The US Navy's Ghost WarShip

Built by Juliet Marine Systems, a private company in Portsmouth, N.H., it’s designed to fight swarm attacks, water-born IEDs, and, aargghh, piracy. According to Business Insider, “Ghost is intended to have zero radar signature, and the vessel is supposedly difficult for the enemy to spot, let alone target. The ship is nonmagnetic and hard to detect via sonar, making it ideal for infiltration and surveillance of enemy areas.”

US Navy Autonomous Swarm Boats

A fleet of U.S. Navy boats approached an enemy vessel like sharks circling their prey. 

Iin this case, part of an exercise conducted by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), the boats operated without any direct human control: they acted as a robot boat swarm.

The tests on Virginia’s James River this past summer represented the first large-scale military demonstration of a swarm of autonomous boats designed to overwhelm enemies. This capability points to a future where the U.S. Navy and other militaries may deploy underwater, surface, and flying robotic vehicles to defend themselves or attack a hostile force.

“What’s new about the James River test was having five USVs [unmanned surface vessels] operating together with no humans on board,” said Robert Brizzolara, an ONR program manager.

In the test, five robot boats practiced an escort mission that involved protecting a main ship against possible attackers. To command the boats, the Navy use a system called the Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing (CARACaS). The system not only steered the autonomous boats but also coordinated its actions with other vehicles—a larger group of manned and remotely-controlled vessels.

The Black Knight Transformer Drone

The military's newest drone is a hybrid "heli-truck." Called the Black Knight Transformer, the drone is capable of carrying more than 4,000 pounds in payload, is able to travel over land on truck wheels, and comes with an attachable boat hull. RT's Lindsay France takes a look at the new vehicle.

The Navy Is Building A Stealth Battleship Strike Force

The Navy's newest warships are hard to detect on radar, heavily armed with super-accurate guns and missiles ... and gigantic. Six hundred feet long and displacing 15,000 tons of water, the DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class ships are designated as destroyers but are actually as big as some World War I battleships.

By David Axe

The lead ship in the class is slated to launch any day now -- a milestone briefly delayed by the recent government shutdown. The Navy is building three of the Zumwalts over the next five years and deploying them to the Pacific to counter China's fast-improving military.

That's assuming the $7-billion-apiece Zumwalts don't simply capsize the first time a powerful wave strikes them from behind. The high-tech battleships feature a novel, downward-sloping "tumblehome" hull that's optimized for stealth not stability -- and lacks the wave-resisting qualities of traditional ships with upward-flaring hulls.

"On the DDG-1000, with the waves coming at you from behind, when a ship pitches down, it can lose transverse stability as the stern comes out of the water-and basically roll over," naval architect Ken Brower told Defense News.

Even if they don't sink in heavy seas, the Zumwalts are controversial vessels. Besides being by far the biggest and most expensive surface combatants in memory, the Zumwalts are actually inferior to older, smaller ships in certain key stats, in particular radar performance and missile capacity.

But what they lack in weapons and sensors, the new battleships make up for with other enhancements, including space for their own robotic air forces plus massive electrical output that, in the near future, could support powerful laser weapons.

Navy art

Warship Fantasy

The Zumwalts began as a 1990s naval fantasy. The sailing branch wanted to revamp its entire fleet of 100 frigates, destroyers and cruisers with a single basic design that could avoid radar detection, carry new sensors and weapons and be operated by a greatly reduced crew. The stealth design would be scaled upward or downward to replace 10,000-ton cruisers and destroyers and 4,000-ton frigates.

As with other military techno-fantasies of the ‘90s, the 21st-Century Surface Combatant initiative collapsed under the weight of its mounting cost and complexity. All that survives at present are a couple dozen small Littoral Combat Ships currently under construction plus the three Zumwalts. To keep its surface fleet numbers up, the Navy has decided to keep building the same Arleigh Burke-class destroyers it has been buying since the late 1980s.

So few in number, the Zumwalts will be niche, practically experimental vessels -- albeit with potentially powerful combat abilities. "What a tremendous ship!" Rear Adm. Thomas Rowden, the Navy's top shipbuilder, crowed to Defense Media Network. He described the Zumwalt class as "unique because it incorporates several innovative technologies into a multi-mission warship, including integrated power distribution, signature reduction, active and passive self-defense systems and enhanced survivability features."

Wheeling out DDG-1000's deckhouse. Huntington Ingalls Industries photo

Building The Battleships

In addition to the hard-to-detect tumblehome hull, the Zumwalts have smooth, angular superstructures that, in two of the three vessels, are made of composites instead of steel, further enhancing their stealth qualities. To save money, the Navy decided last week that the third and final Zumwalt will have a steel deckhouse made in Maine.

Huntington Ingalls Industries makes the 1,000-ton composite superstructure deckhouses in a special facility in Gulfport, Mississippi and ships them by barge to Bath Iron Works in Maine, where the ships are assembled and where they will be launched, one every couple of years starting later this year.

