This fall, the American army in Afghanistan will be replenished with another supercomputer. But it will not be installed in the central headquarters and not in command centers. He will soar at an altitude of 6 km above the theater of operations, aboard a huge airship, hearing and seeing everything that happens.
At least, it is for this autumn, October 15, that the test flight of the soft airship, created under the Blue Devil program, is scheduled. It is reported that at the present time, individual parts of the impressive size of the body of the device have already been produced, and its assembly will begin soon. The US Air Force, however, has not yet finally decided on a set of sensors, eavesdropping devices, cameras and radars that will be placed on it.
Of course, today the Americans fighting in Afghanistan are conducting very active reconnaissance from the air, listening to mobile phones and walkie-talkies. But all these actions are performed by a mass of different flying vehicles, and it takes a lot of time and resources to coordinate their activity. Priceless moments are often missed. It was the idea of combining dozens of different tools of modern intelligence into a single mechanism that became the starting point for the implementation of the Blue Devil project. Dozens of such devices, placed on a single device, connected by a powerful supercomputer, will be able to operate in concert - and, according to plans, within 15 seconds, transmit information to ground services.
Last year, the system was tested on board specially modified aircraft, but, of course, it will work more efficiently on sedentary, non-maneuverable, but surprisingly load-carrying airships capable of economical long flight. Therefore, the second phase of the Blue Devil program is to create a suitable lighter than air vehicle. The task is entrusted to TCOM LP. "It will be really huge," said an anonymous source close to the Blue Devil team, "one of the largest aircraft ever built since WWII."
As conceived by the leadership of the American Air Force, it is the large dimensions that will provide the airship with the opportunity to take on board sufficient supplies of fuel and helium for a long - for about a week to begin with - continuous flight at an altitude of more than 6 km (ordinary airships rarely rise above 1 km). In the future, they hope to increase this period to at least three weeks.
But of course this is only a shell. The main thing in this intelligence system is the electronic filling. With the help of rail guides, it will be able to automatically or on command from the ground move the necessary sensors and tools to observation positions. It can be listening devices, day and night cameras, radars, communication antennas - as well as dozens of cameras of the latest wide-angle optical system WAAS (Wide-Area Airborne Surveillance System). Mav6 LLC is responsible for integrating all these components into a single system.
The weakest point of all this splendor is the same human factor. For example, today 19 analysts are engaged in viewing video recordings made by the camera of each MQ-1 Predator reconnaissance drone in parallel. And if we talk about a system equipped with WAAS (it includes 96 cameras that collect 274 TB of information every hour), it may require, according to General James Cartwright, a couple of thousand specialists just to view and select recordings.
However, it is in this connection that the Blue Devil developers have high hopes for a supercomputer that can be placed directly on an aircraft. According to preliminary calculations, it will be able to process up to 300 TB of data per hour. The apparatus, thus, will not only collect information and send it to people, as it happens today, but also carry out its primary analysis and selection, sorting in accordance with a set of meta tags. People on earth will be able, using the same tags, to display only the data that are of direct interest to them at the moment.
