US Army to Try Out New, Anime-based Uniforms

PenguinRadio writes "This is being reported in a few places, most notably USA Today which has an article about the US Army teaming up with MIT to develop a new nanotechnology-based outfit for our soldiers that can detect bio hazards, injury, and other funky things. The 5 year, $50 million grant also wants to look at bending light around the uniform to create some sort of invisibility." CNET has another story. The Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies has its own web page, of course.

Comments

Anime?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm.. What does Anime have to do with any of this? Are Slashdot editors hoping that female soldiers will be outfitted with scantily-clad, breast-hugging Anime style getups?

Re:Anime?

[susano_otter]

Did you look at the artist's rendition? The guy is clearly ripping off Masamune Shirow. And the actual suit concepts (which are really unrelated to the artist's rendition) aren't that much different from the hard Japanese SF anyway.

But seriously, look at the gun in that picture. It's obviously a Seburo!

Re:Anime?

[Rimbo]

Not only does the picture look like something out of anime, but there's also the issue of the gravity-defying D-cup breasts in the picture, long a staple of anime SF. This artist watched too much Bubblegum Crisis or Ghost in the Shell.

But it brings up an interesting thought sort of in-line with the last line of the C|Net article. Imagine having a troop of women wearing these things dealing with issues in the Middle East, where women are second-class citizens. "Tell me to be subservient now, willya?" blam blam blam... It's no big thing for a woman to be a good fighter to Westerners, but in the Middle East, talk about adding insult to injury... You're not only getting killed, but you're getting killed by seemingly invicible warriors protected by armor and endowed with superhuman abilities, but by squads of seemingly invincible, armored, superhuman women.

Too awesome.

Re:Anime?

[An Onerous Coward]

As someone who has actually been in the Army, this is something we very definitely do not want. Any pleasure derived from seeing certain military type women scantily clad must be weighed against the risk of, well, seeing certain other military type women scantily clad.

In the end, the reward just isn't worth the risk.

How Are These Anime-Based?

[John_Booty]

You see this sort of thing (powered and/or cloaking exosuits) in anime, but you also see it in every other walk of science fiction too. ex: Starship Troopers, every other comic book ever published, etc, etc.

Neither of the articles mentions anime either. I'm just wondering where the "anime" reference in the article title came from. Left field, apparently, unless I missed something! (which is entirely likely)

Re:How Are These Anime-Based?

[John_Booty]

...Besides, if they were really ANIME-based, these suits would be easily pilotable by 13 year-olds.

In fact, they'd probably be pilotable ONLY by 13-year olds, as the result of some plot twist!

Re:How Are These Anime-Based?

[ghostlibrary]

It's anime-like because, in combat, the two sides will simply hang back and stare at each other for a while. Then both will fire off everything they have with explosive fury. When the dust settles... both sides will still be standing, but the collateral damage to the area will be _huge_ and there will be massive civilian casualties.

Oh, wait, that's how modern military actions are now. Alas.

Re:How Are These Anime-Based?

[pizen]

In fact, they'd probably be pilotable ONLY by 13-year olds, as the result of some plot twist!

But only if the suit turns out to be your enemy.

Re:How Are These Anime-Based?

[reemul]

Well, since most of the folks on here apparently only know Starship Troopers from the suckass movie - where they not only aren't in armor, they don't even have long sleeved shirts - I'm glad at least someone made the connection. Robert Heinlein *invented* the idea of powered armor in that book. Anime may have borrowed it, but it was RAH who started it all.

Though the artist rendering does demonstrate what sorts of comic books that guy reads. At least he didn't do the female version, with breasts each bigger than the helmet. Too bad the artist missed the important point that with nano-scale materials, the suit could funtion while still being flexible enough that you wouldn't need those multi-part joints, which are only needed in bulky or rigid materials. But it looked cool.

-reemul

old news

[kb3edk]

We Metal Gear fans have long known that stealth camo and nanomachines became standard equipment for FoxHound operatives in 1995. "Find... Big Boss! Destroy... Outer Heaven!"

Re:old news

[TheGreenLantern]

Suprisingly, infiltrating enemy strongholds using cigarettes and a cardboard box seldom works in real life.

Power?

[beninkster]

How do they plan to power these things???

Army trained hamster powered generators carried in backpacks perhaps? ;-)

Re:Power?

[silicon_synapse]

I'd imagine they could also use nanotechnology or piezoelectric sheets to generate enough electricity from body movement. I can't imagine nanobots use much power. Even while standing still, your body is moving a lot.

