Darpa announced yesterday that it will host a secret industry day to gather input on a new anti-sniper program. C-Sniper, like the several other counter-sniper programs being rushed through research and development for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is supposed to develop technology to identify and neutralize snipers in complex urban environments. This is difficult to do -- the system must tune out irrelevant sounds, which are plentiful in a urban environment, pinpoint the location of the shooter so that civilians aren't taken out in the process, and do it all while riding on a moving vehicle. I wrote about countersniper technology in the April issue of DTI magazine.
But whereas existing and developing countersniper systems are focused on detecting the direction of muzzle blasts, C-Sniper aims to see the sniper before he even fires his weapon.
Darpa already sponsored counter-sniper research for a technology called Boomerang which is made by BBN Technologies and deployed with U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It looks like a giant hairbrush with acoustic sensors in an array of microphones centered on a pole and is mounted on vehicles.
Darpa says the C-Sniper will be integrated into the Crosshairs program, which is a larger effort to identify and target a variety of threats including shooters, rocket propelled grenades, mortars and man portable air defense systems.
--Catherine MacRae Hockmuth
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