Urban surveillance still falling short, say army commanders.

• Author: Wagner, Breanne
• Position: Battlefield Surveillance

SAN DIEGO -- Army commanders need more sophisticated aerial surveillance sensors to give them a wider, more detailed view of the complex urban battle field, officials said.

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"We face an incredible problem, a conundrum in intelligence today ... We are no longer looking for a needle in a haystack ... we are looking for a needle in a stack of six million needles," said Maj. Gen. John Custer, commander of the Army Intelligence Center, Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

But beyond just finding individual terrorist suspects, commanders want to use next-generation intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, to track patterns and behaviors over the entire cityscape that will lead them back to the target terrorist network.

"You have to disable the network," said Master Sgt. Kevin Purdy, with electronic warfare research and development testing at Fort Huachuca. "Bomb planters are a dime a dozen, but the network is the bigger problem," he said at a Technology Training Corp. unmanned systems conference.

"Over the last tour years, we killed off all the dumb guys, There ale no dumb guys left," Custer said at the conference. But smart ones remain, and the Army needs better ways to find them. he noted.

The Army introduced a concept called "tactical persistent surveillance," Custer said, which involves acquiring a larger view of the entire scene of action.

The Army has relied for years on images provided by large drones such as the Global Hawk and Predator, but those only give a "soda straw" view of the battlefield.

Custer said the service is looking to get wide area surveillance and persistent, full-motion video coupled with electro-optical and radar technologies to provide more precise information. The military currently has a limited wide-area surveillance capability that only provides "pockets" of information.

The Army also wants sensors that can "tip and cue," meaning they can detect areas of interest and tell another sensor to stare at that spot. This would give commanders a more comprehensive view of the battlefield, said Custer.

Having the ability to observe larger areas could provide more clues about enemy behaviors and patterns that can lead to important discoveries, he said.

"If a couple of vehicles went to a couple of fields in a couple of days, there's a [weapons] cache there," he said.

Purdy said advances in persistent surveillance could also help soldiers spot activity that is difficult to trace, such as bomb planting if a...