Jesse Ventura<\/a>\u00a0from the \u201cPredator\u201d film, who used an M-134 Mini-gun that was fed by an ammo box he wore on his back.<\/p>\n![\"Ironman](\"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/IronmanClip3-239x300.jpg\" "\\"Ironman")
After a short laugh, one soldier, Staff Sgt. Vincent Winkowski realized that making a backpack that could feed a machine gun wouldn\u2019t be that far-fetched. So he welded two ammunitions cans together, grabbed an old ALICE (all-purpose lightweight individual carrying equipment), and combined it with a MOLLE (modular, lightweight load-carrying equipment) pouch. The result was a backpack capable of both carrying and feeding ammo to the gun without burning its carrier or getting jammed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wondered why there wasn\u2019t some type of dismounted (Common Remote Operating Weapons Station) that fed our machine guns instead of a mini-gun as portrayed in the movie,\u201d Winkowski said. \u201cSo, I decided to try it using the feed chute assembly off of the vehicle CROWS. We glued a piece of wood from an ammo crate inside the ammo cans to create the decreased space necessary so the rounds would not fall in on each other.<\/p>\n
Initial tests showed it still had some flaws, but \u201cit was much better than the current TTP (tactics, techniques and procedures) we employed,\u201d Winkowski said.<\/p>\n
Then, on Feb. 26, 2011, their new \u201cIronman\u201d pack was given its real test. The squad was ambushed by close to 50 enemy fighters in a river valley, \u201cand it worked great!\u201d Winkowski said. The Army doesn\u2019t give much detail here, but it sounds like 50 fighters were greeted by an Ironman backpack feeding a light machine gun as it blew copious amounts of doom in their general directions.<\/p>\n
The team reported their new gadget in the combat report, which drew the interest of forward-deployed science advisers from the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe looked at it,\u201d recalled Dave Roy, of the research center. \u201cMy first reaction was, \u2018Wow, that\u2019s cool.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Ironman](\"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/IronmanClip2-300x238.jpg\" "\\"Ironman")
Roy and his team modified the massive ammo clip-turned-backpack, and 48 days later, they had a new prototype, and put the \u201cHigh-Capacity Ammunition Carriage System\u201d back in theater.<\/p>\n
The troops who built it, from the 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, Iowa National Guard, are called \u201cTask Force Ironman,\u201d and Roy named the machine the \u201cIronman.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe pretty much took their design and just reverse-engineered it and improved upon it,\u201d said Laura Winters, who headed up the fabrication effort, according to the Army news website.<\/p>\n
Roy adds, \u201cWe\u2019ve already gotten email traffic from (one of) our science advisers that everybody in theater wants one of these.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTo allow the gunner himself to be able to have this kind of firepower increases his lethality,\u201d Roy said. \u201cBy increasing his lethality, you\u2019ve also increased his survivability by a certain amount. Now that gunner has 500 rounds of ammunition. It\u2019s very difficult for me to make him ineffective.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a video of a similar system, the \u201cQuiver of Death.\u201d<\/p>\n
[Via Techzwn.com<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Inspiration comes at interesting moments, and for a group of soldiers in Afghanistan, this one came during a two-and-a-half-hour firefight with the Taliban.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[195],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Ironman](\"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/IronmanPack3-1024x548.jpg\" "\\"Ironman")
Inspiration comes at interesting moments, and for a group of soldiers in Afghanistan, this one came during a two-and-a-half-hour firefight with the Taliban.<\/p>\n