Posted on 09/30/2006 6:17:40 PM PDT by Pokey78
Well, shucks. I thought fences didn't work. The media slime here in the U.S. assure us that a fence won't do diddly if built on the Southern border. They also assure us that it won't work for Israel; I guess the past several years of vastly reduced raghead incursions is just a blip.
I don't know beans about the tech angle, but could it perhaps have something to do with the local environment? If the surroundings are often hotter than the human body's 98.7 fahr would it make more sense to work from the opposite end of the spectrum?
I remember once reading in a book about polar bear research that airborne IR equipment could not spot polar bears on the ice floes because their insulation was such that they didn't stand out thermally, so they used an ultraviolet based system that could pick out the different reflected wavelenth from the critter's fur.
Walls work pretty well, so long as the gate guards can't be bribed. At the least, prices of bribing the gate guards will go up.
The Italians cut off the Arab rebellion in Libya in the 1920s with a wire fence of significant depth along the Egyptian border. The fence was still a significant obstacle in desert battles in WWII.
Morocco did a good job against the Polisario in the 80s. with a sand berm and wire fence. The weakness of any border wall is the guards. "Qui custodiet ipso custodes." Who guards the Guards? is the old line. In a nation with a long tradition of corruption (and before you get too proud, remember Chicago, Louisiana, and the Big Dig in Boston), being a guard is a very very lucrative position.
IR in the desert is unreliable, at certain times of the day. The desert sand is hot in the afternoon, and cools off at night. The wide range gives you two windows of opportunity to cross.
Ultraviolet looks specifically for shadows from the UV reflected first from the sky, and second from the ground. Why is UV more effective than plan optical cameras? Any dope can make a camouflage outfit that matches the ground in the optical range. You have to know the specific frequencies of UV in the cameras to match the UV signature.
Of course shooting out the cameras would work a little bit, but cameras.
I hope we have a similar requirement for ours and that the project doesn't die after the November election.
I would rather they just keep their own damn people from going INTO Iraq, as they have by the hundreds, to become martyrs against Coalition forces.
It was supposed to be the end of totalitarianism, remember? A whole new world of freedom. The end of a cold era.
Nobody ever thought then the walls would be going up again.
It's an observation that takes a bit of poetic license to make its point.
Your explanation is good, and it sounds like you have direct knowledge of this approach. If you do, that would tend to settle it for me.
Two of the "standard" approaches to night vision video surveillance that seem likely to work (even in the hot desert) are:
The saudis are the biggest slave drivers in the world. They fly in all their slave labor and sex slave/house keepers from countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
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