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COMING SOON TO A BATTLEFIELD NEAR YOU: THE NEXT WAVE OF WARBOTS
They’re going to sneak up on us. . . . They’re going to do more and more of the toting. They’re going to do more and more of the surveilling. And when they start fighting, no organized force could stand against them.
“William James once said, ‘We are literally in the midst of an infinite.’ Today, there is an infinite going on in the world of war. . . . The challenge is that there are fewer things to look for and more information. The needle in the haystack is at the essence of counterinsurgency. Machines can filter down what we need to see. Instead of us telling machines where to go, it is increasingly machines telling us.”
Noah Shachtman is the new breed of war correspondent. He’s quoting the nineteenth-century philosopher William James, but doing so while talking about the next generation of robots, as we sit in a chic Manhattan bar filled with rap stars and models. Describing his beat as “technology, national security, politics, and geek culture,” Shachtman writes for the New York Times and is a contributing editor at Wired, the digital world’s most popular magazine. He also runs Danger Room, the blog focusing on “what’s next in national security.”
In the course of his reporting, Shachtman has done everything from sneaking into the Los Alamos nuclear lab to riding out on missions in Iraq with an EOD team and their robots. Based on these experiences, he is emphatic that we’ve only seen the start of the robotics trend in war. “In both war and police actions, you will see more and more of robots in all shapes and sizes.... There is a huge growth curve, with no signs of slowing down. To see having one [robot] in every squad isn’t all that crazy. And that is before you get into the sexy, futuristic stuff.” For military robotics in the next decade, “there is zero chance of the field not increasing exponentially.”
THE COMING WARBOTS BY LAND
The systems just rolling out or already in prototype stage are far more capable, intelligent, and autonomous than ones now in Iraq and Afghanistan. But even they are just the start. As one robotics executive put it at a demonstration of new military prototypes in 2007, “The robots you are seeing here today I like to think of as the Model T. These are not what you are going to see when they are actually deployed in the field. We are seeing the very first stages of this technology.”
Charles Shoemaker, who runs the Robotics Program Office at the Army Research Laboratory, agrees. “It is really, really hard” to create military robots that fight on land, more officially called UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles), and especially ones that can operate independent of a human controller. “But I’m convinced that we’re going to develop systems that work for a whole range of tactical missions. . . . We could be at the dawn of a golden age of military UGVs.”
To make such visions come true, the Pentagon’s Joint Robotics Program is currently developing twenty-two different prototypes of intelligent ground vehicles. They range in size from tiny eight-pound robots to truck-sized armored robots that weigh thirty thousand pounds. In addition, there are various programs to convert existing manned vehicles into UGVs. Robert Finkelstein thinks that the conversion of supply trucks to unmanned vehicles will actually be among the first major uses. A converted Humvee has already driven around military bases at an average of thirty-five miles per hour and never veered from its planned route by more than eight inches. Describing how supply convoys of such unmanned trucks would cut losses in Iraq, he exclaims, “It’s already been done. The kits are available. We can save lives!”
In addition to these plug-in kits, the next wave of new robots to be deployed on land will mostly be “new and improved” versions of existing platforms. For example, iRobot’s original PackBot just had a digital camera that sent back views of what the robot was seeing, making it essentially a mobile pair of binoculars. Now most PackBots perform EOD roles with fairly simple effector arms and grippers.
But as new add-ons are developed, the same robot will be able to take on a wider and wider set of battlefield roles. For example, the company has already tested out an armed PackBot. For iRobot’s first weapon, it eschewed the variety that Foster-Miller had for the SWORDS and instead chose a good old-fashioned shotgun, because it is “so versatile.” The robot can now fire a variety of ammunition, including nonlethal rubber bullets, rounds that can blow down a door, and even more powerful “elephant killer” bullets.
