Jedburgh
11-07-2005, 09:46 PM
National Security Watch: Collecting Data for the Fight (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/051104/4natsec.htm)
When Capt. Jason Feser first arrived in the northern Iraq city of Mosul for his yearlong tour of duty, he found that his headquarters was drowning in information. In the fast-paced environment of Mosul, where soldiers were tracking an adaptable and persistent insurgency in the ancient city, it was hard to keep up with the threats.
Individual commanders in Mosul were running their own intelligence collection operations and nobody was charged with putting it all together in one place. One military intelligence team was building its own database of local political and neighborhood leaders. The chaplains kept track of the religious leaders. And other soldiers were cataloguing the city's hospitals and clinics. After suggesting to his commanders that someone gather all the data in one place, Feser got the job.
This made perfect sense. Feser was running a four-man team under the 25th Infantry Division in charge of the burgeoning discipline of geospatial intelligence, which involves developing complex maps from satellite images and other sources. At a San Antonio conference on geospatial intelligence (http://www.geoint2005.com/), Feser described how he cobbled together one single database from 19 separate collections of information.
The final product was a massive trove of intelligence, including details on mosques, religious leaders, hospitals, and important Iraqi tribal leaders. Everything could be mapped out, block by block, throughout the city. Feser's four-man team produced everything from tailored maps for specific operations to analytical reports on patterns of roadside bombs.
When Capt. Jason Feser first arrived in the northern Iraq city of Mosul for his yearlong tour of duty, he found that his headquarters was drowning in information. In the fast-paced environment of Mosul, where soldiers were tracking an adaptable and persistent insurgency in the ancient city, it was hard to keep up with the threats.
Individual commanders in Mosul were running their own intelligence collection operations and nobody was charged with putting it all together in one place. One military intelligence team was building its own database of local political and neighborhood leaders. The chaplains kept track of the religious leaders. And other soldiers were cataloguing the city's hospitals and clinics. After suggesting to his commanders that someone gather all the data in one place, Feser got the job.
This made perfect sense. Feser was running a four-man team under the 25th Infantry Division in charge of the burgeoning discipline of geospatial intelligence, which involves developing complex maps from satellite images and other sources. At a San Antonio conference on geospatial intelligence (http://www.geoint2005.com/), Feser described how he cobbled together one single database from 19 separate collections of information.
The final product was a massive trove of intelligence, including details on mosques, religious leaders, hospitals, and important Iraqi tribal leaders. Everything could be mapped out, block by block, throughout the city. Feser's four-man team produced everything from tailored maps for specific operations to analytical reports on patterns of roadside bombs.