Through the walls sensors are nothing new, but the Office of Naval Research is looking to go one more step: render walls and other barriers "transparent." According to a broad agency announcement:
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The Transparent Urban Structures (TUS) program will develop measurable advances for improving the collection, understanding, and dissemination of intelligence for the urban conflict. ONR seeks to develop technology which assists the warfighter in understanding the urban terrain of interest by detecting and classifying threats, both inside buildings and underground, and by maximizing situational awareness inside structures. The key focus of this program is to develop advanced technologies that make urban man-made structures transparent, thereby eliminating the safe harbor that buildings provide to hostile forces and their malicious activities. This capability will be provided through basic phenomenological research, hardware, and algorithm development of sense-through-wall technology that can directly support tactical expeditionary urban operations in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). *Sense-through-wall systems resulting from this research will enable the Marine Corps, Special Operations, and the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC) to execute their urban warfighting philosophies.
Defense Review outlines a number of radars being marketed as "through-the-wall" sensing devices, but that's not all the Navy wants. They also would like to have three-dimensional maps of urban areas, decision aids, and a great deal of specificity about what lies behind walls. In other words, they wisely want to integrate a variety of technologies. According to the solicitation, they even want technology that helps in "determining intent of personnel detected within structures..."
