It makes more sense than trying to build Master Chiefs. Robot powered body armour sounds awesome, but in reality it's a lot more efficient to avoid getting hit then to try and take hits and keep moving, especially if you're a rich country with an advantage in micropocessing resources (assuming Taiwan doesn't fall).

What they're talking about isn't crazy either, build out a platform that can handle robust military comms, connect it to a modern military information network, and then have local machine learning capabilities to handle local on site applications.

I mean, even just a bunch of soldiers in a line with networked helmets would create a line array of microphones that could theoretically be used to figure out where enemy fire is coming from / how many people are shooting at them, what type of gun is firing at them, how much they have left, etc. If humans today can pick out where a sniper might be shooting them from, Im willing to bet a computer connected to an array of different soldiers' sensors will be able to do it not too long for now.

his backpack supercomputers for processing with the help of an onboard artificial intelligence engine.

Instead of the "super perforator", they get the "super hallucinator" now.

More like a pipe-nightmare

Sure, let a text generator try tactics

Why does that thing from the beginning of Robocop come to mind?

An army of John Backplips stomping trough everything until the enemy trains William Front Flip AI sounds terrifying.

In a world where all research is funded by violent imperialists...