Another version is called the REDOWL (Robotic Enhanced Detection Outpost with Lasers), which uses lasers and sound detection equipment to find any sniper who dares to shoot at the robot or accompanying troops, and then instantly targets them with an infrared laser beam. “You’ll actually see the sniper before the smoke disappears from the shot,” said retired admiral Joe Dyer, who leads the military programming at iRobot. He adds that in tests, it’s been 94 percent accurate and is smart enough that “it can tell the difference between a 9 millimeter pistol and an AK-47 or an M-16.”
Foster-Miller has similar plans to upgrade its current generation of ground robots. For example, the first version of the armed SWORDS needed the remote human operator to be situated within a mile or two, which can still put the human in danger. Vice President Robert Quinn describes how the company plans to vastly extend the range of communications to get ground robot operators completely off the battlefield. “It is not an insurmountable problem. It is nothing that money and time can’t solve.” The SWORDS itself is being replaced by a new version named after the Roman god of war. The MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System) carries a more powerful machine gun, 40mm grenade launchers, and, for nonlethal settings, a green laser “dazzler,” tear gas, and a loudspeaker to warn any insurgents that resistance is futile.
As these systems evolve, we will also soon see entirely new unmanned combat vehicles hit the battlefield. One such prototype was the Gladiator. Described as the “world’s first multipurpose combat robot,” it came out of a partnership between the Marine Corps and Carnegie Mellon University. About the size of a golf cart, the vehicle was controlled by a soldier wielding a PlayStation video game controller, but software plug-ins will allow it to be upgraded to semiautonomous and then fully autonomous modes. Fully loaded, it costs $400,000 and carries a machine gun with six hundred rounds of ammunition, antitank rockets, and nonlethal weapons. “It is just fucking nasty,” raves journalist Noah Shachtman.
Not all ground robots will take on combat roles. For instance, medics have long had one of the most dangerous jobs on the battlefield. A former army special forces officer explains how this is generating a pull for robotic solutions. “If you can avoid unnecessary situations where you expose them [medics] to fire and you end up with two dead guys, then we have a responsibility to the American people to avoid that.”
An early entry into the “medbot” field is yet another improved version of the PackBot, known as the Bloodhound. Whenever a soldier is hurt, an alert will go out and the robot will find the wounded soldier on its own. Then the robot’s human controller, who might be located anywhere in the world, will check out the soldier via the video link and treat them using the robot’s onboard medical payload, which will include a stethoscope (likely very cold, with no one to breathe on it), liquid bandages, and even automatic syringes to dispense morphine or antidotes.
The next step will be specially designed medbots, such as the previously mentioned marsupial pair of REV and REX. REV, the Robotic Evacuation Vehicle (a robot version of an ambulance), carries REX, the Robotic Extraction Vehicle, a tiny stretcher bearer that zips out to drag soldiers into the safety of the ambulance. REX has an arm with six joints to drag a soldier to safety, while REV has a life-support pod that even comes with a flat-screen TV facing the wounded soldier’s face so that operators can see and communicate with the human on the other end if they are conscious.
Ultimately, REV will be configured so that complex surgeries can occur inside the medbot. DARPA has already spent more than $12 million on developing such a remote “trauma pod” (originally called a “crechepod” in Frank Herbert’s Dune novels) that will automatically diagnose and treat a wounded soldier. The soldier will be loaded up into the protected pod and sped away to safety, all the while being scanned from head to toe, given oxygen, and their information processed to remote doctors, who might even perform surgery. The system is based on the da Vinci robotic surgical system, a commercialized technology that is already used at some three hundred facilities around the world. The maker, SRI International, thinks that such a system “could be operational on the battlefield in ten to fifteen years.” As described by Russell Taylor, an engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University, these robotic systems don’t just allow a surgeon to do their work remotely, but to do it with far greater machine-enabled dexterity than before. “The average surgeon will become as good as the star surgeon, and the star will have superhuman capabilities.”
Of course, robots will have a hard time replicating the compassion of a real-life medic. As one special forces soldier says, “The last thing I want to see if I’m about to die is a robot coming for me. I want to see a human.” On the other hand, that robot may be able to go where humans could not, so their lack of a bedside manner is seen as an acceptable trade-off.
