Chokepoints: more eyes in the sky may not generate better intelligence.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: IN FOCUS: DEFENSE AND TECHNOLOGY NEWS

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* Under orders from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the military services are moving to accelerate the production and deployment of surveillance aircraft.

This mad rush to deploy more spy planes over Iraq and Afghanistan is meant to help U.S. troops hunt down their shadowy enemies.

But more eyes in the sky may not necessarily translate into better information on the ground, according to military officials and scientists.

The problem is that no matter how many more dozens or hundreds of manned and unmanned aircraft hover over war zones, the data that they provide have limited value because they cannot be shared across the force.

Another impediment is that the massive amounts of data being collected cannot be analyzed quickly enough to be useful.

Incompatibility between Air Force and Army databases often hinders the flow of information in Iraq and Afghanistan, officials said. Streaming video from the Air Force's unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, is not always available to Army units in real time, nor is the Army's UAV data automatically made available to Air Force commanders. As a result of this lack of interoperability, much of the intelligence that UAVs collect cannot be acted upon because it's not accessible in real time.

"The key issue is not the aircraft, it's getting a common picture," said Brig. Gen. Stephen Mundt, director of Army aviation. "The debate needs to be about the ability to see all things in the air on a common picture" rather than on how many aircraft should be deployed, he told reporters.

Air Force officials have argued for some time that this situation could be solved by turning over control of all Defense Department medium- and high-altitude surveillance UAVs to the Air Force, but the Army has resisted, claiming that its commanders want to be in charge of their own UAVs rather than have to work through the Air Force's bureaucracy.

The inter-service spat over UAVs has gotten so ugly that both services have given up trying to resolve it on their own and now expect the dispute to be settled as part of a broad Pentagon-wide review of military "roles and missions."

Mundt contends that no matter who owns the UAVs, everyone should still share a common picture of the airspace, and that the services should have a single "blue force tracker" for both manned and unmanned aircraft.

"That's not something we thought about before the war," said Mundt. During the past several years, both services have tried to...