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Rapid Deployment Integrated Surveillance System (RDISS)
RDISS (Rapid Deployment Integrated Surveillance System took just three weeks of design and manufacturing by the Army's Rapid Equipping Force. It is already being used in the field in Iraq.
(RDISS camera [photo: Maj. Robert Lentz])
RDISS solves a persistent problem in Iraq; situational awareness for soldiers at joint security stations and combat outposts.
"There are a lot of areas, especially obscured areas, around the combat outposts and we needed a way to cut down on exposing the troops to this broad danger," said Sgt. 1st Class Mark Henderson, REF operations NCO.
REF plans to install hundreds of RDISSs in Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of the year.
This is obviously a helpful system, but if what you want is quickly deployed surveillance, you can't beat the recording eyes from Robert Silverberg's 1969 novel The Man in the Maze:
..three alien figures came strolling through the somber grove. They were elongated, almost spidery, with clusters of eight or ten jointed limbs depending from their narrow shoulders...One of them paused, bent peered closely at the ground. It scooped up the eye that had been witnessing its activities. The image grew chaotic; Muller guessed that the eye was being passed from hand to hand...
Boardman said, "That was taken less than a month ago. We parked a drone ship fifty thousand kilometers up and dropped roughly a thousand eyes on Beta Hydri IV. At least half went straight to the bottom of the ocean... This was the only one that actually showed us a clear view of the aliens."
(Read more about Silverberg's recording eye)
Via The Rapid Deployment Integrated Surveillance System and Army.mil/images.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 7/28/2007)
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