All these various ground robots are supposed to come together in the army’s $230 billion Future Combat Systems (FCS) program. The FCS concept grew from the sense that the army had become unwieldy and hard to deploy because its vehicles and weapons platforms were too heavy. The army of the twenty-first century, so the thinking goes, should instead be decomposed into smaller, lighter, and more lethal units of manned and unmanned components, joined together by a massive computer network.
The FCS is certainly ambitious. It involves everything from replacing the army’s twenty-eight thousand armored vehicles with a new generation of manned and unmanned vehicles to writing some thirty-four million lines of software code for the new computers that will link them all together. Starting in 2011, the army plans to start spiraling a few new technologies at a time into the force. By 2015, the army believes it will be in a position to reorganize its units into new FCS brigades, which will present a revolutionary new model of how military units are staffed and organized. Each brigade will actually have more unmanned vehicles than manned ones (a planned 330 unmanned to 300 manned). Each brigade will also have its own unmanned air force, with over a hundred drones controlled by the unit’s soldiers. They will range in size from a fifteen-pounder that will fit in soldiers’ backpacks to a twenty-three-foot-long robotic helicopter.
The unmanned ground robots will come in many flavors. One will be the Multifunction Utility/Logistics and Equipment Vehicle, or MULE. Made by Lockheed Martin, it is about the size of a small car. The aptly named MULE will do everything from carrying equipment and supplies to mounting its own weapons, such as a machine gun or rockets. The runt of the FCS litter will be the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle. This is essentially a smaller but souped-up version of the PackBot. iRobot has received a contract of $51 million to make the first run of 3,600 of these robots.
In addition to vehicles, the FCS will also have a variety of unmanned ground sensors. One example is the Sensor Dart, a small missile packed with sensors that will be carried on a drone and then dropped behind enemy lines to report back on what’s going on. In the air it will have wings, and then transform into an earth-penetrating dart. In the testing so far, soldiers have been enthusiastic. One commander said that if his unit had the systems during their previous deployment to Iraq, “it would have saved an NCO’s life, his squad leader’s legs, and his team leader’s hand.”
The FCS plan is not without its critics. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that it might cost as much as $16 billion a year, for a full twenty-five years (about $170 billion more than the original planned costs). Military robots expert Robert Finkelstein describes it as “the largest weapons procurement in history... at least in this part of the galaxy,” while former army officer Ralph Peters jokes that FCS spending has gotten so out of control that “it’s the system that ate the army.”
Interestingly, this debate over cost may lead to more purchasing of robots rather than less. While unmanned systems make up roughly half of the new vehicles to be bought, they represent only 15 percent of the planned costs. Similarly, the majority of technical hurdles remaining for the program (twenty-seven identified by the CBO) are on the manned vehicles rather than the unmanned ones. Many who look to cut costs on the FCS now advocate cutting the new manned vehicles rather than the robots.
WET AND WILD, ROBOT STYLE
A broad new set of robots is also being introduced for war at sea, where the main differentiation is whether they are designed to operate on the surface, like a boat, or underwater, like a submarine.
Robots of the first type, unmanned boats, are called USVs (unmanned surface vessels). They actually have a great deal in common with the simpler land robots, as they both primarily operate in a two-dimensional world. Many basic USVs merely entail taking sensors and a remote control unit and plugging them into a boat.
However, many think the sea is actually a far more difficult environment for robots than land. “Everything’s working against you,” says Robert Wernli of the Ocean Systems Division of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego. Waves and currents can pull a boat off course. Visibility is lower, and sometimes communications are more difficult. Plus, robots can get seasick; the constant motion and corrosive effects of salt water cause mechanical breakdowns much more rapidly than on land.
