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Computer sleuthing to fight the insurgents
Edited for brevity.U.S. troops battling the shadowy guerrilla insurgency in Iraq have adopted the computer-sleuthing tactics of big-city American police departments to prepare strikes against rebel fighters and their sources of money and weapons. Military intelligence analysts have adopted databases and software used by civilian law enforcers to catalog names, pictures and suspectsâ fingerprints and to search such for links among guerrilla suspects, said Lt. Col. Ken Devan, the top intelligence officer for the U.S. Armyâs 1st Armored Division. Devan and the divisionâs intelligence analysts study clusters of attacks in Baghdad neighborhoods, looking for the time of day and days of the week when strikes are most likely. They then alter their convoy schedules and routes to avoid ambushes or send patrols to confront the guerrillas, Devan said. The division uses three programs in tandem, entering data on every bomb blast, every firefight, every suspect detained and every tip given by a local resident. Digital fingerprints are taken from every arrested suspect and added to the database. "Weâre seeing patterns emerge. There are certain neighborhoods you donât want to be out in, or thereâs a better likelihood youâll be attacked," Devan said. "You try to predict what the enemyâs going to do next. We try to cut him off at the knees." The software allows the military to plot on a Baghdad street map, for instance, the locations of roadside bomb blast that occurred between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. in a given month. Commanders then tailor raids to catch the bombers by watching the neighborhood and rounding up suspects until they find a weapons cache, Devan said. On Friday, one 1st Armored unit did just that, turning up a cache of about 50 130mm artillery shells _ commonly used to make roadside bombs, Devan said. Analysts have compared attack clusters with weather and other data to pick up interesting clues. Intelligence analysts struggling to find a pattern among seemingly random nightly mortar attacks compared attack histories with a chart showing the phases of the moon, and learned the attacks tend to come bunched on nights when the moon is fullest. "They need moon illumination with their mortars especially," Devan said. "The database tracks all these events." Posted by: Dar 2003-12-22 |
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