Patrick Tucker at Defense One has reported that James Smith, SOCOM’s acquisition executive has stated that the Special Ops Exoskeleton is nowhere near ready for use in combat. There have been improvements in lightweight body armor and improved helmet displays. There are tests of partial suits to help support walking and running with heavy loads. …
The US Navy is considering converting available merchant ships into missile-armed Navy ships. They would be able to make 15-20 merchant ships for the cost of one destroyer. The merchant missile ships would have 450-600 missiles versus 90 on one destroyer. Offensive and defensive missiles are one of the main metrics for how much combat …
In mid-2018, a US destroyer fired 20 hypervelocity projectiles (HVP) from a standard Mk 45 5-inch deck gun. The Hypervelocity projectiles will make the guns effective and low-cost weapons against cruise missiles and larger unmanned aerial vehicles. In 2016, there was test firing from US Army artillery guns. US Defense Department modeling shows that hypervelocity …
The Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant is built and will make its first flight early in 2019. The SB-1 Defiant will have a cruise speed of 250 knots (460 km/h). It will initially will have less range due to using the “old” T55 engine. A new engine, the future affordable turbine engine (FATE), will enable it to …
The US Army will use AI enabled holographic goggles to make soldiers part of the sensor network for remote weapons. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was the use of lasers to spot and help missiles hit their desired targets. This was classically shown in Clear and Present Danger with the bombing of the cartel. …
The US Army will test 50 kilowatt lasers on an Anti-aircraft Stryker starting in 2021 and then will field them in 2023. Doubling a laser’s power level halves the time it takes to burn out a given target at a given range. A 50-kilowatt laser should destroy low-end drones in less than a second and …
The US Army is shifting over $25 billion over the next five years to 6 major high priority projects like better guns for frontline soldiers. The first phase of the better guns effort is the Next Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW), which will replace the M249 SAW, a 5.56 mm light machinegun issued one or two …
The US Strategic Long Range Cannon (SLRC) will have a range of up to 1,150 miles. The Strategic Long Range Cannon could be a follow-up to supergun work that Gerard Bull started for Iraq from 1988-1990. It could be a long barrel using high-performance propellant powder. The SLRC could also be a scaled up railgun. …
The Bell V-280 Valor is a tiltrotor aircraft being developed by Bell Helicopter and Lockheed Martin for the United States Army’s Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program. The prototype reached 190 knots (352 km/h) in cruise mode with horizontal propellers on May, 2018. A recent videos claim the V-280 has reached 280 knots of speed about …
The US Army is accelerating its Automated Ground Resupply (AGR) program by spinning off something called the Expedient Leader-Follower demonstration. Contractors are currently installing Robotic Research LLC’s computer brains and sensors on 10 Oshkosh M1075 PLS (Palletized Loader System) trucks that’ll be used for safety certification tests in 2019. They’ll convert 60 more to self-driving …