So far, the prototype USVs tend to be smaller boats than large navy ships. One example is a thirty-six-foot robotic motorboat called the Spartan Scout, which the navy has spent some $30 million developing. Guided by a GPS navigation system, the boat can be on its own for up to forty-eight hours, and speed up to fifty miles per hour. Filled with sensors (including day and night video cameras), Spartan Scout is designed to carry out surveillance, patrol harbors, and inspect any suspicious ships that might be trying to pull another U.S.S. Cole-type attack by sneaking up on a navy vessel. If it finds something fishy, the robot boat is also packing a .50-caliber machine gun. Spartan Scout got its first real-world use in the Iraq war in 2003, inspecting small civilian boats in the Persian Gulf without risking sailors’ lives. The boat also mounts a loudspeaker and microphone, so an Arab linguist back on the “mothership” would interrogate any suspicious boats that the Spartan Scout had stopped. As one report put it, “The civilian sailors were somewhat taken aback when they were interrogated by this Arab speaking boat that had no one aboard.”
The other type of navybots are UUVs (Unmanned Underwater Vehicles). These are designed for underwater roles such as searching for mines, the cause of most naval combat losses over the last two decades. Many UUVs are biologically inspired, like the “Robo-lobster,” which operates in the choppy waters close to shore. But others are converted torpedoes, like the REMUS, which was used to clear sea mines in Iraq, or even mini-submarines, which are launched from manned submarines to hunt down the enemy.
The sea will also prove to be a new platform for robots to fly from. The navy plans to equip many of its ships with the MQ-8 Fire Scout, a sister version of the robotic helicopter used in the army FCS plans. Able to take off from and land autonomously from any warship with a small deck, the Fire Scout can fly more than six hours. It packs thermal imagers, radar, high-powered video cameras, and a laser designator that can target for the mothership’s weapons or fire its own rockets. With a range of over two hundred miles, the robotic chopper can take the ship captain’s eyes farther than ever before, including even inland.
The most novel of the drones at sea may be the Cormorant, DARPA’s design for a submarine-launched flying drone. Operating a plane off a submarine may sound new, but it actually dates back to World War II; indeed, the very first air attack on the mainland United States was in 1942, when a submarine-launched Japanese plane bombed Brookings, Oregon. What is novel about the Cormorant is not only that it would be unmanned, but also that it would be able to be both launched and recovered while the submarine stays hidden under the water. Having wings like a seagull, the drone would be squeezed into a missile launch tube. Whenever the sub commander wants to scout above or launch a surprise air attack, the drone would be fired from the tubes, float to the surface, and then launch into the air using converted rocket boosters. The drone would then fly back to a rendezvous location on its return. It lands in the water, sinks back down, and the submarine scoops the robot plane back inside.
TOP (UNMANNED) GUNS
As with ground robots, the next wave of robot planes, also known as “unmanned aerial vehicles” or “systems” (UAVs or UASs), will be a mix of upgraded current systems, converted manned vehicles, and brand-new designs. For example, the Predator drone today does surveillance and also some ground attack missions. New versions are being reconfigured for electronic warfare, submarine hunting, and even air-to-air combat. Thomas Cassidy, a former navy fighter pilot (so respected that he even had a cameo in the movie Top Gun) and now CEO of Predator’s manufacturer, General Atomics, declares, “I want to see a Predator coming back here with MiG kills painted on its side; and that will happen soon.”
The next generation of the Predator is the even more menacing-sounding Reaper, an air force drone about four times bigger and nine times more powerful. Among its improvements is a Microsoft Windows software package that has “automatic man-made object detection” and “coherent change detection.” Not only can the plane come close to flying itself, but its sensors can also recognize and categorize humans and human-made objects. It can even make sense of the changes in the target it is watching, such as being able to interpret and retrace footprints or even lawn mower tracks. As of 2008, two Reaper prototypes were already operational and deployed to Afghanistan; military air journalist Bill Sweetman writes, “It may not be unreasonable to assume they are standing alert somewhere in case a certain high-priority target pops his head out of his cave.”
As new prototypes of unmanned planes hit the battlefield, the trend will be for the size extremes to be pushed in two directions. The air force sees at least 45 percent of its future large bomber fleet being able to operate without humans aboard.
