GlobalSecurity.org In the News

Boston Globe July 23, 2008

Tuning in to trouble

Army places $74m order for a Cambridge company's antisniper device

By Ross Kerber

BBN Technologies of Cambridge has done plenty of military work in the past, but never has its equipment been so dear to individual soldiers as its newest gear.

The technology firm yesterday said the Army has ordered 8,131 of its "Boomerang" shooter-detection systems for $74 million, by far its largest contract for the devices to date. The company has already deployed around 400 Boomerang systems in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army is only the latest institution buying such systems, which also are becoming popular with civilian police forces, as improved sensors and processors make them more accurate.

Boomerang systems include a sensor and display unit the size of a clock radio, wired to an antenna mast bristling with seven microphones. These record the noise created by a gun's muzzle blast, plus the shock wave created by the bullet as it moves through the air, and then use BBN software to pinpoint the shooter's location. The system can be mounted on vehicles like Humvees or installed at individual checkpoints.

According to BBN, once the system detects a gunshot, it emits an audible signal describing the estimated location and range of the shot's origin such as: "Shot, 3 o'clock, 200 meters." A computer screen displays the same details plus the elevation from which the shot was fired. The devices are particularly critical in loud settings such as convoys or urban streets where troops often can't tell right away when they're under fire, much less where it's coming from, said BBN vice president Mark Sherman.

"The genesis of this was that a lot of Humvees weren't armored and the only way to know in noisy situations when you're being shot at is when there are holes in the windshield." The system will keep track of successive shots as they come in, he said, and was designed to eliminate the false alarms that have hampered other systems.

"If you're in a combat environment, it's pretty high stress. If it keeps giving you false alarms, soldiers will turn it off," Sherman said. The company also has versions under development that could be worn by individual soldiers and mounted in helicopters.

The Boomerang is similar to a system being used by the Boston Police Department, the ShotSpotter, which uses numerous sensors deployed around neighborhoods to cover wide areas. Boston is one of 30 police departments in the United States using ShotSpotter, a system it bought for $1.5 million last year.

Company spokesman Gregg Rowland said ShotSpotter Inc. has also sold systems to military agencies for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, but said the costs are classified. BBN's contract, however, is much larger than anything his company has supplied, Rowland said. Meanwhile, BBN said it has no plans to sell Boomerang to civilian forces.

A third company, the Planning Systems Inc. unit of Waltham's Foster-Miller Inc., also has sold sniper-detection gear to the Special Forces and other military agencies. (Planning Systems recently sued ShotSpotter in federal court in Boston, claiming it violated a patent; ShotSpotter declined to comment on the suit.)

Devices known as "fire-spotters" once were cumbersome radar rigs used to track incoming missiles and artillery rounds. But advancements in microchips and software have made smaller systems more practical lately. However, one weakness of the current systems is that many smaller-caliber arms shoot slower bullets that don't create as much air disturbance for sensors to pick up.

John Pike of the GlobalSecurity.org website said the shooter-detection systems make impressive use of sensors to track bullets traveling hundreds of yards in fractions of a second. In contrast, a mortar shell might be in the air half a minute and as high as a mile up, a much simpler target to detect and trace with radar.

BBN also sells software for voice-translation and healthcare management. But it is best known for the role it played pioneering the Internet in the 1960s and 1970s. Called Bolt Beranek & Newman Inc. at the time, after its founders from MIT, it also did much of that work under Pentagon contracts and was first to send a person-to-person e-mail using the "@" sign. It also designed acoustics for the United Nation's General Assembly hall in Manhattan.

But none of that made BBN rich, and it has since evolved through several owners and spun off units on its way to becoming the closely held entity it is today, with 700 employees including 450 in Massachusetts. Big investors include Accel Partners of Palo Alto, Calif., and General Catalyst Partners of Cambridge.