British Military Working on Invisible War Machines

No stranger to stealth and stealthy hardware, the company has projects ranging from liquid battle armor to stealthy submarines like Astute.

Courtesy: eggfuel.ie

(CHICAGO) - If defense contractor BAE Systems has its way, within five years the entire British military will disappear. The soldiers and their equipment won't go away, the enemy will be unable to see them.

The defense company that employees 100,000 employees around the world, provides systems and services for air, land and naval forces.

No stranger to stealth and stealthy hardware, the company has projects ranging from liquid battle armor to stealthy submarines like Astute.

The invisibility project was developed as an integral part of Britain's Future Protected Vehicle program. It's expected to transform the battlefield and the way wars will be fought in the future.  

Now the British military is gearing up for the next generation of breakthroughs expected from their premiere defense contracting company: invisible tanks.

The company literature explains how invisibility on the battlefield will be achieved. A "display system within the structure of the vehicle" will be used to project bright, high definition images of the terrain on the other side of the vehicle.

That display—a realtime, updated, correctable image—is the ultimate in camouflage. It will literally make an enemy "see" right through the tank, effectively making the war machine invisible to the eye as the tank will blend in with the background.

During an interview with an MSNBC blogger, BAE Systems spokesman Mike Sweeney said, "We also have a way to protect that structure from battle damage and that's obviously key."

For more than a decade researchers have been experimenting in optical laboratories to achieve seamless optical wraparounds. Work on such systems has been carried out at Stanford, Cal-Tech, MIT, Harvard, the University of Tokyo, and a handful of British universities. During 2010 the advancements in an invisible "cloak" made news around the world.

"Pretty much all the systems that have been cooked up so far all use a projector that picks up the background," Sweeney told MSNBC. "Where they differ is in how the image is then displayed."

Stealth aircraft, stealth cloaks, stealth tanks. What's next? Stealth submarines.

Taking a lesson on radar invisibility from U.S. aircraft manufacturer Lockheed's famous stealth fighter jet—configured to make it appear as small as a bird when painted on the most advanced radar screen—the U.S. Navy has embarked on a program of nuclear submarine reconfiguration of the hulls. The goal is to make sonar pings travel around the hull and continue onwards, thus failing to echo back to an enemy vessel. In essence, the U.S. sub will become sonar-invisible.

Paint and special exotic materials may also come into play creating a perfect symphony that creates a masterpiece of deep sea stealth.

There could always be a downside to all this sneaking about with games of hide-and-seek in the combat theater, though. Combatants in a war zone may find themselves unable to tell if they're coming or going.

Original Helium article.

Terrence Aym is a Salem-News.com Contributor based in Chicago, who is well known nationally for his stirring reports on the top ranked site, helium.com. Born in Minnesota, Terrence Aym grew up in the Chicagoland suburbs. Having traveled to 40 of the 50 states and lived in 7 of them, Aym is no stranger to travel. He's also spent time in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia and Western Africa. An executive for many years with Wall Street broker-dealer firms, Aym has also had a life-long interest in science, technology, the arts, philosophy and history. If it's still possible to be a 'Renaissance man' in the 21st Century, Aym is working hard to be one.

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