Spy technology caught in military turf battle

[unhappycamper]

Spy technology caught in military turf battle
By Tom Vanden Brook - USA Today
Posted : Wednesday Oct 3, 2007 5:59:38 EDT

A Marine in Iraq scans a screen with images of the streets he’ll soon patrol. Spotting suspicious movement, he replays the digital video, just like a TV viewer who’s missed a play from a football game.

The cutting-edge surveillance system, called Angel Fire, employs aircraft armed with cameras to monitor the battlefield. It gives troops what U.S. commanders in Iraq have sought for years: a persistent, bird’s-eye view to search roads and neighborhoods for improvised explosive devices and the insurgents who plant them.

“Angel Fire distributes real-time imagery straight to the war fighter, providing the ability to zoom in and observe an area more closely,” John Young, director of Defense Research and Engineering at the Pentagon, told Congress in March. “Angel Fire also allows for playback of significant events with a ‘TiVo-like’ capability to monitor areas.”

Despite its advantages over other surveillance systems in Iraq, Angel Fire came close to being killed last year because of a turf battle among the military services.

On one side of this inter-service squabble were officers of the Marine Corps and the Air Force, which have been developing Angel Fire since 2005 and regard it as a practical way to relay timely information to small units of troops in combat. On the other side was the Army, which backed a different surveillance system known as Constant Hawk that surveys a much larger area and will be available only to commanders.

Documents obtained by USA Today show continuing friction among the services over how to rush the latest reconnaissance technology to troops under fire. Marine and Air Force backers of Angel Fire feared it would lose out to Constant Hawk, according to e-mails obtained by USA Today. The Pentagon agency in charge of defeating IEDs finally intervened to fund both.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/10/gns_spytechnology_071002/



uhc comment: This is a pretty good read about the infighting between the services regarding spy technology.