I just finished listening to No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden
Much of the rest of the book concerns Navy SEAL training and missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a American citizen you’ll be simultaneously awed that some of us are willing to endure so much physical discomfort and risk and dismayed that so many tax dollars are spent to fight against a handful of barely literate guys with a few hundred dollars worth of Chinese-made weapons. Owen describes how SEAL tactics have evolved from “flying to the X” (dropping in on a house by fast-roping down from a helicopter) to “patrolling to the X” (landing a few miles away and walking quietly in the dark). Much of the tactical advantage of the SEALs seems to come from their use of infrared lasers and night-vision googles. They light up the house with a bunch of bright IR beams, quietly enter, and shoot people in their beds. When they are lucky, people in adjacent bedrooms don’t even wake up from the sound of the silenced rifles that the SEALs typically use. What is difficult to understand why a market has not developed for an automated system that uses a CMOS sensor and a bit of software to sound an alarm when swept by an IR laser. One would think that Afghans and Iraqis would be willing to pay a reasonable price for a machine that they could place in a window and that would wake them up when U.S. forces come to visit.
[Wikipedia says that the U.S. military was upset about the book’s publication on the grounds that it revealed secret SEAL tactics. To the extent that the guys we are constantly at war with did not previously appreciate the importance of infrared lasers I would have to agree with the Pentagon.]
Finally the book has a few stories from Bissonnette’s childhood in a remote Alaskan village.
Those IR lasers show up quite nicely in night-vision equipment (these days monoculars are more common than goggles), so they’re really only useful against illiterate peasants with no equipment to speak of. All it takes is one guy with a $3000 piece of equipment and suddenly they become “here I am, shoot me!” beacons.
Strictly speaking, night-vision goggles work on very low light, not infrared, so it shouldn’t be necessary to supply your own infrared light source and counter measures would have to be technologies like motion detectors.
Most “night” surveillance cameras work with infrared since the military night-vision technology is far too expensive for most residential or even commercial surveillance systems, especially since an infrared light source is a good alternative to military grade night-vision.
As far as giving away military secrets, the value of night-vision was described in Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger novel in 1989.
IR sensors would make for a crappy alarm system. Any time a car drove by, its headlights would set off your alarm. Really, any defense that relies on line-of-sight detection of your enemy gives you almost no time to prepare. The reason Osama lived so long was that they kept moving him around and were very careful (yet seemingly not careful enough) to prevent leaks as to his location.
He was previously profiled on 60 Minutes.
Phil,
You question why there isn’t a market for an automated system that detects IR lasers.
Your second sentence in your second paragraph sort of answers that, doesn’t it? ))
NVG’s are passive so can’t be easily detected, and they are used more often than IR lasers. There are other problems with lasers, for example, it’s hard to tell your laser dot from your buddy’s.
As for “patrolling to the X”, that’s not always better, as the French recently demonstrated in Africa.