Among the planes being made at the military’s flight test center near Groom Lake, Nevada, better known as Area 51, is the Lockheed Martin “Polecat.” Described as looking like “a B-2 bomber’s chick,” the bomber drone is made of only two hundred parts that are glued, rather than riveted, together to increase its stealthiness. It will be rigged up with “a fully autonomous flight control and mission-handling system,” meaning it will be able to carry out its mission from takeoff to landing without any human instruction. Lockheed Martin claims its studies show Polecat to be five times more survivable and mission-effective than the air force’s plans for a manned bomber version of its new F-22 fighter jet.
Not having pilots who need to be replaced every ten hours or so will also allow unmanned planes to have greater endurance and become far bigger than any created so far. For example, Boeing is at work on a glider powered by solar energy and liquid hydrogen that could stay aloft for seven to ten days. It would have a wingspan almost the length of a football field. The next step is DARPA’s plan announced in 2007 for a “VULTURE” (Very-high-altitude, Ultra-endurance, Loitering Theater Unmanned Reconnaissance Element) drone, which the agency hopes will be able to stay aloft for as long as five years.
We may even see the return of blimps to warfare. Lockheed Martin has been given $150 million to design and build a robotic “High Altitude Airship” twenty-five times larger than the Goodyear blimp. Such huge, long-endurance blimps open up a whole new range of roles not normally possible for planes. For example, airships could literally be “parked” in the air, as high as one hundred thousand feet up, for weeks, months, or years, serving as a communications relay, spy satellite, hub for a ballistic missile defense system, floating gas station, or even airstrip for other planes and drones.
At the other end, there will also be more of what Noah Shachtman describes as “itty-bitty, teeny-weeny UAVs.” Some even think that small, pilotless planes will make up as much as 75 percent of the military’s future air forces, mainly because they are cheap, easy to use, and perhaps most suitable for the clogged urban battlefields of the twenty-first century.
Any plane that is smaller than fifteen centimeters is technically known as a “micro-unmanned aerial vehicle.” As far back as the 1970s, the CIA experimented with a “bio-inspired” drone the size of a dragonfly. The problem during testing was that, as one scientist describes, “It was tough to track on film and easy to lose in the grass.” Today, the exact nature of this program is classified. But the military’s belief in what is possible is illustrated by a contract let by DARPA in 2006. It sought an insectlike drone that weighs less than 10 grams, is smaller than 7.5 centimeters, has a speed of 10 meters per second, a range of 1,000 meters, and can hover in place for at least a minute. The agency has also given Lockheed Martin a $1.7 million contract to build the SAMERAI drone. As Shachtman says, this drone is “similar in size and shape to a maple tree seed,” but is powered by a chemical rocket able to carry tiny sensors over a half mile from the launch point.
Tiny drones are such a hot item because they make a perfect platform for spy jobs. As one scientist described, “A lot of the three-letter agencies are interested in miniaturization.” They can do things like “perch and stare” into windows or climb up walls or into pipes. Besides carrying tiny sensors and cameras, they might be loaded with electromagnets, which will allow them to recharge themselves off electrical outlets or lightbulbs. They might also carry tiny weapons, such as a small syringe filled with poison (an idea featured in Dan Brown’s novel Deception Point).
Some even believe that such microsystems could eventually go down to the nanoscale. “Nano” is Greek for 10 to the minus 9. So to be at nanoscale is to be in measures of one billionth of a meter, or the width of a human hair cut into a hundred thousand parts. While the idea has been bandied about in such fiction as Michael Crichton’s novel Prey, many think it could come to fruition in the coming decades. Boston College researchers have already built a chemically powered nanomotor that is just seventy-eight atoms in size, while those at a university in the Netherlands have made a solar-powered engine just fifty-eight atoms in size.
