Fishkill Business makes equipment that saves soldiers lives

Written by Craig Wolf Poughkeepsie Journal

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FISHKILL — In Afghanistan, American soldiers face a high risk of being blown to bits. A company here is doing something about it.

Advanced Reconnaissance Corp. has gone through a surge of job creation under a government contract to make devices that can detect disturbed earth that may signal the presence of a buried “improvised explosive device” that can blast passing military vehicles and maim or kill the people inside.

ARC, as the company usually refers to itself, was just a handful of people keeping an idea and a technology alive until the doctor came. That was the federal government, with a $10 million contract award in May that let it put the idea into practice.

It’s now close to deploying the systems for use in airplanes. “Disturbed earth is what we’re looking for,” explained Joe Jamin, vice president. “It’s remote sensing. You fly over the road and analyze the reflected light from the road.”

A later phase is intended to add vehicular and handheld systems.

The work was funded under the Department of Defense’s Department’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO. The military has been seeking ways to cut down deaths and serious injuries caused by the improvised bombs that enemies place along roads and detonate when an American or allied vehicle comes along.

Tougher vehicles, mine-clearing machines and sniffer dogs are some of the approaches. Reconnaissance systems like ARC’s are another.

Jamin said ARC expects to have 27 people on board by the end of the month, some of them in an office in Maryland but most of them here.

Mark Westfield, the CEO and chairman of ARC, said it has been a long path to this point, starting with the early development of the sensing technology going back many years and continuing with a pitch to the military to develop it into actual systems.

“The funding dried up and it was very hard on us,” Westfield said. “It didn’t dry up because of the technology. It dried up because of the shenanigans that went on with Congress and the budget.”

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