Imagine planes invis­i­ble — lit­er­ally — to radar; a sub slip­ping beneath the waves hid­den com­pletely from any attempt at a sonar ping; a tank imper­vi­ous to infrared sensors.

According to an arti­cle in Science Daily, this could be pos­si­ble — but not in the way we’ve seen in recent attempts.

With planes it’s geom­e­try and mate­ri­als. With subs its mate­ri­als, tac­tics and sound alle­vi­a­tors. With tanks — well, we haven’t got­ten there yet. But sci­en­tists have suc­cess­fully tested active cloak­ing from cer­tain types of radi­a­tion, includ­ing microwaves.

“It’s a brand new method of cloak­ing,” Milton adds. “It is two-dimensional, but we believe it can be extended eas­ily to three dimen­sions, mean­ing real objects could be cloaked. It’s called active cloak­ing, which means it uses devices that actively gen­er­ate elec­tro­mag­netic fields rather than being com­posed of ‘meta­ma­te­ri­als’ [exotic metal­lic sub­stances] that pas­sively shield objects from pass­ing elec­tro­mag­netic waves.”

Milton says his pre­vi­ous research involved “just cloak­ing clus­ters of small par­ti­cles, but now we are able to cloak larger objects.”

For exam­ple, radar microwaves have wave­lengths of about four inches, so Milton says the study shows it is pos­si­ble to use the method to cloak from radar some­thing 10 times wider, or 40 inches. That raises hope for cloak­ing larger objects. So far, the largest object cloaked from microwaves in actual exper­i­ments was an inch-wide cop­per cylin­der.

According to the report, this method could be more effec­tive across a wider range of band­widths. In other words, one active cloak­ing mod­ule could ren­der the object invis­i­ble to many sources of emis­sions. Previous iter­a­tions involved mate­ri­als that cloak against a sin­gle band­width or wavelength.

“The prob­lem with meta­ma­te­ri­als is that their behav­ior depends strongly on the fre­quency you are try­ing to cloak from,” he adds. “So it is dif­fi­cult to obtain broad­band cloak­ing. Maybe you’d be invis­i­ble to red light, but peo­ple would see you in blue light.”

Most pre­vi­ous research used inte­rior cloak­ing, where the cloak­ing device envelops the cloaked object. Milton says the new method “is the first active, exte­rior cloak­ing” tech­nique: cloak­ing devices emit sig­nals and sit out­side the cloaked object.

Be sure to read the sci­en­tists’ arti­cle in Optics Express jour­nal HERE and watch the demon­stra­tion video. Can it cloak me from my boss, I won­der?

Broadband exte­rior cloak­ing from Fernando Guevara Vasquez on Vimeo.

(Gouge: MP)

– Christian

You’re dri­ving down a rut­ted out wahdi in Helmand province. Your eyes are tired from the monot­ony, but you know you have to keep on your scan for those tell-tale spots of dis­turbed earth.

Rounding a small bend, you drive down a slight embank­ment and veer back to the right and BOOM! the IED goes off.

The prox­im­ity of your JLTV was close enough to the huge explo­sion (dou­ble stack 155 rounds) that your crew — if they had not been killed out­right — would be left severely wounded, with pos­si­ble brain injury from the cun­cus­sive blast.

That is except for the inno­v­a­tive armor their high tech vehi­cle carried…

For more than a year, a good friend of mine has been devel­op­ing with some key indus­try lead­ers in sen­sors, explo­sives and armor tech­nol­ogy a new sys­tem designed to take the boom out of a bomb. I can’t get into the spe­cific num­bers for secu­rity and patent rea­sons, but the long and the short of it is that David Woroner of Survival Consultants International has designed a sys­tem that uses high-tech air bags to absorb the blast of a road­side bomb. The lay­ers of bal­lis­tic mate­r­ial also help mit­i­gate shrap­nel, but the pri­mary mis­sion of the armor is to negate the over­pres­sure that causes so many TBI casualties.

This project is still in the “paper” stages and has not been field tested yet, but a bevy of sci­en­tists and indus­try engi­neers are on the case run­ning the numbers.

I have included here a video ani­ma­tion of the sys­tem to give you a bet­ter idea of how it works. While a lot has to be refined, the sys­tem offers the promise of a light­weight solu­tion to a prob­lem that the JLTV will likely face in the future.

And if the tech­nol­ogy doesn’t work on the test­ing field, at least Dave’s idea could prompt some dis­cus­sion of bal­lis­tic pro­tec­tion sys­tems that don’t rely on heavy plates of armor or com­posits, but instead attack the prob­lem from a very dif­fer­ent angle.

– Christian

[From our friends at Breach-Bang-Clear on the Woroner armor debate.]

