
Do the Oakleys
Come with it?
A powered exoskeleton suit designed to let soldiers march and fight carrying huge loads of weaponry, equipment and armour is to enter testing with the US Army. A soldier wearing a HULC exoskeleton lifts something heavy. Credit: Lockheed That box of pies plainly isn't going to last him long. The machine in question is of …
How much does it cost?
How easy is it to fuel up?
How protected is the power pack, and what happens if it's hit by, say, just thinking out loud, a decent bullet?
How protected is the cybernetics part - how hackable from afar, how easy to mess up with the aforementioned bullet or shock so as to dismember the wearer?
Why not use a mule/camel?
Above all, what need does this gizmo fill (serious question)?
As it can mimic the movement range of the human body, it can do things even tracked vehicles can't do that humans can, like climb over boulders, go through doorways, walk along narrow mountain or jungle paths, etc. You can also use it inside structures you can't get a vehicle into - imagine loading a 155m howitzer in an emplacement dug into the top of a mountain peak so remote from roads they had to bring the howitzer in slung under a chopper. I can't see them getting the battery life up for several years to come, so I don't imagine this being a regular soldier's bit of kit for a while, but it will be a very useful item for those troops that make that last few yards to several miles between the end of the road for a cargo truck/chopper and where heavy items have to be stored/used (usually down that narrow mountain/jungle path mentioned).
In this case though, not so much.
What's the use scenario for this? Most soldiering is hurry up and wait. Carrying heavy loads to the point where you stand around guarding them is best left to wheels or tracks. Anywhere you're out of vehicle supply range, i.e. special forces, you're going to run out of batteries pretty fast, then you're nobbed.
You know who's going to buy this? SWAT teams. They flip for war porn, and they'll cream their leopard print thongs[*] over a proper Power Armour version of this, as long as it makes scary whining noises and comes with a full face armoured mask, with a stupid little moustache painted on it.
[*] All 'special forces' copper wear these. Next time you see any Plod toting machine guns around, be sure to tell them I said so.
Unloading those lorries full of supplies...
Artillery gunners carrying heavy shells, medics carrying stretchers over 'uneven terrain'...
Did you know that special soldiers (SAS, SEAL, FSK, HJK and so on) when they' exited a chopper in 'stan often carried packs as heavy as 90Kg?
(About 30L of water as it's sometimes difficult to find good watersources up in the mountains)
With those weights you can't 'run for cover' as you exit the chopper. The best you can do is a slow waddle. And until you're well away from the LZ, you're a rather slow-moving target...
Also, with exoskeletons like these it should be much easier to clear away obstacles or improvise barricades, clearing an LZ or any of the other tasks the engineers do in the field.
BTW: Not all Plods wih guns wear leopard print thongs... Some go 'commando'...
closer to the book and well worth a watch.
wiki:
http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roughnecks:_Starship_Troopers_Chronicles
UTube
http://
www.google.co.uk/#q=starship+troopers+animated+series&hl=en&prmd=v&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=UwJETPUppvrTBOvZvakP&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CCAQqwQwAA&fp=270cd07514528d23
ttfn
...Shoulder-Mounted Gatling Gun. Iron-Man indeed.
But aside the military use, I see its uses for alpinists. Provided the mechanic legs hit ground (immediately) before the human ones, you can distribute the impact across the straps, thus not breaking your fleshy legs.
Other people that might use it are FD's, search and rescue crews, nurses, handicapped... Not to mention that non-military don´t need the *rugged* or *bullet-resistant* version that bad, pushing costs down. GO.
A prior Reg article on this showed a video with Angold laying down on the ground, getting back up, front, back, etc. all in normal time (or little better due to the hydralic assist).
There were extended ones from the arms show he was at where he did tricks with a 120 pound (US) ruck back on the "back" of the device.
As it was not wired up to anything, it was pretty impressive. But one of the main selling points was walking for hours and not getting tired - the device did all the work.
Getting relatively heavy equipment to a remote site quickly then setting up. I can envision HALO drops where the soldiers in question could then hit the ground running with 300lbs of equipment each. Subtract the 40lbs of standard issue they carry and that leaves 240lbs of other stuff they could then assemble/rearm, etc. with. Get in quick with heavy firepower that you then unleash on the bad dudes, thus eliminating the need for carrying said firepower, and get out on old fashioned feet if needed or pack up the exos when the troops arrive. Black ops... Black Helo, of course.
It's a big short on the arm-replacement side, but that powerloader from the movie Aliens might be an example of a more likely use. I could see this being useful for the artillery, who can be handling compact, heavy, objects, while within reach of battery recharge tech.
And I can think of plenty of examples from history of where soldiers had to carry supplies up to the front line. That sort of last-mile supply delivery might be a practical application.
I don't see it as an answer for actual infantry combat.
You really don't seem to get it.. with this system, a single man can carry a heavy machine gun plus ammunition and his personal weapon.. and that was the task of at least three soldiers, two for the weapon and one for the ammunition. And they tired.