Rather than packing the vertical-launch missile cells into tight groupings fore and aft, as is typical, the Zumwalts carry their missile cells along the edge of the hull, effectively adding heft to their outside lines that can insulate them against enemy strikes.

But the unique layout decreases the overall missile arsenal from 96 large munitions in an Arleigh Burke to just 80 in a Zumwalt. Granted, the Sea Sparrow short-range self-defense missile comes in four-packs that fit inside a standard launch cell, so in theory a Zumwalt could carry 320 Sea Sparrows.

But in practice the vessels will carry a mix of munitions including larger, one-per-cell SM-2 long-range air-defense missiles. In a divisive move, the Navy has opted not to give the new battleships the radar enhancement for deploying all the SM-2's modes, in particular its ability to hit incoming ballistic missiles.

Cost is one reason. The other reason is that the Zumwalts are primarily bombardment ships meant for sneaking up on and smashing targets on land. And for that they will carry scores of Tomahawk cruise missiles plus other high-tech weapons.

Scale models of an Arleigh Burke and a Zumwalt by Modeled Horizons, showing their relative sizes. Modeled Horizons photo

Reaching Out

Each Zumwalt comes equipped with two 155-millimeter cannons made by BAE Systems and installed forward of the deckhouse in "holsters" that help them avoid radar detection. The guns are fed by automatic ammo systems that can deliver a 225-pound shell to each gun every six seconds until the 600-round magazine is depleted.

Boosted by rockets in their bottoms and steered by small fins, the shells can fly 62 miles to precisely hit GPS coordinates. But it's the possible future weapons that have the Navy really excited?-?and that's got everything to do with the battleships' electrical power generation.

"It has the power margin," Rowden said. "It's an electric drive-ship, and the power generation capability it has is huge." At cruising speed, the Zumwalts produce 58 megawatts of excess power for weapons, sensors and other gear.

That electricity could power a laser gun. In 2010 Boeing completed initial design work on the so-called "Free Electron Laser Weapon System," a weapons-grade light beam. "The Free Electron Laser will use a ship's electrical power to create, in effect, unlimited ammunition and provide the ultra-precise, speed-of-light capability required to defend U.S. naval forces against emerging threats, such as hyper-velocity cruise missiles," Boeing veep Gary Fitzmire said.

An officer in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment told War is Boring that the Zumwalts would be perfect test platforms for the laser.

Navy concept art

Pacific Showdown

Based in San Diego starting in 2014, the Zumwalts will reinforce the Navy's Pacific Fleet as it stands up to an increasingly aggressive and well-armed China. Rowden said the battleships could sail alone, in groups with other surface ships or alongside aircraft carriers.

In America's ongoing campaign against Islamic terrorists or, God forbid, in some future shooting war with China, the Zumwalts could send Navy SEALs ashore by small boat or by one of the two Seahawk helicopters each carries. With their 11,000-square foot flight decks, the vessels can also support up to three Fire Scout drone helicopters for recon missions.

The commandos and drones could spot the targets and the Zumwalts could hit them with missiles and guns?-?and then fire missiles and possibly lasers to defend themselves from counter-attack.

But if a big wave hits from behind -- watch out. Even a $7-billion stealth battleship has weaknesses. The Zumwalts' most dangerous enemy could be the sea itself.

DARPA's Terminator-Like Atlas Robot

Tim Hornyak:

DARPA unveiled this hulking, 6-foot robot developed by Boston Dynamics, creator of the infamous BigDog and other scary creatures. Surprisingly, the 330-pound terror is designed to help us meatsacks.

Atlas is a testbed humanoid for disaster response, but it looks like it knows its way around a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range. Fortunately, it comes from Massachusetts, not the future.

We've seen hints of Atlas with Boston Dynamics' Petman soldier robot, which can do pushups and run on a treadmill.

Whereas that humanoid was designed to test chemical protection clothing, Atlas is altogether different. It's designed to not only walk and carry things, but can travel through rough terrain outdoors and climb using its hands and feet.

"Articulated, sensate hands will enable Atlas to use tools designed for human use," Boston Dynamics says. 

"Atlas includes 28 hydraulically actuated degrees of freedom, two hands, arms, legs, feet, and a torso."

Its head includes stereo cameras and a laser range finder. It's tethered to an off-board, electric power supply -- at least that's one weakness.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge is designed to help evolve machines that can cope with disasters and hazardous environments like nuclear power plant accidents.

The seven teams currently in the challenge will get their own Atlas bot and then program it until December, when trials will be held at the Homestead Miami Speedway in Florida.

They will be presented with tasks such as driving a utility vehicle, walking over uneven terrain, clearing debris, breaking through a wall, closing a valve, and connecting a fire hose.

Meanwhile, check out Atlas' other weakness in the vid below -- it's got an unstoppable desire to groove. As the English playwright William Congreve observed, music has charms to soothe the savage robot.

