Sunday, January 2, 2011
Courtesy Of "The Washington Post"
In ancient times, Gorgon was a mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them. In modern times, Gorgon may be one of the military's most valuable new tools.
This winter, the Air Force is set to deploy to Afghanistan what it says is a revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.
The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a "soda straw" area the size of a building or two.
With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. "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."
Questions persist, however, about whether the military has the capability to sift through huge quantities of imagery quickly enough to convey useful data to troops in the field.
Officials also acknowledge that Gorgon Stare is of limited value unless they can match it with improved human intelligence - eyewitness reports of who is doing what on the ground.
The Air Force is exponentially increasing surveillance across Afghanistan. The monthly number of unmanned and manned aircraft surveillance sorties has more than doubled since last January, and quadrupled since the beginning of 2009.
Indeed, officials say, they cannot keep pace with the demand.
"I have yet to go a week in my job here without having a request for more Air Force surveillance out there," Poss said.
But adding Gorgon Stare will also generate oceans of more data to process.
"Today an analyst sits there and stares at Death TV for hours on end, trying to find the single target or see something move," Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a conference in New Orleans in November. "It's just a waste of manpower."
The hunger for these high-tech tools was evident at the conference, where officials told several thousand industry and intelligence officials they had to move "at the speed of war." Cartwright pressed for solutions, even partial ones, in a year or less.
The development of Gorgon Stare began about 18 months ago. It is based on the work of Air Force scientists who came up with the idea of stitching together views from multiple cameras shooting two frames per second at half-meter resolution. Currently full-motion video is shot at 30 frames per second from one camera mounted on a Predator or the larger Reaper drone. That makes for more fluid video, but also more difficulty in assembling frames quickly to get the wide-area view.
Technological advances now make it possible for a soldier on the ground to receive any portion of a panoramic view in real time, streamed to a portable device about the size of an iPad, Poss said. At the same time, nine other soldiers can get the same or a different view. The images will be stored so analysts can study them to determine, for instance, who planted an improvised bomb or what the patterns of life in a village are.
The Air Force has also taken tips from the purveyors of pop culture. It is working with Harris Corp. to adapt ESPN's technique of tagging key moments in National Football League videotape to the war zone. Just as a sportscaster can call up a series of archived quarterback blitzes as soon as a player is sacked on the field, an analyst in Afghanistan can retrieve the last month's worth of bombings in a particular stretch of road with the push of a button, officials said.
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.
The Air Force is looking to mount wide-area surveillance cameras on airships that can stay aloft for up to two weeks.
"This is all cutting-edge technology that is being fielded in a short period of time," said retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who served as deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
"If you look into the not-too-distant future, what these technologies 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," he said.
But other military officials caution that a counterinsurgency requires an understanding of the local population. "That really only comes from human intelligence or boots on the ground," said Army Col. Steven A. Beckman, the former intelligence chief for coalition forces in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
"We can get the 3-D geo-intelligence that tells us what every building, what every street looks like in Marja," Beckman said at the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation conference in New Orleans in November. But such intelligence needs to be "underpinned by a degree of local knowledge . . . to enable us to maximize that."
Beckman called full-motion video "the crack cocaine of our ground forces" - but often, he said, it's a technology that is poorly utilized.
He noted in an interview that he is an advocate of the technology but that in some cases, other tools might be a better solution for a commander's needs.
Marine Capt. Matt Pottinger, who collaborated on "Fixing Intel," an official critique of the intelligence effort in Afghanistan issued a year ago, said he found a disconnect between the intelligence requests for aerial surveillance issued by commanders in regional headquarters and the needs of the soldiers or Marines at the platoon level.
"Often what the guys need it for is not to stare at some highway for five hours because they want to drop a bomb on some guy they see coming out to dig a hole in the ground to plant an IED," he said. "Oftentimes, the questions that the soldiers and Marines need answered are 'Where's the traffic? Where are the cars going? Are they actually using this strip of desert or completely bypassing this district?' "
Pottinger, a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said analysts in regional headquarters should meet with troops in the field to understand their needs, otherwise all the "whiz-bang" gear will never be used to its full potential.