All right boys and girls, theres been a hel­luva lot of dis­cus­sion here about Dave Woroner’s armor design and whether it would work or not work or what­ever. Honestly I think part of the prob­lem is that first off its over most (not all) of our heads. Second off, Woroner doesnt want to tell too much about the damned thing out of OPSEC or COMSEC con­cerns, which makes expla­na­tion dif­fi­cult at best. Imagine try­ing to explain a lawn­mower engine if you couldn’t talk about inter­nal com­bus­tion, or if pis­tons were classifed. 

Lemme see what I can do to make it make a lit­tle sense. 

Have you heard about the Boomerang System made by BBN Technologies in Boston? Its an acousti­cal sen­sor sys­tem that uses “acousti­cal entrap­ment” to quickly and reli­ably iden­tify the loca­tion of a sniper or other shooter thats putting rounds down­range towards our grunts. It’s been on Future Weapons and a cou­ple other shows, has actu­ally deployed to the AOR and appar­ently works. 

Woroners sys­tem is kind of like that, but it uses light sen­si­tiv­ity to detect incom­ing pro­jec­tiles. Sound wont work, its too slow for a sys­tem to detect an EFP or what­ever and mit­i­gate the blast. You might be able to detect the blast, depend­ing upon the strength of the device and the range, but you damn sure wouldnt be able to detect it and then take steps to defeat it. Only light and elec­tric­ity are fast enough to react to some­thing mov­ing at thou­sands of feet per sec­ond, which is why light and elec­tric­ity are the basis of Woroners bar­rier system. 

Its in the high nanosec­ond, low microsec­ond range of response, putting a coun­ter­mea­sure out to inter­cept the incom­ing weapon and either destroy it or mit­i­gate it by shear­ing the blast wave off with its own blast mov­ing at a rec­i­p­ro­cal speed. This is effec­tively a coun­ter­mea­sure sys­tem intended to be used in addi­tion to next-gen armor to reduce or nul­lify the incom­ing blast and projectile(s). Let me put it to you the way I had to explain it to Slim, which I think youll find is a lit­tle sim­pler than Daves explanation. 

Some delin­quent lit­tle bas­tard in your neigh­bor­hood uses a potato gun to launch a spud at your car. Youve got Woroners sys­tem mounted on the hood. It detects the incom­ing spud using light, not sound, and throws out some high tech shit you cant pro­nounce let alone explain to inter­cept it. That stuff is mov­ing at about the same speed as the spud. It hits the potato and slows it down, pos­si­bly deflect­ing it some so that while it still hits your fender, it only hits with the impact of a nerf dart. 

Potato-gun launched spud to nerf dart. Makes sense to me. Id rather get clocked in the head with an orange foam bul­let than an Idaho baker any day.

(more…)

[NOTE: Here’s another con­tri­bu­tion from our friends at Breach Bang Clear. The author is a friend of mine, David Woroner of Survival Consultants International. He’s a bal­lis­tics expert, for­mer PSD con­trac­tor and all-around mad sci­en­tist who’s come up with a novel new armor for newly built vehi­cles. This is part one of a multi-part series on new solu­tions for bal­lis­tic defeat.]

If it has a new gen armor sys­tem attached to it, then Im in favor of the JLTV over the MRAP. Why? Well, a num­ber of reasons. 

The MRAP has some things going for it, and its saved some lives, no ques­tion. But its not the end-all be-all, ulti­mate solu­tion to whats going on in Iraq and Afghanistanand its not going to be the solu­tion in future wars that may be fought dif­fer­entlyand cer­tainly will be fought in dif­fer­ent terrain. 

Lets face it, the MRAP is a bank vault tipped on its side with wheels and a motor. A mil­lion dol­lar bank vault tipped on its side with wheels and a motor. Consider some of its weak­nesses, and the finan­cial bur­den to fix or repair. Were talk­ing about a seri­ous chunk of change just in the case of blow­ing the under­car­riage out. My opin­ion on this shouldnt be mis­con­strued as some ret­i­cence on my part to help out the troops. Anyone that knows me or has served with me knows I am STAUNCHLY behind the pro­tec­tion of our troops. It can be done with the tech­nol­ogy at hand, and it can be done more efficiently. 

Consider the cost, oper­a­tional rel­e­vance and troop trans­porta­tion capa­bil­ity of the MRAP (and the com­ing MRAPII) vs. some­thing like the JLTV. Were in a war, and in a war, par­tic­u­larly con­ducted with blitzkrieg type oper­a­tions, its always going to be bet­ter to put fewer men and less equip­ment into less expen­sive vehi­cles. Put sim­ply, Id rather attack any­thing with a mil­lion ants than a pair of ele­phants. When it comes to those vehi­cles, pro­tec­tion doesnt have to be expen­sive, the vehi­cles can be more effi­cient to oper­ate in a dis­parate vari­ety of ter­rains, and lets dont for­get the cost of fuel. 

Let me explain further. 

