Hunting terrorists is a dramatic business worthy of a Marvel comic. Quiet, covert intelligence-gathering foreshadows sudden violence: door kicks, smoke grenades, gunfire. And then there are the gadgets.
In November, the Defense Department’s Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office put out a draft of its annual Broad Agency Announcement, a sort of wishlist of futuristic superhero tools.
Here are some of this year’s items of note:
A Mini-Drone Deployable from a V-22
Future Marines will ride the Boeing V-22 Osprey to their beachhead landings. But what will they find when they get there? The Pentagon is looking for a drone that can deploy from the Osprey and “dash ahead of the V-22…providing at least 8.5 minutes of overhead [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] at the landing zone or drop zone prior to arrival.” The system drone should be largely autonomous, with waypoint guided navigation and, of course, work in all sorts of weather.
Sensors for Iron Man Electro-Skeletons
U.S. Special Operations Command has been working on a sort of Tony Stark-esque Iron Man outfit called the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit since 2013, aiming to deliver a prototype in 2018. Before that can happen, researchers need to be able to derive “timely, accurate, and reliable prediction of intended human motion,” which is “essential for highly dynamic human augmentation systems,” like TALOS.
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