Scientist Looks To Weaponize Ball Lightning

David Hambling says:

Two hundred years ago this week, the warshipHMS Warren Hastingswas struck by a weird phenomenon: "Three distinct balls of fire" fell from the heavens, striking the ship and killing two crewmen, leaving behind "a nauseous, sulfurous smell," according to the Times of London.

Ball lightning has been the subject of much scientific scrutiny over the years. And, as with many powerful natural phenomena, the question arises: "Can we turn it into a weapon?" Peculiar as it may seem, that’s exactly what some researchers are working on — even though it hasn’t even been properly replicated in the laboratory yet.

The exact cause and nature of ball lighting has yet to be determined; there may be several different types, confusing matters further. But generally it manifests as a grapefruit-sized sphere of light moving slowly through the air which may end by fizzling out or exploding.

In the mid-’60s, the U.S. military started exploring ways that the phenomenon might be weaponized. Take this 1965 Defense Technical Information Center report on Survey of Kugelblitz Theories For Electromagnetic Incendiaries, (Kugelblitz is German for ball lighting). The document summarizes and evaluates the ball lightning theories then prevalent, and recommends "a theoretical and experimental Kugelblitz program… as a means of developing the theory into a weapons application." This led to an Air Force program called Harness Cavalier, which seems to have ended without producing anything conclusive.

However, some years later scientist Dr. Paul Koloc was looking at methods of containing high-temperature plasma during nuclear fusion. There are many schemes for containing plasma in donut-shaped magnetic fields using a device called a Tokomak. Koloc’s insight was that, under the right conditions, a donut-shaped mass of moving plasma would generate the required fields for containment itself. No Tokomak would be required for this "plasmoid," which would be completely stable and self-sustaining. It is a very close equivalent of the smoke ring — another type of dynamic "vortex ring," which remains stable over a period of time, unlike an unstructured cloud of smoke.

Koloc also theorized that if a donut-shaped plasmoid was created accidentally — say, during a lightning strike — it would remain stable for a period of seconds of minutes. This he believes is the explanation for ball lightning. He has a lot of competition from other, wildly different theories of ball lightning, though, from nanobatteries to vaporized silicon to black holes. There is no scientific consensus.

In the ’80s, Koloc’s team succeeded in creating small, short-lived plasmoids from "chicken egg to softball" size in the laboratory. It was a good start, but not enough to convince the world that he’s right about ball lightning. Ultimately the work might lead to a means of containing nuclear fusion… but there were some engineering challenges to tackle. Moreover, the scientific mainstream has not bought into the concept. While giant programs to achieve controlled fusion like ITER are sucking up billions, Koloc has found it much harder to attract funding. This is not like cold fusion or bubble fusion which has been challenged on scientific grounds, but it’s been very much sidelined in favor of other "confinement concepts" for fusion power.

However, in 2002, Koloc’s company, Prometheus II, briefly obtained funding from the Missile Defence Agency. The aim was to create stable ‘magnetoplasmoids’ a foot in diameter which would last between one and five seconds. In the subsequent phase, the magnetoplasmoid would be compressed and accelerate to two hundred kilometers a second. This "encapsulated EMP bullet" would make an idea anti-missile weapon, generating an intense electromagnetic pulse on impact which would scramble the guidance system and any electronics, as well as causing thermal damage.

Koloc called the weapon "Phased Hyper-Acceleration for Shock, EMP, and Radiation" — PHASER.

"It can be used for a range of purposes from stunning personnel to destroying the functionality of electronically operated devices, smaller rockets, vehicles and packages that represent an immediate threat to the United States," he wrote. "This dial-able PHASER weapon can be set on ‘Stun’ or dialed down, selecting a non-lethal level for persons needed for later interrogation… One mundane application for law enforcement would be the disruption of the engine electronics to stop vehicles that would otherwise be the target of a high-speed chase. Dialable versions of the PHASER will be available for use in civilian encounters."

Nothing seems to have resulted after the Phase I contract, so I contacted Koloc to see how his research had progressed. He confirmed that they had successfully formed plasmoids a foot in diameter, but that these could not be made sufficiently stable.

To make it work and overcome the stability problem, they need a device known as a "fast rising parallel plate transmission line." There was not enough funding for this and the company is still trying to raise funds.

"Once the re-engineered formation system becomes operational, we will proceed to form plasmoids of approximately 35 to 45 centimeters in diameter with a stable lifetime of from one to thirty seconds," says Prometheus II Vice President D. M. Cooper. "The plasmoids should be rugged and energetic, and should attain quiescence (thus becoming very stable) within two or three milliseconds of the formation pulse. The plasmoids will be useful for energy applications even if the military applications are not pursued."

So a ball lightning weapon remains tantalizingly out of reach –- or does it? As I noted in a previous article on military ball lightning, the USAF’s Phillips Laboratory examined a very similar concept in 1993. Again, this involved accelerating a donut-shaped mass of plasma to high speed as an anti-missile weapon in a project called Magnetically Accelerated Ring to Achieve Ultra-high Directed Energy and Radiation, or  MARAUDER. Based on the Air Force’s awesome Shiva Star power system, experiments spat out plasmoids at ultra-high speed that were expected to reach 3,000 kilometers a second by 1995. But nothing was published after 1993, and MARAUDER was classified, disappearing into the black world of secret programs.

