[privacy] Pentagon report sees spy methods for small targets

["'Richard M. Smith'" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=inDepthNews&storyID=2007
-03-01T213258Z_01_N01472468_RTRUKOC_0_US-ARMS-USA-FUTURE.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsHo
me-C3-inDepthNews-2

Pentagon report sees spy methods for small targets
Thu Mar 1, 2007 4:34 PM ET
By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sensing devices smaller than a shirt button.
Databases that could track car bombers to their sources. Constant
surveillance of tens of thousands of kilometers to pick out moving targets
as small as a man.

Welcome to the U.S. military tool kit of the 21st century envisioned by the
Pentagon's top outside science advisors.

In the first volume of a sweeping look at futuristic technologies released
on Wednesday, the Defense Science Board called for new investment priorities
to meet post-September 11 security challenges.

William Schneider, the board's chairman, said a key finding was a need to
track individuals, objects and activities -- much smaller targets than the
Cold War's regiments, battalions and naval battle groups.

"It's really an appeal to capture and put into military systems the know-how
that's already available in the market place," Schneider said in a telephone
interview.

The board's 126-page report said an "over-overarching strategic vision has
not yet emerged and operational concepts are still relatively immature" for
the new methods it envisions.

But a task force put together by the board identified four "critical"
capabilities for success in the U.S.-declared global war on terrorism.

To a large extent, the new know-how is not wedded to the tanks, ships and
warplanes of the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet
Union.

Although U.S. technological wizardry helped win the Cold War, the practices
of that era "must be reshaped to deal with the new security challenges today
and in the future," the task force said.

BETTER KNOWLEDGE OF FOES

It said U.S. forces need better knowledge of their foes, and the Defense
Department must draw more on methods from psychology, sociology, political
science, economics and cultural anthropology to model human behavior.

A second priority involves enhanced ways to keep tabs in urban and other
hard-to-monitor settings and the ability to record and recall the data.

Technologies exist or could be developed "to run recorded time backwards to
help identify and locate even low-level enemy forces," the study said,
describing threats like those faced by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play
high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the
source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional
information by organizing and searching through archived data," it said.

The report dubs such techniques "ubiquitous observation and recording." The
goal: surveillance of tens of thousands of square kilometers for targets as
small as a single person.

Such broad surveillance could come from relays of unmanned aerial vehicles,
some flying at high altitudes for weeks at a time, underpinned by
space-based surveillance systems.

It could also tie in fields of tiny, camouflaged "close-in" sensors --
smaller than a cubic centimeter -- that could relay indications of
everything from radiation to chemical and germ weapons to optical, seismic
and infrared data.

"A combination of nanotechnology, biology and chemistry promises to provide
significant increases in capability to conduct persistent surveillance on a
global basis -- with minimized personnel exposure," it said.

A third priority critical for U.S. forces is faster extraction of useful
information often hidden in clutter.

Fourth is developing more precise ways to eliminate an enemy while
minimizing unintended damage, using everything from high-energy lasers to
"scalable" warheads, as well as efforts to influence public opinion.

Alan Shaffer, the Pentagon's director of science and technology plans and
programs, said Defense Department investments in the proposed fiscal 2008
budget were shifting from Cold War era methods to cope with the new kind of
enemy.

"This goes back to Sun Tzu," he said in an interview, referring to the
fabled Chinese military strategist. "The ultimate art of war is to get your
adversary to do what you want them to do."
_______________________________________________
privacy mailing list
privacy () whitestar linuxbox org
http://www.whitestar.linuxbox.org/mailman/listinfo/privacy