Soldier Lethality Advanced Technology

Abstract

This Program Element (PE) matures and demonstrates Soldier Lethality technologies that improve Soldier operational performance by increasing lethality, mobility, protection, and optimizing situational awareness across the spectrum of operating environments and missions. This PE matures Soldier weapons and enabling components / subsystems, demonstrates lethal weapons systems with potential to provide greater lethality, target acquisition, fire control, and range at a significantly reduced weight for optimized Soldier and Small Unit system performance. The major focus areas for Soldier Lethality Science and Technology are Soldier weapons and ammunition technologies, protection technologies, cognitive and physical performance measures, training in synthetic training environments, and mission support capabilities such as situational awareness sensors and displays, dismounted power and energy technologies, and Soldier and Small Unit sustainment capabilities. This technology diverse PE also matures and demonstrates sensor technologies that increase Warfighter situational understanding, survivability, and lethality by providing sensor capabilities to acquire and engage all targets and threats at longer ranges in complex environments and operational conditions (e.g. day/night, obscured, smoke, adverse weather, and other degraded visual environments), and for advancing live training technologies that accurately replicate and realistically represent the effects of current and future weapons systems during force-on-force and force-on-target training. This PE matures and demonstrates effective technology in personal combat clothing, protective equipment such as personal armor, helmets, and eyewear, combat rations, shelters, logistical support items for aerial delivery of personnel and cargo, and energy systems to power current and emerging Soldier-born Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR), sensor, optical, and communication systems with the least weight and sustainment burden on the Soldiers and Small Combat Units. This PE also matures and demonstrates technologies supporting the Army's Synthetic Training Environment (STE), a single, interconnected synthetic training system that will enable Army units and leaders to conduct realistic multi-echelon / multi-domain combined arms maneuver and mission command training, increasing proficiency through repetition. A specific research thrust area is applying systems-based practices to mature and demonstrate scientific and tailored knowledge of Soldiers' physical and cognitive architecture to facilitate rapid and efficient designs, assessments and trade-off analyses of technology insertions on the Soldier. Significant science and technology (S&T) investments are directed to improve the effectiveness of the technologies a Soldier utilizes while reducing the size and weight of the form factor of the equipment. Research in this PE complements PE 0602143A (Soldier Lethality Technology). This PE is directly aligned to the Soldier Lethality and STE Modernization Priorities. Research in this Project is performed by the United States Army Futures Command.

Document Details

• Document Type: R2 Budgetary Justification
• Publication Date: Oct 01, 2024
• Source ID: 0603118A_3_2040_PB_2024
• Change Summary Explanation: Funding increase will focus on soldier power and energy supply resiliency and advanced soldier sensor displays including integrated headborne sensors with preemptive threat detection.
• Service Agency Name: Army

Entities

Organizations

• United States Army

Tags

Communities of Interest

• Autonomy
• Biomedical
• Cyber
• Energy and Power Technologies
• Human Systems
• Kinetic Weapons
• Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

• Autonomous Systems
• Control Systems
• Detection
• Detectors
• Fire Control Systems
• Global Positioning Systems
• Infrared Detectors
• Personal Protective Equipment
• Protective Equipment
• Supply Chain Integrity
• Target Recognition
• Test And Evaluation
• Test Methods
• Three Dimensional
• Unmanned Aerial Systems
• Unmanned Systems
• Warfare

Readers

• Military Science and Technology Research and Modernization.