Artillery soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, recently conducted parachute jumps while testing a new targeting system for artillery and mortar call for fire missions.
Soldiers with the 2nd Battalion, 319th Field Artillery Regiment spent four days testing the Joint Effects Targeting System.
The system is a man-portable, handheld, target observation, location and designation system built for day or night use in all weather conditions, according to an Army Operational Test Command release.
The system includes a Handheld Target Location Module, a Laser Marker Module and a Precision Azimuth Vertical Angle Module, which are mounted on a tripod.
“Operational testing provides Soldiers the opportunity to use, work with, and offer up their own suggestions on pieces of equipment that can impact development of systems that future Soldiers will use in combat,” Col. Brad Mock, the director of all the Army’s Airborne testing, said in the release.
The soldiers performed seven combat equipment jumps, door bundle jumps and then assembled the equipment and began identifying targets over terrain from 800 to 2,500 meters, according to the release.
Researchers with the Program Manager Soldier Precision Targeting Devices at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, gathered test data during the four-day period for input to procurement decisions by the Army.
Testing is planned to continue at several undesignated sites into 2018, according to the release.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
