In Afghanistan the US Air Force is deploying an airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare. Yes Gorgon, sounding like something from mythology,horror movies and /or comics got it’s name from a Greek god, the word itself derived from gorgós, which means dreadful. Unlike the god for which it is named it can only see and cannot turn those it views into stone.
It is a video system that monitors and transmits real time images of physical movement over an entire town. It employs some of the latest sports video techniques and one Air Force intelligence officer while recognizing limitations says. "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything."
Consisting of nine video cameras the $17.5 million unit mounted on an aircraft has the capacity to provide 65 different images for analysts and soldiers on the ground. Currently drones videos (once billed as game changers themselves) called “soda straw views” are the size of a building .
It [Air Force] is working with Harris Corp. to adapt ESPN's technique of tagging key moments in National Football League videotape to the war zone………The Air Force placed a contractor on the set of a reality TV show to learn how to pick out the interesting scenes shot from cameras simultaneously recording the action in a house. And taking a page from high-tech companies such as Google, the Air Force will store its reams of video on servers placed in used shipping containers in Iowa.
Reservations are being expressed and it is acknowledged that seeing an entire city is of little value without improved human intelligence,eyewitness reports and the capacity to sift through mountains of data. Still yesterday’s headline declared: With Air Force's new drone, 'we can see everything' and officials speculate that Gorgon and technology will "…allow us to do is remove more and more ground forces and replace them with sensors where we normally would have to rely on people going somewhere to find something out,"
Long ago in another long confusing war, hearing and smelling the enemy with sensors along the Ho Chi Minh trail in South East Asia was the whiz-bang solve-all. Along the shadowy jungle supply trail a network of 20,000 sensors were dropped by US forces. The US military while limited to operations in the South needed to stem the flow of supplies from North Vietnam and much of this took place illegally in Cambodia and Laos.
The program called Indigo White in the early years enlisted the latest high technology and most powerful IBM computers.
Sensors in strings of six or seven (to be sure at least three would survive) that ran on batteries which operated for one week when replacement sensors were dropped by parachute. At a top secret location the best computers available collated and processed the data for targeting use. Many vehicles were destroyed but generally the program wasn’t successful, as a determined enemy challenged and even outwitted the high tech campaign.
The challenge for the seismic sensors (and for the analysts) was not so much in detecting the people and the trucks as it was in separating out the false alarms generated by wind, thunder, rain, earth tremors, and animals—especially frogs.
There were other kinds of sensors as well. One of them was the “people sniffer,” which chemically sensed sweat and urine.
The North Vietnamese were aware of the Igloo White sensors and took countermeasures. They destroyed some and tried to induce false reports by others. Among other techniques, the North Vietnamese drove animals up the trail and hung buckets of urine in the trees to foil the sensors. North Vietnamese forces had bypasses unknown to the Air Force, and they were very good at clearing the blocking points.
Commenting about this effort in his memoirs former MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) commander Gen. Westmorland said in his memoirs: “As any experienced military man would know, the concept had a basic flaw in that no fence—electronic or otherwise—would be foolproof without men to cover it by fire, which raised the specter of tying down a battalion every mile or so in conventional defense.”
