Washington: US military has started to provide its troops a special device deployed in Afghanistan, which would identify the Taliban snipers location in a second after firing despite having positions to the mountainous terrains and villages.
The thousands of high-tech devices would attach to US troops’ uniform in order to stop a major source of casualties.
According to Pentagon figures, Taliban shooters have killed or wounded more than 4,500 U.S. troops in 2010 alone. Many shooters fire from mountainous terrain or in villages where it can be hard to locate the source of the gunfire in Afghanistan
Gen. David Petraeus first requested the devices eight years ago when casualties in Iraq from gunmen and snipers were mounting, but they are showing up for widespread use here in Afghanistan.
“It will greatly increase our ability to go and destroy the enemy,” Army Lt. Col. Chris Schneider, who manages the program, said.
The $2,000 device is the size of an iPod and contains technology that detects shock waves from a gun blast. The device locates the distance and direction of the blast. Within one second, the device gives a visual display of the shooter’s location from as far as 400 yards.
In 2008, the Army received $50 million from Congress to buy 37,660 of the devices.
In 2009, a joint defense subcommittee report chided the military for its “slow pace” in issuing the Soldier Wearable Acoustic Targeting System. Schneider said the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force gave 2,000 sensors last year to units most in need.
“There was no single person or organization that slowed the process down,” he said.
Schneider said the latest version is superior because it provides more accurate readings, though it sometimes fails to identify the source of gunfire.
The Army will receive as many as 1,500 detectors a month starting from March 2011. There are about 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and all combat units would get the latest versions of the system.
Experts term the technology critical of facing new kind of warfare faced by U.S. troops.
“This is a good example of a technology that wouldn’t have been needed a generation ago,” said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute.
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