[ProudVet77]

I make my living in technology. And in the last 10 years I've been interested in the technology that the military uses, particularly in the USN as that is where I served. It is fantastic. Most people have no idea.
Something I just came across (everything I ever post here can be found on the web), was the new model launcher for the sea sparrow. It allows them to pack 4 missiles into one launcher tube. The Aegis class cruiser has 127 tubes. If they only use 80 tubes for surface to air that's 320 missiles they can use. In my day a DLG would be lucky to get off 2 terrier rounds. And radar and EW would be overwhelmed by more than 10 targets. The Aegis can track several hundred. Unreal stuff.

[crushelits]

This one is quite amazing:

The Phraselator, made by VoxTec. It contains a database of thousands of phrases, and when the user speaks a given English phrase into the device, the prerecorded foreign-language equivalent is played through the device's built-in speaker. SOF in Iraq and Afghanistan are currently using them.

Ace Sarich, vice president of VoxTec and a former Navy SEAL in Vietnam, worked with civil affairs units in Afghanistan, who found it quite useful. Without the device, a physician's assistant had to resort to pantomime in order to give instructions to an Afghani patient. "So we built it on the spot—we had a lot of medical phrases but they weren't translated into Pashto. Using the toolkit we sat down with the contract translator and built a custom medical module," said Sarich.

Sarich cited an e-mail from a SOF operator in Iraq, which read, "We used [the Phraselator] as a briefing aid to interrogate former Iraqi intelligence officials, and used it a lot with civilians to determine when and where the enemy went. We were able to use the device to get the exact information on a huge weapons cache where unexploded ordnance was. And as a special forces soldier, I was able to use the device to build rapport with the Iraqi population."