The Marines Want Mini-Missiles That Hunt for Specific Radio Signals - Defense One: In the 1984 film “Runaway,” an archvillain (played by Gene Simmons) uses bullets that bob and weave around obstacles to kill specific people. The U.S. Marines are looking for something similar: a cross between a drone and a missile that can pick up a specific radio frequency and then strike its source from above.
“We can bring those type of unmanned systems to where our reconnaissance units are forward, and they can launch their own capabilities, LOCUST-type capabilities” — the Office of Naval Research’s cannon-launched swarmbot program — “or lethal munitions,” said Lt. Gen. Robert S. Walsh, who commands Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command is the deputy commandant for ,Combat Development and Integration said at the Unmanned Systems Defense conference on Tuesday. “They can sense, locate different signals and then attack those capabilities in advance of our soldiers, keeping them out of harm’s way.”
Such munitions might be fired from the kind of unmanned underwater vehicles that Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, Navy oceanographer, has observed in testing off Hawaii. Gallaudet described an experiment in which a robot submarine surfaced and passed targeting information to a Puma UAV, allowing an over-the-horizon kill. “That was really fun to do,” he said.
