Yesterday in 1866, the U.S. Army adopted machine guns for the first time. Or, well, almost machine guns: the Gatling gun, first patented in 1862, wasn't fully mechanical. Someone still had to crank it by hand make the gun fire. In an era of warfare remembered for muskets and bayonets, the Gatling gun was a terrifying leap forward.
Battery chargers are finally getting a military upgrade. This is big! Not in a literal sense-that honor goes to the previous battery charger used by the US Army, which was the size of a suitcase and either vehicle-mounted or left to rest on a table. It was hardly something a soldier could carry into the battlefield or on patrol.
Heavy does not even begin to describe the US Army's new tank. At 84 tons, the Ground Combat Vehicle weighs more than twice as much as its predecessor, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Both vehicles are designed to carry a six-man squad (and three-man driving crew) into combat, provide covering fire, and damage enemy tanks. But the military has built the new GCV to withstand a kind of threat that didn't exist when the Bradley was deployed in the early 1980s: improvised explosive devices.
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