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.

Giant Military Surveillance Blimp To Constantly Monitor East Coast

Photo: Raytheon

By the end of the year, there will likely be two giant Army blimps hovering 10,000 feet above Baltimore with the ability to see 340 miles in any direction.

Most forms of surveillance have weaknesses: If they’re ground-based, they have range limitations. Predator drones have to refuel and don’t have the ability to hover in one spot. Helicopters are really loud and generally have to fly pretty low. That’s where JLENS comes in. It’s a giant, 243-foot long blimp that’s tethered to the ground. It has ridiculously powerful radar and cameras. It pretty much doesn’t have to move, and it only has to land once a month or so for quick maintenance.

Yes, that means the entire mid-Atlantic region will, at least, have the potential to be under “persistent surveillance,” a dream term for those in the intelligence biz and a worst-case scenario for those who care a lick about privacy. One aerostat that was tested in Utah last year was able to follow individual vehicles “dozens of miles away” and watch a test subject plant a fake bomb on the side of the road. According to the Washington Post, the Army has “no current plans” to use that high-powered video sensor in Maryland, but wouldn’t rule out using it in the future. 

Rumors of the Army buying a JLENS from Raytheon to put in Aberdeen, Maryland, have been swirling for a couple years now—earlier this year, Timothy Carey, then-Vice President for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance with Raytheon told me that “it depends on the day of the week” as to whether the Army wanted to go ahead and purchase one. Well, it seems they’ve made up their mind. They’re reportedly buying two blimps at a cost of roughly $2.7 billion—one will use a long-range radar and the other will use a higher-frequency radar to help target threats.

Even at $2.7 billion, the system is much cheaper than running constant Predator drones or having other manned surveillance aircraft fly in circles all day. There's still no exact date for when the blimps will start operating, and a collision in which a separate airship crashed into a JLENS last fallhas delayed the program. 

JLENS, at least in theory, isn’t meant to spy on everyday citizens. It’s a military aircraft that’s supposed to spot things like incoming enemy fighter jets and missiles long before ground-based radar can. It’s meant to be paired with Patriot Missiles to do things like shoot nukes out of the air. It can spot incoming missiles or aircrafts up to 340 miles out and can track vehicles on the ground up to 140 miles away, meaning its effective ground vision area is 62,000 miles. Raytheon envisioned it as something that could sit on an army base in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan to allow the military to spot threats many miles away.

“You can keep it up for virtually a month or so at a time with very little maintenance,” Carey said. “You wouldn’t have them positioned anywhere close to the front lines because they have the capability to see deep and aren’t great at moving.” 

But with its capabilities, it certainly can also be used at home for persistent surveillance on not-so-nearby people. 

“I don’t care how good of a radar you have, if you put it on the ground and you’re trying to detect targets flying close to the earth, you’re not going to see them in time,” Carey said. “When you elevate the sensor, clearly you can see further out, you can detect things further out.”

JLENS also doesn’t have to focus on just one target at a time. According to Raytheon, it can “track hundreds of airborne and surface moving threats, in 360 degrees.” And it’ll be flying full time by the end of the year. 

By Jason Koebler

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.

The Pentagon's Mind Experiments

Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (credit: DARPA)

By Ray Kurzweil

Duke University experiments in connecting the brains of two rats through implanted electrodes and the planned Brain Activity Map project reflect a growing Pentagon interest in neuroscience for applications that range from such far-off ideas as teleoperation of military devices (think mind-controlled drones), to more near-term and less controversial technology, like prosthetics controlled by the human brain, BBC Future reports.

The Pentagon’s expanding work in neuroscience in recent years has focused on medical applications, like research to understand traumatic brain injury and on concepts intended to help the military fight wars more effectively, such as studying ways to keep soldiers’ brains alert even after days without sleep.

But under the rubric of “Augmented Cognition,” DARPA has also pursued a number of military technologies, like goggles that would monitor a soldier’s brain signals to pick up potential threats before the conscious mind is aware of them.

While some of the applications might be a generation away, or may never arrive, like mind-controlled drones, others, like the brain-monitoring goggles, are already in testing (though probably not ready for use in the field).  That’s raising questions from ethicists, who are pushing for the government to begin now to think about “neuro ethics.”

