New Exoskeleton Makes Super Soldiers?

The fashionable soldier of tomorrow will rip off the flak jacket and store the camo for a trip to the mall. If the military magnates at Raytheon have their way, soldiers will be donning futuristic exoskeletons before heading into combat. Sweet!

Described as a "wearable robot" on the Raytheon site, the exoskeleton looks extremely clunky...yet strangely super cool. After watching a video of an engineer ripping through a solid set of pull downs of a 200 lbs, we were wondering where we could score a pair of robotic arms for our next workout.

Raytheon tied the release of their super suit to the big-screen release of blockbuster flick "Iron Man," but we're not sure of the bigger surprise -- a sober Robert Downey Jr. becoming bankable at the box-office or this titanic triumph of engineering wizardry.

Yup, Iron Man was the first thing I thought of.  Are these things really a peak into the future of soldiers?

 I thought this was also talked about after halo 3's release. Maybe its an update, or before it was in a beta stage.

 I don't know if it is the same suit or not, but I saw a discovery channel special that had a "robotic" exoskeleton suit about 3 or 4 months ago. This thing was clunky but incredible; the soldier that was wearing it was able to lift box after box each one weighing around 200 pounds. He did this for hours, and never used a muscle of his own. It had some really incredible real world applications. 

I can see a multitude of uses for this when it comes to heavy lifting, moving and construction, but it seems way too cumbersome for actual combat.

=O would cool to see hand to hand combat with that lol 

I agree with AjayD here, this could have plenty of uses, but none of them involve combat. It doesn't assist aiming or stop bullets. Frankly, it doesn't matter how much it can lift, if the person wearing it gets shot, it's just a metal hunk on the ground, and an expensive piece of technology our soldiers would either have to risk their life to retrieve or allow to fall into enemy hands (wouldn't want them getting the edge in warehouse loading, would we?).

Yeah! I saw a video of this on CNN about 4 months ago. This thing is awesome! Now they just need to figure out how to pack a power supply into it.