The Problem With Never Blinking
Persistent surveillance sounds straightforward: watch a target continuously and report what you see. In practice, it’s one of the most demanding intelligence operations the military runs. Analysts rotate through shifts. Sensors require calibration. Data feeds drop and resume. The “persistent” part depends entirely on whether humans and systems can maintain quality over time. Jason Goins Air Force officer managed persistent surveillance teams and understood that the biggest risk wasn’t missing a target. It was degraded attention.
An analyst on hour ten of a twelve-hour shift does not see the same way they did on hour two. They miss patterns. They second-guess anomalies. The data hasn’t changed, but the human processing it has.
Systems That Account for Human Limits
Jason Goins of Washington DC built shift structures and review protocols that acknowledged those limits instead of ignoring them. Fresh eyes on every handover. Mandatory briefings where the outgoing team walked the incoming team through everything unusual, not just the highlights. Checklists that forced analysts to confirm specific observations rather than summarizing in generalities.
This wasn’t bureaucracy for its own sake. It was an engineering approach to a human problem. The same thinking that shaped his chemistry training at Creighton University and his graduate work at the Colorado School of Mines: measure what matters, control the variables you can, and document everything.
When Surveillance Feeds Strategy
Persistent surveillance doesn’t exist in isolation. The data it produces feeds into targeting decisions, threat assessments, and operational planning. Jason Goins Air Force career included roles where surveillance outputs directly informed actions, from missile defense missions aboard USNS Invincible to counter-WMD policy work.
That downstream impact means errors in surveillance don’t just affect the watching. They affect the deciding. A missed indicator or a misidentified pattern can cascade into bad calls at levels far above the analyst who made the initial observation.
The Unsexy Work of Staying Good
Nobody writes dramatic accounts of surveillance teams running well. The recognition comes when things go wrong. But the work of keeping teams calibrated, keeping equipment functional, keeping analysts alert — that work prevents the failures that make headlines. Jason Goins Air Force approach to surveillance management was the same as his approach to everything else: clear problem statements, steady communication, and a preference for repeatable processes over individual heroics.
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not constitute endorsement by the Department of War, Department of the Air Force, or the U.S. Government.