Ball lighting is still mysterious 200 years later… and the next time a warship gets struck by weird fireballs they will probably be as baffled as were the sailors aboard the HMS Warren Hastings.

Pentagon Creates 13 Offensive Cyber Teams For Worldwide Attacks

"Russia Today" reports the following:

The head of the United States Cyber Command says the US is developing 40 new teams of cyber-agents that will both protect America’s critical infrastructure from hackers and as well as launch attacks against the country’s adversaries.

Gen. Keith Alexander, who leads both the Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, told the US Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that the 40 online support teams should be ready for action by 2015, with 13 of those units existing specifically to attack other countries.

Alexander has been reluctant to go into detail about how the newly-designed teams will engage in cyber battle with America’s enemies, but he did say that the 13 squads of offensive fighters won’t be sitting around waiting for hackers from abroad to strike first. The NSA chief described the groups as‘‘defend-the-nation’’ teams but also stressed that their role will be one that puts them on both sides of the action.

“I would like to be clear that this team. . . is an offensive team,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

“The teams are analogous to battalions in the Army and Marine Corps — or squadrons in the Navy and Air Force,” said Alexander. “In short, they will soon be capable of operating on their own, with a range of operational and intelligence skill sets, as well as a mix of military and civilian personnel.”

Chris Strohm, a national security reporter for Bloomberg, says the units will “focus on missions such as protecting vital computer networks from attacks, supporting combat operations and keeping the Pentagon’s information-technology systems secure.”

The Associated Press reports that Gen. Alexander likened the teams’ duties to “knocking an incoming missile out of the sky before it hits a target,” and that they’d serve as defensive teams with added offensive capabilities. What offensive actions the teams will engage in exactly will likely remain unknown for now, however, as the US has continues to closely guard its secretive cyber operations. Anorder signed by President Barack Obama last year outlining the offensive capabilities of US cyber squads remains classified four months later, but it has been described as being the most aggressive cybersecurity directive ever. Meanwhile, the commander-in-chief and other administration officials have only said that attacks aimed at US infrastructure are increasing in frequency.

"What is absolutely true is that we have seen a steady ramping up of cyber security threats,” Pres. Obama told ABC News during an interview filmed on Tuesday.

And while Gen. Alexander’s 40 new teams won’t be ready for either side of a cyberbattle until 2015, meanwhile Washington is looking for other ways to protect an onslaught of attacks. In addition to the classified order signed by Mr. Obama in November — Presidential Policy Directive 20 — the White House has also released an executive order that will pave the way for the country’s private businesses to share threat information with the US government.

“I signed a new executive order that will strengthen our cyber defenses by increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs and our privacy,” Pres. Obama said during last month’s State of the Union address. Moments later during his speech, he also urged Congress to act fast on their own “by passing legislation to give our government a greater capacity to secure our networks and deter attacks.” One day later members of Congress reintroduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, and again this week Pres. Obama asked for lawmakers on Capitol Hill to act on it.

"There are ways that we can harden our critical infrastructure, our financial sector," Obama to ABC. "They need to get this done."

Gen. Alexander and Pres. Obama’s statements come on the heels of a series of cyberattacks aimed at America’s military computers, government servers, utility companies and banks. Iran has been largely considered responsible for a series of recent attacks on US banking websites, and China has repeatedly been linked to both cyber-espionage and cyberattacks on the US Department of Defense, Department of State and the private sector. Earlier this week, hackers claiming to be from the Tunisian Cyber Army took credit for hacking a handful of government websites, and say that, along with the al-Qaeda Electronic Army and a crew of Chinese hackers, will continue to attack US websites as part of Operation BlackSummer, or #OpBlackSummer.

The Pentagon’s Wall-of-Light Laser Shield

The Plasma Acoustic Shield System (PASS) is a crackling, flashing wall of light hanging in the air up to 100 meters away. And while it’s the stuff of sci-fi, the laser-powered PASS already exists in prototype form, built by Stellar Photonics of Redmond, Wash., with funding from the Pentagon’s Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD). 

Initially intended to shield soldiers by creating a high-intensity distraction and provide a highly visible warning signal, PASS may develop into a weapon in its own right, producing a barrage of explosions with the power of flash–bang stun grenades. It may also evolve into a shield capable of absorbing laser and microwave blasts from directed energy weapons. 

The technology is based on short pulses from a high-power laser. If you focus a laser beam down to a point, the intensity can become so great that the molecules of air itself break down. As electrons separate from their atoms to produce ions, the gas becomes plasma, an effect seen at the core of a lightning bolt. This ionization produces a miniature explosion with a flash of light and a sharp pop. 