In a 2012 article published last year in the journal Plos Biology, Jonathan Moreno, a professor of medical ethics, and Michael Tennison, a professor of neurology, argued that many neuroscientists don’t think about the contribution of their work to warfare, or consider the ethical implication of such work.

The question they raise is what choice future soldiers might have in such cognitively enhanced warfare. “If a warfighter is allowed no autonomous freedom to accept or decline an enhancement intervention, and the intervention in question is as invasive as remote brain control,” they write, “then the ethical implications are immense.”

Sharon Weinberger spoke in more detail about the Pentagon’s growing interest in neuroscience in her talk A Manhattan Project of the Mind at SXSW.

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.”

B-2 Stealth Bomber's Successor

The youngest active stealth bomber in the U.S. turns 15 this year, and the other 19 B-2s in the Air Force fleet are nearly five years older. Meanwhile, the integrated defense systems they face have become much more sophisticated. Multi-static radar, which is now relatively common, is so sensitive that it can detect certain stealth craft. To stay ahead of such defense systems, the Air Force has budgeted $3.7 billion over the next five years to develop a successor to the B-2 that could be active by 2020. Actual designs of the new bomber are classified, but some secrets are already out.

Patents and bid proposals from Northrop Grumman, maker of the B-2, suggest that the new bomber will be narrower than the B-2 but maintain the familiar flying wing design, which reduces radar reflection by minimizing hard edges. Engineers are also testing new types of radar-absorbing coatings that could be customized to individual defense systems. And so a picture of the next generation of stealth bombers is beginning to emerge.

CUSTOM COATINGS

Most stealth coatings consist of a radar-absorbing material, typically a form of iron, suspended in paint. But they are heavy (which lowers fuel efficiency), need to be reapplied frequently, and don’t absorb all radar frequencies. Ceno Technologies, a particles-science company in Sanborn, New York, has developed a lighter, more durable coating that uses hollow ceramic spheres, called cenospheres. Because the spheres can be covered in carbon, silver or other metals that absorb slightly different wavelengths of radar, the coating can be customized to deceive specific radar systems.

SMOOTHER SHAPE

The B-2 has two semi-flush air-intake vents, the hard edges of which can reflect radar. In one design seen in a patent from Northrop Grumman, the new bomber has four small vents rather than two large ones. The smaller vents can be buried more deeply in the wing, reducing the possibility of radar returns.

SMARTER DECOYS

To confuse radar defense systems, the new bomber will probably carry something like the Miniature Air Launched Decoy made by Raytheon. The modified drones use radar reflectors to create bomber-like signatures that divert attention from the actual bomber. The decoys fly on a preprogrammed course for up to 575 miles and may carry radar jammers to further confuse air defenses.

RETRACTABLE WING

In one design from Northrop Grumman, engineers included a canard wing on the plane’s nose, which would provide extra lift during takeoff and flight, allowing a smaller bomber to carry a heavier weapons payload. Because its straight lines and hard angles would reflect radar, the canard wing will most likely be designed to fold flush with the bomber’s body as the craft comes within range of defense systems.

HEAVIER WEAPONS

The new bomber will most likely have a single weapons bay, as opposed to the twin bays on the B-2. It will still be able to carry conventional GPS-guided JDAM missiles, nuclear warheads and even the new 30,000-pound, bunker-busting Massive Ordnance Penetrator, but a single bay would reduce the cost of manufacturing—a major concern for designers on a relatively tight budget.

Via: "PopSci"

Hacking The Brain: The Next Domain Of Warfare

It’s been fashionable in military circles to talk about cyberspace as a “fifth domain” for warfare, along with land, space, air and sea. But there’s a sixth and arguably more important warfighting domain emerging: the human brain.

This new battlespace is not just about influencing hearts and minds with people seeking information. It’s about involuntarily penetrating, shaping, and coercing the mind in the ultimate realization of Clausewitz’s definition of war: compelling an adversary to submit to one’s will. And the most powerful tool in this war is brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies, which connect the human brain to devices.

