Wireless system monitors weapons and their health.

• Author: Beidel, Eric
• Position: Defense Technology Newswire

Special Operations forces have begun using magnetic signals to keep track of their weapons.

Visible Assets Inc. recently received a $5 million order from the Defense Department for its system to be used on the SCAR-H battle rifle. The company's Allegro technology combines RuBee wireless identification tags, a shot counter and a custom chip that includes, among other things, an amplifier.

Together, these components are meant to provide rapid inventory assessments and measurements of a weapon's health.

"A weapon is not a simple device," said Visible Assets CEO John Stevens. Each time a rifle is fired, metals crash against each other. "It's being broken every day ... If you can't measure something, you can't fix it."

The technology provides a usage snapshot for a weapon the way an odometer would for a car. But it gets even more detailed than that, Stevens explained. It can tell a user when a weapon is about to jam and predict other failures before they occur. It pinpoints erosion on the barrels and cracked bolts and takes...