Sniper Stoppers

Story by Heike Hasenauer

   John Eicke, chief of the Acoustics and Special Sensors Branch at the Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Md., has "talked to a lot of guys who have been shot at," he said. "They all remember one thing: 'You can't believe your ears,'" Eicke said.

   "You hear the supersonic boom when the bullet leaves the barrel, and there's an acoustic shock wave that moves in front of the bullet," he said. The sound of a bullet as it zips through space could come from anywhere.

   ARL, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Washington, D.C., and the Fort Benning, Ga.-based Dismounted Battlespace Battle Lab are working with contractors and representatives from industry and academia to provide soldiers with a sniper-detection system that will eliminate potentially deadly guesswork.

   "We want to have a system ready to deploy to Bosnia if commanders in Europe request it," said Christopher Kearns, DBBL's countersniper representative. "We know soldiers need counter-sniper technology," Kearns said. "What we don't know is what technology or technologies will provide the best detection system."

   "We're trying to come up with acoustic and infrared sensors that will accurately tell where the shot came from," said Eicke. Such a countersniper system -- used to pinpoint the locations of snipers who take pot shots at soldiers deployed in operations other than war, where there isn't a lot of simultaneous gunfire -- could be fielded to Bosnia as early as this summer, according to Eicke.

   The snipers soldiers have most often encountered in places like Somalia and Haiti are amateurs, Eicke said. They're not the special forces-caliber snipers who kill with one shot.

   "Random sniper incidents were common in Somalia," said Kearns. "And there's potential for incidents to occur in Bosnia again; there were nine sniping incidents in a week in Bosnia when NATO Implementation Force troops first arrived. "If such incidents occur again, the problem won't be how frequently they occur. The problem will be the constant effect even one such incident will have on the entire force. It's a psychological thing," Kearns said.

   To date, about a half-dozen contractors have developed countersniper technologies that can be demonstrated, said Eicke, who, with other ARL engineers, evaluates technologies proposed by DARPA contractors and other interested parties. For the near-term, the Army has purchased five of the acoustic-based countersniper systems for delivery to the DBBL, where officials will determine the best method of introducing them into field units, Eicke said.

   One promising system uses a small, notebook-size computer display for the dismounted soldier or a miniature, dashboard-mounted display for vehicles. Both indicate the origin of a sniper's bullet with a flashing arrow or red dot on a clock-face image on-screen. The system includes a collapsible pole and microphones that, in the vehicle system, are attached to each of the vehicle's four corners.

   In Bosnia, a lookout at a checkpoint might soon be able to unfold the collapsible pole with microphones at a particular site. Humvees might sport ball-shaped microphone arrays, and computer screens inside vehicles would alert soldiers to areas of danger. "The British and Israelis already have acoustic sniper-detection systems," Kearns said. And a system developed by a French company has already been deployed to Bosnia, Eicke added.

   To date, an acoustic-based system that can sense a blast and determine the direction of the noise is the only type of countersniper system that's been demonstrated in the United States for military use and shown success, said Kearns. While ARL and DARPA conducted the technical tests, Fort Benning soldiers participated in demonstrations of the technology to help researchers collect data.

   "In the demos, we provided soldiers terrain and a good spread of weapons on the range, giving them a decent example of what's in the world today," Kearns said. Soldiers fired everything from AK-47 assault rifles to .50- and .25-caliber foreign weapons in order to gauge the speed, range and elevation of various bullets.

   In another test of technology for the longer-term, Sgt. Chuck Bonnett from ARL and soldiers from Fort Bragg, N.C., recently tested a prototype infrared-based countersniper system at Camp Pendleton, Calif. Developed by the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., the VIPER system uses infrared sensors, a digital camera, a computer and processor to provide video images of a sniper in action. Mounted on a tripod for tests, VIPER in its final form could be mounted on a weapon, but numerous options are being considered.

   Further tests are needed to determine the best method of system implementation, Eicke said. And the handful of IR prototypes now available all contain big, bulky components that will have to be made much smaller.

   A sniper-detection system based on radio frequency -- that is, detection of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum -- is also being considered for the long-term, Eicke said.

   "We have hundreds of good ideas," said Lt. Col. Kevin House, deputy chief of the Army Materiel Command's Bosnia Technology Integration Cell. "It's no small task to determine which are the best." Soldiers in Bosnia can, however, expect to see some form of countersniper system soon, Eicke said.