14 DAY TRIAL // As evolved as humans are, the dominant species of this world has not evolved much, in terms of man-to-man combat, beyond the stone-throwing ability developed by our ape-like ancestors, around 4 million years ago.
And since we still use bullets, a more evolved model of the basic stone, the Pentagon is searching for the best method of defending the American soldiers against these bullets. The U.S. Defense Department, through The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, issued a request for proposals to develop a new, bulletproof shield.
This wouldn't be much news, but the Pentagon's wide-eyed research arm is searching for something truly out of the sci-fi movies. What they want is a shield that would be invisible when looking from the outside that would self heal and which would allow the soldier behind it to shoot through it, but in the same time would stop the bullets coming in the opposite direction.
It seems there are many Star Wars fans working for the Department of Defense, since they want a new, all-in-one supershield that only the most futuristic sci-fi productions have envisioned.
They created a $15 million project to use metamaterials in these more fictional, rather than scientific, applications. Metamaterials are artificially engineered to gain special properties, coming from their structure rather than directly from their composition. They usually can't be found in nature and have been built for use in electromagnetism (especially optics and photonics), where they are promising for a variety of optical and microwave applications, such as new types of beam steerers, modulators, band-pass filters, lenses, microwave couplers and antenna radomes.
They are already showing promises, as the building blocks to real-life invisibility cloaks; that's because the composites let electromagnetic waves flow around them, instead of reflecting them back. But now, DARPA' s "Asymmetric Materials for the Urban Battlespace" program goes far beyond.
"Asymmetric, or 'one-way,' materials will support basic unit operations such as raids, cordon and search activities, snap checkpoints, and fire fights," according to military budget documents. "Friendly forces will be able to see through [one of these new materials] and shoot through it, but hostile forces will not."
The agency doesn't say much about exactly how this should be done, but they mentioned that these shields must be "lightweight, respond instantly, and be easy to deploy and retract in confined spaces."
What they do mention in an earlier budget document is that "Initial studies have shown optical analogs of secure digital communication hold great promise for providing a 'coded' obscurant system. The optical properties of obscurant can be tailored such that they develop transparency at narrow, tunable wavelengths. This narrow band optical bleaching phenomena could be realized through optical threshold sensitive switching materials akin to some developed for laser protection goggles."