Military

The nature of warfare requires military tacticians to know the lay of the land in advance to protect troops, a capability increasingly enabled by 3D printing technology and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The Army Corps has obtained the ability to produce durable solid 3D models quickly, easily and inexpensively from digital geospatial information. The Corps purchased the Z Corporation Z810 3D Printer to create color models of cities, mountainous areas and other complex terrain around the world in support of military operations and related applications. The new printing technology cuts weeks of labor from the construction of topographic models and displays details that other technologies cannot match.

Air-raid sirens, Frank Sinatra songs and Muhammad Ali trash talk blared over the Southern California desert in a demonstration of new acoustic technology for crowd control and disaster communications.

In mid-90's morning heat at Edwards Air Force Base, HPV Technologies and American Technology demonstrated prototypes of non-lethal sonic devices for a group of military and law enforcement guests, including representatives of the U.K. Home Office.

Representatives of both companies say that within days, they will ship some units of their respective products to areas hit by Hurricane Katrina, so authorities can use the tools for crowd control, aid distribution and rescue operations.

A car that drives itself has long been the stuff of science fiction.

But at Stanford University, you can find one going as fast as 40 mph on a dirt road in a sleepy part of the campus, and it goes by the name "Stanley."

"In the future, cars will drive themselves, no question," said Sebastian Thrun, a German-born computer scientist who is director of Stanford's artificial-intelligence laboratory and the man responsible for Stanley. As Thrun, 38, talked about the car last week, he was like a giddy schoolkid, particularly when he was hitching a ride with his robot car.
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What's new:
Like engineers at universities all over the country, a Stanford University team is still perfecting its driverless car in hopes of winning the Defense Advanced Research Projects' upcoming Grand Challenge, an unmanned race through the desert.

Bottom line:
"Stanley" can go as fast as 40 miles per hour, and in desert tests, it's managed to navigate for 25 miles before running into trouble. But this year's Grand Challenge involves a 175-mile course, so clearly the vehicle has a ways to go.

Among the handiest villains in science fiction are Computers That Know Too Much. Think of the dream-weaving despots of The Matrix or murderous HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But in reality, even the most super supercomputer lacks the reasoning capacity of a child engrossed in a Dr. Seuss book. Computers can't read the way we do. They can't learn or reason like us.

Narrowing that cognitive gap between humans and machines — creating a computer that can read and learn at a sophisticated level — is a big goal of artificial intelligence researchers.

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA, granted a contract worth at least $400,000 last fall to two Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professors who are trying to build a machine that can learn by reading.

It would be hard to imagine improving on the intelligence of computer engineer Bjoern Stenger, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University. Yet for several hours, a pill seemed to make him even brainier.

Participating in a research project, Stenger downed a green gelatin cap containing a drug called modafinil. Within an hour, his attention sharpened. So did his memory. He aced a series of mental-agility tests. If his brainpower would normally rate a 10, the drug raised it to 15, he said.

"I was quite focused," said Stenger. "It was also kind of fun."

The age of smart drugs is dawning. Modafinil is just one in an array of brain-boosting medications — some already on pharmacy shelves and others in development — that promise an era of sharper thinking through chemistry.

These drugs may change the way we think. And by doing so, they may change who we are.

Long-haul truckers and Air Force pilots have long popped amphetamines to ward off drowsiness. Generations of college students have swallowed over-the-counter caffeine tablets to get through all-nighters. But such stimulants provide only a temporary edge, and their effect is broad and blunt — they boost the brain by juicing the entire nervous system.

The new mind-enhancing drugs, in contrast, hold the potential for more powerful, more targeted and more lasting improvements in mental acuity. Some of the most promising have reached the stage of testing in human subjects and could become available in the next decade, brain scientists say.

By the light of flashlights and a crescent moon, the three-member crew catapults a 300-pound pilotless airplane into the sky.

Minutes later, other U.S. soldiers behind a computer screen inside a shed monitor video images from the plane, known as a Shadow, as it loiters over a traffic circle frequently attacked by insurgent bombs.

"We fill some of the gaps in the intelligence field. We put one of these in harm's way instead of a soldier. It's all about saving lives," says Sgt. Francisco Huereque, who is in charge of the night's launch.

