Military researchers seek ways to 'interrogate' buildings.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: URBAN OPERATIONS

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

IN VIETNAM, KOREA and World War II, soldiers and Marines were often ordered to "take the high ground."

But in today's urban battles, buildings have become the new "hills."

Buildings may hide weapon caches, bomb-making factories, enemy combatants or command and control centers--and more often than not--innocent civilians who may have nothing to do with these nefarious activities.

"It is the urban structure that has largely replaced the hilltop as strategic ground," said Martin Kruger, a scientist at the Office of Naval Research.

ONR as well as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and other military labs are looking at sensors that can peer through walls to take away the enemy's ability to hide in the urban landscape.

While self defense is the most practical value in employing such technologies, the larger strategic goal is to expose insurgent enemy networks, Kruger said at an Institute for Defense and Government Advancement conference on urban operations.

To do so, these sensors must be able to "interrogate" a building to discover its "intent," he added. Of course, as inanimate objects, structures don't have "intent," he noted. But they are often chosen for a reason. Their location, shape or amount of space may be suitable for training, recruiting or hiding weapon caches.

Sensors, combined with cultural knowledge of how certain types of buildings are used, can narrow down for commanders the number of buildings that need to be checked out.

Wide area sensors that are currently in development can be mounted on humvees or unmanned aerial vehicles to scan for objects of interest. For example, the presence of long metal cylinders may indicate an ordnance cache. That, combined with data indicating a high rate of improvised explosive device attacks in the same neighborhood, would be cause for suspicion.

To carry out these wide area searches, the lab is working on a high-resolution narrow pulse ultra wideband sensor. The challenges have been cutting out the clutter and displaying the data in a way that is easy for soldiers or analysts to interpret, he said.

Once a suspicious building has been located, a sensor that can more narrowly look at a specific structure to determine who or what is inside is underdevelopment. It sends acoustic energy into a building, then a Doppler radar reads the vibrations and returns data. That would give commanders a better understanding of floor plans, objects, and people inside the...