Current BCI work ranges from researchers compiling and interfacing neural data such as in the Human Conectome Project to work by scientists hardening the human brain against rubber hose cryptanalysis to technologists connecting the brain to robotic systems. While these groups are streamlining the BCI for either security or humanitarian purposes, the reality is that misapplication of such research and technology has significant implications for the future of warfare.

Where BCIs can provide opportunities for injured or disabled soldiers to remain on active duty post-injury, enable paralyzed individuals to use their brain to type, or allow amputees to feel usingbionic limbs, they can also be exploited if hacked. BCIs can be used to manipulate … or kill.

Recently, security expert Barnaby Jack demonstrated the vulnerability of biotechnological systems by highlighting how easilypacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) could be hacked, raising fears about the susceptibility of even life-saving biotechnological implants. This vulnerability could easily be extended to biotechnologies that connect directly to the brain, such as vagus nerve stimulation or deep-brain stimulation.

Outside the body, recent experiments have proven that the brain can control and maneuverquadcopter drones and metal exoskeletons. How long before we harness the power of mind-controlled weaponized drones – or use BCIs to enhance the power, efficiency, and sheer lethality of our soldiers?

This new battlespace is not just about influencing hearts and minds. It’s about involuntarily penetrating and coercing the mind.

Given that military research arms such as the United States’ DARPA are investing in understanding complex neural processesand enhanced threat detection through BCI scan for P300responses, it seems the marriage between neuroscience and military systems will fundamentally alter the future of conflict.

And it is here that military researchers need to harden the systems that enable military application of BCIs. We need to prevent BCIs from being disrupted or manipulated, and safeguard against the ability of the enemy to hack an individual’s brain.

The possibilities for damage, destruction, and chaos are very real. This could include manipulating a soldier’s BCI during conflict so that s/he were forced to pull the gun trigger on friendlies, install malicious code in his own secure computer system, call in inaccurate coordinates for an air strike, or divulge state secrets to the enemy seemingly voluntarily. Whether an insider has fallen victim to BCI hacking and exploits a system from within, or an external threat is compelled to initiate a physical attack on hard and soft targets, the results would present major complications: in attribution, effectiveness of kinetic operations, and stability of geopolitical relations.

Like every other domain of warfare, the mind as the sixth domain is neither isolated nor removed from other domains; coordinated attacks across all domains will continue to be the norm. It’s just that military and defense thinkers now need to account for the subtleties of the human mind … and our increasing reliance upon the brain-computer interface.

Regardless of how it will look, though, the threat is real and not as far away as we would like – especially now that researchers just discovered a zero-day vulnerability in the brain.

Via: "Wired"

New Weapons Systems Could Give Pentagon Unprecedented Power Over The Plane

Combining Biometrics, Cyberwarfare, and A Potential Future Aerospace Shield, The Pentagon Is Rushing Toward Uncharted Territory, and Domination.

By Alfred W. McCoy,
Courtesy Of "Alter-Net"

It’s 2025 and an American “triple canopy” of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere.  A wonder of the modern age, it can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out an enemy’s satellite communications system, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances.  Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated militarized information system ever created and an insurance policy for U.S. global dominion deep into the twenty-first century.  It’s the future as the Pentagon imagines it; it’s under development; and Americans know nothing about it.

They are still operating in another age.  “Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917,” complained Republican candidate Mitt Romney during the last presidential debate.

With words of withering mockery, President Obama shot back: “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed... the question is not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships. It's what are our capabilities.”

Obama later offered just a hint of what those capabilities might be: “What I did was work with our joint chiefs of staff to think about, what are we going to need in the future to make sure that we are safe?... We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be talking about space.”

Amid all the post-debate media chatter, however, not a single commentator seemed to have a clue when it came to the profound strategic changes encoded in the president’s sparse words. Yet for the past four years, working in silence and secrecy, the Obama administration has presided over a technological revolution in defense planning, moving the nation far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyberwarfare and the full-scale weaponization of space. In the face of waning economic influence, this bold new breakthrough in what’s called “information warfare” may prove significantly responsible should U.S. global dominion somehow continue far into the twenty-first century.

