The United States is sending 50 extra surveillance aircraft to Afghanistan, some of which will help spot badguys laying roadside bombs, said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell.

On Nov. 12, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said U.S. forces are establishing a Task Force ODIN for Afghanistan. ODIN, which stands for Observe, Detect, Identify and Neutralize, originally started as an effort to use manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft to monitor roads in Iraq.

As part of that effort, 50 extra MC-12 aircraft are being sent to Afghanistan to provide “persistent eyes in the sky,” Morrell said on Tuesday. The first aircraft is expected to arrive in Afghanistan in January.

The manned aircraft are unarmed, so if they spot insurgents digging a hole for an IED, they can call in attack helicopters, planes or other aircraft to take them out.

“The whole point of them is that we can build them cheaply and quickly and make sure we can get more of them,” he said

“We are maxing out the Predator line as it is now, so rather than wait until we can build more Predators, we can get more eyes in the sky that aren’t armed that will allow us to, as I said, map, diagram, trace these networks as they’re going about their IED emplacing, and ultimately using that intelligence to deploy forces on the ground to go after the networks.”

Photo: U.S. Air Force