Picatinny employees recognized among Army’s top 10 inventors for 2006

By Audra Calloway
Picatinny Public Affairs Office

The Army has recognized two Picatinny weapons-development teams by awarding them highly coveted 2006 Army Greatest Inventions of the Year Awards. Both teams’ products are designed to keep Soldiers safer when dealing with potentially volatile situations.

In an April 26 letter Gen. Benjamin S. Griffin, commanding general of the Army Materiel Command, announced two Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center laboratory teams here are being recognized for their commitment to improving readiness and their innovative technologies that positively impact Soldiers.

This year’s Army Greatest Invention list includes the EM113A2 Rapid Entry Vehicle, used for crowd-control and rescue-squad insertion situations, and the Hand Packed Plastic Shaped Charge Assembly, used for remote destruction of buried improvised explosive devices.
Both inventions were based here at Picatinny.

Nominations were submitted from across the Army laboratory community and evaluated by Soldier teams from the U.S. Army Training Doctrine Command and U.S. Army divisions.
The awards will be presented during a luncheon ceremony in Arlington, Va., June 12.

EM113A2 Rapid Entry Vehicle
The Enhanced M113 Rapid Entry Vehicle, Spiral 2, is a modified M113A2 Armored Personnel Carrier with bulldozer variant, which is lightly armored, full tracked and air transportable.

The purpose of this invention is to provide rapid-entry, non-lethal crowd-control and rescue-squad insertion capability into the center of detainee compounds during riots.

This will increase Soldier survivability by providing improved situational awareness and the ability to move and fire from within an armored vehicle.
Innovative features of the original REV include six Modular Crowd Control Munitions that can spray non-lethal rubber pellets into a crowd, a larger periscope for greater visibility, windows and Bradley firing ports modified for shotguns that fire non-lethal bullets.

The Spiral 2 version contains all these features as well as a bulldozer blade which provides the capability to breach detainee-constructed barricades.
The Spiral 2 also has a Bradley-style ventilation system that allows warfighters to fire the mounted shotguns within the vehicle with the hatches closed without worrying about a build up of fumes.

Hand Packed Plastic Shaped Charge Assembly
The Plastic Shaped Charge Assembly for remote destruction of buried improvised explosive devices is an on-the-spot assembled hand-packed shaped-charge assembly that is emplaced via robot to destroy known or suspected buried improvised explosive devices or unexploded ordnance.

The Plastic Shaped Charge Assembly allows Explosive Ordnance Disposal operators to penetrate deeper through rocky soil and asphalt to destroy buried IEDs that otherwise are not accessible to lower-performance shaped charges.

Furthermore, due to the low fragmentation plastic housing, it destroys IEDs with an almost non-existent level of collateral damage, making it ideally suited for use in urban terrain where the minimization of such damage is highly desirable.

No other current focused weapon is capable of equal performance with equivalently low collateral damage.