I always love how the Pentagon, after spending billions of dollars on Rube Goldberg contraptions, suddenly discovers that useful things might actually exist in the commercial sector. And so yet another Pentagon advisory panel has picked up on this fact.

Reuters yesterday reported on a recently issued study on future technologies written by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board. More than anything, it seems these outside advisers want a surveillance system that would put Big Brother to shame, and they're looking at the commercial sector to provide it:

William Schneider, the board's chairman, said a key finding was a need to track individuals, objects and activities – much smaller targets than the Cold War's regiments, battalions and naval battle groups. *"It's really an appeal to capture and put into military systems the know-how that's already available in the market place," Schneider said in a telephone interview. *

So, after reviewing the available technology, what specific types of things do they suggest the military needs? Well, one example, is the Pentagon wants TiVo, according the report (available as a PDF here):

To counter these new threats, technology exists, or could be developed, to provide new levels of spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution and diversity. Furthermore, the ability to record terabyte and larger databases will provide an omnipresent knowledge of the present and the past that can be used to rewind battle space observations in TiVo-like fashion and to run recorded time backwards to help identify and locate even low-level enemy forces. For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data.

Much of the report comes as little surprise: the science advisers want to move away from Cold War-era weapons and toward technologies that can be used in urban conflicts. Small sensors, finding better ways to use data, and an emphasis on increasingly popular "influence operations" all figure big.

\– Sharon Weinberger

UPDATE: Noah here. While a combat TiVo may sound a little crazy, there are several firms that are closer than you think to making it happen. I wrote about one of them last year for the New York Times.

UPDATE 2: Our pals at Inside Defense, in an unusually free-to-the-public article, have more on that Defense Science Board report. It's a doozy:

The DSB, defining technology broadly to include “tools enabled by the social sciences as well as the physical and life sciences,” came up with four critical capabilities...* ...The first capability area, “human terrain preparation,” is seen by the science board as “perhaps most central.” The authors want the military to understand better how people and groups, societies and states behave – and put this information to use to improve training and education, especially of junior leaders and small units. In the second area, “ubiquitous observation and recording,” the board sees the potential to eliminate sanctuaries where adversaries can hide and gain support and emphasizes the ability to record huge amounts of data that can be rapidly analyzed and retrieved. Keys to this capability include day/night all-weather surveillance “in areas where it is not done well today (urban areas and under foliage),” among other sensor systems and related technology. As for “contextual exploitation,” the report again focuses on the need to quickly extract meaningful information from massive amounts of data. Here the focus is on data management and the collaboration of human operators and computer systems.*

Finally, “rapidly tailored effects” revolve around the first three capabilities...*

But three key areas with ramifications for current operations and threats are not well-covered by today’s systems, the authors found: U.S. forces’ ability to “conduct non-kinetic operations aimed at influencing the local populace”; delivering “conventional strikes with great precision and timeliness from afar”; and “mitigating the effects of [weapons of mass destruction] attacks.”*

Influencing local populations is “strategic communication at the operational and tactical levels,” the report states – the soldier on the ground delivering the right message through both “words and deeds,” carrying out non-lethal and lethal missions.*

From afar, the task force suggests directed energy, high-energy lasers, ballistic missiles, “scalable” warheads and “hypersonic flight of either transport or launch vehicle” should be considered for the future toolkit.*

UPDATE 3: The DSB's idea, of a gaining "omnipresent knowledge of the present and the past" might sound far-fetched. But its a goal that the big thinkers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have been pursuing for quite a while. Darpa-funded engineers are developing a number of different sensors designed to provide what the agency calls "persistent surveillance" and military omniscience." For years, Darpa has also been pushing to develop "Combat Zones that See" – citywide surveillance camera networks, meant to TiVo a whole town.

UPDATE 4: Could a combat TiVo be used to watch the troops, too?