The military is using technology intended for oil and gas exploration to find the bad guys.

What goes around comes around - after World War I, folks who had used seismic technology to locate gun emplacements began experimenting with the potential of the technology to find oil and gas.
Now, it seems, the military wants its seismic back.
Oil and gas reserves aren't the only things lurking underground. Terrorists use natural and man-made underground hiding places to store supplies or even plant booby-traps for unsuspecting troops on the surface. In the United States, the long border with Mexico is riddled with underground tunnels used to shepherd illegal aliens into the country. And, until recently, there was very little that the military and law enforcement could do to detect these hidden activities.
But SGI has teamed with the US Army Battle Command Battle Laboratory at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., to test-drive a system that soldiers can use in the field to locate and identify underground structures. Under the Subterranean Target Identification (STI) program, SGI will help the Army develop a prototype capability to characterize these facilities through the use of advanced sensing and data processing capabilities.
According to Bill Bartling, formerly with SGI, the idea was hatched when a member of SGI's defense business development group was giving a series of talks to an audience in Kuala Lumpur. "Because I couldn't make the meeting, he gave my talk on the energy industry," Bartling said. "After he saw the subsurface images that are so prevalent in our activities, he returned to the States, walked into my cube and said, 'You guys can see underground, can't you?' And we started talking about potential applications in the defense industry."
The concept may be simple, but the application poses some challenges. Soldiers in a war zone don't have the luxury of laying out strings of geophones and driving around in thumper trucks. So a few adaptations were needed.
The source issue is the easiest to solve. "I've seen pictures from old publications of Jeeps with a gun mounted on the back pointing down," Bartling said. "They would fire these large-caliber weapons to create a high-frequency seismic source."
Receivers may need more tweaking. Bartling said that the current thought is to have a bag full of sensors in the back of the vehicle that are either wireless or cabled together. "The soldiers have a compass, lay them out in a line, shoot the gun into the ground and collect the information,"
he said.
But then what? While the same processing algorithms used in oil and gas exploration can be used to find buried threats, most units in combat areas don't have access to supercomputers or cluster configurations. "If I get a few petabytes of seismic data off of a vessel in the Gulf of Mexico, I can bring all of this information to my supercomputer center," Bartling said. "I've got 20 guys with Ph.D.s sitting around that can process it, and it will take 6 to 9 months to get a final image.
"That's different from two PFCs in a Humvee with camouflage gear, with people shooting at them, trying to do the same thing and get an answer within a minute."
With the situation in Iraq going from full-scale war to a less intense environment over the past 2 years, however, Bartling said that the deployment of this type of system becomes a little more realistic. Ideally the data will come both to a PC in the field and a central command-and-control base, where it will be quickly processed and the soldiers will be given a simple red-yellow-green answer - definite threat, maybe a threat or definite no threat.
Currently things are being buried in the Arizona desert, which the SGI scientists will then be asked to find, meaning that the project has moved past the "I wonder if it will work?" phase into more of a proof-of-concept stage. "Everybody's confident that the fundamentals of the technology are sound," Bartling said. "We do know how to do this. People who do water resource evaluation use this kind of methodology all the time.
"We have a lot of confidence that it's going to work, but we also have an expectation that it's going to need some tuning and perhaps additional development."
While the technology will not be able to identify specific people, it will be sensitive to human activity. "We can find people if they're making enough noise," he said.
Overall, Bartling said that this technology transfer is not complicated from the oil and gas side, but it's certainly an eye-opener for the military. "They've got kind of a heavy-lifting approach to solutions that we usually don't," he said. "But this is intriguing to them because it gives them a dimension to their intelligence programs as to how to keep their soldiers a bit safer."