Operation Cobalt Blue

Sean Naylor has an interesting article in the new Army Times on a Navy SEAL operation in November 2003 to plant hidden hi-tech cameras along the Somali coastline to monitor al-Qa'ida activity in that country.  For you purveyors SEAL porn (and you know who you are), the description of "a long swim though some of the most shark-infested waters in the world" alone makes this worthwhile. 

For policy mavens, however, the article comes to a much more frustrating conclusion:

To save battery power, the cameras were set to take photographs every 12 hours, too long a gap to be of value in the hunt for individuals.  Consequently, the pictures relayed were "less really good intelligence and more really good atmospherics," said the senior intelligence official.  (The devices' batteries likely expired several years ago, sources said). . . .
Asked what the secret camera missions achieved, the intel source with long experience on the Horn answered bluntly: "Nothing."

Naylor's sources (and damn, he has some good ones!) are not anti-technology.  In fact, they lament the lack of Predator drones available to the military and CIA officials charged with tracking down al-Qa'ida operatives in Somalia in 2003.  But besides showing what general bad-asses the SEALs can be even on recon missions (did I mention the swim through shark-infested waters?), Naylor provides a case-study about how bureaucracies can oversell the utility of specific technologies in the targeting of individuals.