we’d decimated the Japanese. This was around the end of the chinese civil war. We expected Germany to start some shit again or war with Russia. Maybe China. The fact that we’d spend decades fighting in every tropical rainforest was a surprise
I get what you mean, but in 1959 we had already been in Vietnam for 5 years, and had plenty of knowledge about the shortcomings of the garand. Then we just, made the same fucking mistake with the M14. Not to mention how poorly it handles in even small amounts of mud and dirt
I was gonna say. Keep your M14. Gimme a stock for the 1911 or whatever pistol they were using back then and and somewhere to place a bayonet. At least I’ll know it will fire when needed.
Also we’d just fought in Korea which had lots of cold weather combat. You might appreciate those nylon layers in the cold.
Really, this setup was made with radioactively contaminated (RIP Germany) environments in mind.
Take away the radiation protection elements and the M14 (the biggest unforced small arms error in US history), and what you are left with is the idea of a soldier wearing body armor, with a radio, with night vision, with thermal vision. That’s pretty much where things lead, it just needed decades for the technology to catch up.
We’re still waiting on those jetpack belts.
Shit man, a lot of that is surprisingly accurate lol
Imma need more information on that image metascope
It scopes a picture of the enemy meta, allowing you to hard-counter their build.
Slightly more seriously: it’s a generation zero IR night-vision scope, that relies on actively illuminating the target (read: being an IR flashlight, or preferably, bolt one onto your vehicle). This type was first used in ww2, but got pretty popular, and more portable, in Korea.
It is what we would nowadays call an active night vision or starlight system. Manual for a PAS-6 metascope.
There’s a few things in this picture that really need explanations. Nobody’s even questioning the fact this man has a jetpack or ‘jumpbelt’.
Wait until you find out how we nuked our own troops, on the mainland US
I like how most of this is fairly reasonable, then right at the end out of nowhere it’s just a jetpack.
Also any idea what “welded” boots means?
Well obviously you’d need a jet pack to jump over the nuclear craters you’ve just made.
When they say welded, they don’t mean welded in the way you think. What they mean is molded combat boots. Directly molded soles were much stronger than stitched soles and much stronger than glued soles. This was relatively new and fancy at the time and made for super tough boots. We’d begin to see molded boots become the standard in Vietnam, so I guess this prediction was dead on.
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