In the year 2006, the United States Army deployed what's called a wide area motion imagery system,

sometimes called a whammy, on some of its manned reconnaissance aircraft flying in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This whammy called Constant Hawk allowed the army to test the more fundamental concept out,

to see if it would help them detect enemy ambushes and improvised

explosive devices, to things that were causing the army a great deal of trouble at the time,

increasing the duration of what was supposed to be a relatively short conflict.

To achieve this goal, the constant hawk leveraged a 96 megapixel camera alongside a supplementary

sensor suite that refined the images captured with that camera, making them clearer. It also

contained software that detected changes in patterns within the collected imagery. Specifically,

it allowed the camera to capture snapshots of part of a city or region over time to assess the normal order of things,

and then to note when something seemed to disrupt that order.

This information was flagged, with photos showing the seemingly out-of-place object or pattern disruptor,

sent to intelligence officers who would then determine if the weirdness was indicative of some

kind of explosive, of a base of enemy combatants, or something else, maybe even just a glitch,

or something the software would have no reason to know

is normal, like a civilian taking a different route to work because of a road closure.

Constant Hawk was successful enough that it eventually, after a few years in the field,

evolved into another project called Kestrel. Made by the same company as the previous

iteration, Logos Technologies, Kestrel was an upgrade to the constant hawk, replacing the single

96 megapixel camera with six cameras tucked inside a gimbal, a container that allows the cameras

to rotate around an axis, which allowed the device,

if perched suitably high up, like on a plane or drone, to map out an entire city-sized

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