I can see the headline from early 2001 now:
“Pentagon wants to waste money on surveillance cameras to watch sky - spies flying jetpacks feared!”
-Joe
After missing my point completely, I will state it a different way:
The Pentagon is THE symbol of US military might and superiority. It’s not just another Wal Mart or car wash (although, as soon as they are mentioned in the same sentence, you can’t disconnect them).
With our military might we can launch satellites that can read license plates. We can produce and deploy thousands of nuclear bombs. We can fight wars at night. We can deploy aircraft carriers that are singly more powerful than the militarys of many countries. We can pour billions into a missle defense system. On and on and on. Yet, this symbol of military superiority has a security surveilance system that can’t capture an image of an incoming attacker, as if that is totally out of the realm of possibility? I mean, after all, with the Cold War and all, I guess there was never any chance that the Pentagon ever would or could be targeted by something travelling at the unheard of speed of 500 miles and hour.
I guess I’m just naive.
OK, you have a security cameras pointed up at the sky in every direction to photograph objects travelling at 500 mph toward the Pentagon. Then what? What would you do with the five-second warning that would give you, assuming that someone is watching all the security camera monitors continuously?
Duh!
Just like the Wal Mart parking lot or the car wash, you might to know what happened. You might want to have a record for analysis. Why does the idea that a place like the Pentagon might have, or should have had, state of the art surveilance equipment strike some people as such a threatening thought? We have military personell that track, on a 24 hour a day basis, the gun placements of the North Korean military yet we don’t even keep an eye on our own military headquarters?
Again, I guess I’m just naive.
We do have state of the art surveillance equipment, and it’s called radar.