ShotSpotter to be tested on the battlefield
An acoustic gun and mortar detection system which uses sound triangulation to detect and locate the origin of weapons’ fire to be tested in Iraq
In 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that there was probably a conspiracy involved in the assassination of President John Kennedy, a conclusion primarily based on the acoustic evidence contained on the Dallas Police Department (DPD) radio recordings (for a scientific analysis of the acoustic evidence, see D. B. Thomas’s article clisted below).
Why this walk down memory lane? Becasue in news which would be of interest to first responders and law enforcement, the U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) is about to test in Iraq a technology designed to locate enemy combatants by the sound of their weapons. ShotSpotter, a technology developed by the Santa Clara, California-based company with the same name could help locate insurgents by zeroing in on the sound of their gunfire.
The ShotSpotter system is an acoustic gun and mortar detection system which uses sound triangulation to detect and locate the origin of weapons’ fire from different small arms and crew-served weapons. On the battlefield, ShotSpotter combines information from individual sensors worn by troops, sensors on mobile units, and sensors in fixed locations to triangulate the origin of small arms fire. The information is conveyed to a laptop or PDA, which will show the location of the shot on a digital map in near-real time.
Ted Ferrazano of USJFCOM’s Joint Intelligence Command says that the ShotSpotter can prove invaluable in today’s battlefield. “Especially in an urban environment where you have all types of noise and it may not be clear in the heat of battle where the shots are coming from, ShotSpotter will tell you so you can react accordingly to the direction of the gun fire,” he said.
The system was originally designed for use in law enforcement and later adapted for military use. Based on its initial evaluation, USJFCOM suggested some improvements, among them the integration of the Cursor on Target data interoperability schema which allows ShotSpotter data to be shared better and faster with other dissimilar sensors over a network. USJFCOM also urged development of filters which allow ShotSpotter to distinguish between small arms fire and the copious amount of background noise which exists in an urban environment.
Earlier tests by law enforcement agencies show a 90 percent accuracy rate for ShotSpotter, and the system is rently in use with the police forces of several U.S. cities.
-read more about the acoustic evidence in the Kennedy assassination in D. B. Thomas’s, “Echo Correlation Analysis and the Acoustic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination Revisited,” Science & Justice 41, no. 1 (2001): 21-32
