Already, we’ve seen Navy SEAL shooters take out three pirates with three trigger-pulls — despite uneven seas and bobbing ships. Imagine how much easier the snipers’ jobs would have been, if they had rounds that could change course in mid-air, to account for crosswinds, air density, and moving targets. Darpa, the Defense Department’s way-out research arm, launched a $22 million effort in November to do just that. By countering these “fundamental limitation[s] of accuracy,” Darpa thinks it can dramatically improve American snipers’ range — and “provide a dramatic new capability to the U.S. military.”
And if this EXACTO (“EXtreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance”) project doesn’t work out, Darpa has other guided-bullet programs — like a $7.5 million effort to use lasers to steer rounds to their targets. Laser guidance systems are what made the some of the early “smart bombs” so much more accurate than their predecessors; it changed how war was waged from the sky. “Smart bullets” could eventually make a similar impact, perhaps.
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