“Basically,
I’m here to announce that we’re building Iron Man,” President
Barack Obama joked last February at a press conference for
his high-tech manufacturing hubs plan.
“I’m going to blast off in a second,” he went on. “This has been
a secret project we’ve been working on for a long time. Not really.
Maybe. It’s classified.”
There is a bit of truth in the president’s jest about the Marvel
character. As
reported by The Wall Street Journal, the military is
creating a “suit to protect and propel elite U.S. troops by
encasing them in body armor equipped with an agile exoskeleton to
enable troops to carry hundreds of pounds of gear.” The
project is called TALOS, which stands for Tactical Assault Light
Operator Suit but its nickname is the Iron Man suit.
And the project is indeed not so secret.
In fact, the nickname Iron Man suit was picked precisely “to
attract the attention and excitement of the industry and academia
and, yes, the media,” Mike Fieldson, TALOS project manager told
Defense News.
That attention may have something to do with diverting eyes away
from the project’s hefty price tag. U.S. Special Operations Command
has spent $10 million so far on the high-tech suit. But there is no
fixed budget because it isn’t an official Pentagon
program. And
at least one defense firm official has said, “To do it right,
they need about a billion dollars.”
The military’s plan certainty
is ambitious:
Exactly what capabilities the TALOs will deliver is not yet
clear, explained Michael Fieldson. The goal is to provide operators
lighter, more efficient full-body ballistics protection and
super-human strength. Antennas and computers embedded into the suit
will increase the wearer’s situational awareness by providing
user-friendly and real-time battlefield information.
And the military has enlisted a large range of groups for help:
56 corporations, 16 government agencies, 13 universities, and 10
national laboratories. These numbers include
Legacy Effects, the special effects team that made the
Iron Man costume for the movie. They’ll be using 3D printers to
create prototypes of the body armor designs. Other groups
involved:
A Canadian company that is studying how sumo wrestlers fight
while carrying so much weight, researchers in Florida studying
medieval suits of armor, and Ekso Bionics, known for designing an
exoskeleton that enables paraplegics to walk.
But skeptical military veterans such as Peter Nealen have pointed
out that the U.S. doesn’t have the best record for developing
smart-soldier technology.
The U.S. military has, especially over the last couple of
decades, become convinced that high-tech is the solution to all
problems. Any battlefield or tactical problem can be solved with
the latest piece of kit. The result has been the F-22 (only 195
built at a unit cost of $150 million, and a program cost of $66.7
billion), the Crusader howitzer system (cancelled due to a
projected unit cost of $23 million each, minimum), the
Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (cancelled after over 10 years, at
an estimated unit price of $22.3 million, and a total program cost
of over $15 billion), to name but a few.
Early prototypes of Iron Man suit haven’t been very successful.
Currently, researchers say they’ll need about
365 pounds of batteries to power the suit that the millitary has
envisioned because unlike Tony Stark, they don’t have an arc
reactor.
Looks like Robert Downey Jr. will be the only person to be
wearing an Iron Man suit for the foreseeable future.
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