A small group of Army Rangers–the elite unit of ground troops–were testing out the beta version of a “see through walls” (STW) sensor at Eiler Hall, an old maintenance facility converted into a training site. One soldier pointed the sensor, housed inside a big, bright-orange suitcase, directly at the target: a windowless building that might contain the enemy. Several yards behind him, another took a reading off a laptop. On the screen: a simple graph charting time and distance. A single red dot moved down the grid. Movement behind the wall! “Up until now, the only way to see through the wall was to blow a hole in it and stick your head in,” says Maj. Bill Kimbley, our tour guide for the training exercise.
The device actually uses old-fashioned radio-frequency technology. It sends out low-frequency signals that return low-resolution information. Radar, by contrast, is high frequency and high resolution. But radar can’t go through walls. The Army is testing the sensor on stucco, vinyl siding, brick and even cement. The gadget can’t see through wet cement (water is conductive) or steel. It also can’t count enemy soldiers–yet. “It’s hard to tell if there is more than one,” explains Brandon Cross, 19, of Salina, Kans., who was manning the laptop. But he liked the technology so far. “We don’t have anything like it yet,” he says.
It will be at least a couple years before the Army actually uses this STW technology, and by then it will look a lot different. The sensor, for instance will be the size of a Palm Pilot, not a 14-pound suitcase. And it won’t be orange. “Orange is not an optimal color for anything but hunters,” jokes Kimbley, who is an experimental project officer for the Dismounted Battlespace Battle Lab. About a decade old, the lab tests what is known in militarese as GOTS and COTS–government-off-the-shelf and commercial-off-the-shelf products. The lab’s technicians take existing gadgets (the sensor was first built for police use) and try to figure out how to adapt them to the military. Actually, feedback from Wednesday’s STW trials will be turned over to Raytheon, the company developing the technology. “The Army doesn’t make anything anymore,” Kimbley explains.
The lab’s goal is to develop resources that can be used to save soldiers. “It’s better to risk the machines than a human life,” says Mike Kennedy, who works in the lab’s UGV and UAV division (that’s unmanned ground vehicle and unmanned air vehicle). Eventually, the STW sensor could be mounted on a miniature robot tank like Mathilda. This Army “battle bot” works by remote control for up to a couple hundred meters and has already been used in war. Some of the lab’s innovations, though, have been decidedly low tech, including knee and elbow pads for soldiers who complained about glass and rubble in street fighting.
Urban warfare, in fact, is a major new training focus for the Army–driven by the death of 18 American soldiers fighting in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, in 1993. About five years ago, the Pentagon launched something called MOUT, Military Operations in Urban Terrain, and has since invested millions in MOUT training, By some estimates, 80 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2020, making wars increasingly urban. Baghdad, with almost 5 million residents, would likely be much scarier than “Mog.”
The best way soldiers know to combat fear is to train seriously for every conceivable scenario. Even in Wednesday’s test, the Rangers shot to kill. The big difference was that their M-4s were loaded with paint pellets–blue for the good guys and red for the bad guys. It’s the Army’s version of paintball. After the STW sensor alerted them to movement behind the wall, the Rangers stormed the building and took out the “enemy”–other members of their squad who were role-playing. Daniel Blumquist, 19, of Baltimore has taken his share of “simurounds” or “simunitions.” “They hurt a lot,” he says, explaining that they don’t just leave paint stains but welts. They can even draw blood. “It makes you realize you’re vulnerable,” he says.
MOUT training has two phases: gaining a foothold in a building and then clearing its rooms. Typically, when entering a room, four Rangers pack together tightly in a formation called “stacking.” They move as one in what they call a “careful hurry.” The last man walks backward to guard against a rear ambush. After entering a room, each man covers a prescribed angle with his weapon and looks for the enemy. Part of the trick is learning how to identify “friendlies” or “AmCitz” from bad guys. Eiler Hall is still installing targets that will pop up at the men from behind doors. For now, there are some makeshift ones, including a picture of a voluptuous brunette in a red bathing suit. If a soldier’s eye gets drawn to the wrong place, he might miss the gun she’s pointing at him.
