News By Lee Mathews Jul. 11, 2014 1:30 pm
Today’s high-tech soldier can already use a smartphone to make firing blind far less blind. Now it looks like they’ll be getting .50 caliber rounds that can guide themselves toward a target after they’ve left the chamber of a sniper’s rifle.
The rendering you see above is DARPA’s EXACTO round, and, yes, that’s really the acronym they went with. It stands for Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordinance. EXACTO rounds are connected to remote guidance and monitoring equipment, which receive target information from a rifle’s sighting system. Environmental factors like wind, rain, and snow won’t deter the bullets, nor will target movement. Lockheed Martin and Teledyne Scientific have been working on the project for nearly seven years, and their latest demo is impressive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX8Z2MDYX3g
Why develop a smart bullet? The U.S. Military has seen greatly increased demand for trained snipers since the conflict in Iraq. In a 2010 EXACTO press release, DARPA’s Lyndall Beamer declared that it was “time we look at how to maximize the utility of these assets and give them the best tools we can.” EXACTO, it’s hoped, will allow two-man sniper/spotter teams to be more effective and safer than ever before. DARPA is also counting on the system requiring only minimal changes to current concepts of operations (CONOPS).
Pair these new rounds with TrackingPoint’s smart scope technology, and today’s U.S. military is surprisingly close to the ZF-1 developed by John-Emmanuel Baptiste Zorg in The Fifth Element. Looks like he may not get to claim that replay feature as a Zorg invention after all…
More...
The rendering you see above is DARPA’s EXACTO round, and, yes, that’s really the acronym they went with. It stands for Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordinance. EXACTO rounds are connected to remote guidance and monitoring equipment, which receive target information from a rifle’s sighting system. Environmental factors like wind, rain, and snow won’t deter the bullets, nor will target movement. Lockheed Martin and Teledyne Scientific have been working on the project for nearly seven years, and their latest demo is impressive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX8Z2MDYX3g
Why develop a smart bullet? The U.S. Military has seen greatly increased demand for trained snipers since the conflict in Iraq. In a 2010 EXACTO press release, DARPA’s Lyndall Beamer declared that it was “time we look at how to maximize the utility of these assets and give them the best tools we can.” EXACTO, it’s hoped, will allow two-man sniper/spotter teams to be more effective and safer than ever before. DARPA is also counting on the system requiring only minimal changes to current concepts of operations (CONOPS).
Pair these new rounds with TrackingPoint’s smart scope technology, and today’s U.S. military is surprisingly close to the ZF-1 developed by John-Emmanuel Baptiste Zorg in The Fifth Element. Looks like he may not get to claim that replay feature as a Zorg invention after all…
More...
