ARMY WANTS SOLAR-​​POWERED TENTS, UNIFORMS

“If We Run Out of Batteries, This War is Screwed.“
That was the head­line to one of my favorite embed­ded accounts of the Iraq inva­sion. And it cap­tured a fun­da­men­tal truth about today’s mil­i­tary: with so much warfight­ing gear going elec­tronic, bat­tles are increas­ingly won or lost by the side with the best power sup­ply.
To break the bat­tery addic­tion, the Army has been pour­ing more and more resources into alter­na­tive and renew­able ways to gen­er­ate power. The lat­est exam­ple, reports John Gartner in today’s Wired News: “flex­i­ble solar pan­els that can be lay­ered on top of a tent, or rolled up into a back­pack to pro­vide a portable power source.“
Long-​​term, the idea is to have solar pan­els that can be cam­ou­flaged into tents or even uni­forms. So the Army is work­ing with con­trac­tors “to develop nanotechnology-​​based solar pan­els that can be woven directly into fab­ric. [The] tech­nol­ogy replaces sil­i­con with dye poly­mer plas­tics that trans­form any kind of light into elec­tri­cal energy,” Gartner writes.
“We want to cut back on the things that sol­diers have to bring with them,” includ­ing gen­er­a­tors and per­sonal bat­tery packs, Jean Hampel, with the Army’s Natick Soldier Systems Center, tells Gartner. “In mod­ern war­fare, portable power for com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy is every bit as impor­tant as fire­power and manpower.”

June 29th, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.