While the technological changes involved are nothing less than revolutionary, they have deep historical roots in a distinctive style of American global power.  It’s been evident from the moment this nation first stepped onto the world stage with its conquest of the Philippines in 1898. Over the span of a century, plunged into three Asian crucibles of counterinsurgency -- in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Afghanistan -- the U.S. military has repeatedly been pushed to the breaking point.  It has repeatedly responded by fusing the nation’s most advanced technologies into new information infrastructures of unprecedented power.

That military first created a manual information regime for Philippine pacification, then a computerized apparatus to fight communist guerrillas in Vietnam.  Finally, during its decade-plus in Afghanistan (and its years in Iraq), the Pentagon has begun to fuse biometrics, cyberwarfare, and a potential future triple canopy aerospace shield into a robotic information regime that could produce a platform of unprecedented power for the exercise of global dominion -- or for future military disaster. 

America’s First Information Revolution 

This distinctive U.S. system of imperial information gathering (and the surveillance and war-making practices that go with it) traces its origins to some brilliant American innovations in the management of textual, statistical, and visual data.  Their sum was nothing less than a new information infrastructure with an unprecedented capacity for mass surveillance.

During two extraordinary decades, American inventions like Thomas Alva Edison’s quadruplex telegraph (1874), Philo Remington’s commercial typewriter (1874), Melvil Dewey’s library decimal system (1876), and Herman Hollerith’s patented punch card (1889) created synergies that led to the militarized application of America’s first information revolution. To pacify a determined guerrilla resistance that persisted in the Philippines for a decade after 1898, the U.S. colonial regime -- unlike European empires with their cultural studies of “Oriental civilizations” -- used these advanced information technologies to amass detailed empirical data on Philippine society.  In this way, they forged an Argus-eyed security apparatus that played a major role in crushing the Filipino nationalist movement. The resulting colonial policing and surveillance system would also leave a lasting institutional imprint on the emerging American state.

When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, the “father of U.S. military intelligence” Colonel Ralph Van Deman drew upon security methods he had developed years before in the Philippines to found the Army’s Military Intelligence Division.  He recruited a staff that quickly grew from one (himself) to 1,700, deployed some 300,000 citizen-operatives to compile more than a million pages of surveillance reports on American citizens, and laid the foundations for a permanent domestic surveillance apparatus.

A version of this system rose to unparalleled success during World War II when Washington established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as the nation’s first worldwide espionage agency. Among its nine branches, Research & Analysis recruited a staff of nearly 2,000 academics who amassed 300,000 photographs, a million maps, and three million file cards, which they deployed in an information system via “indexing, cross-indexing, and counter-indexing” to answer countless tactical questions.

Yet by early 1944, the OSS found itself, in the words of historian Robin Winks, “drowning under the flow of information.”  Many of the materials it had so carefully collected were left to molder in storage, unread and unprocessed. Despite its ambitious global reach, this first U.S. information regime, absent technological change, might well have collapsed under its own weight, slowing the flow of foreign intelligence that would prove so crucial for America’s exercise of global dominion after World War II.

Computerizing Vietnam         

Under the pressures of a never-ending war in Vietnam, those running the U.S. information infrastructure turned to computerized data management, launching a second American information regime.  Powered by the most advanced IBM mainframe computers, the U.S. military compiled monthly tabulations of security in all of South Vietnam’s 12,000 villages and filed the three million enemy documents its soldiers captured annually on giant reels of bar-coded film.  At the same time, the CIA collated and computerized diverse data on the communist civilian infrastructure as part of its infamous Phoenix Program.  This, in turn, became the basis for its systematic tortures and 41,000 “extra-judicial executions” (which, based on disinformation from petty local grudges and communist counterintelligence, killed many but failed to capture more than a handfull of top communist cadres).

Most ambitiously, the U.S. Air Force spent $800 million a year to lace southern Laos with a network of 20,000 acoustic, seismic, thermal, and ammonia-sensitive sensors to pinpoint Hanoi’s truck convoys coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail under a heavy jungle canopy.  The information these provided was then gathered on computerized systems for the targeting of incessant bombing runs. After 100,000 North Vietnamese troops passed right through this electronic grid undetected with trucks, tanks, and heavy artillery to launch the Nguyen Hue Offensive in 1972, the U.S. Pacific Air Force pronounced this bold attempt to build an “electronic battlefield” an unqualified failure.

