DARPA is working on a laser-guided .50 calibre rifle bullet. It’s EXACTO, or Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance.
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The above list of “developments” in military technology is impressive. Lots of things are different from about 20 years ago.
I have just come home from a Marine Basic School class reunion that was at Annapolis, MD. We got a tour of the Academy, and on the second day serendipitously had the opportunity to see several Marine Corps equipment pieces that were set up as a one day exhibit for midshipmen who might be interested in going Marine Corps instead of staying in the Navy.
Couple things stuck out. While the “equipment” was interesting, much of it was basically improvements over the old stuff. So, the machine gun is rather similar to the old M-60 with refinements. The take-down was simpler and easier, so cleaning was enhanced. Barrels can now be changed without having the heat-proof gloves to handle the barrel. But it still fired a 7.62 NATO round, and barrels need exchange reasonably often because of heat - a problem with most machine guns after the Maxim, which was water cooled (and as long as you had a good supply of water, you could fire that puppy for a long time).
It’s the electronics that have progressed a tremendous amount. Now the USMC is fielding a mobile command AM(?R - the wheeled and up-armored replacement for the AMTRAK) that is just chock-full of computers, satellite dishes, antennae, etc. It can collect info from higher command to include intel reports shown on a map in real time - which they can now disseminate to at least platoon level. Infantry is carrying tablets to show maps with superposed symbology of data useful in combat. Meanwhile, radio transmission is not only done by smaller units, but has encryption built-in, more reliability, and signal transmission is tailored to avoid detection - at all! The military has apparently taken cyber risks seriously, which wasn’t so before. They even have 3D printing available on a relatively portable basis.
My point is that what we “know” and what the military is actually capable of may not be as close as we think. Thus while the Navy would not have anything to say about it out loud, the defense of carriers against hypersonic missiles may not be “non-existent” as we currently believe.
And, of course, none of this has anything to do with whether or not we should deploy any of this power elsewhere, and under what circumstances.
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Deep shudder.
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Space War
On 2023-10-31, the first combat engagement in history to occur outside the Earth’s atmosphere took place. LiveJournal reports in Russian, machine-translated to English below.
On October 31, 2023, humanity discovered the history of war in Space. The interception of the warhead of a Yemeni medium-range ballistic missile by an Israeli Arrow-3 missile became the first combat operation to take place outside the earth’s atmosphere.
This is also the first time that a medium-range ballistic missile has been destroyed by an anti-missile missile in a real combat situation. All previous cases of interception of ballistic missiles were interceptions of short-range ballistic missiles or generally operational-tactical ones. An intermediate-range ballistic missile is a much more difficult target because it flies faster and follows a higher trajectory. Actually, this was also the first time a medium-range ballistic missile was launched in a real combat situation.
Israeli missile defense has successfully completed the task. Yemeni missile was destroyed outside the atmosphere; her load, whatever it was, dissipated harmlessly tens of kilometers above the ground. In the confrontation between the ballistic sword and the anti-missile shield, the first round was left to the defense.
Here is more about the Arrow 3 anti-ballistic missile system. This is video of a 2015 test launch and intercept.
While the interception is believed to have occurred below the 100 km Kármán line, the international standard for the edge of space, the incoming missile, believed to be a Burkan-2, derivative of the ancient Soviet SS-1 “Scud”, would have flown above this threshold before being intercepted on its ballistic descent toward Israel.
War in space is no longer “futuristic science fiction stuff”.
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Alas.
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And who had the combatants in the first space battle being Israel and Yemen (rebels) on their Bingo card?
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Not I, although ‘Israel and… some other combatant’ wouldn’t have seemed unreasonable.
That said, I think that there’s already too much war by proxy going on.
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Possible metal augmented charge (MAC) Hellfire:
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I’m personally not convinced that it is actually the first ever. First public? Sure.
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?How about something to make those puppies survivable. So far we have only employed them when we had air superiority.
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Emulsa:
According to Rand article below, it dates back to last Gaza war:
More often, tunnels needed to be destroyed from the ground. The IDF experimented with using water and a gel-like explosive termed “Emulsa” to destroy tunnels,140 but the process was time- consuming. Destroying tunnels required nine to 11 tons of “Emulsa” on average, and drilling equipment was often in short supply, forcing ground forces to secure the tunnels for extended periods of time while they waited for equipment to arrive.141 Engineers also reported that occasionally they would detonate explosives inside a tunnel, only to have the shockwave travel through the tunnel and blow up another shaft half a kilometer or more away.142 The IDF, however, benefited from the fact that Gaza’s sandy soil meant that tunnels—assuming the concrete reinforcements could be destroyed—often proved difficult to rebuild.143
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HGV:
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IF this was true, they would have used it already - at least on Israel.
More islamic BS methinks. Those guys have trouble driving goats; not ready to accept they’ve created some hypersonic missile.
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As mentioned elsewhere, “WARFARE” comes in many forms. Here’s one.
Note that this item has generally been either downplayed or totally disregarded - like it never happened. Yet ?when in modern history have you found 1 in 10 Jews gather anywhere in unity over anything! This may bode very badly for the Democrats, media disregard and all.
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Welcome the robotic machine gun nests (deep link into the big reveal):
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