This Video Game Controller Has Become the US Military’s Weapon of Choice

In a future battle, American troops will direct the most recent struggle machines not with sprawling management panels or sci-fi-inspired touchscreens, however controls acquainted to anybody who grew up with an Xbox or PlayStation of their dwelling.

Over the previous a number of years, the US Protection Division has been step by step integrating what seem like variants of the Freedom of Movement Control Unit (FMCU) handsets as the first management items for quite a lot of superior weapons programs, in response to publicly accessible imagery printed to the division’s Defense Visual Information Distribution System media hub.

These programs embody the brand new Navy Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) launcher, a Joint Gentle Tactical Automobile–primarily based anti-ship missile system designed to fireplace the brand new Naval Strike Missile that’s essential to the Marine Corps’ plans for a notional future struggle with China within the Indo-Pacific; the Military’s new Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (M-SHORAD) system that, bristling with FIM-92 Stinger and AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and a 30-mm chain gun mounted on a Stryker infantry preventing car, is seen as a critical anti-air functionality in a possible conflict with Russia in Jap Europe; the Air Power’s MRAP-based Recovery of Air Bases Denied by Ordnance (RADBO) truck that uses a laser to clear away improvised explosive units and different unexploded munitions; and the Humvee-mounted High Energy Laser-Expeditionary (HELEX) laser weapon system presently present process testing by the Marine Corps.

The FMCU has additionally been employed on a variety of experimental unmanned vehicles, and in response to a 2023 Navy contract, the system might be integral to the operation of the AN/SAY-3A Electro-Optic Sensor System (or “I-Stalker”) that’s designed to assist the service’s future Constellation-class guided-missile frigates observe and interact incoming threats.

Produced since 2008 by Measurement Methods Inc. (MSI), a subsidiary of British protection contractor Extremely that focuses on human-machine interfaces, the FMCU gives the same type issue to the usual Xbox or PlayStation controller however with a ruggedized design meant to safeguard its delicate electronics in opposition to no matter hostile environs American service members could discover themselves in. A longtime developer of joysticks used on numerous US naval programs and plane, MSI has served as a subcontractor to main protection “primes” like Normal Atomics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Methods to supply the hand held management items for “numerous plane and car applications,” in response to data compiled by federal contracting software program GovTribe.

“With the foresight to acknowledge the shape issue that may be most accessible to at present’s warfighters, [Ultra] has continued to make the FMCU one of the extremely configurable and highly effective controllers accessible at present,” according to Extremely. (The corporate didn’t reply to a number of requests for remark from WIRED.)

The endlessly customizable FMCU isn’t totally new technology: In response to Extremely, the system has been in use since at least 2010 to function the now-sundowned Navy’s MQ-8 Hearth Scout unmanned autonomous helicopter and the Ground Based Operational Surveillance System (GBOSS) that the Military and Marine Corps have each employed all through the worldwide struggle on terror. However the latest proliferation of the handset throughout refined new weapon platforms displays a rising development within the US navy in direction of controls that aren’t simply uniquely tactile or ergonomic of their operation, however inherently acquainted to the subsequent technology of potential warfighters earlier than they ever even signal as much as serve.