Military Building Iron Man Suit, Confirmed
The program started when McRaven was at SOFIC and said he wanted something that would prevent our first man through the door/door breacher from catching one in the face and taking a long dirt nap,” Jack Murphy, a veteran of the U.S. army’s 75th Ranger Regiment and 5th Special Forces Group, as well as editor-in-chief of the special operations news site SofRep.com, told The Intercept. “It is a serious concern and something worth trying to find a solution to, but from there it morphed into this Iron Man suit project that no one was actually asking for.
the program will likely cost hundreds of millions more to perfect the sophisticated technology.” Former Republican Senator Tom Coburn included the project in his 2014 “Wastebook” — a collection of government programs that Coburn, a noted fan of austerity, considers wasteful. Referring to estimates that TALOS would cost far more than SOCOM has been allocated, Coburn wrote, “That sentiment perfectly describes the problem with the military industrial complex — they really honestly probably could not develop a pencil for DOD for only $20 million.
I am here to announce that we are building Iron Man,” President Obama told the media at an innovation summit last year. “I’m going to blast off in a second,” the president joked, adding that, “This has been a secret project we’ve been working on for a long time. Not really. Maybe. It’s classified.”
This isn’t just with TALOS, it happens on many, many SOF programs,” Murphy says. “The troops will request something and by the time it works its way up
the chain and everyone gets their hands into it, then it gets fielded back to the soldier, they are looking at it like, ‘we never asked for this thing!
