CSI: M4; or, The Magic Bullets

Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End posits a near-future San Diego in which a wide range of everyday objects are equipped with wireless Internet access and some kind of sensory apparatus. Thanks to wearable computing gear that interprets this constantly shifting data stream both visually and audibly, citizens can walk around in a real-life Toontown that constantly informs and interacts with them.

But Rainbows End, as fun and insightful as it is, looks only at the civilian side of this very wired future. The scenario below looks at the consequences of equipping military tools to report on their status and surroundings; in this case, bullets and their rifles.

Assumptions: First World militaries produce rifles and bullets that contain simple versions of the “black boxes” found on aircraft.

Scenario: The Round Recovery Team advanced from cover toward what was pretty clearly a dead insurgent.

Its three soldiers listened to the battle’s sounds growing more distant, but it was not their mission to rush toward combat. Instead, they were here to account for several rounds that an Army Specialist named John Smith had discharged during the firefight in this clearing had occurred here some 90 minutes earlier.

The group’s sergeant wielded a small GPS device whose screen featured an arrow that pointed toward the insurgent’s body. Specialist Smith’s rifle had thoughtfully transmitted GPS coordinates for the body’s probable location to the RRT just after Smith pulled the trigger, and now the modified M4 rifle proved as good as its word.

The RRT advanced to within two meters of the body and the sergeant pressed a few buttons on his GPS to see whether a U.S. Army bullet might be somewhere nearby.

Sure enough, one round—lodged somewhere inside the insurgent, from the appearance of the man’s body—woke up and started radioing what it knew. The sergeant’s GPS device immediately began capturing data from the round’s tiny, low-powered “black box.”

The round wasn’t terribly smart, but it didn’t have to be; it simply recorded where it had been and what it had encountered during its brief period of freedom, then served that data in an encrypted burst to any properly credentialed device.

The sergeant quickly scanned a summary of the bullet’s information on his screen.

“Narrative Summary for 5M4-4820576632-06, round 6 of 30 that were loaded into clip 1 of SPC John Smith’s M4 rifle. (Please consult this rifle for a view of my apparent target at the time of firing.)

“I was fired at 1039:04.18 UTC on 4 May 2015 as part of a burst of at least six rounds. I am currently not moving, facing 244 degrees magnetic at a downward angle of 17 degrees from level. External temperature is 90.4 degrees Fahrenheit and decreasing at about 0.5 degrees/minute.

“Note: I am 8 grams lighter than at firing. I broke apart at +0.882 seconds from firing against an object with the density of bone. I was traveling at 842 meters/second until this impact, giving the missing fragment a probable maximum radius from my resting place of 23 meters. Click on more details for full data.”

The sergeant pressed two more buttons on his GPS device to beam the bullet’s data even further behind the lines, where computers would compare it with accounts pouring in from other rounds expended during this battle. That data would then be cross-matched with records from the rifles in Specialist Smith’s platoon and possibly with the tiny gimbals and accelerometers embedded in his BDUs.

Analysts would pore over the resulting mountain of data to determine whether the insurgents might be using new tactics, and how well Smith and his colleagues had reacted in any case.

The data had more ominous uses, of course, at least from the perspective of a soldier who felt military lawyers looking over his shoulder on a daily basis.

For instance, the sergeant thought, that whole business about a burst of six rounds or more—the bullet had no way to know whether other rounds were fired after it—became important if the Hague showed interest a few hours from now. The suits might want to investigate to see whether Smith et al. had used excessive force.

In that case, a different team would come in before sunset, grab the body for autopsy, then swab the whole battlefield for bullet fragments, footprints, DNA and other evidence—a level of investigation that the sergeant thought was excessive, not to mention costly—and develop a second-by-second account of the battle for possible use at trial. It almost never came to that nowadays, but it wasn’t out of the question.


Questions: Monday-morning quarterbacks at the Hague, auditing the record of a small-unit action, may conclude that a soldier could have acted differently so as to remove the need to fire his or her weapon. When weapons use is so thoroughly monitored, does non-total war—in any cases but those of national survival—remain politically feasible?

Soldiers will attempt to spoof this system. Can the bullets be made to “lie” or be “accidentally” microwaved before a mission to prevent their reporting back? In that case, if the rifle and its rounds did not agree on what had happened—or if the round made no report at all—how would the military handle this?*

Cultural References: JFK-assassination conspiracy theories. First-person “shooter” video games in which players have enhanced senses. The film Dark Star, with its sentient (and moody) Exponential Thermostellar Bombs.


*Much further into the future, if the rifle and its bullets were sufficiently smart, they might argue. The bullets might complain that the rifle was a rear-area paper pusher that never really got out into the field. A round’s black box may be sufficiently expensive that it is reused after being recovered, and remember previous times that it was fired—and that the rifle couldn’t get its story straight then, either.