On a brisk afternoon in early August of 1959, the United States Army debuted what the service billed as its “ultimate weapon”—not a new bomb, not a specialized tank or fighting vehicle, but a single soldier outfitted in combat gear worthy of the Atomic Age.
That soldier was Sergeant First Class Ben Sawicki and, for a few fleeting hours, he represented the Army’s vision of the “soldier of tomorrow”—a future warrior that “will look so weird he may scare the enemy to death without firing a shot,” as military planners told Life magazine at the time.
Appearing before US military and defense leaders (as well as a few curious civilian spectators) at an Association of the US Army event in Washington, DC, Sawicki struck a “spooky” figure. The soldier’s face was shrouded in a heavy “plastic laminate” helmet outfitted with infrared binoculars for night vision and a two-way radio for rapid communication, his body covered head-to-toe in a camouflage “layered nylon armor” purportedly designed to counter not just small arms fire but also the effects of a nuclear blast, as Army officials told The New York Times.
Armed with a 7.62-mm M14 battle rifle (and plans for a lighter standard-issue weapon down the line), the most unusual additions to his futuristic-looking kit included a bandolier of explosive charges for digging foxholes and a “jump belt” jetpack that would enable him to traverse the battlefield in 30-foot leaps. With enhanced survivability, mobility, and lethality, he is “accurately representative of the fighting man in the 1965 era,” as a contemporaneous report in the service’s Armor magazine described him, ready for whatever America’s adversaries may throw at him on the nuclear battlefield.
“With this outfit, I could take on 10 soldiers with ordinary equipment and kill ’em all,” Sawicki colorfully told LIFE.
Of course, the Army’s “GI of the future” unveiled more than six decades ago, like most fantastic visions of the decades ahead, didn’t totally come true. But some of the elements of the soldier’s ambitious kit did end up foreshadowing future innovations for American combat troops. Here’s a look at what the “soldier of tomorrow” from 1959 got right (and wrong) about the future of warfare.
Head Case
The US military had relied on the M1 combat helmet since the United States entered World War II. Sawicki’s helmet stands apart from the M1 not just in the use of novel materials but also in both its departure from the “steel pot” design with slight molding over the ears and its fully integrated communications system in the form of a mounted two-way radio.
Indeed, Sawicki’s helmet contained the seeds of future systems. The Personnel Armor System for Ground Troops (PASGT) helmet, adopted in the early 1980s as a replacement for the M1, features the added ballistic protection around the ears, while the PASGT’s own replacement, the Modular Integrated Communications Helmet (MICH), was specifically designed for use with modern tactical headsets. Both the PASGT and MICH were made from ballistic Kevlar fiber, which is likely stronger than the nondescript “laminate” alluded to in the coverage of Sawicki’s debut, but the 1959 design elements remain present nonetheless.
The Army has experimented with mixing and matching these design features in recent years. For example, the new(ish) Enhanced Combat Helmet, designed in conjunction with the Marine Corps to replace the MICH-based Advanced Combat Helmet, is fabricated from thermoplastic rather than Kevlar fiber but primarily available in a “high cut” tactical style that reduces ear coverage. Interestingly, the forthcoming Integrated Head Protection System (IHPS) may come closest to synthesizing most of the unique design of Sawicki’s helmet. Made from lightweight polyethylene and designed with integrated rails for the seamless inclusion of comms equipment and night-vision devices, the IHPS even features an optional motorcycle-style “mandible” and eye shield for additional facial protection—a step closer to the distinctive “permanent smile” that creeped out onlookers in Washington decades ago, as contemporary newsreels described it.
We Own the Night
While the Pentagon had fielded night-vision optics since World War II, like the so-called sniperscope that relied on actively bathing targets with infrared light, Sawicki’s helmet-mounted “infrared binoculars” envisioned a shift toward “passive” helmet-mounted devices to help soldiers pierce the darkness. The first significant passive night-vision optic appeared during the Vietnam War, when the Army fielded the weapon-mounted AN/PVS-2 “Starlight Scope” to soldiers tasked with operating in low-light jungle conditions (although, true to its name, the system performed better in moonlight than in total darkness). It wasn’t until the 1970s that the service would end up fielding its first pair of helmet-mounted night-vision goggles, the AN/PVS-5, a system that set the US military on a course to “own the night” with unmatched technological superiority in subsequent decades.
Today, the prospect of enhancing a soldier’s situational awareness has evolved far beyond simply preparing them to fight at night. The latest night-vision system fielded by the Army, known as the AN/PSQ-42 Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular (ENVG-B), doesn’t just equip service members with infrared and thermal vision capabilities but can also seamlessly feed the view from a specialized weapon optic known at the Family of Weapon Sights into the goggles’ field of vision, allowing soldiers to scope out the battlefield from cover without exposing themselves to hostile fire.
Then there’s the matter of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), the Army’s futuristic “smart” goggles. Currently based on a ruggedized version of the Microsoft HoloLens 2 augmented reality headset, the IVAS is both night vision goggles and futuristic heads-up display, capable of feeding sensor inputs into a soldier’s line of sight. The Army has long experimented with helmet-mounted displays for decades as part of various “future warrior” programs, and the IVAS hasn’t been immune to the pitfalls of previous efforts—namely, complaints from soldiers about “mission-affecting physical impairments” like headache, nausea, and discomfort associated with prolonged use. And the future of the long-delayed headset now appears uncertain anyway: According to Breaking Defense, the service may end up going back to the drawing board with a new primary contractor for the sophisticated system as part of its IVAS Next initiative after auditing its existing night vision goggle capabilities. Still, between the ENVG-B and IVAS, helmet-mounted night vision devices have progressed far beyond anything Sawicki’s chain of command had previously imagined.
