Pentagon Presents Future of Digital and Robotized Wars

Robotic arms, a military version of Google Glass, and especially digital software and platforms will play a fundamental role in disputes where binary codes will make the difference between winners and losers.

At the Pentagon, the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) presented a hundred projects that it is preparing for cybernetic wars and battlefields riddled with robots.

Robotic arms, the military version of Google Glass, and especially digital software and platforms were displayed at the Pentagon’s central courtyard on May 21, with an eye on future cybernetic wars in which binary codes will make the difference between winners and losers.

Director of the DARPA ULTRA-Vis project, Yiftach Eisenberg, explained that “man and machine will be increasingly integrated.”* ULTRA-Vis is a visor placed on the front of a soldier’s helmet that sends real-time information on orders, distance to enemy targets, latitude, peer situations and the direction to be followed. “It is not the same as Google Glass. This goes further because there is no need to look away at a lens. Thanks to this device, you look though and you see the action directly … quite similar to a video game,”* explained Eisenberg.

Bionic Arms

Meanwhile, Justin Sánchez, director of the advanced prosthesis project at DARPA — the agency that invented the Internet and the GPS system — showed the most recent advances in bionic arms, which are currently helping veteran amputees and might eventually be used for robots that share the battlefield with humans. Those at Johns Hopkins University have managed to create a robotic arm that emulates a person’s movements to a tee — something helpful for people with reduced mobility. Moreover, it has many useful military applications.

The event was attended by an eclectic mixture of uniformed Pentagon officials and newly graduated, unshaven engineers wearing T-shirts, presenting the latest in data analysis, cyberdefense and applications for the soldiers of tomorrow.

Two of the projects were discreetly presented because only American civil servants could attend the showings: video surveillance super camera Argus-IR and war analysis system Insight.

Argus-IR is a new phase of a secret program from Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems, which has created a camera that is able to capture from the air everything that happens within a 40 kilometer radius with an accuracy of 15 centimeters, and which identifies enemy movements with infrared imaging. This system, along with programs like Insight, which includes maps, intelligence information and other types of data, will allow the troops of the future to wage a war from the rear just as one might approach the strategy of a video game.

Plan X

But cyberdefense applications and data analysis, or “Big Data,” were even more prominent at the showing. These applications will shape the future of hyperconnected armed forces who might face wars on a new front: cyberspace.

Plan X is a platform that DARPA is developing for implementation by 2017, which integrates all abilities equivalent to a “central commando”* in a large-scale cybernetic war, explained project scientist Alex Wissner-Gross. The United States wants to have the ability, nonexistent as of yet, to coordinate attacks and defense of their communications network, satellites and other strategic infrastructure in a large-scale, international war of hackers. “Plan X would be like an app store, where every military force integrates their capabilities,”* explained the physicist, who graduated from Harvard only six years ago.

The connection between the world of bits and that of reality is becoming increasingly deeper, and the Pentagon is preparing for any eventuality, as software automatically recognizes whether a person is lying and detects hacker infiltrations. “It is relatively easy to take remote control of any vehicle or change the GPS data of any vessel to divert it from its route,”* explains Franz Franchetti, a Carnegie Mellon University engineer who works with DARPA to prevent other nations from taking control of unmanned aircraft or vehicles.

At the height of tensions with China, everything indicates that these types of actions will be increasingly regular, and have already triggered an “arms race.”

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.