[Infowarrior] - Military Deluged in Intelligence From Drones

[Richard Forno]

January 11, 2010
Military Is Deluged in Intelligence From Drones
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
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.”