Remotely piloted airship vehicle for surveillance to protect US forces

Blackwater's newest innovation is a remotely piloted airship vehicle (RPAV) to fly high and quiet surveillance and communications missions while leaving almost no carbon footprint.

"The Blackwater Airships team completed design work at the end of 2006 and is now building the Polar 400 airship. This highly capable RPAV will provide a platform ready to accomodate a wide variety of state-of-the-art surveillance, communications and detection equipment that can record and store events and downlink them in real-time to ground operators," the company says on its website. "The make-up of the mission payload of up to 400 lbs will be determined by customer requirements -- whether for combat areas, port or border security, or coastal patrol."

Lifesaving transport vehicle designed to help troops and diplomats survive IEDs

The Defense Department's procurement process is so long that it can take as many as 7 years to get an urgently needed product from the drawing board to the battlefield.

That costs American lives.

Blackwater is constantly innovating to deliver simple, inexpensive yet effective products on a much shorter timeframe. One of its most famous innovations is the Grizzly, an armored transport vehicle with a distinctive hull designed to deflect deadly blasts from IEDs. Current US military armored transport vehicles generally have vertical sides that tend to absorb blasts instead of deflect them, resulting in senseless serious injuries and deaths. The Grizzly makes more sense than the currently deployed vehicles, costs a lot less, and is available now.

The Discovery Channel produced a feature on the Grizzly in its "Future Weapons" show.