DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA 'Shark and
Awe' By Tom Engelhardt
The US already has "stealth" aircraft, but
what about a little of the stealth that only
nature can provide?
Navy SEALs, move over
- here come the navy sharks. According to the
latest New Scientist magazine, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the
blue-sky wing of the
Pentagon, has set yet another
group of American scientists loose to create the
basis for future red-in-tooth-and-maw Discovery
Channel programs.
In this case, they are
planning to put neural implants into the brains of
sharks in hopes, one day, of "controlling the
animal's movements, and perhaps even decoding what
it is feeling". In their dreams at least, DARPA's
far-out funders hope to "exploit sharks' natural
ability to glide quietly through the water, sense
delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical
trails. By remotely guiding the sharks' movements,
they hope to transform the animals into stealth
spies, perhaps capable of following vessels
without being spotted."
So far they've
only made it to the poor dogfish, "steered" in
captivity via electrodes keyed to "phantom odors".
As it happens, though, DARPA-sponsored plans are a
good deal lustier than that: next stop, the blue
shark, which reaches a length of 4 meters. Project
engineer Walter Gomes of the Naval Undersea
Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, claims a
team will soon put neural implants "into blue
sharks and release them into the ocean off the
coast of Florida". To transmit signals to the
sharks, the team will need nothing less than a
network of signaling towers in the area. This has
"anti-ballistic shark system" written all over it.
Actually, it's not the first time the US
military has invested in shark technology. As Noah
Shachtman of DefenseTech.org pointed out in July,
"The navy has tapped three firms to build
prototype gadgets that duplicate what sharks do
naturally: find prey from the electric fields they
emit."
One of them, Advanced Ceramics
Research Inc, limned the project's potential
benefits this way: "If developed, such a
capability might allow for the detection of small,
hostile submarines entering a seawater inlet,
harbor or channel, or allow objects such as mines
to be pinpointed in shallow waters where sonar
imaging is severely compromised."
And then
there's that ultimate underwater dream, the
Microfabricated Biomimetic Artificial Gill System,
that could lead to all sorts of navy
breakthroughs, perhaps even - if you'll excuse a
tad of blue-skying - blue shark/human tracking
teams, or if not that, then lots of late-night-TV
Aquaman jokes.
Of course, the US Navy has
been in nature's waters in a big way for a while
with its Marine Mammal Program in San Diego.
There, it trains bottlenose dolphins as "sentries"
and mine detectors. Such dolphins were "first
operationally deployed" in Vietnam in 1971 and a
whole Dolphin Patrol (like, assumedly, the shark
patrol to come) is now on duty in the Khor Abd
Allah waterway, Iraq's passageway into the Persian
Gulf. To the embarrassment of the navy, a dolphin
named Takoma even went "AWOL" (absent without
leave) there in 2003, soon after the invasion of
Iraq began.
DARPA funds research into
weaponizing creatures that inhabit just about any
environmental niche imaginable - including bees
capable of detecting explosives; "eyes" patterned
after those of flies that might some day make
"smart" weaponry even smarter; gecko wall-climbing
and octopus concealment techniques; and
electrode-controlled rats capable of searching
through piles of rubble. In addition, between
nature and whatever the opposite of nurture may
be, there's been an ongoing military
give-and-take. Consider, for instance, BigDog,
highlighted in the same issue of New Scientist.
Compared to a pack mule, goat or horse, this
"robotic beast of burden" is being developed by
Boston Dynamics to haul over rough terrain at
least 40 kilograms of supplies soldiers won't need
to carry, while being able to take a "hefty kick"
in the legs without crumpling to the ground.
From sharks to robots, from hacking into
your nervous system to manipulating the weather,
the Pentagon seems determined to exert
"full-spectrum dominance", especially over that
top-of-the-line primate, us. To achieve this, it
sponsors blue-sky thinking with a vengeance.
Nothing that moves or breathes on the planet, it
seems, is conceptually beyond conscription by
Uncle Sam into possible future war scenarios.
This is undoubtedly what happens when you
have an administration that considers the Pentagon
the answer to all America's problems and gives it
a US$439.3 billion budget to play with - and
that's exclusive of actual war-fighting money
(which, for Iraq and Afghanistan, at an estimated
$120 billion for the year, will come in
supplemental requests to Congress). And remember
as well that the fiscal 2007 Pentagon budget does
not include the $9.3 billion the Department of
Energy will put into nuclear weapons or a host of
veterans-care benefits, all of which bring the
budget at least close to the $600 billion range.
Analyzing the 2006 budget, economist Robert Higgs
estimated that all military-related outlays - that
is, the real Pentagon budget - totaled closer to
$840 billion.
