By John Keller

FORT MONMOUTH, N.J. — U.S. Army optoelectronics experts say it's time for a new generation of thermal sights for a wide variety of weapons, including infantry assault rifles. They are finding their solution from DRS Technologies Inc. in Parsippany, N.J.

Officials of the Army Communications–Electronics Command (CECOM) at Fort Monmouth, N.J., awarded DRS a five-year potential $375 million contract last month to design and build a new family of light, medium, and heavy thermal weapon sights.

DRS optoelectronics designers are using advanced microbolometer-based infrared technology for these thermal weapon sights, which will give Army soldiers and armament crews the ability to detect and identify threats at long surveillance and target-acquisition ranges.

The new family of weapon sights will function regardless of light level, weather conditions, or adverse battlefield conditions, DRS officials say. The light weapon sights weigh about 1.6 pounds and will mount onto hand-held automatic weapons.

DRS engineers are developing the thermal weapon sights together with experts from the Army's Team Soldier at Fort Belvoir, Va. DRS will build the sights at the company's DRS Optronics facilities in Palm Bay and Melbourne, Fla., and at the DRS Infrared Technologies facilities in Dallas.

Deliveries of light, medium, and heavy thermal weapon sights, thermal-imaging module options, and spares will start in September and continue through March 2009. The CECOM contract to DRS has a base value of $118 million, and could exceed $375 million with options, company officials say.

"Optimized for greater range of threat detection and wider field of view at a reduced cost, these sights will place increased lethality in the hands of individual war fighters, enhancing their survivability on the operational and urban battlefields," says Fred Marion, president of the DRS Surveillance & Reconnaissance Group.

DRS currently produces the Thermal Weapon Sight–3000/4000 family of day and night sights for reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition. These 320-by-240-pixel devices use microbolometer-based uncooled thermal-imaging technology and operate in the 8-to-12-microspectral range to detect personnel and vehicles during absolute darkness.

DRS also builds the 320-by-240-pixel Land Warrior Thermal Weapon Sight for the U.S. Army's Land Warrior program office as a light thermal-weapon-sight demonstrator for operations where external power and display are available and when size and weight are major concerns.

The Land Warrior Thermal Weapon Sight comes with 15-degree horizontal field-of-view lens, with options for a 40-degree lens.