W. Alexander Long, vice president and co-founder of Stellar Photonics, says the company developed a technique called dynamic pulse detonation, designed to enhance this blast. The initial laser pulse produces a small cloud of plasma; another pulse strikes the plasma a fraction of a second later. The plasma cloud absorbs the laser energy and expands rapidly in a supersonic shock wave, creating a bigger bang than the first pulse’s. The laser can scan and rapid-fire a series of pulses to build up a wall of plasma bursts, in much the same way that an old cathode-ray television builds up a picture by scanning across the screen. 

The PASS demonstrator is mounted in a turret attached to a Hummer. It is a nonlethal option that might be used, for example, if a vehicle approaches a checkpoint without slowing down. If the driver ignores verbal and other warnings (such as a flash of ultrabright light) to slow down, soldiers could use PASS to produce a barrage of flash–bangs right in front of the car. Anyone who proceeded might be assumed to be hostile. In addition, the bright laser bursts are likely to interfere with attempts to aim a weapon, though PASS cannot inflict damage at its current power levels. 

"At the current state of the art, the Plasma Shield System can only be used for warnings," Long says. "More work is needed on the next generation of eye-safe, high-energy pulse lasers." 

The demonstration system produces 10 flash–bangs per second. Long says other currently available lasers could raise this rate to 40 per second, but they are not eye-safe. Stellar Photonics plans a next-generation system capable of 200 flash–bangs per second, and this rate will increase as more powerful solid-state lasers become available. Ensuring that the lasers cannot cause eye damage or blindness has been one of the major challenges. 

Higher scan rates would allow the plasma shield to take more advanced shapes—for example, to put a horizontal barrier across a road. Long says that once the scan rate reaches kilohertz, thousands of flash–bangs per second, it would be possible generate letters or graphics and literally paint in the air. 

 

Stellar Photonics has been working on the PASS since 2005 with partners Orca Photonic Systems and Laser Guidance. Previously, the Pentagon’s JNLWD funded the Pulsed Energy Projectile, a chemical laser that produced a flash–bang effect at the surface of the target. The intent was to provide a precise, long-range alternative to rubber bullets. But, as with the giant antimissile Airborne Laser, the chemical laser for PEP was very big, weighing about 500 pounds, and carried a limited supply of fuel for laser shots. After years of development, the PEP program disappeared around 2008. 

Another Navy program, Plasma Point Defense, begun in 2004, looked at generating a plasma shield as a way to deflect incoming missiles. This was not feasible with existing technology, and the military dropped the idea. 

PASS, modest as it looks now, has the potential to keep growing and succeed where Plasma Point Defense and the Pulsed Energy Projectile did not. Solid-state lasers mean that PASS is compact and rugged and can keep firing for as long as there is a power supply. The Navy is already exploring how they can get more bang out of laser technology with contracts to two new developers whose systems will rival the one built by Stellar Photonics. 

RadiaBeam Technologies of Santa Monica, Calif., specializes in components for particle accelerators. They are working on MILI-Flash, for Mid-Infrared Laser Induced Flashbang system. This also uses a double-pulse scheme, with an ultrashort ignition pulse to ionize the air, followed by longer pulse to heat and expand the plasma and create the desired flash–bang. Meanwhile Physical Optics Corporation of Torrance, Calif., is offering RESLIFE (Ranged Eye-Safe Laser-Induced Flashbang Enabling System). This uses two lasers operating at different wavelengths for the two pulses, a picosecond Erbium-doped laser for the initial pulse, and a nanosecond Thulium-doped laser for the followup. Both companies are on a nine-month development contract; the successful one will then produce a prototype with a range in excess of a hundred meters. 

It’s easy to see the immediate military applications of PASS technology for warning, signalling, and shielding. Networked together, a number of PASS systems would produce quite an impressive spectacle. The plasma wall is a barrier to both visible and infrared viewing. Because plasma can absorb microwaves and radar, PASS may also prove a viable technology for screening from radar, as well as blocking directed microwave pulses that can damage electronics. 

While the flash–bangs will always be less effective than kinetic weapons, they could serve as a nonlethal option for crowd control or for hitting small, fast-moving targets such as miniature drones at the speed of light and with laser accuracy. 

Similar technology may be used in the civilian world for 3D displays. Japanese company Burton Inc. has demonstrated a laboratory system that can sketch crude moving images of a stick man and a bouncing ball floating in the air. Something the size of PASS should enable stadium-scale plasma displays. 

However, according to the Department of Defense, it’s too early to say what applications the technology will find, or what the timeline is for possible deployment. "The technology is still in its infancy to appropriately respond to its applicability," said Kelley Hughes, spokesperson for the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate. 

Via: "Popular Mechanics"

Teaching Robots To Deceive

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta,Georgia have developed a few robots that deceive each other. 

How? By transferring the deceptive behavioral patterns of squirrels and birds into the small mobile robots. In other words, the research team developed algorithms that allow a robot to determine if it should deceive a human or other intelligent machine and techniques to help the robot select the best deceptive strategy and reduce its chance of being discovered.

