E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
Lt. Col.. Leslie Pratt / AP
A photo provided by the U.S. Air Force shows a MQ-9 Reaper during a combat mission over southern Afghanistan.
The Air Force has such a glut of data – photos and videos and such – captured by its fleet of drone aircraft that it can’t keep up with analyzing the information, Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said Thursday.
Because of the lack people and machinery to make sense of the information, the Air Force will cut back on how many of the drone aircraft it buys, Donley told a group of defense writers in Washington. National Defense magazine was among the publications attending the interview.
"We’ve clearly playing catch-up," Donley said, according to Wired magazine's account of the interview. "It’s not just the pilots and manning the aircraft. It’s also the [data] processing exploitation behind that …. We’re collecting data at rates well above what we had in the past."
Last year the Air Force bought 48 Reaper drones, according to National Defense, and will cut back to 24 in the proposed 2013 budget.
Donley said the fleet of Reaper and Predator drones will remain at 65 aircraft until the analysis backlog is figured out.
According to John Villasenor, a fellow at the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution think tank, the analysis challenges with large amounts of data are likely to continue to increase.
"That said, I don't think that the data challenge itself will slow the growth of U.S. military drone use in any significant manner over the long run, if at all," Villasenor told msnbc.com. "The more likely outcome is that military drones will end up collecting an enormous amount of data that sometimes simply never gets analyzed to any depth."
The drones are manufactured by General Atomics Aeronautical based in San Diego, Calif.
The strike capabilities of these unmanned aircraft have been well demonstrated in attacks in Afghanistan and Yemen. But the General Atomics Reaper and its close sibling the Predator are more widely used for intelligence gathering, according to IHS Jane’s, a defense, security and intelligence publisher. Both models of drones can provide loads of weather, surveillance, target-acquisition and reconnaissance information that can be used to assist ground troops in battle.
They typically fly at medium-altitudes and have the capability to stay in the air for extended time periods.
(Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that General Atomics Aeronautical was based in Maryland.)
More content from msnbc.com and NBC News:
Leave a Comment:
Don't worry with the police departments getting drones the production will go up again and the privatized prisons will make a mint. I am sure that soon we will be told that the military needs a few MORE billion every year and the cuts to the Middle Class and the poor will triple. Don't you just love it???
Those planes dont cost as much as you think they do, in fact, for what it cost to maintain 1 f-15, you could prob buy 10 UAV. And let me remind you that we have a tons of 15, 16, and other old planes that require so much more money to maintain, that the price tag of these uav is really nothing compared to how much money we throw away on something we refuse to replace with a newer model to avoid expenses. F-22 and 35 where suppose to replace everything, but buddy, those 2 planes cost and cost just as much when it comes to maintenance.
Welcome to fascist America...where the govt surveils us with drones!
Personally I'm glad that these drones are creating too much data, I hope that it clogs the processing gears for a few years. As far as drones are concerned they will be comming to a town near you soon. Welcome to the Stasi republic of Amerika...
Write your congressman and/or Senator and tell them that this has gone too far and that inocent people are getting killed in other countries and it may start happening here. Just tell them to stop it.
.........No one saw this coming?
Oh jeez, someone can turn any story into a liberal cause celeb conspiracy theory. Will the insanity never cease?
The amount of sheer misinformation and fearmongering regarding drones is astounding.
Darn! I guess they'll have to upgrade from their Commodore 64's then.
Sounds to me like they should have spent less money on drones and more money on humans.
The US military will not be able to make its quota on Arabs kill by drones in the Arab countries, they do have a solution they are considering. They want to send drones to Israel to assist in their promise to Israel to kill 2 million arabs each year, they figure that by the end of 2020 that there will be less than 10 million arabs in the world and the US oil companies will operate 80% of all oilproduced the the middle east. The US does this all in the name of democracy and justice and peace for Israel.
I have a friend in the Air Force. He posted on FB that he read an article that said the AF collects 6 petabytes of data in surveillance in a day. I think that is small amount of data. Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at the LHC automatically discards 500 times that amount of data in day. I think the AF is complaining about a small problem. Physicists have the comparative data overload. The problem is that the video surveillance is much more difficult to properly analyze than the left over mess of particle collisions which is highly structured. CMS discards a little more than a CD for every floppy disk collected by the AF.
you're comparing apples to oranges. the CMS data miners are looking for anomalies--not at SATCOM data. not at video footage. scientists at the LHC can comb through their data exponentially faster because their software looks for the anomalies and processes that information. predators, reapers, UAVs in general ... they're collecting raw video footage that has to be analyzed sometimes frame by frame--not by a computer, but by a reasoning, intelligent human being.
though in the interest of fairness, 6 *petabytes* is the equivalent of approximately 6000 terabytes, which is the equivalent of 6 million gigabytes of data. possible that the air force collects that much? yah. probable? maybe. but saying that the LHC "discards 500 times that amount of data in a day" is crap. they're throwing away 3000 *petabytes* of data? no way. i call BS. show us your proof.
They are being nosey and then complaining about too much gossip. Sounds like the definition of self-manufactured drama to me. I feel no pity for the hog that overindulges.
