Ambush busters

"The Air Force and the Army are working on a classified project to use new combinations of surveillance aircraft and other sensors, along with intelligence on the ground, to try to detect and counter the increasingly deadly ambushes against American forces in Iraq, senior Pentagon officials said on Wednesday," the NY Times reports.

". . .The Pentagon plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on surveillance and other new ways of fighting insurgents, Congress has been told. But senior military officials are wary of disclosing too much about the Air Force-Army surveillance project, saying they do not want to tip off Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters who are clashing with American forces as many as two dozen times a day.

". . .Mr. Wolfowitz said the spending would include $38.3 million for tethered blimps equipped with digital cameras to spy on guerrillas' movements, more than $30 million for electronic jammers to disrupt their remote-controlled bombs, and $70 million to develop and buy what the letter called other "rapid-reaction/new solution" technologies.

". . .Some devices would help detect roadside bombs and booby traps that have been killing American-led occupation forces, Mr. Tether said. These countermeasures use a variety of approaches including lasers, acoustic sensors and electromagnetic technologies, he said. He said the devices would be shipped in the next three to four months or sooner, after accelerated, last-minute development and testing.

". . .The Army-Air Force project has succeeded in getting the two services to integrate the information from their different remotely piloted aircraft, to provide one common surveillance picture, officials said.

"Using that information and other forensic data, analysts using complex computer programs try to identify patterns of behavior leading up to an attack."

Surveliance cameras make a lot of sense in cathcing those planting the bombs.

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