Page 2 of 4 Spidermen and exploding
frisbees By Nick Turse
DARPA and other Department of Defense
(DoD) dreamers come in. According to DARPA's 2004
report, what's needed are "new systems and
technologies for prosecution of urban warfare ...
[and] new operational methods for our soldiers,
marines and special operations forces".
Today, DARPA, and other Pentagon ventures
like the Small Business Innovation Research
Program (in which the "DoD funds early-stage
R&D [research and development] projects at
small technology companies") and the Small
Business Technology
Transfer Program (where
funding goes to "cooperative R&D projects
involving a small business and a research
institution") are awash in "urban
operations-oriented programs". These go by the
acronym of UO and are designed to support
tomorrow's interventions and occupations. The
director of DARPA's information exploitation
office put it this way:
[They are aimed at] conflicts in
high density urban areas ... against enemies
having social and cultural traditions that may
be counter-intuitive to us, and whose actions
often appear to be irrational because we don't
understand their context.
These
programs include a wide range of efforts to
visualize, map out and spy on the global
mega-favelas that the US has, until now,
largely scorned and neglected. A host of unmanned
vehicles are also being readied for surveillance
and combat in these future "hot-zones", while all
sorts of lethal enhancements are in various stages
of development to enable American troops to more
effectively kick down the doors of the poor in
2025.
Spidermen and exploding frisbees
So let's try to fill out that futuristic
combat scenario in the planet's urban jungles with
a little futuristic detail. Current UO-oriented
systems under development include:
VisiBuilding: This is a
program aimed at addressing "a pressing need in
urban warfare: seeing inside buildings" by
developing technology that will allow US forces to
"determine building layouts, find anomalous
quantities of materials" and "locate people within
the building". According to Edward Baranoski of
DARPA's special projects office, Visibuilding will
allow "a lot of opportunity to stake out buildings
and really see inside". Think of it as a high-tech
military Peeping Tom system that lets US troops
spy inside foreign homes and make judgments about
whatever they might deem "anomalous" inside. While
VisiBuilding is in development, troops will have
to be content with "Radar Scope" which allows them
to "sense through 12 inches of concrete to
determine if someone is inside a building".
Camouflaged long endurance nano
sensors: This "real-time ultra-wideband
radar network ... will detect, classify, localize
and track dismounted combatants ... in urban
environments". In translation, a system of
palm-sized, networked sensors will monitor an
area, day in, day out for weeks at a time. This is
what DARPA likes to call "persistent
surveillance". The US military has headed down
this particular surveillance path before via the
ill-fated McNamara Line and various people-sniffer
devices, all of which proved incapable of
differentiating between armed combatants and
civilians in the Vietnam era. On this score,
there's little reason to believe anything will
change in future alien urban slums, despite the
increasing technological sophistication of such
systems.
UrbanScape: This
program aims "to make the foreign city as familiar
as the soldier's backyard" by providing "the
warfighters patrolling an urban environment with
an up-to-date, high-resolution model of the urban
terrain that can be viewed, manipulated and
analyzed". Specially-outfitted unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs) and Humvees are to gather data
about a target city and then translate it into 3D
visuals. These images will then be available to
troops for use in navigating through and
conducting combat operations in tomorrow's
labyrinthine slums.
Heterogeneous
urban RSTA team: With the apt acronym of
HURT, this program will network a squadron of
small, low-altitude UAVs sending video footage to
hand-held devices for the immediate use of urban
RSTA (reconnaissance, surveillance and target
acquisition) troops. This high-tech system is
designed, according to DARPA's director, Dr
Anthony J Tether, to provide US forces with
"unprecedented awareness that enables them to
shape and control [a] conflict as it unfolds". It
is meant to improve the odds when American
counterinsurgency warriors take on "warfighters in
a MOUT [Military Operations on Urban Terrain]
environment" or any rag-tag slum militia of
tomorrow. If a report by the Pentagon Channel News
is to be believed, HURT will be operational by
2008.
The US Air Force is, in turn,
seeking the "ability to continuously track, tag
and locate [TTL] asymmetric threats in urban
environments using sensors across the tiers of
airborne assets". What they envision is a slew of
UAVs loitering long-term above hostile cities and
slums, ready at a moment's notice to spot a target
and begin tracking it. Such "targets" might be
"commercial vehicles" or individuals identified
through a "hyperspectral imaging HSI video camera"
that allows for "the frequency spectrum of
clothes, hair and skin [to] be exploited" thus
providing "targeting level accuracy to weapon
delivery assets". Think of it as the high-tech
urban hunter-killer system for the neo-colonial
future. While
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