Even taken at face value,
the 2007 Pentagon budget accounts for more than
half of the $873 billion in federal discretionary
spending - the funds that the president and
Congress decide to spend each year. For 2007,
education, the second-largest discretionary budget
item, amounts to just over $50 billion, a piddling
sum by comparison. But there is probably no way to
put any version of the Pentagon's finances into
perspective. Militarily speaking, it throws other
military spending on the planet into the deepest
shadow. As Frida Berrigan, senior research
associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms
Trade Resource Center and co-author of Weapons
at War 2005, points out, "The Pentagon
accounts for about half the world's total military
expenditures of $1.04 trillion, spending alone
what the 32 next most powerful nations spend
together."
The United States is also by
far the planet's largest exporter of weapons and
military hardware. An annual Congressional
Research Service report found that, in 2004,
global weapons deliveries totaled nearly $37
billion - with the United States responsible for
more than 33% of them, or $12.4 billion - and it
hasn't gotten better since.
No other
country puts anything like such effort, planning
and dreaming into the idea of projecting
planet-spanning military power, caught so grimly
in that phrase, "full-spectrum dominance". To
Pentagon minds this seems to mean: from 20,000
leagues down to 30 kilometers up (and everything
that creeps, crawls, swims or flies in between).
The phrase first gained attention with the release
in 2000 of the US Air Force's Joint Vision 2020
statement - a supposed look into a future world of
US war-making.
It's one of those terms
that sticks with you - and not just because of the
full-spectrum weaponry that's now on the drawing
boards, ranging from hypervelocity rod bundles
meant to penetrate underground bunkers from outer
space (ominously nicknamed "rods from God") to the
Common Aero Vehicle (CAV), "an unmanned
maneuverable spacecraft that [by 2010] would
travel at five times the speed of sound and could
carry 1,000 pounds [454 kilograms] of munitions,
intelligence sensors or other payloads" anywhere
on the planet within two hours, or that permanent
base on the moon the administration of President
George W Bush has called for by 2020 (and the
array of Star Wars-style space-based weaponry that
would ring it).
Full-spectrum dominance
turns out to include even the US, where in 2002
the Bush administration established the United
States Northern Command (Northcom), whose website
at present has the following from a visit by
assistant secretary of defense for homeland
defense Paul McHale as its reassuring quote of the
week: "I'm leaving with a clear sense of
confidence in the vision and planning of Northcom
to deal with any emerging threat, whether an
occurrence of pandemic flu, a 2006 hurricane ...
or a terrorist attack still being planned by our
adversaries."
While the Pentagon quietly
begins to take over tasks that once were delegated
to civilian agencies, its blue-sky weapons
planning extends into the distant future. Take,
for instance, the Air Force Futures Game 05, held
for several days last October in the Dulles,
Virginia, office of consultants Booz Allen
Hamilton. The exercise was dedicated to "looking
at scenarios for the year 2025", especially one in
which a nuclear weapon is loose in a "Middle
Eastern country" and a major war is in the offing.
Like many other Pentagon war-gaming exercises,
this one was largely committed to confirming the
usefulness of as-yet-non-existent or hardly
existent weaponry, especially in the areas of
"space access" and "electronic warfare". According
to Colonel Gail Wojtowicz, US Air Force division
director of future concepts and transformation,
the gamers were "also looking at one of the
trickiest issues the air force or another service
may have to face: what the Pentagon can do on
American soil". Indeed.
Military analyst
William Arkin wrote about these particular
air-force games, meant to boost "laser,
high-powered microwaves, and acoustic weapons", at
his Washington Post Early Warning blog. Such
blue-sky exercises, he explained, advance new
weapons systems (and their corporate sponsors)
"along the familiar development path of boosters
and patrons feeding information to war gamers who
feed study participants who feed researchers who
feed manufacturers. At the end of the day, it is
hard to tell whether high-powered microwaves and
laser came into being because someone conceived it
out of need or because its existence in the
laboratory created the need."
To support
letting inventive minds roam free outside normal
frameworks is in itself an inspired idea. But I
bet there's no DARPA-like agency elsewhere in the
government funding the equivalent for education
2025 or health 2025 or even energy independence
2025. To have this happen, I'm afraid, you would
have to transform them into Northcom war games.
Now it's true that much blue-skying may
never come to be. Those US Navy stealth sharks may
not patrol America's coasts and a good, swift
enemy kick to some unexpected spot on BigDog's
anatomy may fell the "creature", if budgetary or
high-tech wrinkles don't do the trick first - just
as an unexpected series of low-tech blows to the
United States' full-spectrum military has left the
Pentagon desperate and its army unraveling in
Iraq.
Wouldn't it be nice, though, if
official blue-sky thinking didn't always mean
mobilizing finances, scientists, corporations and
even the animal kingdom in the service of global
death. Wouldn't it be nice to blue-sky just a tad
about life?
Tom Engelhardt is
editor ofTomdispatch and the author
of The End of Victory Culture. His novel,
The Last Days of Publishing, has recently
come out in paperback.
(The author
offers special thanks for Pentagon facts and
figures in this piece to Frida Berrigan of the
World Policy Institute's invaluable Arms Trade
Resource Center.)
