He pointed out that with the new system commanders will be able to consider each soldier, aircraft and vehicle as part of a node of a tactical network that shares data with each other, sending and receiving data inside the battle space.
The second uniform system, the Vision 2020 Future Warrior concept, will follow the 2010 Future Force Warrior with more advanced nanotechnology. Nanotechnology deals with the creation of incredibly small materials, devices or systems with a scaled-down size of 100 nanometers or less. A nanometer is a metric measurement equivalent to one billionth of a meter.
"If we were in Detroit, the 2020 Future Warrior system would be the concept car. It leverages a lot of the nano-work being done by the Massachusetts Institute for Technology," DeGay said, noting the Army just awarded MIT a five- year, $50 million program to establish the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.
Think about a good action movie that shows an average person walking down a street with a nice designer suit. All of a sudden, gunshots are heard and just before a bullet hits this person, his soft fabric suit transforms into an incredible display of alien armor that deflects bullets. If Natick engineers are successful, this movie will become a reality in the future U.S. Army.
"What we hope to gain from this program is body armor that wears like a traditional textile impregnated with nanomachines connected to an onboard computer, DeGay explained. "So when you shoot a round into the uniform system, it's normally pliable until it senses the strike of a round -- it becomes rigid, defeats the strike of the round and becomes soft again."
A shortcoming of traditional body armor is that it can only absorb so many strikes from machine-gun rounds. "When you have a uniform with this new nanotechnology, it can absorb unlimited numbers of machine-gun rounds," DeGay pointed out.
Another potential development is inserting "nanomuscle fibers" that can actually simulate muscles, giving soldiers more strength. Fabric is impregnated with nanomachines that create the same weight, lift and feel as a muscle. "So I coat the outside of the armor with a nanomuscle fiber that gives me 25 to 35 percent better lifting capability," DeGay explained.
The uniform from the waist down will have a robotic-powered system that is connected directly to the soldier. This system could use pistons to actually replicate the lower body, giving the soldier "upwards of about 300 percent greater lifting and load-carriage capability," DeGay said. "We are looking at potentially mounting a weapon directly to the uniform system and now the soldier becomes a walking gun platform."
The Future Force Warrior is the Army's short-term change, with a complete rebuild of the soldier from skin out being planned through the Future Warrior system. "We are already starting to look at the 2020 Future Warrior concept, which is integrating stuff that is just starting to show promise in the lab," DeGay concluded. He said researchers hope to see this developing technology mature in the next 15 to 20 years. "Future Warrior is a visionary concept of how the individual warrior may be equipped in the 2015-2020 timeframe," he said.