Future warriors

Space.com:

Within three years, soldiers could begin testing futuristic devices that make them each "an army of one" by granting them unprecedented capabilities, such as the ability to see through walls thanks to advanced radar scopes and super-protection and super-strength conferred by high-tech armor.

Although some of the technologies could take years to reach actual battlefields, novel devices developed by the U.S. Army's Future Force Warrior initiative such as advanced sound equipment and smarter lasers should be available to active soldiers as soon as 2010, promising to make them more lethal than ever.

They'll also be better protected. For example, current armor can keep bullets and shrapnel from wounding soldiers directly, but they can carry shock waves to the body that can break ribs and cause other injuries. Improvements will provide a more protective 2-inch gap between soldiers and their armor.

Also, by 2010, body-worn sensors that monitor respiration, heart rate, and shock waves from bullets, will let medics know right away when soldiers get injured.

"They will also tell a soldier's distance and direction, so a medic knows where to go," said Jean-Louis "Dutch" DeGay, an equipment specialist at the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass.

Soldiers will also get lasers to mount on their weapons to relay the location of enemies to everyone with whom and to which they are networked, ranging from other soldiers to Apache helicopters to Abrams tanks, DeGay explained.

"We call it the Borg effect," DeGay told SPACE.com, referring to the Star Trek cyborgs linked together to form a nearly unstoppable force.

Next-generation helmets for 2010 will also integrate electronics that pick up vibrations from the skull and transmit sound directly into the head instead of using traditional microphones and earpieces. They will improve soldiers' ability to discern varying sounds. "It doesn't matter if you're whispering or yelling, it can still hear you," DeGay said.

In the near term, other advances include enhancements to equipment that already seems futuristic, such as the Pathfinder Raven, a roughly 4-pound robot plane with a wingspan of roughly 54 inches—smaller than an average seagull's.Soldiers launch it by hand. It essentially lands via controlled crashes, designed to fall apart into pieces that are easily put back together.

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There is more including links to more data on the equipment. The time frame seems pretty aggressive. Much of the current equipment was shown as future equipment 40 years ago when I was in the Marine Corps. Some of the systems currently in operation were not suggested such as UAV's. I do think that the computerization of equipment will make it smaller and faster and easier to carry. What that means is that more gadgets will be carried. A 70 to 80 pound equipment load has been pretty much the norm for centuries. It is what the Spanish conquerors of Mexico carried. When the US developed the M-16 it and its ammo was much lighter than the M-14 that it replaced. The results was that the troops carried more ammo.