U.S. Military's 5 New Advanced Technology Programs

What does the U.S. military do to stay ahead of her enemies? The answer: commission DARPA to develop cutting edge technologies.

But Washington, what's the fun in doing that if the public doesn't know about it? Sure, secrecy has its place, however, since Cydro found out about these next five projects, anyone could. Cydro just thinks they're kick-butt.

"The objective of the Advanced Sighting System (One-Shot) program is to enable snipers to accurately hit targets with the first round, under crosswind conditions, day or night, at the maximum effective range of the weapon." -DARPA

Historically, a sniper has had one shot on high value targets. After that, here come the bad guys! CIA missions that involve high value targets for a sniper usually don't like collateral damage, being detected, and imprecision in general. Check out this guy who knows a little somethin somethin about one shot kills. Anyway, since most people aren't like Carlos Hathcock, not even in the military's sniper division, DARPA is trying to figure out a way to perfect sights.

Enter the Advanced Sighting System (creative name, DARPA). It's basically a scope with a military style app that calculates EVERYTHING (including temperature) into the crosshairs. This makes it like a videogame... simply line up the enemies thoughtlessly and shoot. Speaking of crosshairs...

"The CROSSHAIRS program seeks to develop a vehicle mounted threat detection and countermeasure system that will detect, locate, and engage shooters, as well as defeat a variety of threats including bullets, rocket propelled grenades, anti-tank guided missiles, and direct fired mortars, while stationary and moving" -DARPA

So what that means is that they're going to attach a bunch of doohickeys to our bomb-resistant vehicles that can detect where enemy fire is coming from. Considering how many deaths come from ambushes in Afghanistan, that could be useful.

Just how good are these doohickeys?

Well the system can track incoming missiles, bullets, bombs and such. It can destroy incoming missiles, bullets, bombs and such. And it can immediately locate where they are coming from. In fact, the new Boomerang system that has already been deployed locates a sniper after he shoots in less than a second, rapidly relaying that to the crew.

The biggest problem with the CROSSHAIRS system, however, is that could cause collateral damage when blowing up incoming RPGs (hardly seems doable, right?).

That leads me to my next topic, anti-RPG nets.

The goal of the Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) Nets program is to use special high-capability nets to dud, break or otherwise disable rocket propelled grenades (RPGs).

"The goal of the Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) Nets program is to use special high-capability nets to dud, break or otherwise disable rocket propelled grenades (RPGs)." -(guess who) DARPA

RPG's are dependable (in a relative sense), very lethal, and cheap. The perfect combination for low budget...even high budget military programs or organizations. So how do you defeat one? Well, in the video about the CROSSHAIRS system, it blew one up. Another way is to place a high performance net in the way of it. Sounds ridiculous, right?

Well its not as ridiculous as it sounds at first (although the guy who suggested it might have had some trouble gaining support). The key to RPGNet's success is to crush the RPG's ogive, thus preventing it from injecting a shaped charge into the side of a vehicle.

Ready to be the test dummy for the system? Me either, but supposedly it's effective.

But hey Cydro, if America can protect her ground vehicles, can she protect her helicopters?

"The Helicopter Alert and Threat Termination (HALTT) program will provide occupants of U.S. Army and Navy/Marine helicopters with a way to detect small arms and RPG attacks, and improve their ability to respond."

The Boomerang program described before worked so well that the U.S. military figured they could put it on helicopters. Touting the Boomerang II system, U.S. helicopters will be able to detect (acoustically!) the exact point where incoming fire is coming from. Troops in ground vehicles have already raved about the system.

What's so useful about it?

Pilots will know in short enough time to launch evasion maneuvers against rockets and the point that it is coming from. Then they will be free to retaliate if needed. Saving lives of airmen is always useful, eh?

What happens when the U.S. military needs a map?

Do they ask Mapquest? Google Maps? Tom Tom?

No, they need geospacial analysis of the battlefield in order to adequately plan maneuvers, navigation, and targeting. How are they going to do that?

By paying BAE systems (maker and producer of the Typhoon) over $7 million, of course. The result: a project called URGENT (Urban Reasoning and Geospatial Exploitation Technology), which can map urban environments seamlessly and accurately. It compiles different sources of information, usually GIS data sources, and sorts through them to map out an urban region. Oh, and it uses algorithms to find tactically significant data.

Now all they need to do is make it a hologram like on Star Wars.