In this pressure cooker of what became history’s largest air war, the Air Force also accelerated the transformation of a new information system that would rise to significance three decades later: the Firebee target drone.  By war’s end, it had morphed into an increasingly agile unmanned aircraft that would make 3,500 top-secret surveillance sorties over China, North Vietnam, and Laos. By 1972, the SC/TV drone, with a camera in its nose, was capable of flying 2,400 miles while navigating via a low-resolution television image.

On balance, all this computerized data helped foster the illusion that American “pacification” programs in the countryside were winning over the inhabitants of Vietnam’s villages, and the delusion that the air war was successfully destroying North Vietnam’s supply effort.  Despite a dismal succession of short-term failures that helped deliver a soul-searing blow to American power, all this computerized data-gathering proved a seminal experiment, even if its advances would not become evident for another 30 years until the U.S. began creating a third -- robotic -- information regime.

The Global War On Terror          

As it found itself at the edge of defeat in the attempted pacification of two complex societies, Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington responded in part by adapting new technologies of electronic surveillance, biometric identification, and drone warfare -- all of which are now melding into what may become an information regime far more powerful and destructive than anything that has come before. 

After six years of a failing counterinsurgency effort in Iraq, the Pentagon discovered the power of biometric identification and electronic surveillance to pacify the country’s sprawling cities.  It then built a biometric database with more than a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans that U.S. patrols on the streets of Baghdad could access instantaneously by satellite link to a computer center in West Virginia.

When President Obama took office and launched his “surge,” escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, that country became a new frontier for testing and perfecting such biometric databases, as well as for full-scale drone war in both that country and the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the latest wrinkle in a technowar already loosed by the Bush administration. This meant accelerating technological developments in drone warfare that had largely been suspended for two decades after the Vietnam War.

Launched as an experimental, unarmed surveillance aircraft in 1994, the Predator drone was first deployed in 2000 for combat surveillance under the CIA’s “Operation Afghan Eyes.” By 2011, the advanced MQ-9 Reaper drone, with “persistent hunter killer” capabilities, was heavily armed with missiles and bombs as well as sensors that could read disturbed dirt at 5,000 feet and track footprints back to enemy installations. Indicating the torrid pace of drone development, between 2004 and 2010 total flying time for all unmanned vehicles rose from just 71 hours to 250,000 hours. 

By 2009, the Air Force and the CIA were already deploying a drone armada of at least 195 Predators and 28 Reapers inside Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan -- and it’s only grown since.  These collected and transmitted 16,000 hours of video daily, and from 2006-2012 fired hundreds of Hellfire missiles that killedan estimated 2,600 supposed insurgents inside Pakistan’s tribal areas. Though the second-generation Reaper drones might seem stunningly sophisticated, one defense analyst has called them “very much Model T Fords.” Beyond the battlefield, there are now some 7,000 drones in the U.S. armada of unmanned aircraft, including 800 larger missile-firing drones. By funding its own fleet of 35 drones and borrowing others from the Air Force, the CIA has moved beyond passive intelligence collection to build a permanent robotic paramilitary capacity.

In the same years, another form of information warfare came, quite literally, online.  Over two administrations, there has been continuity in the development of a cyberwarfare capability at home and abroad. Starting in 2002, President George W. Bush illegally authorized the National Security Agency to scan countless millions of electronic messages with its top-secret “Pinwale” database. Similarly, the FBI started an Investigative Data Warehouse that, by 2009, held a billion individual records. 

Under Presidents Bush and Obama, defensive digital surveillance has grown into an offensive “cyberwarfare” capacity, which has already been deployed against Iran in history’s first significant cyberwar. In 2009, the Pentagon formed U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), with headquarters at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and a cyberwarfare center at Lackland Air Base in Texas,staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees. Two years later, it declared cyberspace an “operational domain” like air, land, or sea, and began putting its energy into developing a cadre of cyber-warriors capable of launching offensive operations, such as a variety of attacks on the computerized centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear facilities and Middle Eastern banks handling Iranian money.