There are, of course, more advantages: you can carry full balistic armour without problems, triple the ammunition, water, rations..
My guess is that the first units to get it will be special troops, and they will use them to carry squad weapons, etc.
What if the exo-skeleton developed a fault and the legs decided to reset to a home position? Might that mean that the soldiers ankles ended up being wrapped around his ears and he was literally kissing his @rse goodbye? I mean, it's not as if the poor squaddie will be able to resist if the machine decides it is going to move the mechanics to wherever it wants to.
And what about the very real danger of the enemy getting hold of some equipment which can hook into the exo-skeleton circuitry and take control? All of a sudden the squaddies are running around like mad things lining themselves up for the enemies gunsights.
I chose Paris because given her reputation one might need a suit like this to keep up with her. I suppose you could put it on auto-pilot for a few hours to get her started, and then take over once she is warmed up.
I mean a soldier- even an American one- is unlikely to be as dumb as the ED-209 in Robocop 3. They're going to notice someone there with a laptop and a serial cable.
Then they'll walk over to them, carrying 300lbs of guns'n'ammo and ask them politely to stop trying to hack their suit.
Then the would-be hacker would back away. Loyal as a puppy.
300lbs load, rough terrain, no arm assist... better hope you fall backwards...
Also, going prone or even to one knee looks like a big problem there.
And shoulder or boom mounted heavy weapons? Recoil would at least ensure they went onto their backs, I suppose.
Sure they've thought of all this though. Must just be missing something in the pics, I'm sure. The military never buy in next to useless kit, after all.
Gives the guy with the RPG a bigger target to aim at!
A new definition to support infantry loadout?
A deployable capability at short range from a host platform such as a helicopter or vehicle. Personnel carrier rocks up, big guys jump out, hoover the place with lots of ammo, run back to the APCs carrying the wounded people they have just rescued. APCs drives off, it was a nice short war guys!
"Most soldiering is hurry up and wait."
I suggest you tell that to any of the soldiers currently serving in Helmand. And then run like hell.
Most squaddies aren't going to be needing this kit, at least until it gets longer between top-ups. But the heavy support guys are going to love it. First step is being able to carry all your own ammo. But the logical next step is using this as a weapons platform, at which point the bloke with a SAW can now be toting a heavy machine-gun that previously would belong on the back of a technical. This can be fully-stabilised, with a HUD that automatically compensates for range and windage, plus night-vision and maybe even millimeter-wave radar.
In other words, you've replaced the armoured car with something the size of a guy with a very large pack. You may also have replaced the sharpshooter role too.
A septic mate has pointed out that a fully-armoured version would probably appear first in the SWAT role rather than the military. Battery live wouldn't be an issue as most SWAT actions are within yards of a powersocket, the kit can be transported right to the scene in a van (most SWAT actions are urban), and the kit will fit through a doorway and climb stairs. Instead of having a team of SWAT fleshies with ballistic shields and bodyarmour that are still vulnerable to firearms, all they need to do is just send in one guy in complete, powered armour with a multi-shot Taser as the pointman, maybe with some sniper backup to stop them dousing him with Molatovs.
What's said to be a Ukrainian-made long-range anti-drone rifle is one of the latest weapons to emerge from Russia's ongoing invasion of its neighbor.
The Antidron KVS G-6 is manufactured by Kvertus Technology, in the western Ukraine region of Ivano-Frankivsk, whose capital of the same name has twice been subjected to Russian bombings during the war. Like other drone-dropping equipment, we're told it uses radio signals to interrupt control, remotely disabling them, and it reportedly has an impressive 3.5 km (2.17 miles) range.
"We are not damaging the drone. With communication lost, it just loses coordination and doesn't know where to go. The drone lands where it is jammed, or can be carried away by the wind because it's uncontrollable," Kvertus' director of technology Yaroslav Filimonov said. Because the downed drones are unharmed, they give Ukrainian soldiers recovering them a wealth of potential intelligence, he added.
The latest drone headed to Ukraine's front lines isn't getting there by air. This one powers over rough terrain, armed with a 7.62mm tank machine gun.
The GNOM (pronounced gnome), designed and built by a company called Temerland, based in Zaporizhzhia, won't be going far either. Next week it's scheduled to begin combat trials in its home city, which sits in southeastern Ukraine and has faced periods of rocket attacks and more since the beginning of the war.
Measuring just under two feet in length, a couple inches less in width (57cm L х 60cm W x 38cm H), and weighing around 110lbs (50kg), GNOM is small like its namesake. It's also designed to operate quietly, with an all-electric motor that drives its 4x4 wheels. This particular model forgoes stealth in favor of a machine gun, but Temerland said it's quiet enough to "conduct covert surveillance using a circular survey camera on a telescopic mast."
An egghead at the Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications, writing in a peer-reviewed domestic journal, has advocated for Chinese military capability to take out Starlink satellites on the grounds of national security.
