A Bullet With A Mind Of Its Own

It exists:

[I]magine if you could transform a dumb bullet into a guided missile? That’s what the Pentagon did earlier this year, successfully firing .50-caliber bullets that steered themselves in mid-flight. It has just released a video [above] trumpeting the tip-top targeting of its Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program.

The technology could make our sharpshooters that much more deadly:

Current sniper rifles can regularly hit trucks at 2,000 meters, but not bad guys. (The record kill is 2,430 meters, just over 1.5 miles. It was charted by Canadian army corporal Rob Furlong against a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan’s Shah-i-kot valley during Operation Anaconda in March 2002—but his first two shots missed.) “There’s no limit as far as I can see so long as the bullet’s stable—I think 2,000 or 2,500 meters is very attainable,” [Keith Bell, former commander of the Army sniper school at Fort Benning, Ga] said. “Right now, anything past around 800 meters is an extremely tough shot.”

Duncan Geere adds a few more details:

The bullets are the size of a large pen and can be used in both sniper rifles and machine guns. The full EXACTO system comprises of both bullets and a real-time guidance system that tracks and delivers the projectile to the target. They’re still some way from the battlefield, however. This live fire test is likely just the first of many.