The U.S. military is the proud owner of some of the world's most advanced technology. It has a fleet of flying robots capable of shooting missiles at enemy targets. It has engineered computer viruses that can inflict physical damage. And soon, the U.S. Air Force could have laser missiles.
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Yet the military, like many bureaucracies, is slow to evolve. In this case, it's resulted in some old tools being used right alongside the world's most advanced weaponry. We've listed seven outdated technologies still used by American armed forces, below.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
The M4 carbine is the U.S. Army's primary infantry weapon, and it is a quarter of a century old. Like a lot of older technology, better things have already come along, but the military has not issued a replacement carbine on a wide scale. The M4A1, which provides soldiers with better accuracy, a more consistent trigger pull and a fully automatic firing speed, according to Military.com, has been used by special forces soldiers for about 10 years.
And although the Army plans to buy 12,000 more in 2014 for regular troops, that will hardly make a dent in the half a million M4s in use today. The Army did launch a competition for companies to design its next generation carbine, but that contest has since been canceled.
Image: Flickr, ALA staff
Harmless though it may seem, Microsoft Outlook wastes countless hours every year for military employees who have to spend time each day culling their email inbox due to lack of storage space. Gmail accounts would provide 60 times more room.
Image: Flickr, Peter
America's B61 nuclear bomb has many variants stationed in military bases across Europe, all of which are Cold War relics, according to German news organization Der Spiegel. But the U.S. has no plans to dismantle or remove them. Instead, they are going to upgrade them into the B61-12, a bomb that will actually pack less TNT than its predecessors because it will presumably be so accurate that the extra explosiveness would be unnecessary.
These futuristic nukes, expected to be ready by 2020, are considered by some to be a new type of weapon, the development of which would contrast President Barack Obama's decree to not engineer new nuclear explosives.
Image: Flickr, U.S. Army
The U.S. military's Distributed Common Grounds System, or DCGS-A (pronounced dee-sigs-a), as it is known, is a multi-billion dollar system designed to procure, analyze and distribute information about the location of enemy combatants to American soldiers fighting overseas. It is supposed to collect this information from various intelligence sources in order to provide soldiers with information that will help them assess the dangerousness of a particular area, collect data about insurgents' movements on certain days and overall patterns in enemy behavior. The system is supposed to save lives.
The problem, according to The New Republic, is that it doesn't do any of that.
But analyzing enemy movements in near real-time can be done, and experienced soldiers know it. One of the soldiers currently using DCGS-A discovered a Palo Alto company called Palantir that, according to the The New Republic article, has the ability to piece together data about enemy behavior at a level of detail he had never before seen. Nevertheless, the Pentagon has yet to make a change.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Like the M4 carbine, the M9 pistol is 25 years old, and similar, but better, weapons are readily available. Well over 200,000 U.S. soldiers use this type of gun, and many have a laundry list of complaints about the weapon.
Troops can't attach lights or lasers to the gun, the safety lock that prevents someone from accidentally firing the M9 is located on the opposite end of the barrel (causing soldiers to accidentally activate it when they reload), silencers don't fit on the weapon's muzzle and many complain that the M9 is not lethal enough.
Plenty of commercially available guns, such as the M&P, designed by firearms manufacturer Smith & Wesson, are free of such problems. Currently, the M&P, as well as a few other gun models, are contestants in a competition to replace the Army's outdated pistol. Testing of new handguns will start next year.
Image: Flickr, United States Mission Geneva
The Pentagon's videoconference system of choice is literally called Video Teleconferencing, a Tandberg product, which, according to former Air Force intelligence enlistee Adam Simmons, is far from up-to-date.
"The cameras are overly expensive and they require [the company's] hardware and software to use," Simmons told Mashable in an email. "This system was revolutionary 10-15 years ago, but quickly became obsolete with PC webcams and free video conferencing tools used in instant messaging applications."
Due to security concerns, not all of those free tools can be used inside the Department of Defense, but Simmons says that Adobe Connect would do just fine. Unfortunately for soldiers, Simmons also says that Adobe Connect is "something many [government] personnel just plain don't know about."
Image: Flickr, VancityAllie.com
Blackberry phones have long been touted as having better security than their counterparts at Apple and Samsung. That's why the Department of Defense allowed the company to provide their smartphones, and why the agency still has 470,000 of them, according to Defense One.
But in recent times, Blackberry has faltered in the security arena, as well as several others, leading to widespread speculation that the company may not be around much longer. In case the company does eventually close its doors, the Pentagon is developing its own system that would secure all employee mobile devices.
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Image: Flickr, Chris Devers