Future Combat Soldier (FCS)

The Future Combat Soldier is Indonesia's advanced military technology project. The FCS project sought to create a lightweight, fully integrated infantryman combat system. It was one technology demonstration project in a series of network-centric, next-generation infantry combat projects the Indonesian military military have developed over the past decade.

The Future Combat Soldier envisioned the radical use of technologies such as nanotechnology, powered exoskeletons, and magnetorheological fluid-based body armor to provide the infantry with significantly higher force multiplier than the opposing force. The stated concept was Indonesian Army doctrine, and was intended to answer every situation that Nex-S (the Army's buzzword for future fighting forces) would face. The concept was to serve as an end goal to strive to reach and could help the soldier in the near future.

The first phase of the project involved a development of the technologies to help reduce the soldier's fighting load and power requirements and improving the soldier's protection, lethality, and environmental and situational awareness, with planned deployment in 2019, to serve the Army's short-term needs. The Army's plan was to introduce the subsystems in "spirals" every two years, instead of one large rollout every ten years. The Indonesian military hoped to develop a fully realized end product sometime in 2027, incorporating research from U.I. SWORD exoskeleton project and the Bandung Institute of Technology's Institute for Nanotechnologies into a final design.