Future Force Warrior

Future Force Warrior
Land Warrior and Air Warrior
Type	Soldier
Place of origin	United States

Future Force Warrior was a United States military advanced technology demonstration project that was part of the Future Combat Systems project. The FFW project sought to create a lightweight, fully integrated infantryman combat system. It was one technology demonstration project in a series of network-centric, next-generation infantry combat projects the U.S. military have developed over the past decade, such as the Soldier Integrated Protective Ensemble technology demonstration program, Land Warrior, and Transformation of the United States Army.

The Future Force Warrior concept envisioned the radical use of technologies such as nanotechnology, powered exoskeletons, and magnetorheological fluid-based body armor to provide the infantry with significantly higher force multiplier than the opposing force. However, the stated concept was not U.S. Army doctrine, and was not intended to answer every situation that Army After Next (the Army's buzzword for future fighting forces) would face; rather, the concept was meant to serve as an end goal to strive to reach or to compromise with current technologies and to stir imagination and dialogue on how these technologies and concepts could help soldiers in the near future.

The first phase of the project involved a development of the technologies to help reduce the soldier's fighting load and power requirements and improving the soldier's protection, lethality, and environmental and situational awareness, with planned deployment in 2010, to serve the Army's short-term needs. The Army's plan was to introduce the subsystems in "spirals" every two years, instead of one large rollout every ten years. The U.S. military hoped to develop a fully realized end product sometime in 2032, incorporating research from U.C. Berkeley's BLEEX exoskeleton project and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies into a final design. This was one of the most important parts.