The weapons that will be used to fight tomorrow’s wars will need to address a very old problem — friendly fire. Researchers think complex algorithms can help by telling soldiers where to shoot, and where not to. But how much trust should soldiers place in a machine that helps them to decide who to kill?
“The reality is that soldiers are doing a very difficult task under very difficult circumstances,” Greg Jamieson, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Cognitive Engineering Laboratory, told me over the phone. “So, if you can provide some kind of tool to help people make better decisions about where there’s a target or who this target is or the identity of that target, that’s in the interest of the civilian or non-aligned people in the environment.”
The problem is that the tool Jamieson is referring to, called automated target detection or ATD, doesn’t really exist in any sort of ready-to-deploy form for individual soldiers. So, in partnership with Defense Research and Development Canada, Jamieson and the other researchers at CEL are tackling the research backwards — instead of testing new tech to see how soldiers respond, they’re testing soldiers to understand what they need out of new tech.
The U.S. military has begun testing several so-called smart rifles made by the applied technology start-up TrackingPoint Inc., company officials said.
The Army is rumored to have acquired six of the precision-guided firearms, which cost as much as $27,000 apiece. Oren Schauble, a marketing official with the Austin, Texas-based company, confirmed the military bought a handful of them in recent months for evaluation. A spokeswoman for the service didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail requesting comment.
“The military has purchased several units for testing and evaluation purposes,” Schauble said during an interview with Military.com Tuesday at the annual SHOT Show here.
It’s not hard to see why more than 30 government and law enforcement agencies have requested demonstrations of the potentially game-changing technology since the company debuted the rifle at last year’s show.
With only a few minutes of instruction on the weapon, this correspondent was able to hit a target almost 1,000 yards away on the first shot. Of the 70 or so reporters and other novice shooters who tested the weapon on Monday at a range in Boulder City, Nev., only one or two missed the target, which was located about 980 yards away, according to Schauble.
“That is a better day than usual,” he said. “I would say we’re at about 70 percent first-shot success probability at 1,000 yards … with inexperienced shooters.”
This week at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show, firearms-manufacturer TrackingPoint announced an AR-15 version of its computer-controlled precision rifles. The company claims that the new weapon can hit moving targets “out to five football fields away.” And anyone can use it.
Described by the company as a “precision-guided firearm,” the 500-Series rifle could revolutionize how armies all over the world prepare for war. The technology promises a world where expert riflemen can be trained with very little effort—blurring the distinction between infantry and sharpshooters.
