DARPA's been up to some interesting stuff of late; the internet, GPS, and other things that we use each day all originated in DARPA labs. Among their latest developments: sniper bullets that never miss a target.
Imagine the incredible potential of a sniper bullet that changes its trajectory after it’s been fired, guaranteeing that the shooter never misses. EXACTO, or Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance bullets does exactly this, turning huge .50 caliber bullets into guided rounds capable of zeroing in on a target. The idea is that this can nullify inaccuracies caused by bad weather, wind, extreme distances or human error.
Coming soon to a battlefield near you: DARPA has developed an incredible exoskeleton - a wearable mobile machine - which transforms any infantryman into a super soldier. Made with help from researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, DARPA’s Soft Exosuit is a lightweight skeleton frame which saves soldiers’ energy when going about their battlefield business.
And then there are the robots; autonomous and A.I.-driven, they're designed to assist infantry on a battle-field - and can make split-second decisions regarding what to kill and when. But DARPA's gone a lot further: their latest thing is tunable plasma weapons. They call it the Scalable Compact Ultra-Short Pulse Laser System. It’s a nonlethal weapon more akin to Star Trek’s fictional phaser, with the ability to warn, dazzle, deafen, stun, or burn, depending on how you tweak the settings.
It's the closest thing we have to a phaser set on stun.
In early 2018, the JNLWD showed off a new Laser Induced Plasma Effect (LIPE) device, which produced a rapid series of plasma pulses, much like PIKL in 1998, but could be also be modulated to carry a signal. They released a demonstration video of a laser fireball conveying a barely comprehensible spoken message, described in Popular Mechanics as “the creepiest thing you’ll hear all week.”
They believe that with finer tuning, battlefield instructions can be issued from a kilometer away, while on other settings the device can incapacitate enemy combatants. A muti-tool, in other words.
