The army thinks its new rifle will look like an iPhone

An iPhone does not look much like a fighting rifle, but military officials looking for a contractor to manufacture the rifle of the future seem to believe that there is one.

Officials at the Armenian Research, Development and Engineering Center at Arsenal's Picatinny, New Jersey, told the Task & Purpose military information and veterans website this week that the aim of the New Generation Weapons Project (NGSW), in which the Army is seeking replacement offers its increasingly haggard M4 rifle and its M249 Squad automatic weapon with a new generation of rifles of 6.8 mm are intended to create an iOS-like platform for shooters. Really.

"Imagine that Steve Jobs and his engineers were trying to convert the iPod Touch to the first iPhone 3G," said Task & Purpose, the project manager of Soldier's Arms and Colonel Elliott Caggins. . "They could have integrated a thousand technologies into the first iPhone, but they were trying to evolve the platform before they could access the system."

The US military announced in January that it was seeking offers for the rifle, a high-tech platform that can accommodate a range of increasingly sophisticated additions or modifications. Task & Purpose wrote that the NGSW team had expressed hope that the rifle would include "a fire control system specifically designed to increase the probability of long-range hit," "a reinforced onboard processor against cyberattacks," called advanced ballistic system for small arms works as a miniaturized artillery positioning and telemetry system and a "multi-laser rangefinder system" to detect elements such as wind speed and help soldiers adjust their target .

The military also wants the rifle to have a suppression base and hopes to incorporate an "increase-in-goal" system in the future, Task & Purpose wrote. According to the Military Times, integration with a head-up display system that will be mounted in helmets should also be an important part of the NGSW project.

"We have hundreds of capabilities that we can integrate into this weapons system, but we want to do that by creating a system that builds on everything we have done in the past," Caggins told the site. . "That means its capabilities will only grow, just like the iPhone."

This probably does not mean that the new US Army rifle will stop firing after two years or shoot only at targets that Tim Cook considers acceptable for a family visit. But hey, at least they do not claim that the NGSW will be like Uber.

The army hopes to use its "lethal iPhone" by the end of fiscal year 2022, but hopes to test prototypes here this summer. The first troops to receive the weapon will be the "100,000 in close combat," according to the Military Times, which includes infantry and reconnaissance troops.