A Robotic Information Regime  

As with the Philippine Insurrection and the Vietnam War, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have served as the catalyst for a new information regime, fusing aerospace, cyberspace, biometrics, and robotics into an apparatus of potentially unprecedented power. In 2012, after years of ground warfare in both countries and the continuous expansion of the Pentagon budget, the Obama administration announced a leaner future defense strategy.  It included a 14% cut in future infantry strength to be compensated for by an increased emphasis on investments in the dominions of outer space and cyberspace, particularly in what the administration calls “critical space-based capabilities.” 

By 2020, this new defense architecture should theoretically be able to integrate space, cyberspace, and terrestrial combat through robotics for -- so the claims go -- the delivery of seamless information for lethal action. Significantly, both space and cyberspace are new, unregulated domains of military conflict, largely beyond international law.  And Washington hopes to use both, without limitation, as Archimedean levers to exercise new forms of global dominion far into the twenty-first century, just as the British Empire once ruled from the seas and the Cold War American imperium exercised its global reach via airpower.

As Washington seeks to surveil the globe from space, the world might well ask: Just how high is national sovereignty? Absent any international agreement about the vertical extent of sovereign airspace (since a conference on international air law, convened in Paris in 1910, failed), some puckish Pentagon lawyer might reply: only as high as you can enforce it. And Washington has filled this legal void with a secret executive matrix -- operated by the CIA and the clandestine Special Operations Command -- that assigns names arbitrarily, without any judicial oversight, to a classified “kill list” that means silent, sudden death from the sky for terror suspects across the Muslim world.

Although U.S. plans for space warfare remain highly classified, it is possible to assemble the pieces of this aerospace puzzle by trolling the Pentagon’s websites, and finding many of the key components in technical descriptions at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As early as 2020, the Pentagon hopes to patrol the entire globe ceaselessly, relentlessly via a triple canopy space shield reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, driven by drones armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, monitored through a telescopic panopticon, and operated by robotic controls. 

At the lowest tier of this emerging U.S. aerospace shield, within striking distance of Earth in the lower stratosphere, the Pentagon is building an armada of 99 Global Hawk drones equipped with high-resolution cameras capable of surveilling all terrain within a 100-mile radius, electronic sensors to intercept communications, efficient engines for continuous 24-hour flights, and eventually Triple Terminator missiles to destroy targets below. By late 2011, the Air Force and the CIA had already ringed the Eurasian land mass with a network of 60 bases for drones armed with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs, allowing air strikes against targets just about anywhere in Europe, Africa, or Asia.

The sophistication of the technology at this level was exposed in December 2011 when one of the CIA’s RQ-170 Sentinels came down in Iran.  Revealed was a bat-winged drone equipped with radar-evading stealth capacity, active electronically scanned array radar, and advanced optics “that allow operators to positively identify terror suspects from tens of thousands of feet in the air.”

If things go according to plan, in this same lower tier at altitudes up to 12 miles unmanned aircraft such as the “Vulture,” with solar panels covering its massive 400-foot wingspan, will be patrolling the globe ceaselessly for up to five years at a time with sensors for “unblinking” surveillance, and possibly missiles for lethal strikes. Establishing the viability of this new technology, NASA’s solar-powered aircraft Pathfinder, with a 100-foot wingspan, reached an altitude of 71,500 feet altitude in 1997, and its fourth-generation successor the “Helios” flew at 97,000 feet with a 247-foot wingspan in 2001, two miles higher than any previous aircraft.

For the next tier above the Earth, in the upper stratosphere, DARPA and the Air Force are collaborating in the development of the Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle.  Flying at an altitude of 20 miles, it is expected to “deliver 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles from the continental United States in less than two hours.” Although the first test launches in April 2010 and August 2011 crashed midflight, they did reach an amazing 13,000 miles per hour, 22 times the speed of sound, and sent back“unique data” that should help resolve remaining aerodynamic problems.

