Soon, even walls or barricades won't protect soldiers at war from incoming fire. The U.S. Army is developing a new type of grenade that can automatically sense when it has cleared an obstacle before detonating.
Soldiers normally hide behind walls or other natural barriers, known as defilade obstacles. The program for the enhanced grenades began in 2012 in order to come up with solutions to more efficiently deal with targets hiding behind such concealment.
On Jan. 4, the Official U.S. Department of Defense Science blog announced that the new Small Arms Grenade Munition round (SAGM) will be ready for evaluation in July.
The SAGM is a 40mm counter-defilade grenade which is designed to be launched from M203 and M320 launchers. The round has sensors which will only allow it to detonate in mid-air after it has passed any obstacles in the way.
According to reports, it is estimated that the SAGM is more lethal than current 40mm rounds which are useless against soldiers in defilade and often even overshoot their targets.
The team of engineers who developed the SAGM is led by Steven Gilbert, who says that the new grenade is good for soldiers with close-range targets who do not need the targeting systems that long-range weapons use.
"The SAGM cartridge, which is compatible with the Army's 40mm grenade launchers, provides the small unit grenadier with a higher probability of achieving a first-shot kill against enemy personnel coupled with the ability to defeat personnel targets in defilade positions at increased ranges with greater accuracy and lethality," he said.
Although the soldier firing the grenade launcher with the SAGM round will still need good enough aim to allow the sensors to detect the wall in order to detonate passed it, the Army is eyeing the projectiles as the ultimate fire-and-forget system.
Should the demonstrations during the evaluation phase of the grenades be successful in July, it is projected that the SAGM may be integrated into the official Army program before the end of the fiscal year 2015.
