Army Science Leads to High-Speed Weapons Attack Breakthroughs

By Kris Osborn President, Center for Military Modernization

(Washington, D.C.) Lasers, hypersonics, robots and precision weaponry are all fast becoming key elements of the Army’s operational arsenal, and each of these paradigm-changing weapons systems first emerged from the Science and Technology element of the service.

The Army is making a decided push to better integrate the science and technology community with rapid acquisition and the operational sphere as a way to fast track promising new technologies to war.

Disruptive Technologies & War

While there has always been a certain synergy between research, scientific inquiry, innovation and active military operations in terms of “urgent” needs statements or requests for a given technology, now the Army is making new efforts to respond to the rapid pace of change by linking breakthrough or disruptive technologies more closely with current soldier needs in war.

Video Above: Robots Destroy Tanks, Army Tests & Accelerates Armed Robots for War

“The way that it was looked at in the past, and I think the way that many people still think of it is that there is science technology, then there’s a valley of death. Then there’s the engineering and production piece, that skips the entire process of going from a demonstration, which is really what science and technology is, and we move in to an actual first article that allows us the ability to employ and learn at a small scale,” Lt. Gen. Thomas Todd, Chief Innovation Officer, Army Futures Command, told Warrior in an interview.

Successful execution of this kind of strategy relies upon what Todd referred to as rapid prototyping, meaning efforts to engineer functional applications of a given promising technology with the hope of making a rapid transition to production and deployment to soldiers in war.