New Truck Blasts Missiles From The Sky — Then Targets The Shooter

New Truck Blasts Missiles From The Sky — Then Targets The Shooter: "Enjoy your fighting season, Afghan insurgents. The ones to come might not be particularly pleasant. The technology to detect your fire, stop it in mid-air, and then “facilitate shooter neutralization” is getting closer and closer to battlefield-ready. Which means some of your most powerful weapons — like missiles and rocket-propelled grenades — could be rendered impotent, even dangerous to fire off.

For the better part of a decade, researchers in Israel and America have been working on so-called “active protection” technology — defenses that can stop bullets and rockets and grenades before they ever have a chance to hit. After years of uneven progress (and the occasional accusation of corporate favoritism) these systems are beginning to show that they are ready for war. If they work out, it’s an honest-to-goodness game changer in urban combat: robbing guerrillas of some of their weapons of choice, and making tanks and trucks much, much harder to take out. The open question is whether active protection can be pulled off consistently without hurting nearby civilians."