West Point - The heart-pounding bass sound thumps in the background: Somewhere in the desert, U.S. Army soldiers are preparing to storm an Iraqi hut.
The tempo quickens. Nearby, a black-veiled insurgent kneels over an artillery tube. A shell is launched. Obliteration is imminent.
But seconds before the whistling round explodes, tiny pagers in the pockets of U.S. soldiers begin to beep. The troops flee. Bricks fly. The hut crumbles in a harmless heap. No one is hurt...
Still in its preproduction phase, the device, creators say, could become as important as body armor and cover fire in the endless fight to save soldiers' lives on the battlefield.
"It's a paradigm shift," said Maj. Fernando Maymi, the West Point assistant professor who helped engineer the system....
Since October 2001, when the Pentagon began tracking the causes of death of U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, 160 soldiers have been killed by mortar and rocket fire. More than 2,000 have been wounded.
The idea for the strike warning system, as it's called, came by way of Fort Monmouth, N.J., where Paul Manz has spent years developing systems for warfare. He approached Maymi with the concept about five years ago.
Here's what they've come up with: On-the-ground radar systems scan the sky for enemy fire. When a shell is launched, software estimates where it's going to land.
Radio signals then relay the information to pagers carried by individual soldiers. Because the system knows where each pager is - a global positioning chip is implanted in each one - only soldiers within the blast zone are alerted.
The cost? Less than $500.
Alan Avidan, senior vice president for sales and marketing at MadahCom Inc., of Sarasota, Fla., said his company is close to signing a deal with the Army to manufacture the device.
He is especially interested in nonmilitary applications, from assisted-living alert pagers to devices that could help parents track children, at amusement parks, for instance.