The Air Force and Marine Corps collaborated on a surveillance system, called Angel Fire, that puts real-time, wide-angle imagery from aircraft directly in the hands of ground forces, but the Army prefers its own system, Constant Hawk, that Tom Vanden Brook of USA Today reports is “more difficult to use and produces video that must be studied by analysts.” The battle, of course, is over money. Although officials of all three services claim to have worked through problems, Vanden Brook reports that e-mails the newspaper obtained “paint a far different picture.”
A new report from the Government Accountability Office calls for the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer to have budget certification authority over the military services’ research and development accounts—a move the services say would add a burdensome and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
