Why The Desert Tech HTI Could Be The Most Important Rifle Of The Next Conflict

The EXACTO is a .50 caliber smart bullet threatening to change the way Snipers ply their trade and it has HTI written all over it.

The Desert Tech HTI was always meant to be measured in miles and light armor. Stretch the letters and you get Hard Target Interdiction with a nasty disposition requiring no help from you or me when discussing its downrange relevance. But here we are anyways behind a small pile of paperwork announcing a new guided, small-caliber bullet and a computer screen with 28 seconds of YouTube footage featuring real-time, in-flight maneuvering of a 50-caliber round sent from, we assume, a shoulder-fired rifle.

The EXACTO (Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordinance) bullet carries right, banks left, pins its ears back and drills the target dead center, leaving behind a squiggly ballistic path normally reserved for the Angelina Jolie we remember in double-stacked eye liner and striking full-body back tattoo. Stretch that trajectory across an ever-evolving battlefield and the most compact, portable long-action rifle in history just got a little bit nastier to the point of becoming downright ornery.

Let’s start and finish with the fact that the HTI is 45 inches long from monopod to the very last fire-breathing baffle and weighs 20 pounds soaking wet while being able to fire .50 BMG, .375 CheyTac, .416 Barrett and .408 CheyTac rounds with the flip of a barrel that seamlessly slides back to zero quicker than you could read this sentence a second time.

I’ve said it once already. It’s the most compact and portable anti-material rifle on the planet. There, I said it again which bore repeating because it sacrifices no distance or accuracy due to its efficiency of size or versatility.

In other words, a sniper team can go from the sexiest round on the precision market nowadays (.375 CheyTac) to the EXACTO (which is manufactured in only .50 BMG) without breaking a second sweat from running up a flight of disemboweled stairs incompatible with any effective barrel length longer than the shortest distance between an ordinary door jamb and your NVG mounts.

In other words, in any two-man team where the superior shooter is almost always the spotter, the most important member in terms of accuracy just became the computer programmer back at the lab who soldered the motherboard and CPU to the inside of the 3.9-inch long casing or however the confidential ordinance was assembled. As explained on the DARPA website, “The EXACTO 50-caliber round and optical sighting technology expects to greatly extend the day and nighttime range over current state-of-the-art sniper systems. The system combines a maneuverable bullet and a real-time guidance system to track and deliver the projectile to the target, allowing the bullet to change path during flight to compensate for any unexpected factors that may drive it off course.”

In other words, we can expect two-mile and even three-mile moonshots to continually set new and astounding records by sniper teams transitioning from artistic MIL clicks to scientific baud rates and whose primary expertise now lay in clever fieldcraft with compactness and portability being the defining factors for a rifle. Decide for yourself. Which precision weapon do you want tangled up in your easy-bake ghillie suit?

The EXACTO YouTube footage is dated Spring 2014 with rumors of a 2015 completion period and another teaser already running in the Tom Clancy Ghost Recon: Future Soldier video game. Cue up your favorite internet news source at your leisure and it isn’t hard to find an imminent conflict where the EXACTO could be put in direct effect and even easier to imagine the Desert Tech HTI being the delivery system of choice.

But pardon the HTI if it sits there stewing in all of its exquisite ergonomics until it actually happens.

See the YouTube footage of the EXACTO here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX8Z2MDYX3g