Tiny engines allow tiny machines. And tiny machines may mean teeny-tiny robots, or “nanobots.” A major advancement in these happened in 2007, when David Leigh, a professor of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, revealed that he had built a “nanomachine,” whose parts consisted of single molecules. When asked to describe to a normal person the significance of his discovery, Leigh said it would be difficult to predict. “It is a bit like when stone-age man made his wheel, asking him to predict the motorway,” he said. He would make one venture. “Things that seem like a Harry Potter film now are going to be a reality.”
Such machines are still fairly limited in military applications; early models can only do things like copy a plant’s photosynthesis or move a molecule of water around. But military analysts see the potential of these prototypes’ one day becoming weapons that work at the molecular level, such as tiny missiles that could truly hit with pinpoint precision or nanobots designed to deconstruct a target from the inside out.
Such minuscule designs actually mandate that the systems will have to have high autonomy, carrying out their missions without human controllers. First, to be useful, the robots will have to be “organic” to the team. That is, they will have to be relatively easy to use, not require special training, and if the goal is to saturate the battlefield, not require each and every small robot to have a soldier somewhere having to stop his mission and fly it. Another problem is that flying the smaller designs actually makes most human operators nauseous. Imagine watching video from a TV camera mounted on a butterfly, as it bobs up and down crossing a room; that is the sensation of flying a micro-drone.
The centerpiece of future plans for unmanned drones, however, is the UCAV (unmanned combat aerial vehicle). This type of drone is specially designed to replace the ultimate of human pilot roles, the fighter jock. A key UCAV prototype was the Boeing X-45, which one author described as “flat as a pancake, with jagged 34-foot batwings, no tail and a triangular, bulbous nose” that make it look like “a set piece from the television program Battlestar Galactica.” X-45 also has a cousin, the Northrop Grumman X-47, which is roughly the same size, but designed to land on aircraft carriers. These drones were designed to be especially stealthy for the most dangerous roles, such as sneaking past enemy air defenses. In war games, UCAV prototypes have shown some impressive capabilities. They’ve launched precision-guided missiles, have been “passed off ” between different remote human operators nine hundred miles away from each other, and in one war game autonomously detected unexpected threats (missiles that “popped up” seemingly out of nowhere). The drones engaged and destroyed them, and then did battle damage assessment on their own. They also promise to lighten the load on human operators. One human pilot remotely flew two UCAVs at the same time.
The X-45 may have been too good, too soon. The fighter drone’s capabilities made it appear as a competitor to the air force’s new manned fighter planes, the F-22 and F-35, in which the air force had already invested $28 billion and $40 billion respectively developing (the X-45’s development cost was $1.8 billion). So in 2006 the air force decided to cancel X-45 and let the navy fund the drone program on its own. Many believe, however, that the program still lives on inside the “black” budget and that ultimately Congress and changing leadership within the air force will soon bring the air force’s robotic fighter plane program back to life.
The pattern with unmanned planes in the early twenty-first century seems to be mirroring what happened with manned planes in the early twentieth century. There was initial skepticism and opposition to them in general, followed by limited use in observation and spotter roles. Soon, however, they began to be used for ad hoc attack roles, much as the early observation plane pilots in World War I began to drop their own grenades and homemade bombs on the enemy below. Perhaps the most amusing parallel in the Iraq war was when an enlisted soldier flying a Raven drone spotted an enemy insurgent planting an IED. He tried to show his commanding officer the danger, but the officer couldn’t pick out the image of the insurgent on the view screen. So the operator kept circling the drone closer and closer to the insurgent. Still, the officer couldn’t see the Iraqi. Finally, the soldier just got frustrated and flew the drone directly into the insurgent’s chest. Then, referencing the annoying Verizon cell phone commercial, he asked his commander, “Can you see him now, sir?!?”
Of course, just as World War I pilots couldn’t just watch each other merrily going about their business of bombing their side on the ground, and so started taking potshots at each other, so too is the next step of advancement unmanned drones that are specially designed to take on other robotic planes. In 2006, DARPA budgeted $11 million for the “Peregrine UAV Killer.” Like a peregrine falcon, it is designed to loiter over an area, stealthily gliding about until it sees an enemy UAV, and then quickly dive down and blast it. Drone versus drone may be the next step in warfare.
