404: Reinforcements Not Found

Posted on January 31, 2003

Apparently the military is facing a shortage of a critical defense resource: bandwidth. It seems that, even though forces in the field have access to orders of magnitude more wired and wireless bandwidth than they did ten years ago, the brass’ desire for whiz-bang features like streaming video from Predator drones is causing other requests to be “crowded out”. For example:

According to The Wall Street Journal, bandwidth constraints kept the military from flying more than two of the Predator unmanned spy planes at a time in Afghanistan — out of a fleet of a half-dozen.

So let me get this straight — you can have two drones in the air with nifty streaming video, or three times as many without — and they’re choosing the streaming video? If I was a grunt in Afghanistan, that would make me feel great! Sorry boys, no air support for you; General Brasstack wants to watch some other battle from his La-Z-Boy. Unbelievable. (Thanks to TPM for the pointer.)