Gorgon Stare is being tested now, and officials hope it will be fielded within two months. Each $17.5 million pod weighs 1,100 pounds and, because of its configuration, will not be mounted with weapons on Reaper aircraft, officials said. They envision it will have civilian applications, including securing borders and aiding in natural disasters. The Department of Homeland Security is exploring the technology's potential, an industry official said.
Poss said he would "never denigrate the need for good, solid human intelligence, because even watching an entire city means nothing unless you can put context to it."
But, he said, "being able to watch an entire city, I'm convinced, is going to have a huge impact on operations in the war zone."
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Gorgon Stare Broadens UAV SurveillanceThe system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a "soda straw" area the size of a building or two.
With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. "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."
Questions persist, however, about whether the military has the capability to sift through huge quantities of imagery quickly enough to convey useful data to troops in the field.
Officials also acknowledge that Gorgon Stare is of limited value unless they can match it with improved human intelligence - eyewitness reports of who is doing what on the ground.
The Air Force is exponentially increasing surveillance across Afghanistan. The monthly number of unmanned and manned aircraft surveillance sorties has more than doubled since last January, and quadrupled since the beginning of 2009.
Indeed, officials say, they cannot keep pace with the demand.
"I have yet to go a week in my job here without having a request for more Air Force surveillance out there," Poss said.
But adding Gorgon Stare will also generate oceans of more data to process.
"Today an analyst sits there and stares at Death TV for hours on end, trying to find the single target or see something move," Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a conference in New Orleans in November. "It's just a waste of manpower."
The hunger for these high-tech tools was evident at the conference, where officials told several thousand industry and intelligence officials they had to move "at the speed of war." Cartwright pressed for solutions, even partial ones, in a year or less.
The development of Gorgon Stare began about 18 months ago. It is based on the work of Air Force scientists who came up with the idea of stitching together views from multiple cameras shooting two frames per second at half-meter resolution. Currently full-motion video is shot at 30 frames per second from one camera mounted on a Predator or the larger Reaper drone. That makes for more fluid video, but also more difficulty in assembling frames quickly to get the wide-area view.
Technological advances now make it possible for a soldier on the ground to receive any portion of a panoramic view in real time, streamed to a portable device about the size of an iPad, Poss said. At the same time, nine other soldiers can get the same or a different view. The images will be stored so analysts can study them to determine, for instance, who planted an improvised bomb or what the patterns of life in a village are.
The Air Force has also taken tips from the purveyors of pop culture. It is working with Harris Corp. to adapt ESPN's technique of tagging key moments in National Football League videotape to the war zone. Just as a sportscaster can call up a series of archived quarterback blitzes as soon as a player is sacked on the field, an analyst in Afghanistan can retrieve the last month's worth of bombings in a particular stretch of road with the push of a button, officials said.
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.
The Air Force is looking to mount wide-area surveillance cameras on airships that can stay aloft for up to two weeks.
"This is all cutting-edge technology that is being fielded in a short period of time," said retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who served as deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
"If you look into the not-too-distant future, what these technologies 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," he said.
But other military officials caution that a counterinsurgency requires an understanding of the local population. "That really only comes from human intelligence or boots on the ground," said Army Col. Steven A. Beckman, the former intelligence chief for coalition forces in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
"We can get the 3-D geo-intelligence that tells us what every building, what every street looks like in Marja," Beckman said at the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation conference in New Orleans in November. But such intelligence needs to be "underpinned by a degree of local knowledge . . . to enable us to maximize that."
Beckman called full-motion video "the crack cocaine of our ground forces" - but often, he said, it's a technology that is poorly utilized.
He noted in an interview that he is an advocate of the technology but that in some cases, other tools might be a better solution for a commander's needs.
Marine Capt. Matt Pottinger, who collaborated on "Fixing Intel," an official critique of the intelligence effort in Afghanistan issued a year ago, said he found a disconnect between the intelligence requests for aerial surveillance issued by commanders in regional headquarters and the needs of the soldiers or Marines at the platoon level.
"Often what the guys need it for is not to stare at some highway for five hours because they want to drop a bomb on some guy they see coming out to dig a hole in the ground to plant an IED," he said. "Oftentimes, the questions that the soldiers and Marines need answered are 'Where's the traffic? Where are the cars going? Are they actually using this strip of desert or completely bypassing this district?' "
Pottinger, a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said analysts in regional headquarters should meet with troops in the field to understand their needs, otherwise all the "whiz-bang" gear will never be used to its full potential.
