The United States Army

United States Army

The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...

 Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), headquartered at the Picatinny Arsenal

Picatinny Arsenal

The Picatinny Arsenal is an American military research and manufacturing facility located on a lot in northern New Jersey near Lake Denmark. The Arsenal is the headquarters of the United States Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center...

 in New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

, is the US Army's primary research and development arm for armament and munitions systems. Besides Picatinny, ARDEC has four other research facilities, including Benét Laboratories

Benet Laboratories

Benét Laboratories, part of the United States Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, is the US Army's primary design, development, engineering and production & field support facility for large caliber armament systems, including Cannons, mortars, and recoilless rifles...

. It is heavily involved in the development of the Future Combat Systems

Future Combat Systems

Future Combat Systems was the United States Army's principal modernization program from 2003 to early 2009. Formally launched in 2003, FCS was envisioned to create new brigades equipped with new manned and unmanned vehicles linked by an unprecedented fast and flexible battlefield network...

 program and also works to develop more advanced weapons using technologies such as microwave

Microwave

Microwaves, a subset of radio waves, have wavelengths ranging from as long as one meter to as short as one millimeter, or equivalently, with frequencies between 300 MHz and 300 GHz. This broad definition includes both UHF and EHF , and various sources use different boundaries...

s, laser

Laser

A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of photons. The term "laser" originated as an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation...

s and nano-technology.

ARDEC is the R&D center for armaments used by the U.S. Army, Special Operations Command, and other organizations. It is one of the specialized research, development, and engineering centers within the U.S. Army Materiel Command. ARDEC’s purpose is to provide battlefield supremacy for U.S. troops through “overmatch capabilities.” Over the past 10 years, ARDEC has developed and released more than 20 products that have provided U.S. troops with “world’s best” capabilities, compared with products from foreign military and other U.S. defense organizations.

Mission

ARDEC's mission is to develop and maintain a world-class workforce to execute and manage integrated life cycle engineering processes required for the research, development, production, field support and demilitarization of munitions, weapons, fire control and associated items.
.

ARDEC is broken into a number of directorates such as "Weapons Systems and Technology Directorate" and "Munitions Systems and Technology Directorate".

Highlights

Efforts to diversify ARDEC’s revenue stream have led to a growth in non-Army revenue from about $60 million in FY 2001 to $140 million in FY07. Overall revenue has increased from approximately $600 million in FY 2001 to around $1.2 billion in FY 2007.

Designated as the benchmark for the Army in technology transfer, ARDEC has had since FY 2005 approximately 75 percent of its technology projects transition from research into customer funded development.

ARDEC has received awards and recognition based on customer satisfaction and perceived value including Value Engineering Accomplishments of Merit. Over the past five years, ARDEC has won 13 of the Army’s “10 Greatest Inventions of the Year” awards. Additionally, ARDEC has won the “Army Research and Development Lab of the Year” award for two of the last four years.

ARDEC’s SWORDS robot was named one of the “most amazing inventions of 2004” by TIME magazine.