Re:Power?

[kilroy_hau]

You need to put your SCV's to gather minerals and vespene gas. That's all that's needed, really

50 mil... a good start I guess

[the_consumer]

Hate to say it, but most new technologies don't seem to get very far until the pentagon decides they're useful. Hopefully this will prime the pump of a nanotech industrial revolution.

Power Suits

[Mad Man]

I didn't realize that Starship Troopers (1960) or Predator (1987) were anime.

re: 5-year MIT program

[bob_clippy]

Supercharged shoes could release energy when soldiers jump, propelling them over a 20-foot wall.

Put me down for $100 on MIT for the 2007 NCAA torney.

Is this really a good thing

[Spit_Fire1]

Supercharged shoes could release energy when soldiers jump, propelling them over a 20-foot wall.
-What happens after the wall, is there also a parachute, or are you just supposed to land after your 20 foot fall.

Micoreactors could detect bleeding and apply pressure.
-So that the enemies crackers can cut off circulation in battle to help their side

Light-deflecting material could make the suit blend in with surroundings.
-So that the number of soilders hurt or killed by friendly fire increases.

MIT's research centers had been working on nanotechnology ideas long before getting involved with the Army, but not with military applications in mind.
-Isn't that how it always happens, soon the MIT reasercher will make a peace time achievment award.

Re:Is this really a good thing

[gartogg]

1) If the nanotech is any good, it can absorb energy from a landing (by cascading stiffness up the armor, and allowing the armor to take the pressure without crushing the guy inside) after a fall of much more than 20 ft. Also, I have jumped off of second stories of buildings higher than that often, and 20 ft. isn't THAT much to land from (especially if you know how to land decently.)

2) Ummm, is it just me or is connecting the suit's pressure control just the kind of feature you store in ROM, so it can't be hacked? Also, don't connect this segment of the suit to the (heavily encrypted) wireless network that you would have (but could turn off to sneak past sensors.)

If you were in a combat situation such as the ones that the USA is likely to face in the near (50 years or so) future, the enemy will not have tech. to be able do much damage in a combat zone, and as long as you have good hackers building the systems for the US, it should be ok (randomize frequency used, use encryption, and be able to switch both in combat in case of problem)

3) With mostly tech availible off the shelf, you could build a system that pinpointed who was using your armor and who wasn't, and display this inside of the helmet that the guys are wearing. The suit could also have night vision that would find hot bodies and check if they were wearing suits (which might be able to mask heat using insulation, by the way)

These ideas are all within the range of technology availible by the time we have nanotech to build the suits. (the real assumption here is the nanotech good enough to make the suits)

Re:Is this really a good thing

[Danse]

What happens after the wall, is there also a parachute, or are you just supposed to land after your 20 foot fall.

GO! GO! Gadget Pogo-Stick!

Re:Is this really a good thing

[Rogerborg]

• If the nanotech is any good, it can absorb energy from a landing (by cascading stiffness up the armor, and allowing the armor to take the pressure without crushing the guy inside)

Oh please. Energy isn't the issue, it's acceleration. If you stiffen the armour, you just get smushed against the hard armour instead of the hard ground. In fact, stiffening is the last thing you want to do; you want as much articulation as possible to minimise the impulse. This "leap tall buildings in a single bound" claim is pure fantasy.

Bending light?

[spineboy]

In other words INVISIBILITY!!

Or am I mistaken... Soldiers will still need light to hit their eyes to be able to see.. I guess a pair of floating eyes won't raise too much suspicion.
What about infrared? Soldiers will still glow in that region.

Jumping 20 ft with some sort of exoskeleton still seems unlikely to me - remember, the landing deceleration won't be too much different than jumping off a 20 ft building without any exoskeleton (that hurts!).
It just doesn't seem plausible. The only thing useful I could see an exoskeleton useful for would be to lift/cary heavy loads. Any other ideas?

Anime = DBZ?

[Havokmon]

Here I thought MIT got $50 million to develop loose t-shirts and excessive narration.

Re:Light bending?

[SanLouBlues]

Actually the light bending will be incorporated into the very skin of the soldiers, with a light mask to cover the eyes. They will have to fight naked of course, but this is causing the Joint Chiefs to rethink allowing women on the battlefield.

Of course, if the light gets bent around the soldier, how will any hit their eyes so they can see?

old news

[Dr. Awktagon]

I have a shirt that can track how many days I've gone without bathing, using a "handsfree background olfactory indicator". High tech stuff, really.

