When he returned to the United States after the attack in Fallouja, Harbin's inner-ear injury left him feeling nauseated and off-balance. As he was recovering, Harbin learned that Shea, his academy classmate, had been killed in Fallouja by an insurgent rocket in September 2004.
Harbin was deeply depressed, but the loss sharpened his focus on trying to speed the military's acceptance of the Rover, said John P. Wheeler, a top Air Force official.
"People try to live two lives after the death of a friend," Wheeler said. "You try to do what your friend might have done."
Over the next few months, Harbin designed a Rover training course and lobbied the Air Force to purchase more.
His next opportunity to use the system did not come until August 2005 -- and it was in the United States.
Harbin arrived in New Orleans 40 hours after Hurricane Katrina. He intended to draw video from a small unmanned aircraft to get an overhead view of New Orleans. But the Federal Aviation Administration would not let the craft fly.
He then taped a Rover video camera to a Black Hawk helicopter, but the image it captured was too shaky.
"That is when Col. Harbin said, 'Let's take the high ground,' " remembered Kyle Stanbro, a retired Air Force special operations master sergeant, who accompanied Harbin to New Orleans. They climbed 51 floors to the top of a bank building to set up Rover cameras on tripods. The system beamed images of the flooded Lower 9th Ward to the military command in Colorado.
The images quickly demonstrated the need for additional small Coast Guard vessels to help rescue people trapped in their homes. Within hours, the military command, in part because of the Rover images, ordered more than 100 small boats to New Orleans.
"We could show them visually that we needed more boats," Harbin said. "And those assets showed up a lot faster than they would have."
--
In the Pentagon, decisions about procuring weapons systems are made by civilians, not uniformed officers. One of the ways civilian service secretaries create their legacy is to find promising, but underappreciated, technology and get behind it.
For much of 2005, the Air Force was without a permanent civilian leader, but in November, Michael W. Wynne was sworn in as the service's secretary. He requested briefings on new technologies and initiatives, and Harbin was asked to discuss the use of the Rover in New Orleans. The secretary was sold.
