"Dragon's Lair": what the American paratroopers have come up with to facilitate service

Alexander Sychev

The competition started in the fall of 2020 and was held in six stages, and beginners could take part in each. Thus, more than 100 new proposals were received for participation in the final stage. There are three winners: a personal cooling system, a holder for the gunner of an M-88 armored recovery vehicle (ARRV) and a digital model for recognizing the layout of buildings.

To fight with the coolness in the body

After all, as stated in the Charter: a soldier "is obliged to endure the hardships and deprivation of military service." And this is understandable. During hostilities, more often than not, hardships and hardships are inevitable - either the kitchen is late, or you can't get out of the trenches. But times are changing, and accordingly, the philosophy of military service too. It is now believed that the soldiers' hardships need to be alleviated.

Air Force First Lieutenant Justin O'Brien was just thinking about this, languishing from the 40-degree heat and looking at the statistics for 2020 that caught his eye. Then 1,667 soldiers and officers turned to medical posts with complaints of overheating. Of these, 475 servicemen received heatstrokes. And no wonder. Americans are fighting more and more in hot countries. Nearly two decades in the Middle East. They are present in various tropical countries, and in the south of the United States it is also very hot and humid.

“As an officer, I can say that my subordinates suffer greatly from excess warmth. And I thought, is it possible to protect myself from the sun? " - said O'Brien, and came up with a bulletproof vest with air conditioning.

The air conditioner is a small backpack that is connected to cooling pads on the inside of the body armor. Cold water flows from the reservoir into the pads, cooling the soldier's body. The jury checked the operation of the air conditioner and found using an electronic thermometer that the temperature on O'Brien's body armor dropped from 39 degrees to 20 degrees in 20 seconds.

The prototype armored cooling vest does work, but it has some limitations. For example, if ice is not supplied to the troops after 14 hours, the air conditioner will stop working. It is possible to arrange cooling with a water source, but in the desert there are serious problems with water, and in the tropics it is just very warm.

In addition, the equipment of a modern American soldier includes over 80 items with a total weight of about 34 kilograms. If you add a few pounds of water and air conditioning equipment to this, the amount of hardships will not decrease. They will only change their character.

However, there is one more plus of the air conditioner, even if it does not work. It can be used, the inventor emphasized, as a reservoir with drinking water and even rinse wounds with a pressure jet.

“Now we are working on improving the technology. Winning the competition, I hope, will open the way for military trials, which will reveal all the shortcomings of the system, ”said O'Brien.

Lieutenant General Michael Kurilla, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, emphasized the value of such a system for an army that often finds itself in hot countries. “It can be hot in the summer at Fort Bragg, too,” he lamented.

Forgot to fasten the seat belts

Another winning project was born in the head of Sergeant First Class Keenan Milley after the death of his comrade. They served on the BREM M-88. When Millay arrived at Fort Knox, he discovered that the M-88s in his platoon were not equipped with a rifle containment system. Although the vehicle is a repair vehicle and is equipped with a crane boom, it can also defend itself - an M2 Browning machine gun is installed in the rotating turret.

The problem is that the turret is designed in such a way that the gunner has to climb out of the hatch to get a good view for firing. When overturning the M-88, which happens during the evacuation of destroyed tanks, the shooter, not secured or protected in any way, simply crushes. This is how Milley's friend died.

The shocked innovator with a group of comrades studied all the technical documentation and found out that the manufacturer did not provide any protection for the shooter. Millay could not radically change the design of the armored vehicle in order to improve the view for the shooter, so he simply increased the tower by almost 37 centimeters. And so that the shooter does not fall out when turning over, he invented a fastening system from the belts, which he screwed to the M-88 body.

General Kurilla praised the sergeant for introducing "common sense" into the design of the machine, and did not rule out the possibility that their proposal could be implemented on hundreds of M-88 ARVs.

Internal layout in appearance

Second Lieutenant Christian Rellev, a reserve officer, an architect by training, proposed his own computer program that allows you to determine their approximate layout by the appearance of buildings. For example, large windows are more likely to represent offices, small ones - bathrooms. The algorithm works for standard buildings. When it comes to asymmetric structures, a different program is required. But in any case, a professional architect must sit at the computer in order to correct the artificial intelligence.

During the presentation of the project, he listed the many benefits of his program, which will help improve combat planning in urban settings and reduce the number of casualties among both the military and civilians.

Rellev was engaged in the creation of his program in his free time from service. But not finding support, he abandoned the idea. In his presentation, the reserve lieutenant calculated that, given the necessary resources, his project could be completed in one year.

The judges suggested to Rellev to expand his horizons and think about integrating augmented reality glasses into the system so that the soldiers storming the building could be conveyed to its internal likely layout. Rellev liked the idea. “Now that I know that the army is backing me, I have more motivation to finish the job,” he said.

But, judging by the words of Colonel Joe Buccino, spokesman for the XVIII Airborne Corps, this is only a matter of moral support. Two servicemen were rewarded with four days of leave, and all three finalists received medals for services to the Army. “We have yet to develop a system for introducing inventions proposed from below,” said the press secretary.