Also, I haven't tried it myself, but I think past the 30-day point it is indeed actually capable of bending light waves. It could probably also melt steel. Though due to the olfactory indicator mentioned above, it isn't exactly what I'd call "invisible"...

Can I have a million dollar grant for this invention? Erm, yeah, I'll understand if you don't want to deliver the check in person.

Cool trick

[fobbman]

Bend light? The best we've been able to accomplish around the lab is break wind.

Good news/Bad news

[BluedemonX]

The GOOD news is, every female soldier will now be a 38 DDD.

The bad news is, these suits are NOT proof against suddenly-appearing, demonic phallic tentacles.

An explanation of the "anime-based" thing

[Lendrick]

Because so many people seem to be having trouble with this...

One would assume that they said "anime-based" because these sorts of battle suits crop up a lot in anime (although generally without invisibility) -- take Bubblegum Crisis, for example. The suit pictured in the article--along with the drawing style and the fact that the wearer is apprently female--looks suspiciously anime-like.

Compare to this.

Also, a little note to the humor impaired: The phrase "anime-based" in the title of the story isn't there to imply that the Pentagon is actually trying to be anime-like. It's a joke.

What's that army man holding in the picture?!

[garagekubrick]

Look closely at the Army's own webpage with their little picture of what the armor suit might look like...

He's holding a Pulse Rifle from Aliens!

I think it's really weird that a filmmaker decides to make a film that's a metaphor for Vietnam in which superior technology is beaten by an organic enemy; an obvious moral. But now the Army wants those Pulse Rifles.

Have any of you seen pictures of the OICW? It's the Army's latest attempt at a replacement infantry rifle for the aging M16 (A rifle which when first made, had a plastic stock stamped with Mattel's logo because they were manufacturing the plastic parts). I swear, the people in charge of defining the equipment a future soldier will be wearing must sit around all day and watch Aliens over and over and over...

I saw some recent footage of a new integrated networking system for mobile soldiers. All these soldiers are checking their PDAs and typing into their wristpad. In some way I can understand the advantage of having access to all that information, but time and again history has proven that soldier's overreliant on technology get their asses bit.

better cause

[LiquidPC]

I was watching the Discovery channel the other day and I saw a peice on asteroids and how little the government gives them ($1 million from the NASA budget) to help track the many floating around space. Alot that, if they hit earth, would cause a global catastrophy, even the end of mankind. Sure, military forces is a good cause for funding, but I, for one, would like to see more money spent in causes like that, as opposed to bending light and creating armor.

New dress code?

[BluedemonX]

Well, obviously now soldiers will be allowed to walk around with big, shaggy, turquoise or bright green hair.

a BAD IDEA

[maddogsparky]

Obviously this is a BAD IDEA, because some soldier's cloaking device will fail, he will be killed by some pathetic little humanoid and he will end up taking out a square mile with a thermo-nuclear explosion.

Or worse, he will be killed and we will have to give a primitive weapon to his killer as a trophy and abandon the planet.

Re:"how little soldiers are actually used"

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

just recruiting wee folk from the Irish American community?

"Green Clovers, Purple Hearts, Black Rifles..." ("The Taliban is after me lucky charms(tm)!"...)

$50 million?

[theCURE]

give me $50 million, i'll show you how to disappear

Invisibility? Huh?

[RobertFisher]

The original poster was seriously confused. Don't people pay attention in physics classes anymore?

Simple considerations tell us that geometrical optics is an excellent approximation for any large object. The size of the object is much, much greater than a wavelength of light, so optics reduces to tracing rays from your eyeball to the source, and thence reflected or absorbed as the case may be. There is no such thing as "bending" visible light around a macroscopic object. You can make a suit which is nearly fully reflective (not a good stealth tactic -- you would appear like a nice shiny mirror), or nearly absorptive (in which case you would appear black), but there are plenty of ordinary materials that already work quite well for either purpose.

Since I presume that the nanotech folks at MIT are well aware of this fact, I doubt they proposed to "bend light" in their suits. Rather, they are probably going to implement something which Nature has long realized in chameleons and various other creatures : "invisibility" through blending in. Various miniaturized digital cameras could sense the background that a suit was in, and change the colorations on the suit (perhaps using a variation on the "digital ink" concept) accordingly. Hence, a suit could appear sandy-yellow when in the desert, white when in the desert, and camoflouge when in the jungle.

