Piercing the fog: to succeed, soldier 'need to see the environment'.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Troops fighting in Iraq's cities often complain that they cannot see the enemy, who is most often hiding among the population. They need sensors that can penetrate walls, identify foes in pitch dark and locate buried explosives.

Military researchers and private contractors have seen an explosion in the demand for new sensor technologies. In response, they are developing next-generation devices and also finding novel ways to employ current systems.

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"The sensor technology is being deployed on virtually every platform imaginable," said David Strong, vice president of marketing at FLIR Systems Inc. Sensors are no longer restricted to multi-million dollar Apache helicopters. They can be attached to humvees or carried by dismounted troops.

"Part of it has to do with this asymmetric warfare that we're into," he added. "Everybody is vulnerable. Everybody needs protection. Everybody needs to see their environment."

That's not to say that the military doesn't still need to locate tanks on the battlefield, experts said.

However, "the nature of the warfare is driving the technology in directions that are very closely linked together," Strong said.

Gary Martin, acting deputy to the commander at the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, said sense-through-wall technologies can assist soldiers in urban operations.

Industry has been busy inventing handheld devices that are "proving the ability to detect moving [targets] behind walls or behind obstacles," he said at the Association of the United States Army winter conference.

Some ground forces are also now receiving the next generation of night vision technology--the enhanced night vision goggle--which blends the ambient light found in traditional image enhancement with infrared signatures, which pick up heat.

Don Morello, director of U.S. military marketing at the goggle's manufacturer, ITT Night Vision, said current urban operations are pushing these advances.

Users now see two colors instead of one. Orange from the thermal, heat-sensing infrared, and the traditional green from image enhancement. This is particularly useful in cities. An electrical cable, for example, appears to be a black line in first- and second-generation night vision optics. Overlaying infrared highlights the electrically charged line in orange, which gives the soldier more information.

Infrared sensors cannot see through glass. Image enhancement...