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DARPA Successfully Demonstrates Self-Guiding Bullets
Lucas123 writes: A DARPA-funded project has successfully developed a .50 caliber sniper round capable of maneuvering during flight in order to remain on target. The self-guiding EXACTO bullet, as it's being called, is optically guided by a laser that must remain on target for the bullet to track. The EXACTO round is capable of accurately tracking a target up to 1.2 miles away, DARPA stated. The technology, which is being developed by Teledyne Scientific and Imaging, is targeted at helping snipers remain at longer distances from targets as well as improving night shots. While DARPA's tracking bullet is the first to use a standard, small-arms caliber round, in 2012 Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) successfully demonstrated a prototype self-guided bullet that was more like like a four-inch dart.
Cheaters! Who's the admin? We need to ban those losers.
Rest assured that a hack is already in the making.
I don't get the US. I mean, by now you should have noticed that the bigger and more complicated the technology, the more you play into your opponent's hands. First of all, you're using high tech weapons in a low tech war. You can't really fire any round anymore that doesn't cost you more than what your target cost your enemy. Welcome to asymmetric warfare. I don't know why I have to say it, I thought it's obvious: You're essentially in the unfunny situation the British were in when you had your fight for independence. And on top of it you also have to pose as the good guy, you can't even simply level the land and bury what's living under the rubble.
In basically all the wars the US had gotten into lately, they had the superior technology and the inferior position. Let's look at the stats. The US is fighting an enemy who not only doesn't give half a shit about collateral damage (the US at least have to pretend they care, so they can't use the aforementioned "scorched earth" tactics), an enemy that does not identify itself as such (so pretty much anyone and everyone could be hostile), while at the same time those that are NOT hostile may not be touched (since the US want to be the "good" guy and the backlash is considerable when something surfaces). And unlike the average US soldier, the enemy doesn't even give a shit whether he survives the war.
That's not a position from which you can win a war. The US loses unless they win, their enemy wins as long as they don't lose. That cannot be won in a scenario where your enemy is in a position where it does not matter to him how many resources he loses as long as he can inflict damage on you.
Precision bombing and precision shooting is a fine thing if you have a target. That's the main problem the US is facing today. It's trivial for them to eliminate any target anywhere on the planet. The problem is FINDING it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You are obviously not part of the military industrial complex! Fuck effective go expensive every time. For the price of one nuclear carrier we could have 50 diesel carrier groups with planes. I know professor that showed that for the price of 1 F14 you could equip a squadron of DeHavalin mosquitoes with Phoenix missiles. Stealth because they are made out of wood and 50 guided missiles will ace any fighter pilot in the sky.
But as a taxpayer ...
And each bullet costs just two times the GDP of the entire village the terrorist is hailing from! And we will make up for it in volume too!
Some times I wonder if it would be cheaper to feed, cloth, provide healthcare and house all the Afghans than what we spent on military over there. Afghanistan hardly has 30 million people. Per capita income is 500$ a year. Just 15 billion dollars total. We spent 1 trillion dollars in the war over there. Our government is borrowing at historically low rate, 10 year t-bills go at 2.5%, the interest charges on that debt alone is 25 billion dollars a year!
I don't know if it would have worked. But the idea goes like, take a large well defended perimeter. Free food, clothing, hospitals and homes inside. Let people in after disarming them. Expand the area as more and more people move in. We might be able to take in 90% of the population inside, standing obediently at the breadline and the hospital waiting rooms. I don't know. May be an idiot slashdot keyboard warrior.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Or as Roger Waters put it: The Bravery of Being Out of Range.
Actually, it's something like $50k-$70k per shot, not $1M, and it can automatically scratch out those projectiles heading into uninhabited areas from its target list. And whenever it destroys a projectile heading for a building or some inhabited place, it not only saves lives but it also quite often saves more money than it costs (the building and infrastructure rebuilds can be costlier than the interceptors), so it really can be a cost-effective solution under the circumstances.
Coming up (if successful): Iron Beam, the fiber-laser-powered interceptor with even better operating costs.
Ezekiel 23:20
No one is going to waste a $250 smart bullet attached to a $5000 weapon system on some kid.
The Iraq war has killed an estimated 300,000, and we have spent about $500 BILLION to do it. That comes out to about $1.7 million per kill, and MANY of them were kids. $250, or even $5000, is an infinitesimal sliver of a rounding error when it comes to the cost of a war.