Page 3 of 4 Spidermen and exploding
frisbees By Nick Turse
the air force sees this as a way to target
and kill "anti-occupation forces" in Baghdad 2025,
they also envision it doing double duty in the
homeland where, they say, "law enforcement
require[s] urban target tracking".
Nano air vehicle: Imagine a
world in which mechanical gnats infest a city,
buzzing through people's homes, intruding on their
lives, filming whatever they choose with tiny
cameras and
transmitting the data to US
troops. This program aims to "develop and
demonstrate an extremely small (less than 7.5 cm),
ultra-lightweight (less than 10 grams) air vehicle
system ... to provide the warfighter with
unprecedented capability for urban mission
operations".
Additionally, there's the
multi-dimensional mobility robot (MDMR), which
"will traverse complex urban terrain"; the micro
air vehicle (MAV) a small, vertical take-off and
landing UAV that will be "employable in a variety
of warfighting environments" including "urban
areas"; and the intriguing but shadowy urban
hopping robots program whose project manager, Dr
Michael Obal, declined to answer Tomdispatch's
inquiries about the project.
Jan R Walker
of DARPA's external relations office told
Tomdispatch in an e-mail that there was "very
limited information available on the urban hopping
robots program", but suggested that the "program
is developing a semi-autonomous hybrid
hopping/articulated wheeled robotic platform that
could 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, small to minimize the burden on the
soldier". The proposed hopping robot, she noted,
"would be truly multi-functional in that it will
negotiate all aspects of the urban battlefield to
deliver payloads to non-line-of-sight areas with
precision".
Z-Man: Copyright
infringement was probably the only thing that
stopped this DARPA program from being called the
"Spiderman Project". Basically, Z-Man seeks to
"develop climbing aids that will enable an
individual soldier to scale vertical walls
constructed of typical building materials without
the need for ropes or ladders". The Pentagon is
aiming to find methods similar to those employed
by "geckos, spiders and small animals [to] scale
vertical surfaces, that is, by using unique
biological material systems that enable
controllable adhesion". This weaponized
wall-crawler, assumedly capable of creeping into
some 2025 apartment window in Baghdad, Beruit or
Karachi "carrying a combat load", definitely is
not meant to be your friendly neighborhood
Spiderman.
Modular disc-wing
(frisbee) urban cruise munition: Yes, you
read it right, the air force has green-lighted
Triton Systems, Inc to create "a MEFP [multiple
explosively formed penetrator]-armed lethal
frisbee UAV". That is, a flying disk that will
"locate defiladed combatants in complex urban
terrain" and annihilate them using a bunker-buster
warhead. Unlike your run-of-the mill Wham-O,
however, this "frisbee" will probably be thrown
using a device resembling a skeet launcher.
Close combat lethal recon.
This deadly, loitering explosive expressively for
use in urban landscapes will expand a soldier's
killing zone by reaching "over and around
buildings, onto rooftops and into open building
portals". Think of it as a smart grenade or,
according to DARPA director Tether, "a
tube-launched cruise munition that can be used by
a dismounted infantryman in an urban area to
attack a target, perhaps spotted by a UAV, which
is beyond his line of sight. It's like a small
mortar round with a grenade-size explosive in it.
A fiber-optic line unreels from its back end and
provides the data link that allows the soldier to
see the video from the munition's camera and to
fly it into the target."
Training for
tomorrow's urban occupations Just a
cursory glance at last year's Pentagon
expenditures makes clear the heavy emphasis on
training the men and women who are slated to use
DARPA's high-tech urban weapons against
slum-dwellers in the coming years. In March 2006,
the army signed a nearly $25 million contract "for
construction of a combined arms collective
training facility/urban assault complex" at Fort
Carson, Colorado. In August, the navy inked a
$18.5 million deal for the "design and
construction of a combined arms military
operations in urban terrain facility" at
Twenty-nine Palms, California.
In
September, the army approved a contract for the
construction of an urban assault course at Fort
Jackson, South Carolina. In November, the navy
awarded a $12,500,000 contract for construction of
a "special operations force military operations on
urban terrain training complex" at San Clemente
Island, California. And in December 2006, the army
agreed to pay $11,838,998 for a new "military
operations urban terrain facility" for Fort Irwin,
California.
The Pentagon has even exported
its urban warfare training centers to sites closer
to tomorrow's prospective targets, such as the
army's custom-made MOUT facilities at Bagram Air
Base, Afghanistan and at Camp Buehring, Kuwait. In
November 2006, the army awarded General Dynamics a
$17 million contract to construct an urban combat
training site as part of the King Abdullah II
Special Operations Training Center in Jordan - a
facility
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