At the outer level of this triple-tier aerospace canopy, the age of space warfare dawned in April 2010 when the Pentagon quietly launched the X-37B space drone, an unmanned craft just 29 feet long, into an orbit 250 miles above the Earth. By the time its second prototype landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in June 2012 after a 15-month flight, this classified mission represented a successful test of “robotically controlled reusable spacecraft” and established the viability of unmanned space drones in the exosphere.

At this apex of the triple canopy, 200 miles above Earth where the space drones will soon roam, orbital satellites are the prime targets, a vulnerability that became obvious in 2007 when China used a ground-to-air missile to shoot down one of its own satellites. In response, the Pentagon is now developing the F-6 satellite system that will “decompose a large monolithic spacecraft into a group of wirelessly linked elements, or nodes [that increases] resistance to... a bad part breaking or an adversary attacking.” And keep in mind that the X-37B has a capacious cargo bay to carry missiles or future laser weaponry to knock out enemy satellites -- in other words, the potential capability to cripple the communications of a future military rival like China, which will have its own global satellite system operational by 2020.

Ultimately, the impact of this third information regime will be shaped by the ability of the U.S. military to integrate its array of global aerospace weaponry into a robotic command structure that would be capable of coordinating operations across all combat domains: space, cyberspace, sky, sea, and land. To manage the surging torrent of information within this delicately balanced triple canopy, the system would, in the end, have to become self-maintaining through “robotic manipulator technologies,” such as the Pentagon’s FREND system that someday could potentially deliver fuel, provide repairs, or reposition satellites.

For a new global optic, DARPA is building the wide-angle Space Surveillance Telescope (SST), which could be sited at bases ringing the globe for a quantum leap in "space surveillance.”  The system would allow future space warriors to see the whole sky wrapped around the entire planet while seated before a single screen, making it possible to track every object in Earth orbit.

Operation of this complex worldwide apparatus will require, as one DARPA official explained in 2007, "an integrated collection of space surveillance systems -- an architecture -- that is leak-proof." Thus, by 2010, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had 16,000 employees, a $5 billion budget, and a massive $2 billion headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, with 8,500 staffers wrapped in electronic security -- all aimed at coordinating the flood of surveillance data pouring in from Predators, Reapers, U-2 spy planes, Global Hawks, X-37B space drones, Google Earth, Space Surveillance Telescopes, and orbiting satellites. By 2020 or thereafter -- such a complex techno-system is unlikely to respect schedules -- this triple canopy should be able to atomize a single “terrorist” with a missile strike after tracking his eyeball, facial image, or heat signature for hundreds of miles through field and favela, or blind an entire army by knocking out all ground communications, avionics, and naval navigation.

Technological Dominion Or Techno-Disaster?

Peering into the future, a still uncertain balance of forces offers two competing scenarios for the continuation of U.S. global power. If all or much goes according to plan, sometime in the third decade of this century the Pentagon will complete a comprehensive global surveillance system for Earth, sky, and space using robotics to coordinate a veritable flood of data from biometric street-level monitoring, cyber-data mining, a worldwide network of Space Surveillance Telescopes, and triple canopy aeronautic patrols. Through agile data management of exceptional power, this system might allow the United States a veto of global lethality, an equalizer for any further loss of economic strength.

However, as in Vietnam, history offers some pessimistic parallels when it comes to the U.S. preserving its global hegemony by militarized technology alone. Even if this robotic information regime could somehow check China’s growing military power, the U.S. might still have the same chance of controlling wider geopolitical forces with aerospace technology as the Third Reich had of winning World War II with its “super weapons” -- V-2 rockets that rained death on London and Messerschmitt Me-262 jets that blasted allied bombers from Europe’s skies. Complicating the future further, the illusion of information omniscience might incline Washington to more military misadventures akin to Vietnam or Iraq, creating the possibility of yet more expensive, draining conflicts, from Iran to the South China Sea. 

If the future of America’s world power is shaped by actual events rather than long-term economic trends, then its fate might well be determined by which comes first in this century-long cycle: military debacle from the illusion of technological mastery, or a new technological regime powerful enough to perpetuate U.S. global dominion.