Ok, I am not usually into the military stuff, but was reading about Obama’s plans regarding changing the battlefront for the “war on terror” to the isolated regions of Afganistan and Pakistan where according to Obama “there are terrorists holed up in those mountains” and where traditional military ‘intelligence’ seems to be severely lacking. And given Obama’s predisposition toward technology and well being a geek, here is an idea…

A while back I mentioned this interesting company called S5 Wireless, there is more detail in the original post, but to review they have developed a very small chip (see picture above) that requires very little power and is designed purely to track the whereabouts of stuff. All it needs is a series of base stations in the general vicinity to listen for the periodic signal at the 915 Mhz frequency from the chips and to triangulating their position. The signal can travel good distances, particularly out in wide open areas, and can even penetrate walls, or maybe into mountains?

Getting the base stations into place, should be no problem, but if we could only get the bad guys to carry these tiny chips around with them we’d be all set. One potential way to do this would be to invest the cost of one predator drone unit and embed these chips in 5-10 million units of ammo (obviously the kind favored by bad guys like maybe Ak-47 ammo which are plenty big enough) at a cost of $1-2 per unit and then flood the black market for ammo in target areas of interest with these units. From there it’s just a matter of sitting back a few weeks or months and seeing where all the ammo goes.

It won’t always lead to bad guys, but it would seem to provide some degree of intelligence, where its otherwise sorely lacking.