Space battles, unmanned submarine hunters and artificial intelligent
systems that help human commanders make split-second decisions may sound
like science fiction fodder, but military researchers are hard at work
trying to make them a reality.
The U.S. military's
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) has put millions of dollars into projects to develop such
technologies, as well as other projects to make cheap, reusable rockets
and war technology, officials with the agency said Wednesday (Feb. 10)
in a news briefing.
New foes, new technology
The U.S. has typically faced big, monolithic adversaries (think the
USSR during the Cold War) or hostile nation states (like Iraq during the
Gulf War), and over the past few decades, it has been incredibly
dominant, said Steve Walker, the deputy director of DARPA. [
Humanoid Robots to Flying Cars: 10 Coolest DARPA Technologies]
In the future, however, "we can't pick the next hotspots in the world
and we can't necessarily focus on the fights we can win," Walker said.
Instead of a limited set of well-known foes, the U.S. now faces a
myriad of quickly shifting and interconnected threats, from
traditionally hostile nation states to criminal organizations to
terrorist networks. Fighting those enemies may require something beyond
the large, expensive military systems that take ages to design and
build.
"We need to mix it up," Walker said.
Robot and man
Toward that end, DARPA is investing in a number of technologies that make warfare cheaper and more flexible.
For instance, the agency is investing in the development of a futuristic, relatively cheap
space plane called the XS-1. The reusable plane would launch into suborbital altitudes, flying at hypersonic speeds of Mach 10, to
deliver fleets of mini-satellites, then return to repeat the process.
Other proposed projects would take humans out of at least some of the
equations of modern warfare. For instance, the agency is designing an
unmanned warship that could hunt down ultraquiet diesel submarines — all
without a human aboard. The first prototype, dubbed the Sea Hunter, is a
130-foot-long (40 meters) behemoth that took its maiden voyage in the
waters off Portland earlier this month and will be christened in April.
Such ghost ships could be connected in an invisible grid with other
manned vessels, constantly communicating to dynamically assess threats.
Another project aims to put
artificial intelligence (AI) in the cockpit with human pilots. The AI would then be used to sabotage the enemy's communication networks.
"The way we would do that is by first of all scouring the spectrum in
real time and then second of all applying some of the most amazing
technology from the frontiers of artificial intelligence and machine
learning to learn what the adversary is doing in the electromagnetic
spectrum, start making predictions about what they're going to do and
then adapt the on-board jammer," said Arati Prabhakar, the director of
DARPA.
Currently, completely unknown signals must be sent back to a central
command station, where they sometimes take months to decode, she said.
And the newly proposed Hallmark program would leverage artificial
intelligence systems to rapidly assess dynamically changing data in
futuristic space battles — then present a set of two or three decisions
to a human commander, who would be able to make decisions more quickly
than he or she otherwise would.
"You don't want to overload the human; you want to give them exactly what they need to make the decision," Walker said.
