recently in @ Drudgereport...

[url]http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-102601caves.story[/url]

^ for those who missed it the first time.

I'm not as optimistic as the sources quoted for the article.  Thousands of caves divided by a few dozen U.S. SpecOps teams = a lot of searching.  

Eh ? Why bother searching a damn cave ? Just blow it up and bury the rat bastards hiding in there alive. Its faster, cheaper and more reasonable.

Gentlemen, you are forgetting that it's going to be Winter there very soon. Let them run for their caves. When they do, we break out the heat seeking optics and blast away. Think about it, if there are a few or even a few hundred bodies in those caves, they will glow very bright. That makes it so much easier for us to pinpoint and....BOMBS AWAY!!!!

1) Do we really have the technology to detect body heat through 50+ feet of [b]rock[/b]?

2) Will US pilots still want to fly low and slow to scan for caves after a few of them have flown into mountains or been downed by lucky anti-aircraft fire?

I hope I'm wrong, but the hunt for Osama bin Laden looks like it will be even more difficult than the unsuccessful hunt for Mohammed Aidid (in Somalia).

This does not sound like a problem that a squadron of B-52s couldn't fix.  They can't hide in a huge crater.

Why would they have to see heat through rock? They have to breeth dont they? The heat will come out the openings. Because of the high contrast our drones should be able to see them from a pretty good altitude. Also, the footprints of food bearers and messengers will be visable going in and out.

Like someone else said, find a suspicous cave, dont be a hero blow it up. If they have anti-aircraft positions around, that will be a real give away after the snow falls.

Also a question, does anyone know if there are any agreements preventing the use of Atomic Demolition Munitions? Cause we used to have small nukes that produced explosives in the tons of HE range that were only about 60 pounds in weight. That is something that could be carried in by paratrooper, and would take out any cave.

They are not going to be able to see those people underground. They may be able to see some small amount of heat comming from the mouth of the caves.  

The bunker buster can only tunnel through 100 feet of SOFT earth, not caves under mountains made of rock(granite).

I am not wanting to be a nay sayer, but the method of getting them out of those caves has not been discovered yet.  Perhaps pick out the 10 largest cave networks and put tactical nukes within them. This would make them uninhabitable as the fire and crap traveled through the network.

Ben