U.S. TROOPS USING ISRAELI GEAR

America is only in the first year of the kind of fight Israel has been wag­ing for decades. So it’s only nat­ural that the Pentagon is start­ing to get some of its com­bat tech­nol­ogy from Tel Aviv.
“From ten­nis ball-sized sen­sors that can be thrown or shot from snipers rifles into ter­ror­ist lairs to wall-breaching devices for urban com­bat, gear invented for Israels anti-terror wars in Gaza and the West Bank are increas­ingly being put in the hands of U.S. warfight­ers,” Defense News reports.

One sys­tem pro­posed for the U.S. Marines is a remote-controlled weapon sta­tion for crew pro­tec­tion and tar­get engage­ment. Combined with an… acoustic sen­sor detec­tion and direction-finding device, it essen­tially becomes a robotic anti-sniper weapon for wheeled or tracked vehi­cles…
[An Israeli] firm sold 100 mar­itime ver­sions of the remote-controlled sys­tems to the U.S. Special Operations Command in late 2003…
Meanwhile, the Pentagons Combating Terrorism Technology Support Office has ordered mul­ti­ple pro­to­types of a new, 360-degree sur­veil­lance sen­sor from a small Tel Aviv-based firm called ODF Optronics Ltd. Called the Eyeball, the ten­nis ball-sized recon­nais­sance sys­tem con­tains motion-detectors, a voice-activated recorder, speak­ers, micro­phones and trans­mit­ters to see, hear and com­mu­ni­cate with enemy insur­gents within a 25 meter radius…
And, the U.S. Army has ordered an addi­tional 14 Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd.-developed Hunter unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles to sup­port ongo­ing oper­a­tions in Iraq.
The Hunter con­tract, esti­mated at $33 mil­lion, is a follow-on to the Armys exist­ing fleet of sys­tems, which col­lec­tively flew more than 3,000 hours over the Iraqi the­ater, U.S. and Israeli sources said. 

March 30th, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.