: Each year, the Pentagon selects some promising new technologies and gives them extra development money. If the projects work out, they are in line for more development money and eventually a procurement contract. The money is focused on technologies that appear likely to solve problems that the military has. This year, sixty projects were proposed by various contractors and the Pentagon selected 14 of them to receive the money:

@ Active Network Intrusion Defense: This could provide real-time detection of cyber attacks on computer networks and an immediate response to the ongoing attack.

@ Adaptive Battlespace Awareness: Improves real-time situational awareness for field commanders.

@ Advanced Tactical Laser: This chemically-powered weapon is in a pod that could be mounted to helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft. It would be used in an urban environment to knock out key enemy positions without causing so much collateral damage.

@ Advanced Technology Ordnance Surveillance: This system would bury miniature sensors inside ammunition to detect if the warhead or propellant had degraded or become unstable.

@ Coalition Combat Identification: This would allow US and allied ground and air units to identify each other quickly and avoid fratricide.

@ Coalition Theater Logistics: This program would develop procedural and security systems that would better allow the US to provide logistical support to allied forces.

@ Coastal Area Protection System: These would be easily deployable sensors that work best in fairly shallow water. They would be quickly deployed to an area where a conflict was likely, and US ships could tap into their data streams to improve their target detection and situational awareness.

@ Hunter Standoff Killer Team: This is a datalink system that allows an armed attack helicopter to control a small unmanned recon vehicle that probes for targets which the helicopter then destroys. In theory, the helicopter would never come within range of enemy weapons while the recon drone would be very hard to shoot down due to its small size.

@ Joint Area Clearance: This is a rapid minefield clearing system that would be used in rear areas not under enemy fire. It could be used to counter enemy efforts to deny the US the use of bases, airfields, depots, or roads by seeding them with mines.

@ Loitering Electronic Warfare Killer: This is a small affordable Unmanned Aerial Vehicle which orbits over enemy air defenses and attacks them when they switch to active mode.

@ Network-Centric Collaborative Targeting: This is a sensor-fuzing system that detect, identify, and locate time-critical targets, allowing them to be attacked before they can move.

@ Personnel Recovery Extraction Survivability Aided by Smart Sensors: This is designed to find pilots shot down behind enemy lines.

@ Tactical Missile Penetrator: This combines the Army Tactical Missile System with a Navy hard-target penetrator to destroy heavily-protected or deeply-buried targets.

@ Theater Integrated Planning System: This is an automatic system that uses the targeting processes of US Strategic Command to support theater commanders.--Stephen V Cole