October 31, 2006: Several hundred hummers in Iraq and Afghanistan have a special gun turret. From a distance, the hummer looks like just another vehicle with a .50 caliber machine-gun mounted in a turret. But those special turrets contain the M707 Knight Precision Targeting System. Added to the turret are; a laser designator (for laser guided bombs or missiles), a laser rangefinder, a thermal imager (for seeing at night or in bad weather), an inertial/GPS navigation system (which also supplies information for smart bombs), communications gear, and computers for quickly taking data from the laser range finder, and transmitting it to a bomber overhead, which then drops the smart bomb (GPS guided or laser homing) on the target. Think of it as; point, calculate, transmit and shoot. The troops were calling for this pretty quickly once it was seen, in late 2001, what GPS bombs could do. The M707 system was introduced in 2005, and now, about 200 are in use, and hundreds more are on order.