Professor Ronald Arkin, a Regents Professor at the School of Interactive Computing at GeorgiaTech, and his team reviewed biological research results from squirrels showing how they gather acorns and store them in specific locations. Then, they patrol their hidden stashes, routinely going back and forth to check on them. When another squirrel shows up, the hoarding squirrel changes its behavior and instead of checking on the true location of its hidden stash, it visits empty stash sites, trying to deceive his competition.

The team implemented the same strategy into a robotic model and it took. The deceiving robot lured the competitor robot to the false locations, delaying the discovery of the protected resources. The hider robots were able to deceive the seeker robots in 75 percent of the trials.

Why you ask? According to Professor Arkin, this type of robot could be applied to the military or search and rescue operations in the future. Incidentally, the project is funded funded by the Office of Naval Research.

“This application could be used by robots guarding ammunition or supplies on the battlefield,” said Arkin. “If an enemy were present, the robot could change its patrolling strategies to deceive humans or another intelligent machine, buying time until reinforcements are able to arrive.”

Georgia Tech Regents professor Ronald Arkin (left) & research engineer Alan Wagner look on as the black robot deceives the red robot into thinking it's hiding down the left corridor. (Georgia Tech Photo: Gary Meek)

According to the research paper, a search and rescue robot may need to deceive in order to calm or receive cooperation from a panicking victim. Robots on the battlefield with the power of deception will be able to successfully hide and mislead the enemy to keep themselves and valuable information safe.

“Most social robots will probably rarely use deception, but it’s still an important tool in the robot’s interactive arsenal because robots that recognize the need for deception have advantages in terms of outcome compared to robots that do not recognize the need for deception,” said Alan Wagner, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute and study’s co-author.

Looking to birds, the research team also created a simulation and demo based on birds that might bluff their way to safety. A bird known as an Arabian babblers that’s in danger of being attacked will join other birds and harass their predator. This mobbing process causes such a commotion that the predator will eventually give up the attack and leave.

Arkin’s team investigated whether a simulated babbler is more likely to survive if it fakes or feigns strength when it doesn’t exist. The team’s simulations, based on biological models of dishonesty and the handicap principle, show that deception is the best strategy when the addition of deceitful agents pushes the size of the group to the minimum level required to frustrate the predator enough for it to flee.

Arkin says the reward for deceit sometimes outweighs the risk of being caught.

“In military operations, a robot that’s threatened might feign the ability to combat adversaries without actually being able to effectively protect itself,” said Arkin. “Being honest about the robot’s abilities risks capture or destruction. Deception, if used at the right time in the right way, could possibly eliminate or minimize the threat.”

Via: "Forbes"

The Pentagon's DNA Factory

Darpa wants to take the life-making business into its own hands — and manufacture new biological forms in a factory of mix-and-match bio-bits.

A recent call for research by the Pentagon’s mad science agency proposes a new program called “Living Foundries.” The idea is to use biology as a manufacturing platform to “enable on-demand production of new and high-value materials, devices and capabilities.”

In other words, let’s engineer life to make stuff we want.

The fields of bioengineering and synthetic biology have already produced some useful, scary and flat-out bizarre entities. Besides renewable petroleum or steel strong spider silk, there are all sorts of potential therapeutic, industrial and agricultural purposes for reorganized DNA.

To jumpstart the process, Darpa wants to open the playing field to people from outside the biological sciences, recruiting designers, engineers, manufacturers, computer scientists, academics and anyone else who has an idea. By democratizing the biological design and manufacturing process, they hope to speed up the development of a reliable factory for all sorts of kind-of-living things.

One of the specifics they’re looking for? Modular genetic parts. Kind of like Legos for biology, a standardized system of bio-units capable of being assembled in any which way would explode the possibilities for producing new materials and systems.

Something like this already exists — the Registry of Standard Biological Parts lists thousands ofBioBricks, or DNA modules that control everything from breaking down chemicals to killing off cells. Expanding this open source “Williams-Sonoma catalog of synthetic biology” could lead to creations we’ve only ever dreamed of.

Darpa is also looking for design tools to map out individual projects, cell-like systems and chassis to use as templates, new test platforms and DNA-assembly techniques, and methods for fine-tuning and debugging. Basically, they want a space for biological innovation limited only by the “creativity of the designer.”

And designers have been known to get pretty creative, so who knows what they could do with Darpa money. I guess we’ll see soon enough — they, along with all other brave souls, have until June 21 to submit an idea.

Photo: Flickr/Spamily; photoshopped by Lena Groeger

Via: "Wired"

Creating Mutant-Powered Troops

By David Axe
Courtesy Of "Wired"

Greater strength and endurance. Enhanced thinking. Better teamwork. New classes of genetic weaponry, able to subvert DNA. Not long from now, the technology could exist to routinely enhance — and undermine — people’s minds and bodies using a wide range of chemical, neurological, genetic and behavioral techniques.

