US military testing domestic wide-area surveillance with high-altitude balloons

Kevin Reed

A report in the Guardian on August 2 revealed that the US military is conducting a “wide-area surveillance test across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons.” The test—which involves up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Missouri—was uncovered from documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission.

According to the FCC document, titled “Experimental Special Temporary Authorization,” shared with the Guardian, the Pentagon contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) was given permission to conduct “high altitude MESH networking tests over South Dakota to provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats” between July 12 and September 1, 2019.

A mesh network is a type of communications infrastructure whereby every node (in this case a balloon) is connected to and interacts with all other nodes (the other balloons) dynamically to exchange information and transmit it to receivers on the ground.

US Army high-altitude wide-area persistent surveillance balloon [Credit: US Army]

The Guardian quotes Arthur Holland Michel, the co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York, who said, “What this new technology proposes is to watch everything at once. Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘combat TiVo’ because when an event happens somewhere in the surveiled area, you can potentially rewind the tape to see exactly what occurred, and rewind even further to see who was involved and where they came from.”

Each of the SNC balloons is equipped with “satellite-like vehicles” with sophisticated sensors that can detect moving objects within a 25-mile radius. The balloons also have nine high-resolution cameras capable of recording panoramic images that are then stitched together simultaneously to provide a wide-area view of entire cities. The SNC balloons will fly at altitudes of up to 65,000 feet and carry hi-tech radar designed to “track many individual vehicles day or night, through any kind of weather.”

According to the Guardian, the surveillance test has been commissioned by the US Southern Command (Southcom), a joint effort by the US army, navy, air force and other forces responsible for disaster response, intelligence operations and security cooperation in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

The FCC documents say that the networking technology also includes video indicating that the SNC system will deploy the so-called Gorgon Stare technology of the US Air Force. Gorgon Stare is a Wide-Area Persistent Surveillance (WAPS) system with Wide-Area Motion Imagery (WAMI) capability. According to an SNC press release from July 2014, an earlier iteration of Gorgon Stare was deployed for reconnaissance in Afghanistan and it “provides unprecedented, real-time situational awareness—both for troops in contact and commanders who are directing large scale operations.”