Page 2 of
2 The Pentagon's battle
bugs By Nick
Turse
they could breed new cyborg
insects, which is not possible," he explained.
"Genetic engineering will be the ethical and legal
battleground, not cybernetics."
Battle
beetles and hawkish hawkmoths Weaponized
or not, moths are hardly the only cyborg insects
that may fly, creep, or crawl into the military's
future arsenal. Scientists from Arizona State
University and elsewhere, working under a grant
from the Office of Naval Research and DARPA, "are
rearing beetle species at various oxygen levels to
attempt to produce beetles with
greater-than-normal size and payload capacity".
Earlier this year, some of the same
scientists published an article
on their DARPA-funded
research titled "A Cyborg Beetle: Insect Flight
Control Through an Implantable, Tetherless
Microsystem." They explained that, by implanting
"multiple inserted neural and muscular
stimulators, a visual stimulator, a polyimide
assembly and a microcontroller" in a
two-centimeter long, 1-2 gram green June beetle,
they were "capable of modulating [the insect's]
flight starts, stops, throttle/lift, and turning".
They could, that is, drive an actual beetle.
However, unlike the June bug you might find on a
porch screen or in a garden, these sported
on-board electronics powered by cochlear implant
batteries.
DARPA-funded HI-MEMS research
has also been undertaken at other institutions
across the country and around the world. For
example, in 2006, researchers at Cornell, in
conjunction with scientists at Pennsylvania State
University and the Universidad de Valparaiso,
Chile, received an US$8.4 million DARPA grant for
work on "Insect Cyborg Sentinels". According to a
recent article in New Scientist, a team led by one
of the primary investigators on that grant, David
Stern, screened a series of video clips at a
recent conference in Tucson, Arizona demonstrating
their ability to control tethered tobacco
hawkmoths through "flexible plastic probes"
implanted during the pupal stage. Simply stated,
the researchers were able to remotely control the
moths-on-a-leash, manipulating the cyborg
creatures' wing speed and direction.
Robo-bugs Cyborg insects are
only the latest additions to the US military's
menagerie. As defense tech-expert Noah Shachtman
of Wired magazine's Danger Room blog has reported,
DARPA projects have equipped rats with electronic
equipment and remotely controlled sharks, while
the military has utilized all sorts of animals,
from bomb-detecting honeybees and "chickens used
as early-warning sensors for chemical attacks" to
guard dogs and dolphins trained to hunt mines.
Additionally, he notes, the Department of
Defense's emphasis on the natural world has led to
robots that resemble dogs, monkeys that control
robotic limbs with their minds, and numerous other
projects inspired by nature.
But whatever
other creatures they favor, insects never seem far
from the Pentagon's dreams of the future. In fact,
Shachtman reported earlier this year that "Air
force scientists are looking for robotic bombs
that look - and act - like swarms of bugs and
birds". He went on to quote Colonel Kirk Kloeppel,
head of the Air Force Research Laboratory's
munitions directorate, who announced the lab's
interest in "bio-inspired munitions", in "small,
autonomous" machines that would "provide close-in
[surveillance] information, in addition to killing
intended targets".
This month, researcher
Robert Wood wrote in IEEE Spectrum about what he
believes was "the first flight of an insect-size
robot". After almost a decade of research, Wood
and his colleagues at the Harvard Microrobotics
Laboratory are now creating small insect-like
robots that will eventually be outfitted "with
onboard sensors, flight controls, and batteries
... to nimbly flit around obstacles and into
places beyond human reach". Like cyborg insect
researchers, Wood is DARPA-funded. Last year, in
fact, the agency selected him as one of 24 "rising
stars" for a "young faculty awards" grant.
Asked about the relative advantages of
cyborg insects compared to mechanical bugs, Robert
Michelson noted that "robotic insects obey without
innate or external influences" and "they can be
mass produced rapidly". He cautioned, however,
that they are extremely limited power-wise. Insect
cyborgs, on the other hand, "can harvest energy
and continue missions of longer duration".
However, they "may be diverted from their task by
stronger influences"; must be grown to maturity
and so may not be available when needed; and, of
course, are mortal and run the risk of dying
before they can be employed as needed.
The future is now There is
plenty of technical information about the HI-MEMS
program available in the scientific literature.
And if you make inquiries, DARPA will even direct
you to some of the relevant citations. But while
it's relatively easy to learn about the optimal
spots to insert a neural stimulator in a green
June beetle ("behind the eye, in the flight
control area of the insect brain") or an
electronic implant in a tobacco hawkmoth ("the
main flight powering muscles ... in the
dorsal-thorax"), it's much harder to discover the
likely future implications of this sci-fi sounding
research.
The "final demonstration goal" -
the immediate aim - of DARPA's HI-MEMS program "is
the delivery of an insect within five meters of a
specific target located a hundred meters away,
using electronic remote control, and/or global
positioning system (GPS)." Right now, DARPA
doesn't know when that might happen. "We basically
operate phase to phase," says Walker. "So, it kind
of depends on how they do in the current phase and
we'll make decisions on future phases."
DARPA refuses to examine anything but
research-oriented issues. As a result, its
Pentagon-funded scientists churn out inventions
with potentially dangerous, if not deadly,
implications without ever fully considering - let
alone seeking public or expert comment on - the
future ramifications of new technologies under
production.
"The people who build this
equipment are always going to say that they're
just building tools, that there are legitimate
uses for them, and that it isn't their fault if
the tools are abused," says the Electronic
Frontier Foundation's Eckersley. "Unfortunately,
we've seen that governments are more than willing
to play fast-and-loose with the legal bounds on
surveillance. Unless and until that changes, we'd
urge researchers to find other projects to work
on." Nick Turse is the associate
editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com.
His first book, The Complex: How the Military
Invades Our Everyday Lives, has just been
published in Metropolitan Books' American Empire
Project series. His website is NickTurse.com
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