Improvised Bombs Baffle Army reports on a number of high-tech efforts to detect and destroy improvised explosive devices. The PING project can find weapons caches:
Another Pentagon microwave project, code-named PING, is already in the country, and has been ‘very successful’ at finding insurgent weapons caches, said Billy Mullins, an associate director of strategic security for the Air Force. The machine, which fits inside a Humvee, sends out waves, looking for metal that will bounce the signals back. Concrete won’t stop the microwaves, so PING can examine a building’s interior.
‘When you find a large amount of metal in a country that doesn’t use a lot of metal in its construction, you have an idea that there’s something there that there shouldn’t be,’ Mullins told a military research conference last week.