Child Locators / Troop Locators ???

We can apparently locate a lost child if they are wearing a $179 watch (see http://www.gpschildlocatorwatch.com ). So why can't the government install a version of these on each soldier in Iraq? I'm sure that, with our governmental technological capabilities, the gps locater installed in this relatively small watch could be shrunk down a bit, and placed under the skin of a soldier. (In fact, I believe that I heard about this on 60 minutes a while back where a test was being done on a child with one of these under-the-skin locators).

I doubt that the watch contains anything too proprietary, however lets do a quick analysis. Since retail costs are about twice wholesale, and wholesale price is about 125% of manufacturer price, then the price from the manufacturer comes to about $71.60. There is profit built into that for the manufacturer, but the government should be able to get a good deal by buying one for each one of our troops. So lets say they can get it down to $60/watch. 250,000 troops * $60/watch = $15,000,000 total cost. That is probably equal to the rounding error in the overall budget in the war.

Even if we had to buy all the watches at $179 each, that is still only $44,750,000...still within reach of our government.

If we cannot get the components small enought to imbed under one's skin, then why not take the functionality, and imbed it within, say, the automatic weapon of the soldier. You know that the terrorists would keep the automatic weapon for future use (of course, it would not be public knowledge, and strictly Top Secret, that the weapon contains a GPS receiver!).

The watch also allows for the equivalent of a 911 call. If one of our guys can trigger this emergency call, we could be notified immediately of an in-progress kidnapping, and begin tracking the soldier (and kidnappers) immediately. This would result in either a) quick capture of Al-Zarkowi and his gang of henchmen, not to mention others or b) the kidnappers would soon figure out that we are able to track our soldiers, and would then stop kidnapping them. Of course, they would resort back to just trying to kill them. I'd rather die of a bullet in combat, than from being decapitated while alive!