Since we all already doing essentially that when outfitting soldiers (no one wears the bright red of old British regulars anymore), it is unclear whether there is any real advantage to this concept, especially given the cost. Particularly since, to anyone equipped with infrared night vision goggles, every body temperature objects glow like a beacon.

Bob

Re:Invisibility? Huh?

[istartedi]

Indeed, when I first heard of a proposal to do this, circa 1986, it was referred to as "chameleon cloth".

With the right software, I bet you could get by with perhaps just 4 cameras. The tricky part is having the fabric be durable, and having the signals that travel to the pixels be fault tolerant. Also, it's got to be non-stick. Otherwise, any damage to the fabric, or anything stuck to it ruins the whole thing. OTOH, if the enemy delivers bright green sticky stuff that rains down on the soldiers, it will also rain down on the terrain. Another possible tactic is to fire a flare that backlights the soldiers with a strobe. Any latency in the camo system will be detectable, although cave-dwelling terrorists aren't likely to have such tech.

Re:Invisibility? Huh?

[RobertFisher]

Unlike some other posters, at least you are in the realm of reality, so I think I'll respond.

Yes, fiber optics can bend light. The problem is that they are highly directional -- only incoming light from a very narrow angle will be piped. If you've ever had to splice two fiber optic cables together, you know just how difficult this is. So while a very narrow cone of light could be routed in principle, most light is just going to be reflected or absorbed as usual.

Infrared camo is more interesting. Yes, you could probably arrange for something like this. You'd effectively be wearing a thermos outfit, and it could potentially get very hot inside. It's unclear to me that you could built up heat for any significant duration without forcing the soldier into heat exhaustion. Yes, you could install an air conditioner, but thermodynamics tells us that even more heat is generated in the process.

Your best bet is probably not to try to capture all of the heat, but retain it briefly in an outer suit layer, and let it equilibrate to the mean temperature of the environment before releasing it. You would still be radiating in the infrared, but you would be nearly indistinguishable from your background.

Bob

Uhh...

[PlaysWithMatches]

The 5 year, $50 million grant also wants to look at bending light around the uniform to create some sort of invisibility.

IANAS (I Am Not A Scientist), so correct me if I'm wrong... But if you're bending light around a person, that means THEY can't see the light either. Right?

If so, this approach would be limited to situations where vision is not necessary, perhaps holding a hidden position until it is time to move out. Or maybe they would use some sort of devices to allow a soldier to "see" things outside the normal human visual spectrum, thus allowing them to see something despite not being able to see the normally visible light.

Just my 2 :)

HAH! A Mental Picture

[Petersko]

We're gonna make soldiers so incredibly expensive that we can't afford very many.

Then we'll send them into battle, whereupon they'll be vastly outnumbered by hoards of people carrying rocks.

Last words? "Ah... now here's a problem we didn't consider..."

OFW

[Telemakhos]

This is part of the Objective Force Warrior Program. From that page: ""The Objective Force Warrior will be a Formidable Warrior in an Invincible Team, Able to See First, Understand First, Act First, and Finish Decisively." Despite the capitalization, diction, and picture, which remind one more of a video game than a project of the federal government, the page is for real and provides some interesting reading. See also The Natick Soldier Center, which hosts the OFW program.

Anime based == Ghost in the shell

[ACK!!]

Ghost in the Shell had the characters basically wearing a suit that made the wearer invisible. The drawing from the story looks like a straight up rip off of the art concept used by said anime.

However, who ever submitted the story could have made that clearer.

Still does not mean that a dozen jokes would not have come out of the comparison. I am not sure this will happen though considering how cheap a body is next to the cost of a plane or a tank but we can hope. The American military putting its soldier's first? I hope so.

________________________________________________ __

Non-military applications

[DragonPup]

As I said when I submitted this 5 hours ago(no I'm not bitter:-) ), is that this technology has potential for very good non-military uses. The enchancing of strength could help people with Muscular Schirrosis move around more freely, or help people who've had a leg smashed by a car or something walk again. Lots of fuzzy warm stuff could result from the development project that can benefit humanity(as well as letting otakus live out anime dreams of a exosuit).

-Henry

What's the difference between... (joke)

[HEbGb]

What's the difference between an MIT mechanical engineer and and MIT civil engineer?

.
.
.
.

Mechanical engineers build weapons, and civil engineers build targets.

Ha!

Oh my god!!!

[Dirtside]

The military is going to hire Cobra Commander!

Re: 5-year MIT program

[nEoN nOoDlE]

Put me down for $100 on MIT for the 2007 NCAA torney.

or the Darwin Awards...