Remember the military exo-skeleton worn by the mercenaries in movies like Elysium or Chappie? Or animes like the Starship Trooper OVAs or Metal Skin Panic Maddox-01? The Brotherhood of Steel’s power suit as seen in Fallout series, the Crysis suit or Master Chief’s Mjolnir armour? Space Marines from Warhammer 40K series? Well, in reality, DARPA is working on something called TALOS which is almost all of the above, and will be ready for use in a few years time.
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has been researching into the possibility of making the soldiers of US Armed Forces “superhuman” via technology – do not feel fatigue while carrying out tasks on hand with equipment in a battlefield.
Since 1990, DARPA has quietly been engaged in the research but often was hampered with one problem, the power source to power these machines as shown in the concluded Land Warrior program. The Land Warrior program saw limited action with the 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team (SBCT) in Iraq in spring 2007 which proves to be valuable data for the development of TALOS.
Now with the advance of battery technology, the suits have seen massive stride in progress and US Special Forces (Delta Force, Navy SEALs for example) might able to field TALOS (Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit) by August 2018.
TALOS is a complete soldier system with “full-body ballistics protection; integrated heating and cooling systems; embedded sensors, antennas, and computers; 3D audio (to indicate where a fellow warfighter is by the sound of his voice); optics for vision in various light conditions; life-saving oxygen and hemorrhage controls.”
The system even attempts to address the soldier’s need for sleep, researchers have been studying sea mammals like dolphins and experimenting nootropic drugs like Modafinil to keep the warriors awake in battle. The reason why sea mammals is the focus here is their ability to shut down left or right lobe of their brain so the animals can keep on swimming – essentially they are half sleeping, half awake state. So there is a possibility of TALOS able to keep the soldier fighting 24/7 if situation needs it.
Credit: Courtesy of Xiang Zhang group, Berkeley Lab/UC Berkeley
The Army is very serious about the suit’s “invisibility” capabilities too and at the moment very little is known about the progress of this particular stealth tech. However we do know that US scientists made a serious breakthrough when Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at California announced a new development of “ultrathin invisibility cloak” on 17th September 2015. It will not be surprising if US Army will insert this tech into TALOS in the future.
“I am here to announce that we are building Iron Man,” said President Obama during an event in 2014 and he might not be totally joking about it.
