I have read stories about some of the intense firefights in Iraq and Afghanistan which mentioned that the participants often had severe short-term (and probably long-term) hearing loss. If you’ve ever been around guns, then you can certainly understand why firing a few hundred rounds from your weapon without the benefit of hearing protection might cause this to happen. And unfortunately, it’s also easy to understand why soldiers can’t go walking around a war zone wearing earplugs all day: you need to be able to hear, as clearly as possible, any move your enemy may be making as well as any friendly-to-friendly communication before and during a firefight.
A few days ago a friend and I conceived of “clipping” ear plugs. These would block out all sound (or at least as much as possible; best NRR I’ve seen is 33) except for what gets picked up by a microphone and transmitted by an in-ear speaker, with electronic circuitry acting as a middle-man to amplify quiet sounds and mitigate dangerously loud sounds. This would be the best of both worlds: you could hear the bad guy tiptoeing around the corner, but a muzzle blast two feet from your head wouldn’t make your ears bleed.
We posited that such a device must not have been invented yet, since if it was, it would surely be in use by the military; afterall, if it would help keep a soldier alive/effective and protect his physical health for future duty (and after retirement), it would certainly be worth a hundred bucks, wouldn’t it? All of these technologies are already out there; it just requires someone to put them all together into one tidy package.
And then, in the carrier deck noise level thread, someone posted this link, describing earplugs for carrier deck personnel that employ active noise cancellation. Not exactly the same idea, but similar.
This seems like a no-brainer to me, but then I admit I am not experienced in the ways of defense contracts, combat tactics, and other likely relevant fields.
So…can someone tell me why our combat soldiers don’t have high-tech ear protection for field duty?
I’m sure that quite a few of guys out there have those foam ear plugs that you normally see in industry. One of the problems with those ear plugs is that they reduce a lot of the background sounds, which is a good thing on a controlled factor floor, but might seriously reduce a soldiers sensory
capability, in times other than direct combat.
We have had good advances in hearing protection
over the last several decades, along with medical data on hearing loss, that suggests that a compromise solution has not been achieved, or it has and we have just not asked the question regarding what they are using.
You mean something like this? Sure, it’s bigger than earplugs but there is at least one model(not sure if the model I linked does) that will fit under a combat helmet.
Why they’re not used in real combat, I don’t know, if I were to guess it is because of cost and battery issues.
Continuous noise, like MG fire, or engine roar, will still shut them down. Might not want something that shuts down on an unpredictable basis like that. People are using hearing protection a lot more than they used to, but they would rather save their lives than save their hearing.
You’ve got earmuffs, with a microphone on the outside of each ear and a headphone speaker inside. It amplifies normal sounds such as speech in order to bring them closer to the level they would be at without the earmuffs, but it doesn’t amplify very loud sounds. I’ve used them at a shooting range.
Besides battery life and ruggedness, the problem is fidelity. You can’t make a really high-quality microphone that is cheap, rugged and compact, and the same goes for the headphones. They work great for speech and whatnot, but not for more subtle things. You also lose a lot of the directionality of the sound which is important in a warzone.
They would help in the middle of an intense firefight, but it would be very bad to walk around all day in them. That said, I would think it would be a good idea to have some sort of hearing protection that the soldiers could don once the shooting starts. I would think that even a soldier wearing hearing protection would hear better than one whose ears are severely ringing.
BTW, this is an entirely different thing from active noise cancellation.
Probably for the same reason many of them didn’t have needed armor on their vehicles to start with (many welded metal plates on to as ‘home-made’ armor) – the money to buy it went to some other part of the military.
Buying fancy stealth fighters with multi-billion dollar software packages is much sexier than armor for the floors of jeeps. And those companies pay a lot more kickbacks than steel companies do.
A friend of mine wears hearing aids. As a side benefit, he also uses them as ear plugs when he goes shooting, since they automatically clip when the noise level gets too great (I forget what db level, but it’s adequate to be legal hearing protection for a firing range). If you turned the hearing aid amplification down a bit, they would do exactly what you described.
So yeah, it’s already been invented, it’s just not used by the military.
These are used by the army. Pretty much what is described in the OP, only at $9 a pair, not $100.
As a currently serving army medic, responsible for the health and safety of 100 infantrymen, I can tell you that the problem is not technology, it is stubbornness. I have to argue, beg, and bitch at my soldiers just to get them to wear earplugs while at the range, never mind combat.