Message posted by gary on January 29, 2002 at 22:49:56 PST:

I'm guessing D boys are Delta Force. I've been following this conflict the Bush administration is having with calling the Taliban prisoners POWs. The loop hole being used by the US is that they don't wear uniforms. I can buy that legal loophole, but then Colin Powel pointed out that special forces don't wear uniforms either, and he wants to make sure they get POW status if captured.

Regarding the laser illumination, it is possible they are just modulating the laser beam amplitude (or even gating it) to make it harder for the enemy to duplicate. When I worked for EG&G, I got to see some "fuse" designs. A "fuse" in high tech military lingo is an electronic subsystem to insure that only you can arm and detonate the weapon, rather than your opponent. This particular fuse would require 3 tones to be recieved with specific relative levels for the tone amplitudes. Anyway, you could do similar tricks with lasers.

If they were really just trying to detect a specific frequency of light, my recollection is EG&G made Bragg Cells for that purpose. I was working on other stuff (components for passive submarine detection), so I don't know the exact details.

In Reply to: Re: Nevada Horses... posted by Andre' M. Dall'au on January 29, 2002 at 9:38:28 PST:

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