Water supply security

Military Seeks Tech to Extract Drinking Water From the Atmosphere for Troops

Like all humans, U.S. military troops need water to survive and thrive. But the complex and often low-resourced environments they’re deployed to render delivery and access to potable water difficult, and at times even life-threatening.

The Pentagon’s research arm aims to change that.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants innovative proposals that will catalyze the development of next-generation sorbent materials and modern systems to seamlessly extract water directly from the atmosphere to serve warfighters on the ground, according to a broad agency announcement released this week.

“The demand for drinking water is a constant across all [Defense Department] missions, and the risk, cost, and complexity that go into meeting that demand can quickly become force limiting factors,” Seth Cohen, program manager of the agency’s new Atmospheric Water Extraction program said in an early-December statement regarding the impending solicitation.

To provide troops with drinkable water to date, the military depends on transported bottles of it, or the purification of regional water sources—“neither of which are optimal for mobile forces that operate with a small footprint,” Cohen noted.