Carbon Fiber Obscurant: Enhancing Warfighter Effectiveness While Meeting Environmental Regulations

Although the battlefield scenario has changed over the last decade, the need still exists for an obscurant capable of countering enemy weapon strikes. A millimeter-wave MMW material obscuring in the 9-96 GMz range of the electromagnetic spectrum has become critical for the modern Warfighter in order to minimize radar detection by hostile forces, thus saving lives and equipment. To meet this end, the Warfighter must be highly trained in all tasks across the spectrum of military operations. These Warfighters will need demanding, highly realistic training to obtain this capability. This increased training will lead to increased releases into the environment of obscurants at training sites. An uncoated carbon fiber obscurant CFO has been developed for a new module of the M56E1 smoke generation system. In order to field this new capability in 2008, we investigated the potential for environmental impacts of CFO in soil thereby supporting thorough environmental analysis and documentation with the goals of 1 minimal restrictions on troop testing and training, and 2 sustainable range use.