You see things and say ‘why’? But I dream of things that never were and I say: ‘why not’?
— George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, Part 1, Act 1

The high tech future of the US military is encapsulated in the document, Joint Vision 2010 (JV2010), which provides the framework for very long range planning by the defense department. The Vision projects a leading US role in peacetime engagement activities, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, peacekeeping and peace enforcement, as well as large scale combat operations requiring forcible entry.

JV2010 is concerned with “full spectrum dominance”, a concept employing technological leverage to ensure the US is pervasive in peace and decisive in war. In a general acknowledgement of US hegemony, the Vision says: “The US is the only global superpower”, and “must ensure it is preeminent in any form of conflict.” This is a direct affront to the “Russian Concept of the World in the 21st Century”, which emphasises the need for multipolarity.

The Joint Vision stresses the need for the military to protect US economic interests, and identifies various non state groups which could threaten US interests in the coming decade. They include: multinational corporations, legal and illegal cartels, alliances, and special interest groups who compete with the US in specific arenas. “They may or may not conform to international conventions and may resort to violence to achieve their objectives,” the Vision says. Accordingly, the United States military must be prepared to fight or to conduct mobility or special operations anywhere in the world on short notice. The Vision forecasts that: “The military will have to fight at long distances from the United States. In particular, some operations may be staged directly from the continental United States. These operations may endure for weeks or months.”

The withering of national sovereignty, the push for global governance via the UN, and new roles prescribed to organised alliances, such as NATO, have set precedents for different types of military force and organisations to apply that force in the future. The need for a United Nations standing army is on the agenda for the Millennium Assembly to be held on 6th September 2000. All 188 member states of the UN will attend, making it the largest Assembly ever. While the Joint Vision does not specifically mention UN military operations, or a UN standing army, there is no doubt that it seeks to enhance and reinforce the role of the US as global policeman.1 JV2010 sets the groundwork for US forces to play a critical role in the impending world army, thereby protecting America’s vested interests and dictating which conflicts are worthy of support, according to whom the US administration identifies as the enemy of the day.

The Joint Vision sets the agenda for cutting edge military research such as the Army’s ‘Army After Next’ program and the Airforce with its ‘Airforce 2025’. The Navy and Marine Corps are also undertaking their own revolutionary planning processes. The US ‘Army After Next’ project within the Army’s research and academic circles, is designed to determine how the 21st century army will fight, what weapons and assets it will need and what current weapons and practices will no longer be useful. New Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki says the ‘Army After Next’ will work to become lighter and more flexible. The goal is to be able to put a combat brigade of 5,000 troops on the ground anywhere in the world within 96 hours of receiving orders, a division of 11,000 troops on the ground within 120 hours and five divisions on the ground within 30 days. Shinseki illustrates his vision using the example of the Battle of Gettysburg where 165,000 Union and Confederate soldiers battled in 1863. Today the Army would need 400 men to win the day. A single squad of 11 ‘Army After Next’ warriors, able to call on airborne cameras and sensors and smart missiles alongside their own high-tech capabilities, could hold the same battlefield within the next ten years.

By 2010 two thirds of the world’s population will be urbanised mostly in littoral areas. The future for the military therefore lies in urban combat. The US Marine Corps has already begun a series of exercises known as “Urban Warrior’ (see New Dawn No. 54) designed to prepare forces to fight future battles in cities and other urban environments. The ongoing Urban Warrior exercises examine new urban tactics and experimental technologies, including those developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). One of DARPA’s most promising programs involves mobile robotic technologies, which enable land forces to dominate the battlespace using teams of mobile robots in complex terrain – urban, indoor or rugged areas.

The robots, known as Tactical Mobile Robots (TMR), are an offshoot of the micro-rover technologies from the US space program. The backpackable TMR’s are under 40cm long, light weight, manoeuvrable and have real time perception for navigation and reconn-aissance. They are robots for tomorrow’s soldiers, or Warriors, as JV2010 prefers to call its military personnel (figure 1). In future conflicts, and particularly in urban terrain, TMRs will serve as military point men, equipped with a variety of onboard tools for specific situations. For example, special drilling arms enable TMR’s to penetrate and smash into buildings, onboard systems can create topological maps of urban structures with 90% accuracy, others are equipped with tear gas, and onboard surveillance cameras, enabling contin-uous monitoring by New Army Warriors, located a safe distance away. A team of 10 TMR’s will be able to clear a three story building with 20 rooms in one hour or less (figure 2). TMR’s are cheap and easy to mass produce. Above all, they are expendable, a very important point in an age where even one battlefield casualty can be a public relations disaster.

