Nanotechnology-Empowered Smart Soldier

Abstract

A soldier, known in ancient times as a warrior, is the most important element of any military organization to fight and win a war. Earlier, soldiers used to engage in hand-to-hand fight, using weapons made from locally available materials such as stone, wood, and metals, for example, bronze, iron, etc. With the advent of gun powder, the firearms in the form of canons and hand-held guns came into existence and were used as the fighting weapons, leading to colonial rule in the world after seventeenth century. The weapon technologies based on propellants and explosives made tremendous progress, resulting in types of weapons such as artillery guns, tanks, and machine guns used during the two World Wars of the twentieth century, with a war theater extending from land to sea and air. Irrespective of the explosion in warfare technology, the importance of a soldier remained intact. The only change came in the form of his weapon, protection, and communication systems as part of his payloads. The emergence of nonstate actors, that is, terrorists, has further added to the woes of the modern soldier. He has to spend long time on field duties even during peace times with additional amount of loads in terms of rations, protective clothing, along with regular weapons, armor, communication, and surveillance equipment together with power packs to keep these units operational. The weight load carried by a soldier exceeds 60 kg, which is a matter of great concern. Efforts are ongoing to reduce carrier weight of a soldier by the way of designing lightweight weapons, ammunition, body armor, surveillance, and communication systems together with replacing batteries with energy-harvesting systems from renewable sources, such as solar energy, kinetic, and thermal energy produced by the human body. Nanomaterials and nanotechnologies appear to be highly promising in this regard.