Professional Soldiers ® - Future Warrior Systems

Getting these new technologies from the idea stage, into reality is not always easy,, nor prudent...

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Future Force Warrior is a United States military advanced technology demonstration project that is part of the Future Combat Systems project.[1] The FFW project seeks to create a lightweight, fully integrated infantryman combat system. It is one technology demonstration project in a series of network-centric, next-generation infantry combat projects the U.S. military have developed over the past decade, such as the Soldier Integrated Protective Ensemble technology demonstration program, Land Warrior, and Transformation of the United States Army.[2]

The Future Force Warrior concept envisions the radical use of technologies such as nanotechnology, artificial powered exoskeletons, and magnetorheological fluid based body armor to provide the infantry with significantly higher force multiplier than the opposing force, similar to the advantage US fighter aircraft such as the F-22 Raptor have over the older Soviet designs used by many nations of the world. However, the stated concept is not U.S. Army doctrine, and is not intended to answer every situation that Army After Next (the Army's buzzword for future fighting forces) would face; rather, the concept is meant to serve as an end goal to strive to reach or to compromise with current technologies and to stir imagination and dialogue on how these technologies and concepts can help soldiers in the near future.

The first phase of the project involves a development of the technologies to help reduce the soldier's fighting load and power requirements and improving the soldier's protection, lethality, and environmental and situational awareness, with planned deployment in 2010, to serve the Army's short-term needs. The Army's plan is to introduce the subsystems in "spirals" every two years, instead of one large rollout every ten years. The U.S. military hopes to develop a fully realized end product sometime in 2032, incorporating research from U.C. Berkeley's BLEEX exoskeleton project and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies into a final design.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Force_Warrior