From the Screen to Reality: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and the EXACTO Round

From the Screen to Reality: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and the EXACTO Round

Originally Published on the Official Blast Away the Game Review Facebook Page

Written by Dustin Murphy

  If any of you played Ubisoft’s published title, Tom Clancy Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, you know the, painstakingly, accurate bullet called the EXACTO round. This bullet allowed for players to get a hard lock on each other and shoot multiple times without being precisely targeting that person. The downside was the other player almost always died. In recent years, we know our military has been making massive leaps in order to better protect our men and women, of the armed forces, around the world as well as civilians. Recently DARPA has released test videos of this bullet using a tracer round version, and just how well they are developing this thing. The scary part is it’s almost done, and uses target designation in order to go where it needs to. This means anything, anyone, and place could be targeted by this round. The cool part is that Lockheed Martin and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging seem to have this down to almost a perfect equation.

  In Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon the EXACTO round can be loaded into any gun, which made it versatile, and even deadly. In real life, we’ve seen the bullet, and luckily, it’s not as versatile - yet. In real life we’ve seen the round fired from what’s seemingly a high-powered rifle, unfortunately we don’t know what kind of weapon they are using it or at what distances they are firing it. What we do know is this. It’s real, it’s accurate, and it works. The question that will come down in time is the always easy to ask - will it work in the field? From the video I’ll share, or you can go to the DARPA website or even Google, Bing, or even Yahoo and search for DARPA EXACTO Round. The results will astonish what one will think. The video demonstrated where the bullet should go and where it didn’t on the original first test fire, which shows it mess, and by a lot. In the most recent one, which was recently posted, we got to see where they were targeting and where the bullet was going. It did not miss. Instead it hit dead on and made its mark. Had it been a target the military needed taken out? Someone would be calling the local coroner for a clean up.

 Outside of the grim reality of what this round is meant for, it also gives us an idea that research and development is doing one thing right: trying to make things safer. With this round the friendly fire rates could go down if the bullet could be mass produced for the standardized military and police equipment. Unlike the tracer round that helped identify who was firing and if it was friendly, unfortunately that chance is gone and being used already. One thing is for sure. What Ghost Recon did, isn’t too far off and provides a very realistic take on what the future could shape up to be. Now if only they made optic camo.