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).

Document Details

• Document Type: R2 Budgetary Justification
• Publication Date: Oct 01, 2025
• Source ID: 0603118A_3_2040_PB_2025
• Change Summary Explanation: Funding realigned to PE 0603464A / Long Range Precision Fires Advanced Technology, AF2 / Long Range Maneuverable Fires (LRMF) Advanced Tech in support of Precision Strike Missile (PRSM) Increment 4.
• Service Agency Name: Army

Entities

Organizations

• United States Army

Tags

Readers

• Military Science and Technology Research and Modernization.
• Military Training and Readiness Simulation