Gorgon Stare is being tested now, and officials hope it will be fielded within two months. Each $17.5 million pod weighs 1,100 pounds and, because of its configuration, will not be mounted with weapons on Reaper aircraft, officials said. They envision it will have civilian applications, including securing borders and aiding in natural disasters. The Department of Homeland Security is exploring the technology's potential, an industry official said.
Poss said he would "never denigrate the need for good, solid human intelligence, because even watching an entire city means nothing unless you can put context to it."
But, he said, "being able to watch an entire city, I'm convinced, is going to have a huge impact on operations in the war zone."
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By Richard Whittle
Washington
Nove 3, 2010
Courtesy Of "Aviation Week"
The U.S. Air Force’s new Gorgon Stare Wide Area Airborne Surveillance System, described as a revolutionary intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) technology, will make its combat debut in December, flying over undisclosed locations in Afghanistan on board MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Gorgon Stare was conceived, designed and developed in less than three years by prime contractor Sierra Nevada Corp. and USAF’s 645th Aeronautical Systems Group, a rapid acquisition arm also known as Big Safari. It offers an exponential expansion in the scope, amount, quality and distribution of video provided to ground troops, manned aircraft crews, ISR processing centers and others, then-Lt. Gen. David Deptula, Air Force deputy chief of staff for ISR, told DTI prior to his retirement on Sept. 30.
Gorgon Stare’s payload is contained in two pods slightly larger than, but about the same total weight as the two 500-lb. GBU-12 laser-guided bombs the Reaper carries. The pods attach to the inside weapon racks under the wing. One pod carries a sensor ball produced by subcontractor ITT Defense that protrudes from the pod’s bottom. The ball contains five electro-optical (EO) cameras for daytime and four infrared (IR) cameras for nighttime ISR, positioned at different angles for maximum ground coverage. The pod also houses a computer processor. The cameras shoot motion video at 2 frames/sec., as opposed to full motion video at 30 frames/sec. The five EO cameras each shoot two 16-megapixel frames/sec., which are stitched together by the computer to create an 80-megapixel image. The four IR cameras combined shoot the equivalent of two 32-megapixel frames/sec. The second Gorgon Stare pod contains a computer to process and store images, data-link modem, two pairs of Common Data Link and Tactical Common Data Link antennas, plus radio frequency equipment.
Gorgon Stare is operated independently but in coordination with the Reaper’s crew by a two-member team working from a dedicated ground station, which fits on the back of a Humvee. A second Humvee carries a generator and spare parts. A separate, forward-deployed processing, exploitation and dissemination team co-located with the Gorgon Stare ground station coordinates with commanders in-theater, directing the system’s sensors and exploiting their imagery in real time.
The result is a system that offers a “many orders of magnitude” leap beyond the “soda straw” view provided by the single EO/IR camera carried by an MQ-1 Predator or a conventional Reaper UAV, Deptula says. The video taken by Gorgon Stare’s cameras can be “chipped out” into 10 individual views and streamed to that many recipients or more via the Tactical Common Data Link (TCDL). Any ground or airborne unit within range of Gorgon Stare’s TCDL and equipped with a Remote Operations Video Enhanced Receiver, One System Remote Video Terminal or the Marine Corps Video Scout handheld receiver can view one of the chip-outs.
At the same time, Gorgon Stare will process the images from all its cameras in flight, quilting them into a mosaic for a single wide-area view. That image can be streamed to tactical operations centers or Air Force Distributed Common Ground System intelligence facilities by the Gorgon Stare ground station via line-of-sight data link. The ground station team, which will control the system’s sensors, can also transmit the relatively low-resolution wide-area view to recipients in-theater or elsewhere via other wideband communication devices, plus chip-out an additional 50-60 views and forward them as needed.
Gorgon Stare’s coverage area is classified but, as stated, considerably bigger than that provided by a single EO/IR camera, Deptula says. “Instead of looking at a truck or a house, you can look at an entire village or a small city.” Moreover, Gorgon Stare’s computers will store all imagery its cameras capture on a single mission, allowing the data to be transferred for exploitation after landing. “You can review it and accomplish forensic study of the area by looking at movement and tracing activity,” Deptula says. “If you know where an improvised explosive device went off, you can ‘rewind the tapes’ and see where the activity was and what led to it.”
