Technology / Weapons & Security

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), like this MQ-9 Reaper, are receiving a great deal of funding.

Image courtesy of USAF/SR. Airman Larry E. Reid Jr.

The total proposed American defense budget for 2008 is more than half a trillion dollars—with $75 billion of that set aside for research and development. For decades, the Pentagon’s investment in science and technology has produced widely hailed achievements like the Internet and the Global Positioning System. It has also backed quixotic and costly failures, like space-based lasers. And sometimes it has gone off the deep end, funding such things as psychic spies and weapons that defy the laws of physics.

The Department of Defense began systematically funding basic and applied research in a big way after World War II. Today the Pentagon’s investment in science R&D remains a cornerstone of the country’s national security strategy. Yet in the aftermath of the low-tech attacks of 9/11, the growing insurgency in Iraq, and the threat of worldwide terrorism, technology experts both within and outside the Pentagon are questioning whether Defense Department research is producing the results that America needs.

So what are we getting for our money? That $75 billion budget covers a vast array of projects, from perfecting new weapon systems like the Joint Strike Fighter plane to studying pure physics. Focusing on the research side of R&D, DISCOVER looked at four key areas where the military is placing its bets: hypersonic vehicles, laser technology, using information technology and neuroscience to combine human and machine on the battlefield, and employing sociology and psychobiology to combat terrorism.

Hypersonics

For two decades, unconfirmed press reports have speculated that the United States has been developing Aurora, a top secret hypersonic aircraft, sometimes dubbed the SR-72. Rumors of such “black,” or classified, research programs are hard to squelch: How do you prove something does not exist? As recently as June, an article in Defense News, a trade publication, reported that the Air Force was developing “a stealthy 4,000-mph plane capable of flying to altitudes of about 100,000 feet, with transcontinental range.”

In comparison, the state-of-the-art SR-71 stealth reconnaissance plane, which flew from 1964 to 1998, topped out at about an airspeed of 2,200 mph and 85,000 feet, while the Concorde, the fastest commercial jet ever built, flew at a maximum speed of about 1,350 mph and an altitude of 60,000 feet.

The Aurora speculation has been fueled, in part, by the Defense Department’s classified budget requests, estimated by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C., to total $30.1 billion for 2007, with about half going to classified R&D. That black budget has at times led to wild speculation, despite independent analysis indicating that much of the black money flows into satellites and other intelligence assets.

According to Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists (also based in Washington, D.C.), a frequent critic of government secrecy, it would be hard in today’s world—though not impossible—to hide such a large classified program as a hypersonic aircraft. “In principle, it is possible to conduct a large black program,” he says, but the reality is that the larger the program and the more people involved in it, the harder it is to keep totally secret. “I suspect Aurora involved a small grain of truth, and lots of wishful thinking,” he adds.

Mark Lewis, the Air Force’s chief scientist, laughs about the persistence of the Aurora story. “That’s right, we got the technology from Area 51,” he jokes. In fact, Lewis says, hypersonic research really is progressing in notable ways, just not in the direction of an airplane. Lewis is particularly enthusiastic about the X-51 WaveRider, a hypersonic flight-test vehicle funded by the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s research and development arm. The WaveRider gets its name from its unique approach to coping with hypersonic shock waves that form in the air as it drills through the sky. Rather than fighting shock waves, the shape of the X-51 allows it to maximize those waves to provide lift and funnel compressed air into its scramjet engine.

The X-51 will most likely lead to missiles, which are substantially easier to construct and fly than piloted airplanes. In such applications, hypersonic technology could be important for the war on terror: According to Richard Hallion, who once served as the Air Force’s historian and is a former senior adviser for “counterintelligence and special programs oversight,” hypersonics could result in a missile capable of reaching its quarry before it has a chance to escape. “You might go after a fleeting target, a Zarqawi or an Osama bin Laden,” he says.

Laser guns may first appear on the battlefield as
nonlethal weapons intended to blind
and disorient, as in the PHaSR prototype.

Image courtesy of USAF