ASTROBOTS GO TO WAR
But why should robot war be limited just to the Earth? Space has long been a location for satellites that provide military advantage back on Earth, such as spying or beaming GPS locations, but it has yet to be a battleground itself. However, plans for conflict taking place in space go well back to the antisatellite programs of the United States and the Soviets during the cold war and Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program in the 1980s. In 2000, these received a new injection of funds by the U.S. Space Commission, which was chaired by a retired Ford administration official named Donald Rumsfeld. The commission sought out media attention by hyping a rising threat to U.S. space assets in the form of a “space Pearl Harbor.” After becoming secretary of defense, Rumsfeld commissioned twenty more studies on war in space and the U.S. military organized the U.S. Space Command.
If space is to become a new potential zone of conflict, its unique nature demands that unmanned systems play a key, and perhaps near-exclusive, role. Not only do weapons in space need to stay up there a long time, but the major challenge of fighting in space is first getting things into space. It costs roughly $9,100 a pound to launch anything into space with the Space Shuttle. So if a system is to be manned, the humans and each and every pound of water, food, and oxygen tanks to keep them alive are expensive to send. Likewise, manned systems in space are incredibly vulnerable (one bullet or laser hole and there goes all the air).
Instead, the United States has already started work on a number of unmanned systems for potential use in space. One example is the X-37, an orbital test vehicle about a quarter of the size of the Space Shuttle, which flew its first test flight in 2006. The military’s strong interest in it is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that, while the program was originally run by NASA, its development was transferred to DARPA in 2004.
Another program is the X-41 Common Aero Vehicle, also known as the Falcon program. Planned for testing in 2010, it is a cross between an intercontinental ballistic missile and the Space Shuttle. It is designed to travel at the border between space and the atmosphere, around one hundred thousand feet. But, unlike a missile, it will be able to come back after a mission if it finds no targets. As John Pike of the Global Security organization comments, the aim is to give the United States the ability to “crush someone anywhere in the world on 30 minutes notice, with no need for a nearby airbase.”
This weaponization of space, unmanned or not, is certainly controversial. Former U.S. Senate majority leader Tom Daschle defined the Rumsfeld plans as “the single dumbest thing I have heard so far from this administration.... It would be a disaster for us to put weapons in space of any kind under any circumstances. It only invites other countries to do the same thing.” Lieutenant Colonel Bruce M. Deblois of the U.S. Air Force published a detailed study that concurred with Daschle. The report argued that while being the first to deploy weapons in space might seem advantageous, it would only open up the floodgates for others to do the same.
These fears do appear to be playing out. In 2007, after a test of their own antisatellite missile, senior colonel Dr. Yao Yunzhu of the Chinese army’s Academy of Military Science issued a not thinly veiled warning. If the United States thought it was going to be “a space superpower, it is not going to be alone.... It will have company.”
This debate will likely rage on for years, if not decades, or at least until the Vulcans arrive to resolve it. But what is interesting is that governments are not the only ones looking at space as a new unmanned battleground. In 2007, the Tamil Tiger group of Sri Lanka became the first, but likely not last, terrorist group to takes its operations into space, hijacking the signal from an Intelsat satellite and using the commercial satellite to beam its own messages back to Earth. And just as private companies like Blackwater have reentered the conflict game on this planet, we should not be surprised if privatized conflict also arises one day in space, especially with the growth of private space businesses, such as Richard Branson’s “Virgin Galactic” or Google’s $30 million prize that will go to the first private team able to land a robot on the moon (one of the competitors is actually also the maker of some of the Pentagon’s energy beam weapons programs).
Robo-One, a robot combat event held in Japan every year, may provide a taste of what’s to come. The competition organizers have announced plans for a new division in 2010: robot combat in space. A small satellite carrying humanoid robots will be blasted into the heavens. “Once safely in orbit, the satellite will release its robotic passengers, who will proceed to fight each other in the vacuum of space.”
If that does not signify human progress, what does?