America is only in the first year of the kind of fight Israel has been waging for decades. So it's only natural that the Pentagon is starting to get some of its combat technology from Tel Aviv.
"From tennis ball-sized sensors that can be thrown or shot from snipers rifles into terrorist lairs to wall-breaching devices for urban combat, gear invented for Israels anti-terror wars in Gaza and the West Bank are increasingly being put in the hands of U.S. warfighters," Defense News reports.
One system proposed for the U.S. Marines is a remote-controlled weapon station for crew protection and target engagement. Combined with an... acoustic sensor detection and direction-finding device, it essentially becomes a robotic anti-sniper weapon for wheeled or tracked vehicles...
[An Israeli] firm sold 100 maritime versions of the remote-controlled systems to the U.S. Special Operations Command in late 2003...
Meanwhile, the Pentagons Combating Terrorism Technology Support Office has ordered multiple prototypes of a new, 360-degree surveillance sensor from a small Tel Aviv-based firm called ODF Optronics Ltd. Called the Eyeball, the tennis ball-sized reconnaissance system contains motion-detectors, a voice-activated recorder, speakers, microphones and transmitters to see, hear and communicate with enemy insurgents within a 25 meter radius...
And, the U.S. Army has ordered an additional 14 Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd.-developed Hunter unmanned aerial vehicles to support ongoing operations in Iraq.
The Hunter contract, estimated at $33 million, is a follow-on to the Armys existing fleet of systems, which collectively flew more than 3,000 hours over the Iraqi theater, U.S. and Israeli sources said.