Gorgon Stare operates independently of the Reaper’s sensor ball, which MQ-9 operators will continue to control from U.S. ground control stations. Bandwidth limitations will prevent Reaper operators from viewing Gorgon Stare’s imagery as they fly the MQ-9. They will be in contact with the team in the forward-deployed Gorgon Stare ground station, however, to coordinate requests to slew the sensor ball over a target, or for other purposes.
Big Safari gave Gorgon Stare its nickname, taking it from the gorgons of Greek mythology, Medusa and her sisters, whose gaze turned those who looked into it to stone. “Since the gorgon sisters had unblinking eyes, and their images wound up on ancient Greek beer mugs to ward off evil, Gorgon Stare seemed like a good name,” a Big Safari official replied in response to e-mailed questions. Advances in sensor capability, particularly focal plane arrays, and in image-processing capacity are the key technologies that make Gorgon Stare possible, the official wrote.
The initial deployment, designated Quick Reaction Capability Increment I, will consist of four sets of pods built at a cost of $17.5 million per set, excluding the cost of the ground control station, says Robert Marlin, Air Force deputy director of ISR capabilities and technical adviser for Gorgon Stare. The production cost per pod set is expected to rise for a planned Increment II consisting of six pod sets, Marlin says, but “costs will decrease with larger production runs.”
The Increment II pods will differ from Increment I, offering twice the area coverage and double the resolution by using separate EO and IR sensor balls—one of each on individual pods—being built, respectively, by BAE Systems and ITT Defense, says Mike Meermans, vice president of strategic planning at Sierra Nevada. Increment II will produce increased coverage and better resolution by packing a large number of small cameras—perhaps hundreds—into each sensor ball, he notes. Images from the Increment II EO cameras will be in color rather than black-and-white as in Increment I. Sierra Nevada is also designing Increment II with an open architecture to permit additional sensors—perhaps a synthetic aperture radar, for example—to be added to the pods, with the data they gather integrated into the Gorgon Stare video image by the onboard computer processors.
A Gorgon Stare pod set weighs substantially less than a Reaper’s 3,000-lb. payload capacity, but an MQ-9 carrying Gorgon Stare will fly unarmed because of electrical power limitations and stay aloft at 20,000-25,000 ft. for only 14-15 hr., several hours less than an armed MQ-9. Endurance is affected by drag from the pods, Marlin says.
Deptula says Gorgon Stare “changes the dynamic in terms of measuring ISR sufficiency” and is one reason he and other Air Force leaders pushed for the service to stop buying Predators, which can’t carry Gorgon Stare, as of Fiscal 2009. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. makes the Predator and Reaper. USAF’s goal has been to increase the number of daily combat air patrols (CAPS) flown by Predators and Reapers to 50 by the end of Fiscal 2011, Deptula says, and to 65 by Fiscal 2013, which would provide a maximum of 65 full-motion video images streaming at any one time from the UAVs. Fifty Reapers equipped with Gorgon Stare’s Increment II version, however, could provide hundreds of streaming images simultaneously and five times that many after stored images are processed, Deptula says. That calculation calls for rethinking the practice of measuring ISR sufficiency by counting CAPS, he argues.
“We have to get people to stop thinking about input measures—the number of platforms that are flown—and start thinking about output measures, that is, the received output from the entire system,” Deptula says. Ground troops “don’t care how many CAPS are being flown. What they care about is, are they getting increased situational awareness by what’s being flown?”
The Air Force has 53 Reapers and plans to buy 329 in all. There is no official connection between the programs, but Gorgon Stare also could be carried on a future unmanned aircraft known as Magic, an acronym for Medium-Altitude Global ISR and Communications, being designed to fly for five days at 20,000 ft. with a 1,000-lb. payload. Magic is being developed by Aurora Flight Sciences under a $4.7-million contract awarded Sept. 15 by the Air Force Research Laboratory. Aurora will use its Orion Unmanned Aerial System as the airframe for Magic.
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