Tactical Mobile Robots are just one development in a flotilla of new technologies that will change the way wars are fought. By far the most forward thinking in this area is the “Airforce 2025” (AF2025) doctrine. It is about changing the character of war, rather than anticipating changes and adapting after change occurs. According to AF2025, “future conflicts are likely to be supported by a society conditioned to ‘quick wars’ with high operational tempos, minimal casualties, and low collateral damage.” In terms of conducting these ‘quick wars’, the US Airforce envisions a ‘Cyber Situation’, to which there are five key technologies.

First, all-source information collectors will transmit raw data to an Information Integration Center (IIC). Second, archival databases, linked to the IIC, will be used for historical analyses to fill information gaps if the data is not available for collection. Third, the IIC, an integrated and interconnected constellation of “smart” satellites, will analyse, correlate, fuse, and deconflict all relayed data. Fourth, military commanders who have been implanted with microscopic brain chips will link users to the IIC creating computer-generated mental visualisations. The visualisation encompasses the individual and allows the user to place himself into the selected battlespace. Fifth, lethal and nonlethal weapons will be linked to the IIC, allowing authorised users to employ them from the ‘Cyber Situation’ (figure 3).

The US Airforce believes if it can achieve information dominance, it can control the momentum of war. While its vision is a double leap into 2025, collection platforms, miniature satellites, Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s), communications infrastructure, computer power, intelligent software and human-computer interaction (HCI) are fast becoming the order of the day. Creating a seamless flow of information between human and computer is possible as science improves our understanding of the brain and how it functions, making it possible to direct equipment to respond to our thoughts, without any verbal or written command. Already, preliminary research using a 128-sensor array electroencephalograph (EEG) pressed against a subject’s skull can influence information content and display designs on a computer screen. With the exception of the implanted brain chip, the technologies required to achieve the Cyber Situation are well under way.2 Communications architectures are growing in both commercial and military applications and computer power doubles every 18 months. Software, too, is becoming more intelligent.

Every day, scientists, engineers and visionaries come one step closer to perfecting warrior robots, in the shape of George Lucas’ battledroids. The 21st century may well see the evolution of cyborgs, creatures that will have human biological bodies as their legacy core, but will have biological parts directly replaced or improved with technological equivalents. One research area that shows a lot of promise and has attracted the interest of DARPA is the COG project, run by the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. COG is the AI team’s biped humanoid like robot (figure 4). The COG project is an ongoing quest to recreate the human body’s interaction with the environment as it is modulated by sensory information, and also to recreate the body’s inbuilt autopoietic system. DARPA has also expressed interested in the HAL project, run by the MIT AI team.

HAL is the next generation intelligent room. HAL has cameras for eyes, microphones for ears, and uses a variety of computer vision, speech and gesture recognition systems to allow people to interact naturally with it. HAL is designed to support the kind of human-computer interaction that up until now has only been science fiction.

From a science fiction vision to a military doctrine to an emerging reality. The technologies to fight wars and fight people are changing as the interrelationship between people and technology changes. Joint Vision 2010 provides the groundbreaking framework for these warriors on the edge of time. It provides a context for the full development and integration of new technologies into warfighting, US style. The consequences of the Vision are far reaching for us all. Undue haste to get technologically ready for the next war could make the probability of war more likely.

Footnotes:

1. Floating around the White House as at 17th January 2000, is a proposal by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that would have the UN set up a standby force of several thousand policemen, who would rush into war-torn areas to keep law and order.

2. A combination of brain processes and visual imaging already has been developed in the laboratory. The California Institute of Technology has developed an energy efficient computer chip that emulates the analog thinking of the human brain. It is specifically modeled on the construction of the human brain, specifically the cerebral cortex. When this capability is fully mature, this chip could provide the baseline for a brain implant hooked to all the sensory segments of the brain, not just the eye.

