by Robert Gary

Created on: February 19, 2009   Last Updated: February 20, 2009

The U.S. can hope to kill, capture, disable, or disrupt terrorists and their activities aimed at harming U.S. citizens or our nation. That's all we can do. We cannot turn Afghanistan into a functional nation. We cannot create an honest competent trustworthy government, or one that governs democratically, intelligently, or fairly. We cannot have more than a 1% impact on the poppy trade. We cannot make the local people love us by winning their hearts and minds. We cannot make them prosperous, or turn them into pursuers of happiness (our style), or educated, or filled with public spiritedness and civic-mindedness. We cannot give them a rational judicial system, make them love democracy, or make them into capitalists.

The area is about as rugged as Switzerland, and about a million square miles in size. For us to achieve the only achieavble objective related to our own national defense, we need to be 100% airborne, with no "boots on the ground" whatsoever. So it comes down to a military doctrine that, like an ellipse, has two foci. The first, is reconnaissance to identify, track, and put the cross-hair on targets. Then you need Predator unmanned aerial vehicles to put fire and steel on targets while you've got a fire control solution on them.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working on the final stages of a system called Argus which involves an unmanned, robotically controlled helicopter at about 15,000 feet which can see about 40 square miles with a resolution of about the size of a pack of cigarettes. The charge-coupled arrays can be optically focused in on any part of the panorama, so if you do that, you can resolve down to about the size of a dime. The current design of Argus calls for the data from the 500 pound camera to be fed down to a groundstation, and processed on the ground. This is a design flaw. What should happen is that data should go up to an AWACs or to a Satellite, and be processed outside of Afghanistan's airspace. No boots on the ground.

The Predator also needs re-design for it to accomplish our only rational objective in Afghanistan. It needs to be air-recoverable. This way it would not require local ground stations for refuel and re-arming. No boots on the ground.

These two techincal elements - the re-designed Argus and Predator need to be combined with totally new analytical sciences so the human intelligence, signal intelligence and overhead viewing can actually does put the cross hairs on real high value targets in real time

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