ZARI, Afghanistan: On March 3, 2008, a Taliban suicide bomber driving a green truck packed with explosives barreled through the front gate of a small U.S. outpost in Sabari district, Afghanistan, and blew himself up next to the dining facility where American soldiers were just sitting down to dinner.
Taliban foot soldiers streamed in, firing their AK-47s. It took the intervention of a Special Forces A Team to push them back. Two Americans died. Around a dozen were wounded. The Sabari attack was one of several catastrophic attacks on U.S. bases in Afghanistan in recent years. As U.S. forces draw down, there are fewer and fewer troops to spare for guard duty. That’s why, bruised by these attacks, the Pentagon has scrambled to equip its frontline bases with better defenses.
The Combat Outpost Surveillance and Force Protection System, nicknamed “Kraken” after the mythological sea monster because of its many tentacle-like technological extensions, is the latest. Combining tower-mounted cameras, radar, sonic shot-detection and remote-controlled guns and deployable in a single shipping container, the first operational Kraken was recently installed at Forward Operation Base Pashmul South in Zari district, near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
Kraken, which cost $30 million to develop, is “designed to be airlifted into place and setup by a squad of soldiers in two to three hours,” according to an Army release. Along with walls, razor wire and guard posts, Kraken has helped make Pashmul South one of the best-defended U.S. bases … well, ever.
“I’d like to see the Taliban try to attack this place,” 1st Sgt. Jason Pitman, who oversees the base, says rhetorically. Pitman, a six-tour veteran of the Afghanistan war, has seen his share of complex attacks on American outposts. Kraken has many eyes, including an Elta Ground Master vehicle-tracking radar, an additional STS-1400 radar, plus AN/PRS-9 Unattended Ground Sensors built by L3 and five sonic sensors that can detect incoming fire and triangulate the shooter’s location. The system has 11 daylight, infrared and thermal cameras, two of them mounted on a 30-foot mast alongside a laser rangefinder. The rest of the cameras, wired into the central unit, can be positioned around the base perimeter. The main sensors have an approximately 15-mile range.
Kraken can relay its video to deployed ground troops via an overhead Puma Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, although this is apparently rarely practiced. Two PRI Trap 250 remote-controlled 7.62-millimeter guns are included with Kraken but, at present, are operated separately rather than being slaved to the sensors — though integration seems to be the Army’s aim. The whole system and its sensors, minus the guns, can be monitored by a few soldiers with two laptops — and requires very little human intervention.
“The key is the integration standard, fusion and automation,” said Tom O’Neill, the Integrated Base Defense Product director at the military’s Joint Project Manager Guardian, which developed Kraken alongside the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force. If the radar, ground sensors or shot detector spot a viable target, the cameras will automatically slew to it. As the target moves, one camera will automatically hand off to the next.
Kraken is a product of the Army’s controversial Network Integration Exercises, held semiannually at Ft. Bliss, Texas. At the NIEs the Army invites industry to provide new, unproven technologies that are put through realistic combat tests by a dedicated experimentation brigade, many of whose soldiers are veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan. Some of the systems tested at the NIEs have proved too flimsy or complex or simply unnecessary for frontline troops — in particular many of the handheld tablet computers meant to be carried by every soldier in a squad. By contrast Kraken, which drew rave reviews at an NIE in 2011, has arrived in Afghanistan essentially unchanged and to loud applause.
Sgt. Nicholas Pensivy, the resident Kraken expert at Pashmul South, praises the system’s flexibility. With a few taps at his laptop, he can instruct the Kraken to ignore certain kinds of targets that appear on its radars and instead focus on others, automatically slewing its guns and cameras.
“For instance, vehicles driving past the [outpost] are of interest, but vehicles leaving aren’t,” Pensivy says. If there’s a drawback, it’s that Kraken, at present, is self-contained. It does not tie into the military’s vast network of blimp- and tower- mounted cameras and aerial drones that covers much of Afghanistan, relaying imagery from one base to many others. Strangely for base-defense systems, the Army has not been shy about publicizing Kraken, perhaps owing to the possible deterrent effect. If the Taliban know Pashmul South is heavily defended by a smart robotic killer, they might be less likely to attempt an attack. Pashmul South has been untouched this year and Kraken has not yet fired a shot in anger. That could be the best possible evidence that the new system works.
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