For more than a year, U.S. Army officials have touted the success of Task Force ODIN in Iraq by showing video clips taken by surveillance aircraft of insurgents planting roadside bombs, and dying seconds later in bursts of 30mm gunfire or in blasts from Hellfire missiles. Now, the Army aviation task force faces what could pose a much tougher challenge: taking the fight to the Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan.

Once kept top secret, Task Force ODIN set up shop on the fly in Iraq in late 2006 at Camp Speicher, a desert base near Tikrit. Its primary mission: to counter deadly improvised explosive devices and help disrupt the shadowy networks behind them. Army planners named the task force after the chief god of Norse mythology, Odin, who represented war and victory, and then brainstormed an acronym to identify its purpose — Observe, Detect, Identify, Neutralize.

ODIN’s current workhorses in Iraq are eight Warrior Alpha UAVs equipped with full-motion video cameras and other imagery systems, and about 10 C-12 King Air turboprops, most equipped with video cameras and, on occasion, signals intelligence sensors. They are linked by radio to brigade commanders and to such aircraft as Apache helicopters that can quickly swoop in for a kill. Using computer software, intelligence analysts assigned to the task force have pieced together pattern-of-life imagery to trace the movements of insurgents suspected of planting IEDs along convoy routes, said Maj. Robert Kadavy, the Pentagon’s action officer for ODIN. Over time, according to Kadavy, that’s led to larger enemy cells responsible for making the bombs.

ODIN has won widespread — but one general suggests overstated — praise for playing a role in the steep drop in number of roadside bombs planted by insurgents in Iraq. The number of bombs found and cleared declined from a monthly high of 1,543 in March 2007 to 309 in October, according to Multi-National Force-Iraq. “It’s made the loop between sensor and shooter very short, and this really is the beauty of Task Force ODIN,” said Col. Randy Rotte, deputy director of Army Aviation in the Pentagon, which oversees ODIN.

Whether a newly formed Task Force ODIN can pull off the same feat when it begins arriving in Afghanistan in 2009 remains an open question. Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain, extreme weather conditions and a comparatively weak U.S. and NATO communications infrastructure will be obstacles. In addition, the tactics of Afghan enemy forces have differed from the urban battle of pacification in Iraq, with Taliban fighters actively engaging U.S. and coalition troops in firefights and then disappearing into mountainous hideouts. “Rather than taking the exact blueprint that we’ve use in Iraq and putting it in Afghanistan, you’ve got to tailor it for that environment,” Rotte said.

Noting that much about ODIN remains classified, Army officials talked in general terms about the issues they face in Afghanistan and their plans to address them. Disseminating video and other data from ODIN’s aircraft poses one of the major technical challenges. The U.S. military has built a relatively strong backbone of fiber-optic and commercial systems in Iraq to support radio, Internet and voice communications, but the infrastructure in Afghanistan is not as well-developed. That’s particularly the case for combat brigades operating in the field on the edge of communication networks, where low rates of data throughput make it difficult to receive bandwidth-devouring video feeds.

In the flat deserts of Iraq, ODIN’s Warrior Alpha UAVs distributed video over a C-band radio signal, a line-of-sight downlink system that will be limited by Afghanistan’s rugged terrain. The Warrior Alphas have the ability to transmit data over a Ku-satcom band, and for Afghan operations ODIN will have to rely more on that kind of beyond-line-of-sight system, Rotte said.

“That’s the big one, really,” Rotte said. “Because of the mountains, you can’t just broadcast straight to the ground.”

Not everyone in the U.S. military intelligence community speaks in glowing terms about the task force’s effectiveness in Iraq.

“Task Force ODIN produces some very, very sexy videos of the lowest hanging fruit, and the lowest common denominator, putting in 30mm rounds in a hole by the side of the road, period,” Maj. Gen. John Custer, commander of the Army Intelligence Center in Arizona told reporters at the Geospatial Intelligence Symposium in Tennessee in October. Custer said “we’re trying to change that as we go to Afghanistan.”

In Iraq, ODIN was providing little more than full-motion video a few minutes ahead of convoys, Custer said. ODIN needs to attack IED networks, and to do that, its intelligence should be fed into the broader, U.S. tactical intelligence system, consisting of “tactical production, exploitation and dissemination” cells, he said. He was referring to the teams of intelligence experts dispatched into the field to sift through real-time and archived information at computers linked to Distributed Common Ground/Surface Systems, databases designed to share information with one another. Using databases of fingerprints or other “biometrics,” Custer said, investigators can match part of a bomb to a known suspect, and unravel an entire network. “That requires accessing databases and discovering data,” he said.

Privately, some Army officials said Custer’s assessment of ODIN is out of date, noting that the task force has improved its intelligence capabilities significantly since it first began operating. One officer said Custer’s remarks also might reflect tension over the Army’s decision to place ODIN under the command of an aviation brigade at Camp Speicher rather than the Army intelligence command in Baghdad.

“You’ve got what is almost exclusively an intelligence function being run by aviators, and they may not always be doing things the way the intelligence guys would want them to,” the officer said. “I don’t think things are going bad as a result of it, you just find some frustration.”

Kadavy, ODIN’s action officer, described the force’s approach differently than Custer. While ground commanders have downlinked video from Warrior Alphas to assess the safety of convoy routes, they also have used imagery and analysis supplied by ODIN to track insurgents, Kadavy said. In one case, Marines in Iraq’s Al Anbar Province turned to ODIN for support after learning from a trustworthy informant about a man suspected of planting IEDs.

“Task Force ODIN was able to provide the persistent view of that individual over the course of time,” Kadavy said, “and was able to identify his patterns of life — who he worked with, where he went and where he spent the night.”

