More Of Your Tax Dollars At Work (maybe): Northrop Arms Its Robot Pack Mule With Big Gun

[unhappycamper]

Northrop Arms Its Robot Pack Mule With Big Gun
By Spencer Ackerman Email Author
October 27, 2010 | 5:10 pm

Jon Anderson has seen a lot of gawkers pause at his Northrop Grumman booth in the Association of the U.S. Army’s Washington conference. Not that he’s odd-looking or off-putting: He’s a gregarious guy. The stares he’s getting are about the .50-caliber M2 machine gun he’s got mounted on a treaded robot — something Northrop isn’t even selling right now.

“Quite frankly,” explains Anderson, a Northrop advanced-systems employee with short white hair and a whiter smile, “a weapon on a robot brings people into the booth.”

That it does. For the past few years, Northrop has produced a treaded, 60-inch robot vehicle to help troops haul their gear called the Carry-all Mechanized Equipment Landrover, or CaMEL. It’s like a more traditional version of the BigDog robot — a simple flat, motorized platform that putters along at up to 7 miles per hour while taking on up to 1,200 pounds of stuff. Northrop has sold more than 60 of them to the Israeli military; and recently, the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning expressed interest in the CaMEL as a hauler.

Only the version of the CaMEL Anderson brought to the conference doesn’t have any room to load on any gear. There’s a machine gun where the boxes and the body armor should be, with wires stretching from the gun down into the guts of the robot.

With a grin, Anderson calls it a “new application,” comparing his modification to the first time someone thought to arm a drone with a Hellfire missile. “We’re gonna come around the side here,” he says, “and scare people half to death.”



unhappycamper comment: The military is keeping pretty quite about big weapons systems but I have seen many announcements of new toys recently: new shotguns, new XM-25 and lots of stuff on the robot fronts.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. The defense industry is looking more and more offensive if that

were possible.