Future Warrior Suit 2020

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A medic, who can be miles away, will now be able to diagnose and treat a soldier who is about to have sunstroke, without even physically seeing the soldier. "So a medic can see how the soldier's core body temperature is rising (and) heart rate is falling, and the soldier then knows to go directly to the medic for treatment," DeGay said. "The computer will drop down a map to direct the soldier where to find the medic for help."

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, US$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.

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