Secret Duty
Once upon a time, I went to Iraq.
Along the way, I did what most reservists end up doing: parlaying civilian expertise into military pseudo-specialties. The first of these, for me, was learning Arabic at an accelerated pace which, while neat, turned out to be mostly useless because we were awash with local nationals and Arabic-speaking Americans helping us out.
The second involved two extremely new computer-based counter-sniper/counter-battery long range detection systems. I remember that it was just after we had suffered the biggest mortar attack so far in April of 2004. According to my LJ, on or around April 23. Apparently the DoD had already been looking at an infrared system that could detect and process the muzzle flashes of everything from small arms to artillery. They bought it off the workbench of the company that had developed it, and flown it and two engineers to Iraq to set it up and give us a basic orientation.
That system involved a multi-camera infrared getup that we could control from inside our company’s TOC, swiveling the camera around remotely to look for enemy fire. It came with a laser range-finder attached so theoretically it would pop up an indicator on my screen where the fire had come from, then range it and spit out some (theoretically) useful targeting data.
The other system arrived a few days later. It was an acoustical system called UTAMS that used four sets of four microphones, mounted on tripods and arrayed on the corners of our FOB to triangulate the audio signature of small arms fire and explosions. The Wikipedia article, incidentally, needs to be edited badly; the reference they draw their information from-an article on terrain denial missions in southern Iraq-does not indicate that the crew at LSA Diamondback was the first to test it, nor that they first picked up on its ability to pick up IED explosions and such.
Whether we were the first either, I’m not entirely sure, at least as far as the UTAMS goes. I’m fairly certain we were the first with the infrared system since, by the engineer’s own admission, we were working with his workbench prototype.
I remember, particularly, on August 13, 2004 the village to the west of Abu Ghraib suddenly erupted in gunfire. The map on my screen which we used to track the UTAMS contacts suddenly sprouted uncountable pink carats indicating individual shots detected. A few minutes later, as officers and senior NCOs were crowding around, asking what was going on, we got a call over the radio: the Iraqi soccer team had defeated Portugal at the Olympics, and most of the country was going bananas in celebration.
Anyway, what I found most fascinating about it all was that I was never specifically enjoined to secrecy about it, and I sure as heck don’t carry any kind of security clearance beyond what they furnish to every Marine upon entering service. But I didn’t really want to talk about it while I was there, since I figured that was the real core of operational security. Any insurgent with a pair of binoculars and a notepad could have figured out our post-and-relief schedule, for instance. But the capabilities of those two systems might have been very useful information for them.
So, I waited five years. Elements of the acoustic system showed up on Futureweapons, UTAMS has a subheading in a Wikipedia article, and the US is no longer operating out of the facility we used it at. All-in-all, I think I’m safe talking about it in this kind of informal manner.
Oh, and for anyone who thinks I got off easy in the war, sitting in the TOC most of the time-my wonderful squad leader had the same thought, and kicked me back out into regular duty rotation after about a month. I had a couple other stints operating those systems, but I did spent most of my time in Iraq doing something other than staring at a computer screen.
Mirrored from Bum Scoop.