Developed in 2004, the Joint Precision Airdrop System has been used by the military to manually drop ammo and bombs onto battlefields with knife-cutting accuracy. Only recently, however, have they started dropping something else of great importance: blood. By as early as 2011, the Armed Service Blood Program will be teaming up with the US Marines to begin airdropping blood for wounded combat soldiers who are in desperate need of blood transfusions.
In the past, if a soldier was badly wounded, he or she would need to be airlifted by helicopter into a safer combat zone, and would be medically treated there. Sometimes, however, in situations of intense combat in which it would be too difficult to land a helicopter on account of incoming fire, it would be near impossible to get those wounded soldiers to safety without risking the lives of the people in the helicopter attempting to rescue them.
Now, thanks to the joint efforts of the Armed Service Blood Program and the US Marines, blood will simply be able to be dropped from the sky, parachuting down to the soldiers’ position below using a GPS based guidance system. As a result, these wounded soldiers will be able to acquire the immediate help they so desperately needs instead of waiting for what could be hours to arrive at a hospital, which would put them at risk of bleeding out before they can even get there.
New C-130’s and other unmanned aerial vehicles can be equipped with these blood drops, and they can deliver blood to a wounded soldier in less than 10 minutes. Blood loss is the number one cause of death in the military, and thanks to this new GPS based technology we’ll hopefully be able to save more of our soldiers from an early grave.