According to the South China Morning Post, lead author Ren Yuanzhen and colleagues advocated in Modern Defence Technology not only for China to develop anti-satellite capabilities, but also to have a surveillance system that could monitor and track all satellites in Starlink's constellation.
"A combination of soft and hard kill methods should be adopted to make some Starlink satellites lose their functions and destroy the constellation's operating system," the Chinese boffins reportedly said, estimating that data transmission speeds of stealth fighter jets and US military drones could increase by a factor of 100 through a Musk machine connection.
A US House of Representatives subcommittee on Tuesday heard from Pentagon officials on reports of and investigations into unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) – a category that encompasses unidentified flying objects (UFO) and saves room for optical illusions, lens flare, smudges in photos, and other possibilities like meteorological events.
The US military has researched UFOs in the past through initiatives like Project Blue Book (1947-1969), and the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) (2007-2012).
Following a New York Times report in 2017 about the shutdown of the classified $22m AATIP program, public pressure and Congressional interest led the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last June to release a preliminary report on UAP [PDF] dating back to 2004.
Updated The US Army could end up wasting much as $22 billion in taxpayer cash if soldiers aren't actually interested in using, or able to use as intended, the Microsoft HoloLens headsets it said it would purchase, a government watchdog has warned.
In 2018, the American military splashed $480 million on 100,000 prototype augmented-reality goggles from Redmond to see how they could help soldiers train for and fight in combat. The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) project was expanded when the Army decided it wanted the Windows giant to make custom, battle-ready AR headsets in a ten-year deal worth up to $22 billion.
The project was delayed and is reportedly scheduled to roll out some time this year. But the US Dept of Defense's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) cast some doubt on whether it was worth it at all.
DARPA announced a second successful test of its hypersonic cruise missile, adding that the weapon, capable of speeds in excess of Mach 5, is ready for real-world use.
DARPA has been testing hypersonic weapons for several years. The program in question, called the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC), began in 2016 with Raytheon as a partner. Raytheon's HAWC first flew in 2021, and this latest test used a design manufactured by Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Hypersonic weapons are any missile that travels at Mach 5 or faster, but with an added caveat: they can be controlled. Traditional missiles often exceed Mach 5 as well, but can't be steered once they're launched.
The websites of the Ukrainian military and at least two of the nation's biggest banks were knocked offline in a cyberattack today.
Ukraine's Ministry of Defense website is still unavailable at time of publication. On social media, it reported "technical works on restoration of regular functioning" are underway after it was "probably attacked by DDoS: an excessive number of requests per second was recorded." Other military sites are also apparently suffering outages.
In what appears to have been a coordinated internet attack, Ukraine's biggest commercial banking operation PrivatBank and big-three financial institution Oschadbank were also hit around the same time, knocking out some online transactions and ATMs across the country.
Video Video footage has emerged of a British F-35B fighter jet falling off the front of aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth after a botched takeoff.
The leaked clip, seemingly from a CCTV camera on the carrier's bridge, shows the Lockheed Martin-made stealth aircraft slowly trundling down the deck before tipping over the ski-jump ramp on her bows.
As the £100m RAF jet nosed over, the pilot ejected – only for his parachute to snag on the carrier's bows as he descended back towards the ship.
Column Fans of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy know how top military secrets are extracted from the enemy. Senior figures are turned in operations run by the most secret brains in the country, bluff and double-bluff mix with incredible feats of bravery, treachery and psychological manipulation.
Not any more. If head KGB spy Karla wanted to learn intricate details of the British military today, he’d just have to check WhatsApp. He’d learn who in the special services had got an extra stripe, as well as their cover units — and that’s just one document The Reg has seen. Are there others out there on public messaging systems? If we knew, we couldn’t tell you.
Inadvertent leaks of military gen are nothing new. During the Cold War, so some ex-operatives claim, one of the least glamorous jobs in intelligence was analysing paper copies of Eastern Bloc message decodes. Not so bad? They’d been pinched from latrines outside the forest barracks where they’d been recycled as toilet paper. That's real spycraft, not just going through the motions.
The United States Airforce (USAF) has unveiled Project Kaiju, a $150m (£108m) effort to build "cognitive electronic warfare" systems capable of operating entirely autonomously – to be run under Godzilla's watchful eye.
Named for the entertainment genre, Japanese for "strange beast", Project Kaiju is not - sadly - an effort to breed giant monsters to defend US interests. Rather, it's the name given to a project which seeks to give the USAF better electronic warfare capabilities – including the ability to run autonomously, without human interaction.
"US aircraft are increasingly required to operate in hostile environments heavily defended by integrated air-defence systems (IADS)," Project Kaiju's coordinators explained in the Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) unveiling the project. "The next evolution of advanced IADS is likely to employ radars, surface-to-air (SAM), and air-to-air (AAM) threats that utilise multi-spectrum technology.
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