To bust those bunkers, DARPA's Strategically Hardened Facility Defeat program is investigating nuke-free, earth-penetrating munitions to counter the "threat posed by our adversaries' use of hard and deeply buried targets." Specifically aimed at the "senior leaders, command and control functions, and weapons of mass destruction" employed by --rogue' nations," these powerful, high-impact weapons will be designed to tunnel deep into the earth before exploding.
Things That Don't Go Boom in the Night
Not all DARPA projects are designed to kill people and destroy hard targets. Some are geared toward delivering men, materiel, and someday robots to do the job instead. Others are aimed at intrusive surveillance, cyber-war, or making silver-screen dreams come true.
One long-term focus of military futurists and DARPA scientists has been the "urban environment." (Think: the billion or more poor and potentially rebellious people already living in the slum cities of our planet.) The Urban Ops Hopper program, for example, seeks to develop small robots or semi-autonomous land drones -- unmanned ground vehicles or UGVs in mil-speak -- that can "adapt to the urban environment in real-time and provide the delivery of small payloads to any point of the urban jungle while remaining lightweight [and] small to minimize the burden on the soldier." And yes, they might even hop.
For many years, the Pentagon has dreamed of persistent surveillance of planetary hot spots, developing, for instance, drone technologies to serve as spies in the skies across the globe. In 2003, Noah Shachtman, writing for the Village Voice, profiled the military's Combat Zones That See, or CTS program. The rationale for the effort was, he wrote, to "protect our troops in cities like Baghdad, where" fleeting attackers have been picking off American fighters in ones and twos." However, he added, "[D]efense experts believe the surveillance effort has a second, more sinister, purpose: to keep entire cities under an omnipresent, unblinking eye."
All these years later, Americans are still in Baghdad, still periodically under siege there, and still, in the case of DARPA, dreaming of snooping on whole cities. With an acronym that brings to mind over-priced polo shirts, preppies on tennis courts, and an angry little alligator, DARPA's Large Area Coverage Optical Search-while-Track and Engage, or LACOSTE program is dedicated to achieving the dream of CTS: imaging technology that will allow for "single sensor day/night persistent tactical surveillance of all moving vehicles in a large urban battlefield." Think of it as placing an entire city in a panopticon where the jailor has true omniscience.
Through its Gravity Anomaly for Tunnel Exposure, or GATE, program, DARPA is also developing technologies that could someday allow drones, flying overhead, to "see" below the Earth's surface and identify areas with underground tunnels. And just this month, DARPA kicked off a new program called Mind's Eye "aimed at developing a visual intelligence capability for unmanned systems."
Partnering with defense giant General Dynamics, Roomba vacuum cleaner manufacturer iRobot, and long-time Pentagon contractor Toyon Research Corporation, as well as scientists from military-academic powerhouses like Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, the Pentagon is exploring the idea of creating robots with artificial intelligence that could roll ahead of infantry patrols, scan the scene, analyze it, and figure out what to do next. In other words, the quest to build a robotic point man will now join a long list of DARPA projects certain to inspire fears of a future straight out of the Terminator films.
In 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me, secret agent James Bond's Lotus Esprit sports car morphed into a mini-submarine. Never one to let an old silver-screen dream go to waste, DARPA is now attempting to one-up 007. Through its Submersible Aircraft program, the agency seeks to "combine the speed and range of an airborne platform with the stealth of an underwater vehicle by developing a vessel that can both fly and submerge." Revolutionary it may be as a machine, but the reasons for creating it remain thoroughly predictable: the "insertion and extraction of expeditionary forces at greater ranges." In other words, it's meant to facilitate deploying forces overseas, perhaps for the next Iraq or Afghan War.
DARPA and the New Arms Race
Recently, some military experts went into mild hysterics over the unveiling of China's first stealth fighter plane and word that the Chinese military was developing a "carrier killer" missile. Never mind that the jet is not unlike the F-22, a relatively useless fighter in the U.S. arsenal, and is still years away from production; never mind that the man who garnered headlines for the aircraft-carrier story, Admiral Robert Willard, the alarmist chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, said intelligence indicated only "that the component parts of the anti-ship ballistic missile have been developed and tested."
Still, advances like the proto-plane and not-yet-effective missile have made great hyperbolic copy for the military-corporate complex. Some pundits went so far as to suggest that U.S. military "weakness" in Asia was emboldening China.
From the Chinese point of view, it undoubtedly looks quite different. After all, the U.S. has all-but-encircled China with military bases, sites, and facilities -- more than 100 in Japan, around 85 in South Korea, even a few in Central Asia -- and has around 50,000 troops deployed to East Asia and the Pacific, and another 100,000 or more deployed in South Asia, as well as the largest Navy on the planet patrolling offshore waters.
As for the future, perhaps the Chinese don't quite believe that DARPA's Long Range Anti-Ship Missile is meant to take out Somali pirates, or that the Triple Target Terminator is geared to counter the al-Qaeda air corps (which mainly seems to consist of ill-constructed bomb-laced underwear and explosive printer cartridges on commercial aircraft), or that the U.S. military plans to deploy Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munitions to fight off non-existent Taliban tanks.
Amid talk of a new arms race, the American people should know more about just what billions of their tax dollars are paying for and what message they're sending to the world. With Beijing holding close to $1 trillion in U.S. debt, it's unlikely that either country has actual military designs on the other. It's far more likely that such DARPA projects (and pundit saber-rattling) will simply lead to needless expenditures on weapons designed for wars the U.S. won't fight. In the end, if history is any guide, many of these weapons will become the overpriced means of killing lightly armed men, along with unarmed men, women, and children in one poverty-stricken country or another in the decades to come.
Unfortunately, Americans can't begin to have an honest conversation about any of this until DARPA comes clean about exactly what billions of their tax dollars are being spent on -- and why. Only then can the taxpayers begin to consider what message their future weapons plans are sending to the world and whether the U.S. really should be spending increasingly scarce dollars on making MAHEM.
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