Smart bombs, smart bullets – now guided smart artillery shells, thanks to DARPA dosh DARPA, the boffinry nerve-center of the US military, has awarded a contract to develop a cross between a missile and an artillery shell for use by the Navy. Dubbed the Multi-Azimuth Defense – Fast Intercept Round Engagement System (MAD-FIRES) program, the proposed projectile will combine the precision and maneuverability of a …
From way back when I worked in Defense to the present, DARPA has always been the think tank kind of agency. Not so much "we need this item" but more of a "let's try this and see where it leads" type of place. Basically just research with the occasional (for some value of 'occasional') wild idea that actually leads to something. I kind of like what they do. Toss an idea out or get an idea from someone else, and see where it goes.
As for this type of shell.. who knows where it will lead. It could be that the end result is something already out there like what was mentioned about the Isreali/Russians/French do. Or it could lead to somewhere else, like maybe collision avoidance in self-driving cars. No telling where it will go.. even tossing it into the trashbin is possible.
> Not so much "we need this item" but more of a "let's try this and see where it leads" type of place
When the end result costs northwards of $800k a pop and you put it on a functional ship instead of a research platform, you missed the point of the last part of that phrase.
DARPA has been very good at a lot of things but there have been a number of notable failures in recent USA military history caused by trying to cram the latest of everything into one box when the technology isn't mature enough. The military had the good sense to drop the F111B - but got the F14 and F15 out of the design exercise. The ability to get rid of a clusterfuck seems to have been lost recently.
At least the people developing this technology can sleep soundly at night knowing that those using it will always be the "good guys" and those on the receiving end will be the "bad guys".
They can rest assured that these weapons could never fall into "enemy hands", be used against civilians in a civil war, against thought criminals in an ideological confrontation, against the vulnerable deceived by controlled opposition or patsies framed by covert agents.
When looking for the "evil-doers", we need to look everywhere and not just where we are told to look.
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