Jersey Shore could teach the US Air Force a thing or two, according to a new report from one of America’s top defense think tanks.
Producers of reality TV shows like VH1’s “For The Love of Ray J” and E!’s “Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami” were consulted in a RAND Corporation report about how to make the most out of US military spy drones, Wired magazine reported.
The RAND report recommended using MTV’s “Jersey Shore”-style production techniques to make the Air Force more efficient in managing massive amounts of surveillance data.
The report, titled “The Future of Air Force Motion Imagery Exploitation: Lessons from the Commercial World,” concluded that the volume of footage used in a reality TV control room “is comparable in scale” to what an Air Force ground station processes. As both operations run 24/7 with events needing to be reported almost in real-time, the similarities suggest some logic behind this new idea.
Air Force officials have acknowledged that they are overwhelmed by the constant influx of digital information, which exceeds 10,000 hours of surveillance per month.
Analysts are already unable to shift through the footage at a fast enough rate, and the problem will only worsen with the introduction of wide-area surveillance systems, such as the ARGUS and Gorgon Stare camera suites, that can spy on whole cities at once.