Armor Up
The bulletproof vest and camouflage suit combination that Sawicki donned for his AUSA debut, referred to in contemporaneous publications as “layered nylon armor” and “layered nylon vest,” is actually a bit closer to modern Army personal protective equipment than the flak jackets that were accompanying soldiers downrange during the Vietnam War. Currently under development, the Soldier Protection System (SPS) offers modern soldiers a “lightweight modular, scalable and tailorable suite of protective equipment,” according to the Army’s description. What this really means is that the protective ensemble comes in several different pieces that work together to maximize soldier survivability without impairing mobility; in terms of body armor, this refers primarily to the soft armor Torso and Extremity Protection subsystem and the hard armor Vital Torso Protection subsystem that, using reinforced ceramic plates, offer improved ballistic protection against small arms fire.
Protecting soldiers from bullets is one thing, but protecting them from the effects of nuclear explosions, as Army leaders told The New York Times Sawicki’s suit would, is another thing entirely—at least, in terms of equipment. While the well-worn Mission Oriented Protective Posture (MOPP) ensemble has been safeguarding Americans service members against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats for years, it’s an entirely separate system of personal protective gear rather than one integrated into the SPS or the standard-issue Army Combat Uniform. And while the 1959 design calls for specially designed “‘welded’ combat boots” and “molded plastic gloves” to help protect soldiers on an irradiated battlefield, modern troops must, unfortunately, go into battle with their Army Regulation 670-1-authorized boots and tactical gloves, apart from what’s in their MOPP kit. Then again, if the nukes do start flying, nobody will survive long enough for ground combat anyway.
Bullet Time
While the 1959 “soldier of tomorrow” appears armed with an M14, advances in firearms technology have long since left the beloved battle rifle in the dust. The Army began replacing the M14 with the lighter-weight 5.56-mm M16 assault rifle in the late 1960s, which was itself replaced by the shorter-barreled M4 carbine during the Global War on Terror in the 2000s. Replacing the M16 and M4 family of rifles has proven difficult in the past, but it’s safe to say that the promises from Army brass in 1959 of a lighter standard-issue rifle for soldiers have, for the most part, come true in the intervening decades—even if the new XM7 rifle, recently adopted under the service’s Next Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW) program, is actually noticeably heavier than the M4.
So, too, has the promise of “new high-velocity bullets.” While the Army in the early 2000s fielded the 5.56-mm M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round for improved performance over the standard M855 ammo previously adopted in the 1980s, the service undertook a major small arms study in 2017 to determine whether soldiers required a different caliber ammunition to deal with the sudden proliferation of body armor among adversaries. The study determined that the Army’s next rifle should come chambered in 6.8 mm, which would purportedly offer significantly improved performance at range compared to both 5.56-mm and 7.62-mm rounds. From there, the Army ended up selecting Sig Sauer to produce its two 6.8mm NGSW systems in 2022, weapons the service began officially fielding earlier this year. It may have taken several decades, but the Army’s new high-velocity round is finally here.
Rocket Man
While certain elements of Sawicki’s combat kit are clearly represented in recent military innovations, others simply never came to fruition. The automatic foxhole-digging charges, for example, never materialized as an effective replacement for the beloved handheld entrenching tool, despite their prevalence among military futurists at the time. But if there’s one vision that has persisted in military and defense circles, it’s that of jetpack-equipped troops.
The Defense Department has pursued the militarized jetpack for decades, starting with research and development in the 1950s and culminating in October 1961 with the successful demonstration of Bell Aerosystems’s Small Rocket Lift Device (or, colloquially, the “Bell Rocket Belt”) for President John F. Kennedy at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Army ended up abandoning development of the Rocket Belt over fuel constraints that limited its potential tactical applications, but US military planners would revisit the concept time and again in subsequent decades.
Unfortunately, the era of the American jetpack appears to be coming to a close: The Pentagon has moved on from its jetpack dreams in favor of a more elegant individual lift effort in the form of the powered paraglider. Indeed, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Portable Personal Air Mobility System program is testing lightweight one-man flight systems, while the Army recently released a solicitation for its similarly named Personnel Air Mobility System effort for a motorized paraglider for paratroopers that, if all goes to plan, would end up “reducing dependency on traditional aircraft platforms and extending the range available through traditional parachute infiltration systems,” as the service put it. The US military will teach individual service members to fly, but it most likely will not involve a jetpack anytime soon.
The Tomorrow War
Sixty-five years after Sawicki debuted the Army’s next-generation kit, the “soldier of tomorrow” will actually look more like this:
And as the US military gears up for the next big war, the combat load-out of the average soldier will only continue to evolve, from lighter and more versatile anti-tank weapons to airborne drones and other battle robots that will have troops’ backs as they operate on increasingly complex and chaotic battlefields. Indeed, the Army recently unveiled a new fielding strategy called “transformation in contact” that will see soldiers deploy around the world with fresh weapons and training to provide immediate feedback to commanders about how to design the future force. The Pentagon’s byzantine procurement architecture will almost certainly slow things down a bit (don’t ask the Army how many times it has tried to replace the Bradley Fighting Vehicle in the past two decades), but the service appears more prepared than ever to get individual soldiers the gear they need for the next conflict—and fast.
Sawicki may not have proven an “ultimate weapon” for the Army to deploy around the world, but 1959s’ “GI of the future” made some fairly accurate predictions about the changing face of the American soldier. But beyond the foxhole-diggers and the jetpack, the only thing it got seriously wrong was the prevalence of nuclear fallout on the battlefield. Let’s hope it stays that way.
