Come this fall, there will be a new and extremely powerful supercomputer in Afghanistan. But it won’t be in Dave Petraeus’ headquarters in Kabul or at some three-letter agency’s operations center in Kandahar. It’ll be floating 20,000 feet above the war zone, aboard a giant, robotic spy blimp that watches and listens to everything for miles around.
That is, if an ambitious, $211 million crash program called “Blue Devil” works out as planned. As of now, the unmanned airship’s “freakishly large” hull — seven times the size of the Goodyear blimp’s — has yet to be put together. The Air Force hasn’t settled yet on exactly which cameras and listening devices will fly on board. And it’s still an open question whether the military can handle all the information that the airship will be collecting from above.
US planes already shoot surveillance video from on high, and listen in on the Taliban’s walkie-talkies. But those tasks are ordinarily handled by different aircraft. Coordinating their activities — telling the cameramen where to shoot, or the eavesdroppers where to listen — takes time. And that extra time sometimes allows adversaries to get away.
The idea behind the Blue Devil is to pack a dozen different sensors onto the same airship, talking to each other constantly. The supercomputer will crunch the data and automatically aim the sensors in the right direction: pointing a camera at, say, the guy yapping about an upcoming ambush. The goal is to get that coordinated information down to ground troops in less than 15 seconds.
“It could change the nature of overhead surveillance,” says retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, until recently the head of the Air Force’s intelligence efforts. “There’s huge potential there.”
The first phase of the Blue Devil project is already underway. Late last year, four modified executive planes were shipped to Afghanistan and equipped with an array of surveillance gear.
Phase two — the airship — will be considerably bigger, and more complex. The lighter-than-air craft is longer than a football field, at 350 feet. The hull is being stitched and glued and sewn together out of Kevlar-like composite fibers at a facility in North Carolina.
“It’s freakishly large,” says a source close to the program, “one of the largest airships produced since World War II.”
The Air Force hopes that the extra size should give it enough fuel and helium to stay aloft for as much as a week at a time at nearly four miles up. That’s an improvement over most airships, which float at about 3,000 feet — and therefore have a pretty limited field of view. It’s also an upgrade over spy drones, which can only fly for about a day before they run out of gas. So instead of constantly rotating in and out robotic planes, the US military can keep this eye in the sky staring at a suspected Taliban hideout for seven days at a stretch.
The military is spending billions on a fleet of lighter-than-air craft. But none of those other airships will have Blue Devil’s on-board smarts. Listening devices will pick up cellphone chatter for miles around. Surveillance cameras can watch the outside of a compound or a car. Infrared lenses can spot insurgents setting up nighttime ambushes. Targeting radar tracks vehicle and foot traffic. Receivers and transmitters can relay orders or collect information from movement detectors planted in the ground.
But Blue Devil’s most powerful sensor may be a “wide-area airborne surveillance system,” or WAAS. It’s a hive of nine separate cameras, each one shooting at a very slow rate and at a slightly different angle. A standard drone spycam takes a “soda straw” view of what’s beneath, focusing on a lone vehicle or a single home at a time. With WAAS, “The area that can be imaged is about the size of a small town,” Deptula says. That’s about 36 square miles under never-ending watch.
The footage can easily overwhelm the people who have to watch it. Already, 19 analysts monitor the feed from a single Predator spy drone. Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a conference in November that he might need up to 2,000 analysts to process the footage collected by a single drone fitted with a WAAS sensor package. And that’s before the upgrade to the next-generation WAAS, which uses 96 cameras and generates 274 terabytes of information every hour; it’d take 1,870 of the hard drives most consumers use to store that much data.
That’s where the blimp’s supercomputer comes in. With the equivalent of 2,000 single-core servers, it can process up to 300 terabytes per hour. So instead of just sending all the footage to the infantrymen, like most of today’s sensors, the airship’s processors will crunch the information and stamp it with a location and a time. Ground troops will query the airship, which will only broadcast the stuff they’re interested in.
“People ask: ‘With all these sensors, how are you gonna transmit all that data down to the ground?’ Well, we don’t necessarily need to send it all down,” Deptula says. “A potential solution is to process part of the data onboard, and only send what is of interest.”
Provided the Air Force can get the blimp in the air, and the gadgets on the blimp, the first flight is scheduled for Oct. 15.
Noah Shachtman is a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Insitution and an editor at Wired.com, where this first appeared.