(Sorry for the absences but sometimes you just have to take a break from an activity to learn to appreciate it again.)

“SFC Spadde, take your platoon and watch this house. There is a suspected terrorist organizer living in it and we need it surveilled.”

“Roger that Sir. I’ll set up in that warehouse down the street and have a 24 hour rotation of troops watching and taking notes.”

“What?!? Goddamnit SFC Spadde!@ You will take your entire platoon and run in circles around the outside of the house for 6 hours each day and then you will return to base. I don’t have 3 other platoons to watch for the other 18 hours but your scrutiny will be enough! Move out!”

            Sound stupid? Of course it does. Yet the US military does intelligence just this way every single day with UAVS.

            If you want to watch a spot on the ground whether that be a stretch of highway, a house, or just a clearing does it make sense for you to :

A. Set up a remote control camera (hmmm 30,000 dollars for one of the very very very best?) trained on the area with wireless or wired feeds back to a 24-hour processing station.

OR

B. Stick a camera on a UAV (even the cheap ones run into $70,000 in hardware alone let besides the ridiculously high contractor and maintenance costs) with limited reliability (I am looking at you MAKO) and then fly it in circles near the area you want watched even though you don’t have enough UAV’s to watch it all the time.

            The modern Army overwhelmingly believes in option B. I can’t tell you how many times a UAV mission has spent 3 or 4 very expensive (You wouldn’t believe how much the big ones cost in total) hours over a suspect house only to see nothing and have to RTB or go away to watch a different target. End result? Both targets don’t do a single illegal thing 90% of the time even when they are unaware of the UAV’s presence (and they often are aware of them). You can never predict when a partisan is going to do partisan things because he is a partisan! He lives a whole life in addition to occasionally throwing a wrench into the works of the occupying force. Yet we continue to use collection methods that were developed to watch foreign military targets often located in territory that we did not control at all.

            The same commanders who don’t bat an eyelash at this use of UAV’s to watch static targets on land we can stand on would laugh you out of the room if you suggested that they use the same methodology with troops doing the surveillance.

            Don’t get me wrong here, I adore UAV’s and firmly believe they will play a more massive role in the future of combat than any other innovation since the tank. I just wish officers would actually spend a little bit of brain sweat on using them in a more efficient manner.

Sensor on a stick. It ain’t sexy but it is functional and cheap.