Blind alleys: U.S. military still struggling to understand urban environment.

In the beginning stages of the Iraqi insurgency, the Armys main intelligence gathering method was "advance to contact"--in other words--keep driving the humvees until hostiles begin shooting.

That's how commanders found the enemy, said Duane Schattle, director of the joint urban operations office.

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Four years later, that tactic has been abandoned, but the methods and technologies needed to understand what is happening in complex urban environments is due for a major overhaul, said he and other advisers in his small office located at U.S. Joint Forces Command, in Suffolk, Va.

"Urban ISR is the most important thing we have to do, but yet it is in the worst possible condition that I can describe," retired Army intelligence officer Brig. Gen. Wayne Michael Hall told an industry conference sponsored by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement.

The U.S. military's current ISR capabilities are "magnificent," he said, "but the problem is that [the systems were] built for a different time and a different target and a different problem set."

U.S. forces will be fighting in cities for the next 100 years, military analysts predicted. But even after four years of combat in Iraq, industry and the Pentagon seem slow to catch up to the demands of urban war, he maintained.

Incompatible sensor suites are coupled with a poor human intelligence gathering skills, he said. And all that makes for a murky picture of what is happening in the cities.

"It's really frustrating to go around and convince people that this is what we need to do," he added.

Schattle, who directs a staff of about 30, said that prior to 2003, few in the military community were talking about fighting in cities. Officers were familiar with the battle for Hue in Vietnam and Stalingrad in World War II. Back then the attitude was "kill the city in order to save it." Urban areas were considered another type of terrain, and little regard was given to the issue of how military forces would deal with the presence of civilians among enemy combatants.

That doesn't fly anymore, he suggested.

"What we're trying to do is convince people that we need to take another look," he said. His office is attempting to influence both the Defense Department and the intelligence communities to change the way they gather information in cityscapes. That includes a new generation of sensors that can help soldiers understand what is happening inside a building and the "human factors"--what is occurring among the population.

About six months before the 2003 invasion, the Joint Chiefs of Staff released publication 3-06, "Doctrine for Joint Urban Operations."

It's already time for an update, suggested a Rand Corp. report, "People Make the City," which looked at how the military incorporated the doctrine during the first years of the Iraq war.

"Every aspect of an urban areas character, including its 'manmade construction,' is fundamentally linked to its human residents," the report said.

It called for a more holistic approach. "To conceive of physical infrastructure without considering its social component is to misunderstand completely the fabric of municipal life," the report stated.

If the U.S. military was slow to understand this, the enemy was not, Schattle said. Insurgents are successfully hiding among populations. "Our adversaries know that this is where they can level the playing field," he added.

Hall said one commander in Iraq told him that they have already eliminated all the "dumb people." In other words, it's easy to take out the man burying an improvised explosive device by the side of the road. Meanwhile, the leader of the cell is sitting quietly and anonymously in a teashop where he's hiring another lackey to plant even more bombs.

Schattle refuted the notion that technology has no place in fighting an insurgency. Sensors and other analytic tools can help although he admitted that the military has a tendency to throw "money and technology" at problems without necessarily fixing the root causes.

As a result, some technologies to help soldiers see what is happening on the next block have been introduced--most notably small and large unmanned aerial vehicles. There are other sensors in various stages of development that will show who or what lies behind walls or inside buildings.

Berry Fox, deputy director of the joint urban operations office and its principal science adviser, said along with "sense-through-wall" technologies, there are still urgent needs for improved spectrum management, stand-off non-lethal weapons and tactical communications for individual soldiers.

"Dismounted communications is a huge challenge today despite four years in the field," Fox said. Part of the office's mission is to find money for technologies that can help address some of these gaps.

One little known issue is the lack of realistic urban training and technology test sites in the United States that mimic the unseen radio frequency or electro-magnetic environments, Fox said. "It's not an issue that gets a lot of attention, but it's critical," he said. "Without an authentic test environment, it's hard to get realistic results."

James Lasswell, technical director and head of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory's office of science and technology integration, said, "everything we buy should be applicable to the urban environment first. Then applicable to anything else."

Persistent surveillance is the biggest problem his laboratory is working on, he added.

UAVs have generally been a success story, Lasswell and others said, but they all noted that they continue to provide "soda straw" views of urban areas.

Hall recommended a combination of wide area surveillance and strengthened human intelligence networks.

Improving the low-tech work of setting up an informant network will involve changing the way a military unit operating in a city carries out this task, Hall said.

The 3-24 Counterinsurgency Field Manual warns soldiers and Marines to take care when gathering human intelligence. Sources' lives can be at risk if insurgents discover they are informants, it said.

Citizens may approach soldiers with information, and they should report what they hear in debriefings. However, Field Manual 22-22.3 "Human Intelligence Collector Operations" expressly forbids anyone except specially trained personnel from establishing and running informant networks.

But to find the mastermind sitting in a teashop secretly coordinating an IED cell, brigade and company sized units, need to work with low level "snitches," Hall said.

That may mean dealing with some unsavory characters. Or ordinary citizens who spend a lot of time in public such as taxi drivers or street vendors. It's not realistic to think the Central Intelligence Agency or its counterparts in the Defense Department have the time or inclination to cultivate these kinds of informants, he said.

"I want to tell them what I want them to look for and when they see something, I want them to send a text message," he said.

But where will the text message go?

The data collection system that allows information to be shared and disseminated in a timely manner is not yet there, he added.

Lasswell said moving intelligence gathered at higher level commands down to the small units has been a problem from the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. "How do you manage to move all that information around the battlefield and get it down to the user?"

Battalions and companies told the laboratory at the beginning of the war that they "were getting absolutely no ... actionable intelligence of any value to them before they fought," he added.

Hall said that the training of military analysts, like the sensors, is mired in Cold War models. The information often is not moving on a two-way street. He has asked officers in the field if analysts ever tell them what they're looking for. "The answer is inevitably 'no.'"

Russell Glenn, a Rand Corp analyst and co-author of the "People Make the City" report, said there is now a Baghdad intelligence fusion center where a two-way flow of information is occurring, although "they don't have the intelligence robustness on their staff that they need," he said.

In the beginning stages of the war, soldiers and Marines were buttoned up in forward operating bases and had little contact with the citizens, and therefore, intelligence gathering suffered. That is beginning to change, Glenn noted.

Military leadership must ensure that when forces do encounter the population, that it is a positive experience and doesn't create negative friction that will turn citizens against them.

"Speaking softly and carrying a big stick is sometimes good advice during urban operations, although the stick has to be applied with good judgment," Glenn said.

Taking out an IED cell should be similar to how law enforcement busts a drug ring in the United States, Hall said. They get tips from informants, set up a stakeout, gather the evidence that will lead them to the operation's leaders, then move in to make an arrest.

The sensors and cameras that provide this persistent surveillance is where technology can play a role, he said. Such technology exists in the special operations community, but it needs to migrate to other services as far down as the platoon level, Hall added.

Despite the edicts in the two field manuals, Hall believes some brigades and companies are probably using low-level informants to figure out what's happening in the city streets "because you can't exist down at that level without contacts and sources coming in."

Meanwhile, there needs to be institutional change. "We have to combat the policy, combat the doctrine and give the people the right tools and money," he said.