Troops shortchanged by the government

There has to be a better way to protect our own soldiers from friendly fire.

While it seems like something out of a science fiction movie, there has to be a way to mark every one of our troops when in a combat zone. On the television series Star Trek all the good guys have a special transponder in their communicator so that their ship can identify and keep track of them.

With today’s Global Positioning Satellites, why couldn’t something like that be done for all of the troops. That way aircraft could identify them as friends and not foes.

Sure some would argue that if the enemy got a hold of the signal codes for our troops they might be able to use that to better target them. But there has to be a way to scramble them so that only friendly scanners could interpret them.

With GPS technology, it is easy enough to always know where a car is or to find our way back to a favourite fishing hole. So why aren’t our troops protected by similar technology?

Of course it would cost money; something our military seems to lack. They can’t even afford to dress our troops with the right colour of camouflage uniforms.

There is no reason why our troops can not be better protected from friendly fire, other than there is no money.

The government just ordered two new commercial jets for the top politicians to fly around in at a cost of about $100 million.

Yet our troops, those who defend our freedom, fly around in antiquated Sea King helicopters, are on the ground in the wrong colour of uniforms and are unprotected by technology that would have saved four lives last week in Afghanistan.

–Until then,

Ken