San Francisco Chronicle August 22, 2005
SGI to help in subterranean search for bin Laden
Old technique used to find oil, gas deposits to be updated for military applications
By Benjamin Pimentel
The hunt for Osama bin Laden has proven difficult because he leads an underground organization that is, well, underground.
Four years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. forces are still hunting down the world's most-wanted terrorist in caves and mountains in remote parts of Central Asia.
Now, Silicon Graphics Inc. of Mountain View is teaming up with the U.S. military to help pinpoint enemy underground structures, including al Qaeda's hideouts, with the help of technology that U.S. companies use to look for oil and gas deposits.
"It will give us insights into underground structures that we never had before," said Paul Temple, a senior manager at SGI who worked in U.S. military intelligence for more than 20 years.
The technology, dubbed subterranean target identification, is based on a technique that's been used in oil and gas exploration since the 1930s. Engineers use explosives or air pulses to set off vibrations in an area suspected of having oil. The vibrations then reflect signals used to create subterranean images.
"They tell us how deep the reflection is and the character of the rock it reflected off of," said Bill Bartling, senior director of strategy at SGI and one of its experts on the oil and gas industry.
This technique has become more efficient and sophisticated with the advances in computers, such as SGI's highly regarded visualization technology, which allows oil companies to study 3-D images of underground terrain.
About two years ago, with the war on terror in full swing, SGI executives led by Temple and Bartling began toying with the idea of using the technology for military purposes.
The military now uses images taken from satellites or surveillance aircraft to identify underground structures where terrorists may be hiding themselves or their weapons, Temple said.
He said military planners basically compare the way a specific terrain looks, asking, "What did this place look like in 1992, and what does it look like in 1998?"
The SGI program, which is being developed as part of the U.S. military's Battle Command Battle Lab at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, hopes to develop a more- efficient system.
Its goal is to come up with devices that soldiers can use in the field to pinpoint, in real time, enemy structures beneath the ground.
"Instead of geophysicists using the technology, we want to make it soldier friendly," Temple said. "The intent is to take those sensors around an area of the battle space they consider hot, shoot an explosion and take the information to the Humvee."
Temple said SGI and the military hope to have a prototype ready by next year.
The device could also be used for domestic security missions, such as identifying tunnels used for smuggling undocumented immigrants or drugs into the United States.
Bartling said he is confident that the technology will work, noting that the military hopes to use it to probe areas about 20 feet underground. Oil companies use it to look about 2 miles underground.
It's unclear how the technology typically used by geophysicists and engineers could apply to a battlefield.
"If I've got a building with a hundred guys with Ph.D.s in physics with huge computers -- that's a lot different from guys in a Humvee and someone is taking potshots at them," Bartling said.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research group, said it may also be harder to use a technology created to probe a broad area.
"What (the military) will be looking for is going to be a lot smaller," he said. "These tunnels are very small relative to the size of an oil field."
But Winslow Wheeler, a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank, said the SGI technology is a better approach than some proposals to use nuclear weapons to destroy underground bunkers.
"It's certainly a more reasonable thing to pursue than the so-called nuclear bunker-buster system," he said.
Still, Wheeler said more-sophisticated technology will not necessarily guarantee successful military campaigns overseas.
"We had better weapons in Vietnam, and we lost big-time," he said. "Technology does not win wars. People do."
© Copyright 2005, San Francisco Chronicle
