At the battalion command post outside Balad, cables spill along the floor like the guts of an electronic beast. Flat-screen monitors display both grainy black-and-white and color surveillance footage, as many as 20 feeds at a time. Tower-mounted cameras, unmanned spy planes, even Air Force and Marine Corps fighter jets toting infrared targeting pods supply the images. It’s an absolute torrent of information for the battalion’s rumpled intelligence officer, Captain Pete Simpson, and his team of five analysts. With it, they keep watch over more than 1,000 square miles of Iraq from their desks.