The con­cepts of blitzkrieg were known in other coun­tries, albeit poorly devel­oped (the British army had par­tially imple­mented it), by the end of the First World War, but the Germans had worked out the com­plex­i­ties of break­ing through a front with highly con­cen­trated resources. This tech­nique failed the Germans in their offen­sives of March 1918, largely because the break­through ele­ments were on foot and could not sus­tain the impe­tus of the ini­tial attack. The deploy­ment of motor­ized infantry was the key to sus­tain­ing a break­through, but this would have to wait until the 1930s to be realized. 

Superimpose the real­i­ties of mod­ern war and we can see that the Humvee has proven itself to be a woe­fully inad­e­quate method of safely trans­port­ing troops into bat­tle, even with all the so-called hill­billy armor, up-armor pack­ages, etc. We should have done it right the first time, or not done it at all. We should still be doing things right the first time or not doing it at all… 

Lets scroll back a hun­dred years to see the appear­ance of the first true British/American tanks wor­thy of the name. These hunks of steel, bristling with machine guns and small guns, were long enough to accom­plish what they were orig­i­nally designed forto bridge the gaps of trenches. In those days, this was per­haps a good idea. Review the real­i­ties of today again. Everything has changed. Virtually every fun­da­men­tal tenet of mod­ern war­fare is dif­fer­ent than it was in WWI. So why do we per­sist in revert­ing to brawn over brains?

(more…)

All right folks, so you’re prob­a­bly going to need to help set me straight on this, but there were a cou­ple of inter­est­ing pre­sen­ta­tions at the armor con­fer­ence regard­ing nano-fibers — par­tic­u­larly the con­struc­tion of car­bon fiber nano-tubes in a lab environment. 

The impact on the body armor indus­try if this tech­nol­ogy could be pro­duced on a large scale is huge. One of my body armor buds told me if fully real­ized, “a big foot­ball player could flip a tank over” that’s made out of the stuff. 

Whoa!

The long and the short of it is that sev­eral researchers (par­tic­u­larly uni­ver­sity labs) have been able to con­struct micro­scopic tubu­lar struc­tures out of car­bon fiber and extrude them into long weaves of nanites. The stuff is incred­i­bly light­weight, but stronger than steel. According to experts, if this stuff is wrapped around strands of aramid fibers like Kevlar, Dyneema or Spectra Shield, the bal­lis­tic resis­tance yield would be huge — as would the weight reduction. 

For exam­ple: I used two Level III plates dur­ing my last trip to Iraq that weighed about four pounds and were made of aramid mate­ri­als like Dyneema [thank you to my bros at Protective Products who hooked me with the totally sweet set of 11014 plates. They saved my back and would have defi­nately saved my butt if I’d needed them to]. There was no boron car­bide (ceramic) plat­ing in them at all. They could with­stand a stan­dard AK round, but not an armor pierc­ing one.

(more…)

Earlier I gave you some notes I took on the fore­casted expen­di­tures of the ser­vices for armor prod­ucts. The ana­lyst from Vector Strategy also went into the fore­casted expen­di­tures of armored mate­ri­als, includ­ing steel, ceram­ics and aramid fiber armors. But I thought that stuff was a bit spec­u­la­tive, so I won’t pass it along unless any of you email me for it. 

What she did talk about, how­ever, were some “issues” that could affect her assump­tions on mate­ri­als and expen­di­tures — things that could raise or lower the amounts or con­tribute to the cre­ation of a whole new cat­e­gory of mate­r­ial demands and dol­lars spent. 

Some of those issues include:

(more…)

Another pre­sen­ter here at the armor con­fer­ence was a woman who runs a busi­ness con­sult­ing com­pany called Vector Strategy Inc. She gave a light­en­ing fast brief­ing on trends in the armor busi­ness, includ­ing vehi­cle armor orders, body armor pro­cure­ment, vehi­cle upgrades, new vehi­cle orders, etc. through like 2015.

It was a fas­ci­nat­ing pre­sen­ta­tion if not deliv­ered at too blis­ter­ing a pace to really keep up with it, but here are some num­bers she came up with:

(more…)

Something told me this would happen. 

Saw a great report last night from Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin who’s been trav­el­ing with Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway in Iraq. 

She knew news when she saw it and reports that Marines are com­plain­ing might­ily about their new body armor vest, the Modular Tactical Vest or MTV.

The Pentagon and Marine Corps autho­rized the pur­chase of 84,000 bul­let­proof vests in 2006 that not only are too heavy but are so imprac­ti­cal that some U.S. Marines are ask­ing for their old vests back so they can remain agile enough to fight. 

Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway wants to know who autho­rized the costly pur­chase of the nearly 30-pound flak jack­ets and has ordered the Marine pro­cure­ment offi­cers at the Quantico base in Virginia to halt the rest of an unfilled order, FOX News has learned. 

(more…)