December 15, 2001	Saturday	Ramazan 29, 1422

SAN JOSE, Dec 14: Meet the Windows-based warrior of the future, locked and loaded with the latest information-age weapons from Silicon Valley.

Like a toy soldier come to life, U.S Army Sergeant Chris Augustine was paraded out in full battledress and adorned with gadgets at the Silicon Valley Technology & Homeland Security Summit in San Jose, California on Thursday.

The goal of the conference, the first of its kind, was to show how technology companies could find military contracts to supplant market losses from the economic slowdown and dot-com bust.

“You’ve seen the bin Laden tapes. We’d like to show you a response to that,” Hugh Duffy, chief executive of Pemstar Pacific Consultants, a defense contractor in Mountain View, California, said to applause.

During a luncheon presentation, Duffy showed off a test version of the Land Warrior System he designed and his firm is manufacturing for the US government.

Sporting what Duffy described as a “personal area network,” Augustine, an Airborne Ranger, walked on stage holding an unloaded M-4 assault rifle at the ready with a lot of little black boxes strapped on his body.

OFF-THE-SHELF COMPONENTS: The equipment runs on a wireless local area network, allowing soldiers to communicate with each other and with commanders in far away offices, Duffy said.

The rifle features an adjustable stock with a lens near the end that transmits thermal and regular images to a matchbook-size screen. The pictures can be transmitted over the network to central command, said Justus Decher, executive director of business development at Pemstar.

Soldiers can use the rifle barrel like a periscope to survey the area without having to climb out of a foxhole and use the thermal lens to find people hiding in the brush, he said.

Strapped to Augustine’s right back hip was a computer running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 2000 operating system and on his left back hip was an Intel Corp. StrongARM-based “triple navigation box,” Decher said.

A Global Positioning System antenna, jutted up from the right shoulder and a wireless antenna was on the left shoulder.

The system was made from off-the-shelf components purchased at Fry’s Electronics and RadioShack Corp. Duffy said, adding that he had built the prototype in just 12 weeks and beat out companies like Raytheon Co. and Motorola Inc. for the first of several contracts in January 2000, he said.

The US military will complete its testing of the Land Warrior system within six months, Decher said.

The company would not say when the systems are expected to be deployed in the field, saying the US government did not want that information released.—Reuters