ppp

INTRO

The Operation that Killed Bin Ladin

In the early morning hours of May 2^nd in Pakistan, a U.S. military raid of an al-Qa’ida compound in Abbottabad killed America’s most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Ladin.

The mission’s success was the culmination of many years of complex, thorough, and highly-advanced intelligence operations and analysis led by the CIA with support from partners across the Intelligence Community. U.S. agencies had been collecting intelligence about the compound since it was discovered in August, 2010. Multiple streams of intelligence led to the assessment that Bin Ladin was hiding there, protected by two of his closest facilitators.

The strike on the compound, authorized by the President on April 29^th, was a surgical raid by a small team of special operations forces. The raid was designed to minimize collateral damage and to pose as little risk as possible to non-combatants on the compound or to Pakistani civilians in the neighborhood.

The Compound

The compound where Bin Ladin was hiding is in Abbottabad, a town in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province (formerly the Northwest Frontier Province), about 35 miles north of Islamabad. The compound and its main residence had extensive security features: high walls topped with barbed wire, double entry gates, opaque windows, no apparent Internet or telephone connection, and the residents burned their trash. It was valued at $1 million, but the two al-Qa’ida facilitators who owned it had no apparent source of wealth. For an illustration of the compound, click here.

The Impact

The death of Usama Bin Ladin marks the single greatest victory in the U.S.-led campaign to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qa’ida. It is a major and essential step in bringing about the terrorist organization’s eventual dissolution.

Bin Ladin was al-Qa’ida’s founder and only amir, or commander, in its 22-year history. He was largely responsible for the organization’s mystique, its ability to raise money and attract new recruits, and its focus on the United States as a target for terrorist attacks. As the only al-Qa’ida leader whose authority was universally respected, he also maintained the group’s cohesion.

AI Gleaned Information About Emerging Threats, Future Plots From bin Laden Raid BY DAVID VERGUN, DOD
On May 2, 2011, U.S. Navy special operators carried out a Central Intelligence Agency-led operation to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaida, the group responsible for many terrorist activities, including the 9/11 attacks. The raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, owned by OBL, as he was called, was launched from Afghanistan. 

Here’s the rest of the story:

The operators that entered the compound gathered a treasure trove of documents explained Brian Drake, Defense Intelligence Agency’s Science and Technology director of artificial intelligence, as he spoke via a webcast discussion yesterday. The webcast, titled “Human Machine Team: The Intersection of Diverse Skill Sets” was sponsored by Defense One. 

DIA’s National Media Exploitation Center, working with the CIA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and others, collaborated on this, Drake said.

The media that was captured was flown to NMEC, where rudimentary artificial intelligence was able to exploit the data to discover future al-Qaida plans.

NMEC invested early in AI capabilities across the board, he said, in things like text recognition, object detection, machine translation and audio and image categorization that allowed them to go through petabytes of data that they get from document exploitation.

The result was tens of billions of pieces of relevant data that allowed analysts to quickly delve into the terrorist organization. The data alerted them to future plots, emerging threats and a greater understanding of mysteries they didn’t understand before, he said.

“Their installation of AI was the most impressive in government I’ve seen,” he added.

Had AI not been used in that instance, it would have taken the entire federal workforce to piece the puzzle together and it still probably wouldn’t have succeeded, he noted.

AI can enable analysts not only to discover what they’re looking for, but also enable them to gain insights from things they don’t know they’re looking for but are relevant and important, he added.

The speed of AI analyzing the media after the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was approximately a couple of hours. Today, AI can deliver the same information analysts need in mere milliseconds, he said.