New York: The US is rushing to place more spy drones over Afghanistan for hunting terrorist commanders and protecting allied forces as the Unmanned Surveillance planes are proving "most critical" in the war against terrorism.
"The demand for Predator and Reaper drones has surged since the terror attacks in 2001 and they have become the most critical weapons for hunting insurgent leaders and protecting allied forces", New York Times said today quoting Senior Military Commanders.
The Paper said Washington was now in the process of sending upgraded Reaper drones with multi-dimensional spy cameras to Afghanistan by next year even as analysts are finding it more and more difficult to sift through the amount of intelligence inputs being provided by the UAVs.
"Military commanders are now relying on the video feeds to catch insurgents burying roadside bombs, to find their safe houses, weapons caches and are now reluctant to send road convoy's without an armed drone watching over it" the Paper said.
Times said, the Army, Marines and the special forces were deploying hundreds of mini drones in their anti-Taliban sweeps.
Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as 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 watches every second of the footage live as it is streamed to Langley Air Force Base here and to other intelligence centres, 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.
Instead of carrying just one camera, the Reaper drones, which are newer and larger than the Predators, will soon be able to record video in 10 directions at once.
By 2011, that will increase to 30 directions with plans for 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," Times said.
He said the Air Force would have to funnel many of those feeds directly to ground troops to keep from overwhelming its intelligence centres.
He said the Air Force was working more closely with field commanders to identify the most important targets, and it was adding 2,500 analysts to help handle the growing volume of data.
With a new USD 500 million computer system that is being installed now, the Air Force will be able to start using some of the television techniques and to send out automatic alerts when important information comes in, complete with highlight clips and even text and graphics.
PTI
First Published: Monday, January 11, 2010, 14:47