Pentagon report sees spy methods for small targets

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sensing devices smaller than a shirt button. Databases that could track car bombers to their sources. Constant surveillance of tens of thousands of kilometers to pick out moving targets as small as a man.

Welcome to the U.S. military tool kit of the 21st century envisioned by the Pentagon's top outside science advisors.

In the first volume of a sweeping look at futuristic technologies released on Wednesday, the Defense Science Board called for new investment priorities to meet post-September 11 security challenges.

William Schneider, the board's chairman, said a key finding was a need to track individuals, objects and activities -- much smaller targets than the Cold War's regiments, battalions and naval battle groups.

"It's really an appeal to capture and put into military systems the know-how that's already available in the market place," Schneider said in a telephone interview.

The board's 126-page report said an "over-overarching strategic vision has not yet emerged and operational concepts are still relatively immature" for the new methods it envisions.

But a task force put together by the board identified four "critical" capabilities for success in the U.S.-declared global war on terrorism.

To a large extent, the new know-how is not wedded to the tanks, ships and warplanes of the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union.

Although U.S. technological wizardry helped win the Cold War, the practices of that era "must be reshaped to deal with the new security challenges today and in the future," the task force said.

BETTER KNOWLEDGE OF FOES

It said U.S. forces need better knowledge of their foes, and the Defense Department must draw more on methods from psychology, sociology, political science, economics and cultural anthropology to model human behavior.

A second priority involves enhanced ways to keep tabs in urban and other hard-to-monitor settings and the ability to record and recall the data.

Technologies exist or could be developed "to run recorded time backwards to help identify and locate even low-level enemy forces," the study said, describing threats like those faced by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data," it said.

The report dubs such techniques "ubiquitous observation and recording." The goal: surveillance of tens of thousands of square kilometers for targets as small as a single person.