Through the years I’ve seen a good deal of ground bots being devel­oped for troops in the zone. But I’ve never seen one as seem­ingly resilient and sim­ply func­tional as the Recon Robotics Recon Scout XT.

Weighing in at 1.2lbs and able to with­stand a drop from three sto­ries up, the Recon Scout XT can shoot real time video day or night. Its sig­nal goes through walls no prob­lem and the con­troller is no big­ger than a stan­dard com­pany com­mand radio.

So far Army Special Forces and SEALs have some, as well as some civil­ian law enforce­ment agen­cies. Looks like a good piece of gear for Joes and grunts too.

– Christian

You gotta love the chutz­pah of a com­pany so con­tro­ver­sial that they just go ahead and dou­ble down with a more aggres­sive product.

At Modern Day Marine yes­ter­day, Ward and I strolled up to the Taser International booth and I saw this thing that looked like a cross between an elec­tric switch­ing sta­tion and a Claymore mine — which is pretty much with this thing is…

Called the SHOCKWAVE, Taser has devel­oped what it calls an “area denial” non-​​lethal weapon that fea­tures up to 18 shocker nodes that can go six-​​at-​​a-​​time or all at once. Standing up to 100 meters away, a trooper on over­watch can zap a bad guy and hold him there jit­ter­ing on the ground until Joe’s gone over to see why the intruder didn’t have the proper pass­word.

Taser reps tell DT that the sys­tem has been tested at full power on a pig who had no ill effects (I asked whether there was some resid­ual BBQ from the test, but was rebuffed with a chuckle) and even a cou­ple Taser employ­ees stepped into the SHOCKWAVE’s path for a go (a reminder: be in the office at 8:30am from now on, okay?).

No word yet on mil­i­tary use, but if the con­tro­versy over Taser effects con­tin­ues, maybe we’ll see F-22’s drop­ping elec­tro JDAMs soon.

– Christian

Like the old song says, “Every pic­ture tells a story, don’t it?”

A dig­i­tal cam­era being used by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq pro­duces pic­tures can tell incred­i­bly detailed sto­ries: exact time of day taken, longitude/​latitude of both shooter and sub­ject, direc­tion of the cam­era aim, and even 16 sec­onds of audio per photo, so that the user can note crit­i­cal information.

“You get every­thing you need in three sec­onds,” said Jim Kidd, vice pres­i­dent of Geo Tactical Solutions of Parker, Colo. Everything is stored on a mem­ory disk and can be turned over to intel offi­cials for analy­sis. “This way, you get back into the rear and the intel peo­ple don’t have you sit­ting for hours going over what you saw.”

The Ricoh 500SE-​​M Tactical Digital Camera is the heart of the sys­tem. It comes with a GPS capa­bil­ity devel­oped by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and is com­pat­i­ble with the range of map­ping soft­ware and pro­grams, includ­ing Google Earth and Falcon View, Kidd said.

The camera’s acces­sories include tele­scopic lenses, a night-​​vision lens and a range finder that cap­tures the dis­tance between shooter and tar­get and IDs the target’s exact lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude. Even on its own, the cam­era records its own loca­tion every five sec­onds, and specif­i­cally notes its lat/​long when­ever a photo is taken, accord­ing to Kidd.

For Marines and Soldiers out on patrol, the cam­era is a con­tin­u­ously updated log. Once back at base, the disc can be put into a com­puter and the entire route of the patrol can be super­im­posed over a zoom-​​in/​zoom-​​out map, with each spot where a pic­ture clearly marked; a click on the mark and the image appears as a pop-​​up.

“We’ve got about 1,000 of these down­range right now in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Kidd said.

– Bryant Jordan