Bandwidth for the war effort - Afghanistan has an area of 280,000 square miles.
There is an unmanned recon aircraft called the Global Hawk
(http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/global_hawk.htm). This aircraft is in production now. It has the capability of mapping (see below scanning example) 40,000 square miles per day. If there was a squadron of only 10 of these planes criss-crossing Afghanistan, they could map all of the country once every 17 hours. High interest areas could be scanned more often.
Another back-of-the-envelope - If you think of Afghanistan as a piece of paper with 1 sq ft pixels, you have 280,000 * (5280 * 5280) = 7.8e+12 pixels. If each pixel has 32 bits (3 colors + infra-red), and this area is scanned at the rate of one scan per day (24*3600 seconds), then the data rate from this scanning activity is around 3 Gbits/sec.
This recon data could be sent back via a multimedia fat pipe (ATM) to the suburbs of Dallas for analysis by members of the 'new army' - looking at computer screens, looking for footprints in the snow, tracks of heavy vehicles, or infra-red 'hot' spots - indicating interesting activity.
The search for Osama bin Laden could be transformed into an Air Traffic Control job for an army of screen jockeys and a room full of pattern recognition computers.
No blood, no risk, and not science fiction. |