REFERENCES:

Army After Next, a Vision for the Future, Army Acquisition Corps, May-June 1998, Headquarters, Department of the Army, USA.

Concept for Future Operations, Expanding Joint Vision 2010, US Department of Defense Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 1997.

“Concept of the world in the 21st century”, The Russian Federation, available at <www.un.org>

Information Operations: A New War-Fighting Capability, A research paper presented to Air Force 2025 by LTC William B. Osborne (USA), Maj Scott A. Bethel, Maj Nolen R. Chew, Maj Philip M. Nostrand, Maj YuLin G. Whitehead. August 1996.

Figures/diagrams for this article are only available in the physical version of the magazine.

Side-Piece:

A Future World

The following section depicts the Cyber Situation in action in a hypothetical scenario from the US Airforce 2025 document.

(12 March, 2025 — 1435 EST/2045Z) The persistent flashing blue light at the corner of his vision alerted the CJCS that the NMCC was initiating a category II ALERT, the blue code for International, Domestic. As the chairman made himself comfortable, he double-blinked rapidly to set in motion his Cyber Situation. As his computer-generated mental display command centre whirled into being before his eyes, his mental display-mail — the message that started the ALERT — became operational. CINCSOUTH’s image appeared and began briefing.

The government of Argentina was asking for help in conducting a hit on a narcoterrorist group hidden within a room in the centre of the Zircon building, a 50-story skyscraper building in downtown Buenos Aires. The Argentina government is worried because the building also contains thousands of civilians unaware of the terrorists’ presence. A moment’s thought and the topographical detail map of Buenos Aires floats into view. As the CJCS studied the map from all angles, zeroing in on the Zircon building, the other major players “stepped” one by one into the “Cyber conference.”

The NCA, along with the unified CINCs, service chiefs, and State Department representatives all studied the unfolding three-dimensional schematics of the Zircon building within their own personal “cyberspace.” Weather reports began to come in, indicating a storm raging off the coast in Tierra Del Fuego with winds NNE at 35 miles per hour. Light rain was falling in and around Buenos Aires. Now the CJCS moved into the “Cyber Situation” of the intelligence analyst that had been monitoring the situation. DNA and heat-sensing probes of the Zircon building were built into a three-dimensional map that pin-pointed the location of the terrorists on the 23rd floor in the offices of the Argentina Spaceways Co. Two floors above, a local telecommunications company was hosting an AT&T International conference. Local police already had sealed off the outer sectors of the building.

After studying the situation, the CINCSOUTH then ordered the execution of Operation Red Ball One — Option 2, with the CJCS approval. At this point the CSAF took over the “Cyber Situation” and entered the “Cyber-space” of the ACC commander. Together, they reviewed the life-like images that appeared before them marking US Aerospace bases. Beside each image were the unit’s designator, manning level, and current activity. For the execution of Red Ball One — Option 2, after consulting his crisis action staff, the ACC commander decided to precision drop three squads of Space Marines from a TC-4 Globemaster on to the roof of the Zircon building.

The Cyber Situation now included the colonel in charge of the 3D Special Operations Group, the squadron commander of the Space Marines at Hurlburt Field, Florida, and the Globemaster wing commander at Eglin AFB, Florida. Together, they reviewed the prevailing weather conditions, where the wind and rain could affect operations. Next, they reviewed the computer-generated mental display schematics of the Zircon building, deciding where best to precision drop the squads, mapping out the ins and outs of the stairways and speed lifts of the building.

Each of the three squad leaders of the Space Marines entered the “Cyber Situation” for a detailed briefing of the Zircon building’s many exits and entries. They discussed the placement of portable force-field shields to isolate the floor and at what point the various nonlethal weapons would be used. One of the Marines suggested using an ultra-high frequency wave burst as the best method to subdue the terrorists with the fewest losses. The TAV-4 pilot and crew, already part of the Cyber Situation, once more reviewed the weather, adjusted for winds, and with the squadrons aboard, launched.

The CINC and others watched the outcome of the operation in their “Cyber Situations,” noting the success of the precision drop and the excellent execution of the Space Marines in avoiding detection by the terrorists, while keeping the civilians calm. The success of the frequency wave burst earned the suggesting Space Marine a merit promotion and the entire operation the Argentine government’s heartfelt thanks.