It’s warfare waged at the evolutionary level. And it’s coming sooner than many people think. According to the futurists at the U.S. National Intelligence Council, by 2030, “neuro-enhancements could provide superior memory recall or speed of thought. Brain-machine interfaces could provide ‘superhuman‘ abilities, enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.”

Qualities that today must be honed by years of training and education could be installed in a relative instant by, say, an injection or a targeted burst of electricity to the brain. Rapid advancements in neurology, pharmacology and genetics could soon make such installations fairly easy.

These modifications could give rise to new breeds of biologically enhanced troops possessing what one expert in the field calls “mutant powers.” But those troops may not American. So far, the U.S. military has been extremely reluctant to embrace human biological modification, or “biomods.” And that could result in a veritable mutant gap. In this new form of biological warfare, the U.S. could find itself outgunned.

A 29-year-old Georgetown-trained researcher with degrees in microbiology, health physics and national security, Herr is one a handful of specialists in the defense community preaching greater U.S. investment in biomods. First as a consultant with the Scitor Corporation, a Virginia-based firm whose clients include top military and intelligence agencies, and later as the head of his own research organization, Herr’s job has been to think about biological modifications whose effects he says are “more than evolutionary.”

The Once-and-Future Mutant Age

Ten years ago, there were all sorts of biomods enthusiasts roaming the halls of the Pentagon’s premiere science division. In 2002 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched an ambitious effort aimed at tweaking troops’ physiology to reduce their susceptibility to stress, sleep deprivation, fatigue, pain and blood loss while enhancing their memory and learning. The idea was to help soldiers “perform at their peak, stay at their peak,” one former Darpa official told Wired.

The program was called Metabolic Dominance. It promised to produce America’s first mutant warriors.

Progress was slow — understandably so considering the scope and scale of the effort. In 2007 Tony Tether, then Darpa director, downplayed Metabolic Dominance, signaling the beginning of the end of the program. “We’re making it possible for people to be all that they can be, not making them be better than they can be,” Tether told Wired.

By 2008 the science agency had all but abandoned Metabolic Dominance. Herr began his work the next year, studying and advocating biomods for an alphabet soup of military and intelligence clients. In effect, Herr helped pick up the pieces from Darpa’s initial, failed effort.

In 2009 Herr was assigned to a Pentagon-funded project aimed at understanding “unit cohesion.” That is, what makes one group of soldiers keep fighting through hunger, thirst, exhaustion, confusion, and the deaths of comrades. Unit cohesion has won and lost conflicts since the beginning of warfare, but it was still poorly understood.

For his unit cohesion study, Herr interviewed Army infantrymen, Navy submariners and Air Force drone operators. Partway into the two-year study Herr had an epiphany. “The ‘aha’ moment,” Herr tells Danger Room, “was seeing a link between an objective physiological phenomenon — knowing the effects on the body and brain of stress hormones — and how that matched with all the literature on unit cohesion.”

In other words, Herr had a vision of the stress hormones that our glands pump into our bloodstreams in life-or-death situations, and, in turn, impact the behavior of trained combat units. Tracing this physiological blueprint for combat effectiveness, Herr realized it could be altered biologically. “All of sudden the Matrix made sense,” Herr says, referencing the secret world of the eponymous 1999 sci-fi film.

The military could select troops and their officers for their unique, inborn ability to cope with stress. Or it could directly tweak a soldier’s body functions — re-balancing the normal hormonal cocktail so the soldier doesn’t panic, doesn’t retreat and keeps on fighting, even when the odds are against him and any normal person would just give up.

Specific enhancement methods Herr studied include: focused diet and exercise regimens; injections of the stress-inhibiting brain molecule neuropeptide Y; electroshock-style Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation to boost thinking; and gene therapy for enhancing a whole host of body functions by literally altering a person’s DNA with viruses or chemicals.

Following the unit-cohesion study, Herr began teaching individual self-enhancement techniques in Washington, D.C. and Indiana. His students were officers and civilians slated to deploy to Afghanistan under a Pentagon program that embeds American mentors in the Afghan government. Among other tricks, Herr instructed them to minimize brain-stimulating blue light in order to protect their sleep cycles; eat small, frequent, protein-rich meals to maintain steady cognition; and exercise in order to biochemically neutralize the steady stream of stress hormones that advisers experience in their year-long, sometimes dangerous deployments.

Herr says the curriculum fed into his other projects, many of which are classified. “I can’t really talk about those,” he says. Clearly, the techniques Herr taught to the advisers could also be applied to pilots, sub and carrier crews and frontline infantry, for whom the stress is even greater and the work even more critical to U.S. national defense.

But for these combatants, the Pentagon wants to go beyond merely encouraging self-enhancement. Patrick Lin, a professor at California Polytechnic State, notes the military’s “ongoing interest in using pharmaceuticals, such as modafinil (a cognitive enhancer), dietary supplements, as well as gene therapy to boost the performance of warfighters.”

