Assuming the people of our country have the political will to stick with it long enough our technology will make it nearly impossible for the Islamic extremists to function.  I just look at the requests for proposals (here and here–these links may die in a week or two) and I know most of them are possible.  Not all of course, but we might have partial solutions for even the more “far out” requests. Compare what they think is really hot stuff to what we are working on:

R2017 Text Attribution
Design and develop computer software tools to automate existing stylometric and related psychological analysis of Arabic and English text to include e-mail, passwords, chat conversations, and other documents. Design analysis to generate investigative leads such as author’s age, sex, geographic orientation, English as a second language, and other basic psychological social and personality traits with resultant probabilities. The software shall include the capability to provide the investigator with a probability of a match to other inputted text (from known or unknown authors). Techniques shall include message stream profiling analyses from computational linguistics that have been used in investigations. The solution shall include a combination of techniques and approaches including, but not limited to, clause analysis, common word approach, idiosyncratic indicators, lexicon analysis, unique word approach, and other word use. The software shall have an interface to allow non-technical investigators the ability to upload text for automated analysis. The tools must employ a modular approach so multiple foreign-language capabilities may be developed in subsequent work efforts.

Imagine monitoring a chat session in real time.  Their chat is entirely innocent stuff but within a few minutes one of the participants is identified as the same individual that wrote the speech for a half dozen beheadings.  The other person is new to the database but the computer says he is the superior of the first person.  The IP addresses of both people are known and from that we know their city and probably can even construct databases of exact locations for a lot of the IP addresses.  The Blackhawks get launched while the chat is still in progress…

You can imagine the impact of the following systems:

R2047 Wireless Sensor System
Develop and test a wireless sensor network integrating seismic, acoustic, IR, and/or other intrusion detection and assessment technologies capable of detecting and tracking human and vehicle intruders while excluding local wildlife. The system is to be deployed in forested or otherwise visually obstructed areas. The system must provide security personnel with a situational awareness overview, alarm on detection of threat events, track multiple intruders, determine direction and speed of travel, and provide information for operators to identify and locate potential adversaries. The command and control unit will be a typical PC-based system.

R2073 Tunnels and Tunneling Detection System
Develop and field-test a prototype tunnel detection and tunneling activity detection system suitable for use by U.S. military and law enforcement personnel in domestic and foreign locations. The system must be capable of scanning the earth to 50 feet below the surface and be usable in urban and rural locations without creating safety or environmental hazards. The system must be capable of displaying a three-dimensional composite picture of the area scanned and must compare the results of scans from prior and subsequent surveys in such a way as to trace a tunnel’s path. The system must be capable of providing operators clear information on the quality of the data and provide indicators of system limitations such that the reliability of the information can be estimated. The system should be air or surface deployed, with minimal and preferably no digging, drilling, or core sampling required. Data acquisition should be relatively fast and accuracy of tunnel location sufficient to allow a protective response.