How This Video Game Controller Became the US Military’s Weapon of Choice

In a aboriginal conflict, American troops volition nonstop the newest warfare machines not with sprawling power panels oregon sci-fi-inspired touchscreens, but controls acquainted to anyone who grew up with an Xbox oregon PlayStation successful their home.

Over the past respective years, the US Defense Department has been gradually integrating what look to beryllium variants of the Freedom of Movement Control Unit (FMCU) handsets arsenic the superior power units for a assortment of precocious weapons systems, according to publically disposable imagery published to the department’s Defense Visual Information Distribution System media hub.

Those systems see the caller Navy Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) launcher, a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle–based anti-ship rocket strategy designed to occurrence the caller Naval Strike Missile that’s essential to the Marine Corps’ plans for a notional aboriginal warfare with China successful the Indo-Pacific; the Army’s caller Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (M-SHORAD) strategy that, bristling with FIM-92 Stinger and AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and a 30-mm concatenation weapon mounted connected a Stryker infantry warring vehicle, is seen arsenic a critical anti-air capableness successful a imaginable clash with Russia successful Eastern Europe; the Air Force’s MRAP-based Recovery of Air Bases Denied by Ordnance (RADBO) motortruck that uses a laser to wide distant improvised explosive devices and different unexploded munitions; and the Humvee-mounted High Energy Laser-Expeditionary (HELEX) laser limb strategy presently undergoing investigating by the Marine Corps.

The FMCU has besides been employed connected a variety of experimental unmanned vehicles, and according to a 2023 Navy contract, the strategy volition beryllium integral to the cognition of the AN/SAY-3A Electro-Optic Sensor System (or “I-Stalker”) that’s designed to assistance the service’s aboriginal Constellation-class guided-missile frigates way and prosecute incoming threats.

Produced since 2008 by Measurement Systems Inc. (MSI), a subsidiary of British defence contractor Ultra that specializes successful human-machine interfaces, the FMCU offers a akin signifier origin to the modular Xbox oregon PlayStation controller but with a ruggedized plan intended to safeguard its delicate electronics against immoderate hostile environs American work members whitethorn find themselves in. A longtime developer of joysticks utilized connected assorted US naval systems and aircraft, MSI has served arsenic a subcontractor to large defence “primes” similar General Atomics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Systems to supply the handheld power units for “various craft and conveyance programs,” according to accusation compiled by national contracting bundle GovTribe.

“With the foresight to admit the signifier origin that would beryllium astir accessible to today’s warfighters, [Ultra] has continued to marque the FMCU 1 of the astir highly configurable and almighty controllers disposable today,” according to Ultra. (The institution did not respond to aggregate requests for remark from WIRED.)

The endlessly customizable FMCU isn’t wholly caller technology: According to Ultra, the strategy has been successful usage since astatine slightest 2010 to run the now-sundowned Navy’s MQ-8 Fire Scout unmanned autonomous chopper and the Ground Based Operational Surveillance System (GBOSS) that the Army and Marine Corps person some employed passim the planetary warfare connected terror. But the caller proliferation of the handset crossed blase caller limb platforms reflects a increasing inclination successful the US subject towards controls that aren’t conscionable uniquely tactile oregon ergonomic successful their operation, but inherently acquainted to the adjacent procreation of imaginable warfighters earlier they ever adjacent motion up to serve.