And in February the British Royal Society identified four small-scale DARPA biomodification efforts focusing on stress-reduction and neurological enhancement, plus an obscure Air Force program aimed at the “exploitation of external stimulant technology” to enable airmen “to receive and process greater amounts of operationally relevant information.” That’s generally understood to mean drugs.

Herr says defense planners are discussing a comprehensive strategy to unite these programs and coordinate growing military investment in modification technologies. “What I’ve been working on is trying to support and guide that discussion.” To that end, he has briefed the Defense Science Board, a panel of the Pentagon’s top technology advisers.

A comprehensive biomods strategy would get the Pentagon back to the same conceptual point it was at a decade ago at the launch of Metabolic Dominance — and prove that U.S. military leaders are serious about preparing for the coming era of mutant warfare.

Whether or not the Pentagon is ready, the biomods bug is spreading, spurred by government programs and, increasingly, privately funded research all over the world. But Herr cautions against expecting biomods to transform society and warfare tomorrow. “We’re still in the foundational phase.”

For its part, the National Intelligence Council expects some resistance to biomods. “Moral and ethical challenges to human augmentation are inevitable,” the Council advised. Americans, especially, tend to have deep reservations about changing people’s biology, Herr points out. That doesn’t mean they won’t do it. He points out increasing acceptance of cognitive-enhancing drugs among American college students. “Seventy to 80 percent of upperclassman have at least once taken these drugs illegally to get better grades,” he says. “If the younger generation in our country is more comfortable with this, then that would make the use of these kinds of things in society, and by extension the military, very different.”

But the U.S. is still likely to move more slowly on biomods than say, China or Russia. “Other countries are probably much more likely to take advantage of these [technologies],” Herr says. “The question will be how they do it.”

“Other countries are also interested in these areas but are not so open as the U.S. about what they are doing, so it is difficult to know exactly what is going on in many cases,” notes Rod Flower, a professor at the William Harvey Research Institute in the U.K. and the chair of the Royal Society’s biomods study. It’s equally hard to tell to which terrorists, militants and criminal groups these countries might have ties — and whether new biological weaponry might proliferate through these channels.

The best-case scenario for biomods, Herr says, is widespread, legal and peaceful use of performance-boosting methods to elevate creativity, potentially leading to technological breakthroughs in other fields that in turn could “really enhance the quality of people’s lives.”

“It would be nice to think that the efforts of military scientists could be put to peaceful uses,” says Flower.

Herr says when it comes to weapons-grade mutations, it’s wisest to focus on worst-case scenarios, albeit only the most plausible one. “What can be useful is a body of research which says here are things, which if they happen, would cause major discontinuities.”

The most realistic future biomods apocalypse is one in which a hostile foreign government or terror group finds ways to subtly change a lot of people. “The worst-case scenario is people could start doing things that wouldn’t be recognized,” Herr says. “At least you can do something about if if you know it’s happening.”

Genetic Sneak Attack

Among his duties at Scitor, Herr was tasked with “red teaming” the performance-enhancement field on behalf of the Defense Department in order to assess the approach America’s rivals are taking to the technology. Drawing on his childhood conversations with his world-traveling parents, Herr concluded that military biomodifications could develop very differently in other countries.

Herr says he achieved a breakthrough in his red-teaming in 2010, while in Boston attending what he describes as a “totally academic, non-military” conference on gene therapy, which typically involves “infecting” a person with a specially tailored virus that can modify DNA and in principle, cure a disease or correct a defect.

But fixing genes is hard. Damaging them is a lot easier, one of the speakers at the Boston conference admitted. “He said if our goal was figuring out how to create muscular dystrophy, we’ve been very successful, but if our goal is to treat it, we’re far from the goal,” Herr recalls. “He meant it as a laugh line. But I’m sitting in the back thinking … it’s kind of scary. They know how to break us but don’t know how to fix us.”

In one dire scenario, an army might attack its enemies by changing their physiology to make them dumber, slower, more afraid. In The Atlantic recently, two researchers even discussed the possibility of governments or terror groups genetically assassinating enemy leaders by tailoring cancers specifically to the target’s DNA. The authors pointed out that the U.S. State Department already surreptitiously collects DNA samples from foreign dignitaries.

There are several ways these theoretical bio-attacks could be accomplished. At an August war game hosted by the Army, Herr and other experts said biological agents could be slipped into an enemy’s food or water supplies or dispersed by air. Herr says it could also be possible to secretly add an agent to a commercial product. “Someone thinks he’s taking protein powder but he’s really taking God-knows-what.”

If America gets caught unaware by some future bio-assault, it won’t be because Herr didn’t try to prepare us. After three years at Scitor, this fall Herr struck out on his own with an ambitious plan to advance the biomods field. He started two companies: one, a research firm called Helicase; the other, a sort of personal consultancy called Cognitrition that Herr says will offer clients advice on “enhancing cognitive performance through nutrition and day-to-day activity.”