Whoever created the predator drone is a genuis. I heard that the military is working on a unmanned Fighter Jet.
They already do and been having for quite some time.
His name is EDI...
" EDI is a Warplane. EDI must have targets."
There are three companies with facilities located in Bangalore offering complete analysis service of drone acquired raw video and metrics.
They are prepared to service the entire U.S. drone fleet and they guarantee 24 hour turnaround basic and 12 hour expedited with 24 hour live customer service. They will charge 25% of the current in-house cost for the basic service with a month-to-month contract.
Sign up for 6 months and the first month is free and all expidite requests over the first fifty each month will cost only a nickel extra.
Outsource analysis to Bangalore - problem solved and money saved.
We need to outsource the data analysis to India and outsource the war in Afghanistan to China.
I agree with Jym Allyn...... and could not have said it any better, that is exactly what we need to do and bring ourmen and women home, heck fire it's going to take a couple of years just to get all the sand off of them folks and im talkin inside and out, I have 4 thats rite 4 kids over there, 2 in the army 2 in the marines and I am so proud of them and ol dad is ready for them to come home and STAY home, but getting back to the point Jym Allyn has come up with the best idea yet now if we could just get er done.
99% of this data or more is worthless... I can't imagine the human "drones" that have to sift through this crap. Couldn't be a worst job out there. I'd rather pick turnips at Dwight's beet farm.
Sounds like the same old story. More of everything than they have use for but buy more to justify the budget increases. I've watched this happen first hand and it hasn't even been slowed down for the last 50 years.
Increase in drones is one of the rare things I'll give Obama kudos for. Much rather have them out there than humans fighting and dying. People of Afghanistan & Iraq combined aren't worth the life of even a single american soldier.
Kudos to the fascist for surveilling us with drones? Traitor.
Have you seen a drone flying over your town or city? I haven't.
just hire more people to do it since the economy is "so bad"
This is nothing more than a play for funding (money). Donley came to the PRESS to complain about his staffing and analysts. I guess he felt that the Air Force didn't get it's share, of that Trillion dollars BOTH parties just allocated!
More oversight is needed where drones are concerned.Not just goverment but public oversight.
just, uhh...outsource the work to China?
The best part of all this is, that out of all those UAV that they have in stock, they can only fly a few at a time.
WOW. What a surprise. "INFORMATION OVERLOAD." hmm!
GOSH, I wonder what will happen when they switch on the Orwellian super computer based in Utah that they are dumping billions of dollars into.
so, should I change the way I play MW3 since they are cutting back on Reapers? Or will I get a grace period? And before I get flamed for that comment, I got out of the Army recently. and don't have to go back. So i can make that joke. Actually am kinda sad I have to preface it with that qualifier.
More Power to the drones!
The real story is not about data overload, but the use of drones to commit indiscriminate slaughter of Afghani and Pakani people because nobody analysed all the UAV data. Because Might-is-Right in America, there will not be any Nuremburg war crime trials of American leaders, both civilian and military.
Those drones are vulnerable as hell. If Iran can take one over, anyone can. And they can likely be blinded with laser tech, so personally I dont see them that useful except against backwards nations, or civilians. And even then Im sure organized crime will come up with a way to deal with drones, if they have the money.
It doesnt take long for people to come up with low tech solutions to things.
dont believe everything you read ^^untrue
lmao blinded by laser tech? really? what the hell you smoking?
It was pretty conclusively shown that Iran got lucky when a drone failed - they didnt "take it over." And before you say I am swallowing the military line, dont you think they would have taken down dozens and not just one if they could?
Parrots repeat, hopefully people think.
In the future, the AF is going to need to automatically include the purchase of one super computer with the purchase of every UAV. Problem solved, except for the personnel to operate the systems. - RC
They're using these drones to surveil us! The fascists are doing it right in front of you and you guys talk about "safety"? It's them we need being made safe from!
"They" aren't
raddave,
They may not be yet, but law enforcement agencies are petitioning the FAA to authorize domestic drone flights. It's coming. Kiss your privacy goodbye.
www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-02-06/unmanned-drones-share-faa-airspace/52994752/1
That's OK. Just fire at anything that moves. Then Congress will be able to order more missile from the defense contractors who pay for their seats.
Whom do you think the Drones will attack, once the Government kills all the so-called Terrorists??? Gun Owners, Constitutionalists, Libertarians... Ranchers..Farmers... Guys wearing John Deere hats, and flannel-shirts that's whom.... Welcome to the Police State of the NWO.... All i will say, better keep those Drones at elevations more than 300' over my Farm... that airspace belongs to me.... Ciao
That's right. The Second Amendment was intended to enable "law-abiding" gun owners to protect themselves from the government—just in case the majority didn't vote their way.
there actually is a movie about exactly that..the drones attack anyone they determine who looks like they are going to break major criminal laws. Not after they do them but before they do them. Naturally they are accidentally killing innocent people as well
Like being in a room with everyone talking at once. They can take 1000 photos real quick but it takes humans a while to see what it crap and what is good. If, as they said, a lot of data is not interrupted in the future what if the humans decided not to view the very data that causes problems. Remember people made decisions about the terrorists in 9-11. They had data on them. They had data before the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor.