Battlefield sensors continue to make technological leaps.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

* Over the past dozen years, the U.S. military has rapidly fielded next-generation battlefield sensors to find roadside bombs and the insurgents who plant them.

Hyperspectral and wide-area surveillance sensors are two examples of technologies that military leaders have touted as success stories.

But the military can't stand pat, one government researcher said.

"The last 10 years we have been concentrating on [intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance] in environments where people can freely say, 'We are swimming in sensors and drowning in data,'" said Stefanie Tompkins, deputy director of the strategic technology office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

But the permissive environment, where unmanned aerial vehicles carrying such sensors fly over warzones unmolested, may not be the situation in which the military finds itself in the future.

DARPA is thinking about new ways to gather data in access-denied areas, she said.

Operating in contested environments means either employing sensors from stand-off distances, or somehow secretly placing them inside enemy territory, she said.

The ultimate challenge would be something buried underground, with a lake over it, a jungle to the side "and maybe a bunch of people trying to shoot at you as well," she said recently at the Defense Security and Sensing Conference in Baltimore.

In the future, peer adversaries will be doing everything possible to prevent the military from experiencing that "drowning in data" situation, she said. Meanwhile, in permissive areas of operation, there are challenges remaining, she stressed. Finding a specific person in a crowd, for example, hasn't become any easier, she said.

"At the same time, we are moving into an environment of incredible cost constraints, so we have to try to do the most with less," she added.

One example is the time and funding the Navy spends hunting for submarines.

DARPA has looked at placing small, inexpensive sensors at the bottom of the ocean in optimal spots to turn them into "underwater satellites." Instead of a top-down approach to submarine hunting, the looking up tactic has been receiving some positive results in experiments, she said.

These are a "couple of orders of magnitude cheaper than anything we have looked at before," she said. Using submarines to hunt submarines is expensive, she noted.

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"I don't think the cost constraints are going to go away anytime soon, so I think we...