[Mb-civic] Xtreme Defense - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Xtreme Defense
Lightning guns, heat rays, weapons that can make you hear the voice of 
God. This is what happens when the war on terror meets the 
entrepreneurial spirit

By Sharon Weinberger
Sunday, August 28, 2005; Page W18

"This is very clandestine," Pete Bitar whispered, as his red Dodge 
Caravan idled in the parking lot of a Burger King near Fort Belvoir. 
"They called last week, and they wanted delivery this week."

It did feel a little clandestine, if a bit unlikely. Yet there, in the 
Burger King parking lot, a small transaction in America's war on terror 
was about to take place. In the minivan were Bitar, the president and 
founder of Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems (XADS), Edward Fry, the 
company's research coordinator, and George Gibbs, of Marine Corps 
Systems Command, who two years ago plucked Bitar's obscure company out 
of its paper existence and provided it with more than half a million 
dollars in Pentagon funding.

They were waiting for Superman.

Bitar had battled start-up disappointments and even ridicule -- not to 
mention January cold and Beltway rush-hour traffic -- to seal his first 
Pentagon deal. The procurement order had gone through so quickly that 
the Indiana-based Bitar, who was in town for a conference, agreed to 
make his final delivery at the Burger King to avoid the hassle of 
getting onto the Virginia Army base.

Bitar flipped open a case containing his first sale: the "dazzler," one 
in a line of about a half-dozen "nonlethal" weapons that XADS is 
marketing to the military. It looked like an executive pen: slick, green 
and flecked with gold. But the pen was really a green laser designed to 
disorient and temporarily blind an enemy. Sale price: $1,100 apiece.

It looked, to use one of Bitar's favorite phrases, really cool.

Bitar glanced up. "There's Superman."

Sure enough, a broad-shouldered man materialized in front of the 
Caravan. He was wearing a leather jacket embroidered with the familiar 
"S" emblem and a matching tie.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/23/AR2005082301227.html?nav=hcmodule
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