Throughout history, man has always strived to design a better and more effective means of killing others and himself surviving the process. From the phalanx to the armored knight to the musket to the machine gun and the tank, weapons and armor technology have evolved with consistent dedication. The next step in this progression is the powered, armored combat suit. By providing the user with augmented strength, electrically powered exoskeletons will allow users to wear significantly heavier full body armor and carry heavier weaponry and equipment than has previously been available to soldiers. No longer will machine guns and rocket launchers be weapons of specialists, but will be carried by every soldier according to mission requirements or individual preference. Soldiers will be protected against most if not all small arms fire that unarmored enemies, such as insurgents or rebels will be equipped with. This armor will be the death of insurgency.
Realistically, this last paragraph is more or less propaganda or a sales pitch from whatever military contractor acquires the contract to mass produce these suits; as armor advances, so do ways of breaking through it, but the advance does highlight a trend: military equipment is passing far beyond what civilian militias could ever hope to match. As weapons get increasingly more advanced and expensive, governments will be the only groups capable of maintaining these high-tech forces, with unfortunate effects of their peoples.
An axiom whose cynicism is matched only by its accuracy is this: violence makes the world go ‘round. The power of governments is derived, at its core, at least partially from violence. It’s behavior restricted by the ability of the people to rise up and remove them from power, something made more difficult every time the combat effectiveness of the soldier increases against that of the civilian. Minorities; ethnic, religious, or otherwise will be most targeted because their ability to make their positions and opinions heard will be crushed under a ceramic-coated, servo actuated, armored boot. As we see now with the #blacklivesmatter movement, societies don’t like it when ethnic minorities express discontent with their role in society, but what happens to society when those minorities no longer can object? When protesters in Baltimore stop fearing being arrested or shot by police officers and start fearing being ripped apart by a faceless, unstoppable suit of armor?
This technology is not in the far future but will probably start getting phased in within the decade. Within another, some of the technology will spread to the civilian sector, but what does that mean? Likely, the medical field will see the benefits of this, in the form of more advanced support for people with damaged limbs that can no longer function at full capacity as well as for physical therapy. Certain manual labor applications would benefit from this technology but likely won’t be seeing too much of it, simply because manual laborers are cheaper and easier to maintain and replace than giant robo-suits. There would also likely be some adoption in the field of extreme sports, though the expense and weight would likely limit the utility.
Those on the civilian side of this technology will not be a random sample of the population, however. The expense will limit the target market to middle to upper class families who can afford the suits. That said though, these suits on the civilian side would likely end up in a similar psychological association as cars, though with somewhat more of a niche application. Civilian ownership of these suits would be a status symbol, similar to owning a Hummer.
Demographically, the civilian users would likely be primarily white, reflecting the current and likely near future distribution of middle class America. Military users on the other hand would be much more egalitarian. The modern military, while definitely not known for being a tolerant organization, integrates it’s recruits well enough that they would likely side with their new family rather than their ethnicity, meaning that in the aspect of distribution of suits, the military would be its own separate entity. While limiting freedom of expression and adding to the fear of the government, the suits would keep the bullets, explosions, and shrapnel of war farther from the soldiers inside the suits, and for that the soldiers would love them.
These suits seem to be a harbinger of doom, but being the byproduct of the inevitable arms race between nations, the US government will be, and already is compelled to interest in these suits to maintain our technological advantage on the battlefield and our preeminence in the global community. These suits may, however end up looked upon in the same way as drones, restricted, in the US, at least, to the military and foreign engagements rather than spilling over to law enforcement.