Any sci-fi flick or video game showing a futuristic battlefield is always filled with soldiers wearing advanced high-tech armor and all manner of fancy gadgetry. Russia is doing its best to make that fictional battlefield of the future a reality with a new powered exoskeleton built to give soldiers a superhuman edge over their foes. It’s sleek, intimidating, and could very well be the future of ground combat.
The suit, which was developed by Russia’s own Central Research Institute for Precision Machine Building, essentially turns its wearer into a super soldier. It features bullet proof armor plates as well as a helmet that includes a digital heads-up display, and the powered exoskeleton that gives the suit its rigidity can also provide the wearer with superhuman strength, allowing them to carry more weight than would normally be possible.
Quite honestly, it looks exactly like something you’d see out of one of the two most recent Call of Duty titles, and while the suit might look a bit like something an ultra-hardcore street biker would don, it’s clearly meant to turn a modern soldier into an elite killing machine. At the moment, the suit itself is still in its conceptual stage, but its creators are aiming to have it on the production line within the next several years.
But Russia isn’t the only world power attempting to turn armed combat into a battle between all-powerful supermen; the US military has also been hard at work on its own high-tech gear for soldiers, with development of the TALOS — short for Tactical Light Operator Suit — moving ahead at a brisk pace.