July 20, 2006: The Geeks With Guns (Operations Research Analysts) in Iraq are getting another tool this Summer. It's called Constant Hawk, and it's an image analysis system. Not too many details have been released, lest the enemy figure out how to deceive the system. Constant Hawk is basically another pattern analysis system. This technology is one of the fundamental tools Operations Research (OR) practitioners have been using since World War II (when the newly developed field of OR got its first big workout). Pattern analysis is widely used on Wall Street, by engineers, law enforcement, marketing specialists, and the military. Constant Hawk uses a special video camera system to observe a locality and find useful patterns of behavior. Some of the Constant hawk systems will be mounted on light aircraft, others will be mounted on ground structures.
Constant Hawk, like most geek stuff, does not get a lot of media attention. It's the math, and TV audiences that get uneasy watching a geek trying to explain this stuff in something resembling English. But it works, and the troops want more of it. The troops like tools of this sort mainly because the systems retain photos of areas they have patrolled, and allows them to retrieve photos of a particular place on a particular day. Often, the troops returning from, or going out on a patrol, can use the pattern analysis skills we all have, to spot something suspicious, or potentially so.