Eventually, Marines turned the information over to Iraqi security forces, which conducted a raid and took out a much larger network. That approach, Kadavy said, also helped the Marines gain the trust of local villagers by showing they were carefully targeting insurgents rather than indiscriminately bombing houses.

After studying Task Force ODIN, the Army’s Test and Evaluation Command concluded that the force’s most important contribution was to “cross-cue” human intelligence, imagery and signals intelligence, and deliver it to troops.

Army officials who have seen ODIN in action give it high marks, both for providing live, situational awareness for soldiers and for doing longer-term analysis of data.

“I’ve sat in ODIN and for anyone to underplay the operational impacts they have, they don’t understand what’s going on there,” said Col. Charles Mehle, commander of Joint Transformation Command-Intelligence in Norfolk, Va., which has supported ODIN’s Warrior Alphas since the Army started flying them over Iraq. “They have tremendous exploitation capabilities.”

Mehle’s command has worked with Echo-Storm Worldwide of Virginia and other contractors to develop a video archiving and distribution system known as the ISR Information Service to downlink streaming video from UAVs across Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since its inception, the task force has focused primarily on image intelligence to counter the IED threat, with three core capabilities that can be discussed in an unclassified setting: full-motion video, change detection and a forensics analysis called backtracking. Most of the C-12 aircraft have been retrofitted with the Aerial Reconnaissance Multi-Sensor systems, which have synthetic aperture radars and electro-optical and infrared cameras for day and night missions. The Warrior Alphas typically fly 20- to 22-hour missions and carry similar sensors, along with ground moving-target indicator radars. The C-12s and UAVs add up to persistent surveillance — or an “unblinking eye” — over a specific area of interest. Some of the C-12 aircraft carry the Army’s Constant Hawk backtracking computer-software system, which allows human analysts to examine wide-area video images to forensically reconstruct events that led to an IED explosion. Some of the aircraft also carry an imagery system called Highlighter that helps human analysts detect landscape changes along specific routes over time. That system can detect signs of IEDs placed beside roads.

Task Force ODIN was the first Army organization to make large-scale use of backtracking and change detection to counter IEDs, said Army Col. Jerry Tait, former director of intelligence for Multi-National Corps-Iraq and now the inspector general for III Corps and Fort Hood, Texas, where members of ODIN train. He witnessed ODIN in action during a deployment to Iraq that ended in February 2008. “For us, to have those capabilities was cutting edge,” Tait said. “As an organization, it was value-added big time on the ISR side and I believe was extremely effective.”

The Army’s Warrior Alphas were built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems using requirements designed for Task Force ODIN, said Donna Hightower, deputy product director for tactical concepts at the Army Aviation and Missile Command at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. The UAVs cost about $1.5 million each and carry a payload of sensors that range in cost from $800,000 to more than $1 million. Recently, the Army decided to arm some of the Warrior Alphas with Hellfire missiles, reflecting the military’s push to keep humans and more expensive weapon systems out of harm’s way. Four of the 16 Warrior Alphas produced have been flying in Afghanistan since October 2007, a “precursor” to standing up Task Force ODIN there, Hightower said. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the UAVs could become a “huge combat multiplier” for ground commanders.

Statistics show that over the past year, the IED threat in Afghanistan has grown. In September, the military recorded 286 IED incidents in Afghanistan, up from 166 in September 2007. U.S. commanders are especially concerned about the placement of IEDs along key supply routes traveled by truck convoys from neighboring Pakistan. In late October, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters that Task Force ODIN would help ground commanders protect a vital transportation corridor known as Ring Road, according to a Defense Department transcript. The battered 2,000-mile road, which the U.S. and other countries have helped rebuild, links Kabul with the country’s other major population centers. In October, the the Army Corps of Engineers issued a bid proposal for a possible $100-million expansion of an airfield in Kandahar to accommodate up to 26 “generic” ISR aircraft. Kandahar is located in the south, about a four-hour drive from the Pakistan border, and is within flying range of the convoy routes the U.S. and NATO rely on to bring supplies and conduct patrols in the border region. Maj. Jimmie Cummings, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, declined to comment on where ODIN’s aircraft will be based, citing “operation security reasons.” The Washington Post reported in November that the airfield expansion is linked to Task Force ODIN.

As part of its Iraqi operations, ODIN flies Warrior Alphas in front of convoys and transmits video feeds to soldiers who access it in their Humvees or in the field using portable laptops called One System Remote Video Terminals. “It’s a very valuable thing for these guys on high-priority convoys, for example, to be out in front of them, either detecting what’s there or activity that’s putting IEDs in, those kinds of things,” Tait said. In theory, the task force’s aerial surveillance and reconnaissance systems could be tapped to do the same thing on supply roads in Afghanistan. They also could be used to track high-value targets in Afghanistan, including top al-Qaida leaders.

Army aviation officials declined to provide a specific target date for having ODIN up and running there, saying only that it would occur during 2009. “It’s not going to come in all at once; it’ll be spread over a little bit of time,” Rotte said. Eventually, it will be a battalion-sized outfit of 400 to 600 personnel, ranging from intelligence analysts and pilots to the crews that maintain the aircraft.

Someday, Task Force ODIN might work itself out of a job, not just by neutralizing IED networks, but by demonstrating how concepts such as manned-unmanned teaming can be adapted to traditional combat brigades. Once that happens, there might be no need for a separate task force to attack IEDs and the people who plant them. “Now we’re looking to the future of how do we integrate some of these lessons learned into the modular force,” Kadavy said. “This is a technology and capability that probably will build into the future force.”

— Ben Iannotta contributed to this report.