Unmanned aerial vehicles and other so-called "stand-off" weapons, whether currently used or in secret testing, belong to a developing high-tech arsenal that the U.S. military says will help minimize casualties as it battles insurgents.

Royal Air Force officers have joined a team of American pilots based in the desert near Las Vegas that is flying and firing missiles from unmanned Predator spy planes more than 7,000 miles away in Iraq, writes Stephen Grey.

The British airmen are part of a 24-hour operation that controls the Predators remotely by satellite, secretly filming militants attacking American and British troops and using Hellfire air-to-ground missiles to destroy enemy positions.

The RAF pilots, like their American counterparts, are split between the bases of Balad, near Baghdad, where Predator pilots are responsible for the landing and takeoff of the 27ft craft, and Nellis, just outside Las Vegas, from where most of the remainder of the Predator’s 18-hour missions are controlled. The RAF has confirmed British involvement but declined to detail how many pilots were taking part.

A few months from now, Peter Anthony Schlesinger hopes to zap a laser beam at a couple of chickens or other animals in a cage a few dozen yards away.

If all goes as planned, the chickens will be frozen in mid-cluck, their leg and wing muscles paralyzed by an electrical charge created by the beam, even as their heart and lungs continue to function normally.

Among those most interested in the demonstration's outcome will be officials at the Pentagon, who helped fund Schlesinger's work and are looking at this type of device to do a lot more than just zap the cluck out of a chicken.

Devices like these, known as directed-energy weapons, could play a huge role in warfighting in coming years.

As early as this summer, rockets hidden in silos near this wind-swept town will give the nation its first operating defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles since the 1970's.

Although the system is not a secret, it has been revived with so little fanfare that few Americans seem to realize it exists.

Among warfare experts, it is reviving the type of bitter debate that began in the cold war, culminating in an antiballistic missile treaty. And it is inspiring the same sort of passion that arose during the national fixation with President Ronald Reagan's Star Wars effort, officially the Strategic Defense Initiative. Unlike Star Wars, which faded into the realm of misbegotten high-tech dreams, the new system relies on agile but fairly ordinary rockets to smash incoming warheads rather than nuclear-powered lasers in space. In the new debate, Pentagon planners see the system as a bulwark against the ultimate calamity, a nuclear attack, while skeptics ridicule it as a defense that will not work against a threat that does not exist.

The Pentagon's New Map
By Thomas P. M. Barnett
Copyright 2004

Liquid armor for Kevlar vests is one of the newest technologies being developed at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to save Soldiers' lives.

This type of body armor is light and flexible, which allows soldiers to be more mobile and won't hinder an individual from running or aiming his or her weapon.

The key component of liquid armor is a shear thickening fluid. STF is composed of hard particles suspended in a liquid. The liquid, polyethylene glycol, is non-toxic, and can withstand a wide range of temperatures. Hard, nano-particles of silica are the other components of STF. This combination of flowable and hard components results in a material with unusual properties.

Network-centric warfare demands robust systems that can respond automatically and dynamically to both accidental and deliberate faults. Adaptation of fault-tolerant computing techniques has made computing and information systems intrusion-tolerant and much more survivable during cyber attacks, but even with these advancements, a system will inevitably exhaust all resources in the face of a sustained attack by a determined cyber adversary. Computing systems and information systems also have a tendency to become more fragile and susceptible to accidental faults and errors over time if manually applied maintenance or refresh routines are not administered regularly. The Self-Regenerative Systems (SRS) program seeks to address these deficiencies by creating a new generation of security and survivability technologies. These "fourth-generation" technologies will bring attributes of human cognition to bear on the problem of reconstituting systems that suffer the accumulated effects of imperfect software, human error, and accidental hardware faults, or the effects of a successful cyber attack. The overarching goals of the SRS program are to implement systems that always provide critical functionality and show a positive trend in reliability, actually exceeding initial operating capability and approaching a theoretical optimal performance level over long time intervals. Desired capabilities include self-optimization, self-diagnosis, and self-healing; it will be important for systems to support self-awareness and reflection in order to achieve these capabilities.

'To provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.'

'To provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.'