Military Is Deluged in Intelligence From Drones

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Zoveel informatie dat ze door de bomen het bos niet meer zien.
Gek dat ze dat niet van te voren bedenken ;)
Nog gekker dat ze het wel met informatie, maar niet met geld hebben. Daar
weten ze precies wat ze mee moeten doen!

Hun behoefte wordt kennelijk bevredigd door veel geld uit te geven, maar
niet door veel informatie te herkennen.

Groet / Cees

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html
January 11, 2010
Military Is Deluged in Intelligence From Drones
By CHRISTOPHER DREW

HAMPTON, Va. — As the military rushes to place more spy drones over
Afghanistan, the remote-controlled planes are producing so much video
intelligence that military analysts are finding it more and more difficult
to keep up.

Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over
Afghanistan and Iraq last year as they did in 2007 — about 24 years’ worth
if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming
years as drones are added to the fleet and as some start using multiple
cameras to shoot in many directions.

A group of young analysts already watch every second of the footage live
as it is streamed to Langley Air Force Base here and to other intelligence
centers, and they quickly pass warnings about insurgents and roadside
bombs to troops in the field.

But military officials also see much potential in using the archives of
video collected by the drones for later analysis, like searching for
patterns of insurgent activity over time. To date, only a small fraction
of the stored video has been retrieved for such intelligence purposes.

So the Air Force and other military units — mindful of the post-9/11
criticism that government agencies focused too heavily on collecting data
without enough tools to spot patterns — are turning to the television
industry to learn how to quickly share video clips, like the highlight
plays in a football game, and display a mix of data in ways that make
analysis faster and easier.

They are even testing some of the splashier techniques used by
broadcasters, like the telestrator that John Madden popularized for
scrawling football plays. It could be used to warn troops about a
threatening vehicle or circle a compound that a drone should attack.

“Imagine you are tuning into a football game without all the graphics,”
said Lucius Stone, an executive as Harris Broadcast Communications, a
provider of commercial technology that is working with the military. “You
don’t know what the score is. You don’t know what the down is. It’s just
raw video. And that’s how the guys in the military have been using it.”

The demand for the Predator and Reaper drones has surged since the terror
attacks in 2001, and they have become one of the most critical weapons for
hunting insurgent leaders and protecting allied forces.

The military relies on the video to catch insurgents burying roadside
bombs and to find their houses or weapons caches. Most commanders are now
reluctant to send a convoy down a road without an armed drone watching
over it.

The Army, the Marines and the special forces are also deploying hundreds
of smaller surveillance drones. And the Central Intelligence Agency uses
drones to mount missile strikes against Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.

Air Force officials, who take the lead in analyzing the video from Iraq
and Afghanistan, say they have managed to keep up with the most urgent
assignments. And it is clear, on a visit to the analysis center in an old
hangar here, that they are often able to correlate the video data with
clues in still images and intercepted phone conversations to build a
fuller picture of the most immediate threats.

But as the Obama administration sends more troops to Afghanistan, the task
of monitoring the video is only going to grow more challenging.

Instead of carrying just one camera, the Reaper drones, which are newer
and larger than the Predators, will soon be able to record in 10
directions at once, and then in 30 by 2011 and as many as 65 after that.
Even the Air Force’s top intelligence official, Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula,
says it could soon be “swimming in sensors and drowning in data.”

He said the Air Force will have to funnel many of those feeds directly to
ground troops to keep from overwhelming its intelligence centers. He said
it is working more closely with field commanders to identify the most
important targets, and it is adding 2,500 analysts to help handle the
growing volume of data.

With a new $500 million computer system that is being installed now, the
Air Force will also be able to start using some of the television
techniques and send out automatic alerts when hot information comes in,
complete with highlight clips and even text and graphics.

“If automation can provide a cue for our people that would make better use
of their time, that would help us significantly,” said General Norton A.
Schwartz, the Air Force’s chief of staff.

Officials acknowledge that in many ways, the military is just catching up
to features that have long been familiar to users of YouTube or Google.

John R. Peele, a chief in the counterterrorism office at the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which helps the Air Force analyze videos,
said the drones “proliferated so quickly, and we didn’t have very much
experience using them. So we’re kind of learning as we go along which
tools would be helpful.”

But Mark A. Bigham, an executive at Raytheon, which designed the new
computer system, said the Air Force had actually moved more quickly than
most intelligence agencies to create Web-like networks where the data
could be shared more easily.

In fact, it has relayed drone video to the United States and Europe for
analysis for more than a decade. The operations, which now include 4,000
airmen, are headquartered at the base here, where three analysts watch the
live feed from a drone.

One never takes his eyes off the monitor, calling out possible threats to
his partners, who immediately pass alerts to the field via computer chat
rooms and snap screenshots of the most valuable images.

“It’s mostly through the chat rooms — that’s how we’re fighting these
days,” said Colonel Daniel R. Johnson, who runs the intelligence centers.

He said other analysts, mostly enlisted men and women in their early 20s,
study the hundreds of still images and phone calls captured each day by
other planes and send out follow-up reports melding all the data.

Mr. Bigham, the Raytheon executive, said the new system will help speed
that process. He said it will also tag basic data, like the geographic
coordinates and the chat room discussions, and alert officials throughout
the military who might want to call up the videos for further study.

But while the biggest timesaver would be to automatically scan the video
for trucks and armed men, that software is not yet reliable. And the
military has run into the same problem that the broadcast industry has in
trying to pick out football players swarming on a tackle.

So Joseph Smith, a Navy commander assigned to the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which sets standards for video
intelligence, said he and other officials have climbed into broadcast
trucks outside football stadiums to learn how the networks tag and
retrieve highlight film.

“There are these three guys who sit in the back of an ESPN or Fox Sports
van, and every time Tom Brady comes on the screen, they tap a button so
that Tom Brady is marked,” Cmdr. Smith said, referring to the New England
Patriots quarterback. Then, to call up the highlights later, he said,
“They just type in: ‘Tom Brady, touchdown pass.”‘

Lt. Col. Brendan M. Harris, who is in charge of an intelligence squadron
here, said his analysts could do that. He said the Air Force has just
installed telestrators on its latest handheld video receiver, and harried
officers in the field will soon be able to simply circle the images of
trucks or individuals they want the drones to follow.

But Colonel Harris also noted that the drones often shoot gray-toned video
with infrared cameras that is harder to decipher than color shots. And
when force is potentially involved, he said, there will be limits on what
automated systems are allowed to do.

“You need somebody who’s trained and is accountable in recognizing that
that is a woman, that is a child and that is someone who’s carrying a
weapon,” he said. “And the best tools for that are still the eyeball and
the human brain.”

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