Security

Senators to Gates: Fork Over the Hidden Spy Cams

Over the last few years, Marine Corps whistleblower Franz Gayl has been waging a one-man war against the military’s gear-buying bureaucracy. And along the way, he’s picked up some powerful allies — like Senators Joe Biden and Kit Bond, who have hammered the Corps for being slow to purchase and field everything from spy drones […]

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Over the last few years,Marine Corps whistleblower Franz Gayl has been waging a one-man war against the military's gear-buying bureaucracy. And along the way, he's picked up some powerful allies -- like Senators Joe Biden and Kit Bond, who have hammered the Corps for being slow to purchase and field everything from spy drones to armored vehicles.

Now, the Senatorial pair have picked up the cudgel again. "The Marines have mismanaged a four-year effort to develop hidden video cameras to track insurgents planting roadside bombs, according to a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates from [the] two senators," *USA Today *reports.

[They] told Gates that the Marines failed to support the Tactical Concealed
Video System, which was developed by St. Louis-based Sentrus.
Adequately supported, they write, the system might have prevented bomb attacks on Marines serving in Iraq... Officials at the Marine Corps
Systems Command, which helps equip Marines for combat, say the system doesn't work...

Late in 2004, Marines in Iraq issued their first urgent plea for the concealed-camera system. It uses cameras and heat-
and motion-detecting sensors, sometimes encased in fake rocks, to monitor areas that can't be seen from the sky by drones. The Marines awarded Sentrus its first contract in September 2005.

*The cameras were slow to be put into use in
Iraq. In 2006, Marines in Iraq sent a request for improvements to the system. In April, Marine commanders in Iraq canceled their orders. The camera systems were cumbersome and complex and their batteries burned out, Col. Phillip Chudoba, the command's program manager for intelligence systems, said. Today, most of the 15 systems, valued at about $1
million apiece, sit on the shelf. *

Bond and Biden told Gates there was a
"disconnect" between calls from commanders in the field for TCVS and other surveillance systems and "the bureaucracy back home."

*...An internal study on TCVS by Franz Gayl, a
Marine Corps science adviser, supports the senators' contention. *

I'sd be willing to lay down money that one of Gayl's many reports was the likely genesis of the that contention. In a January study, reflecting his "personal views," Gayl not only repeated his long-standing concerns about the lack of drones. He also said that the improvised bomb crisis in Iraq was "avoidable" -- if only the Marines hadn't been so sluggish in buying heavily-armored vehicles. Previously, Gayl complained that problems in buying laser dazzlers resulted in civilian deaths. And, in his capacity as science advisor to the First Marine Expeditionary
Force, Gayl requested that a number of exotic weapons be brought to the battlefield. Self-aware robots, super-strength exoskeletons, and an energy weapon that could roast foes alive were all on Gayl's wish-list. Not that Biden and Bond are going to start hammering the Pentagon for holding back on the death rays.

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