October 20, 2009 Check it out! Latest and greatest military gadgets Play video

(NECN: Peter Howe, Boston, Mass.) Some of the most cutting-edge, military-grade wireless video communications technology was on display in Boston Tuesday -- technology that's increasingly being used to keep the peace at home.

The occasion was MilCom 2009, a sort of trade show for about 3,700 people and 250 companies at the World Trade Center and Seaport Hotel.

Chris Marzilli, CEO of General Dynamics C4 Systems, showed off C4's "Land Warrior" system, an 8-pound unit that combines a wearable computer, keyboard, radio, and monocle eyepiece on the helmet that gives a military commander a view equivalent to a 17-inch computer monitor.

"You know where you are, you know where you are, you know where the foe is,'' Marzilli said, reducing the risks of what is often called "the fog of war" by replacing it with a computerized representation of the battlefield, including video from unmanned aerial vehicles. The computer was designed and is manufactured at C4's 1,000-person Taunton, Mass., unit.

Cutting-edge, tough-enough-for-war systems like Land Warrior are what MilCom is all about. And super-high-tech communications equipment like this is likely to move more and more from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to your local police and fire departments. That's the view of the former U.S. Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertof, who in his keynote address said the lines law enforcement and military operations more and more are blurring. "What has been revealed

since 9/11 is that the security threats we face are threats that do not exist simply in the domains of war or law enforcement or crime, military or police,'' Chertof said. Rather, in places as disparate as Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sudan, and Latin America, the U.S. is facing enemies whose activities include criminal drug and contraband smuggling, terrorism and beheadings of rivals, and paramiliatary and military opposition to central governments that breaks into regular and irregular warfare.

"The kind of sophistication and interoperability that we have in our military forces now has to become part of the civilian law enforcement domain and even the full domain of first responders, fire, EMT's and public health,'' Chertof said, to ensure the U.S. has the tools to face major public disasters or domestic terrorist attacks where police and fire chiefs may well be facing something quite similar to "the fog of war" in Afghanistan and Iraq.

That crossover from military to public-safety applications for technology is something General Dynamics and many other contractors displaying gear at MilCom are already making. General Dynamics C4 Systems, for example, has begun marketing a cellphone-sized, ruggedized device called the GD300 that sells for under $1,000. It's designed for domestic first responders to be able to see, on a screen on the device, something similar to what the Land Warrior sees -- at a much higher price -- including the layout of the incident scene and the locations of other first responders.