The Army's Future Combat Systems hope to mesh men
and machines into a single fighting force.
Image courtesy of US Army
Warriors and War Machines
Tanks and missiles are the most obvious fruits of military research, but some defense analysts argue that information technology is the weapon that has most revolutionized warfare. Modern generals never face the command and control problems that plagued, say, Napoleon. Surveillance technologies like radar and spy satellites can warn of an approaching enemy, troops can be given orders in real time from thousands of miles away, and GPS navigation ensures they don’t get lost. These technologies allowed the U.S. military to sweep aside initial opposition in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Philip Coyle, senior adviser for the Center for Defense Information and the Defense Department’s top technology tester during the Clinton administration, in recent years the Pentagon has increasingly relied on information. “Basically, you substitute electrons for armor,” he says. “The idea was if you had enough information, that would make up for armor.”
Research in advanced information technology is feeding ideas like Future Combat Systems, the Army’s ambitious $200 billion program to field a series of manned and unmanned vehicles linked by a common communications network. But Coyle now believes relying on information technology so heavily is at least partially misguided. He notes the lesson learned from the later combat in Iraq—where homemade bombs have proved deadly to U.S. forces—is simple: “You never have enough information to substitute for armor.”
That’s not the only problem. Building that heavily linked network has proved daunting. Costs have grown, particularly as engineers realized the limitations of their technology. Thomas Killion, the Army’s chief scientist, defends this work in much the same way Lewis defends the Air Force’s high-risk ventures: The important thing about Future Combat Systems was that the Army defined “a vision and stuck to it [and then over time] calibrated it with technical reality.”
In fact, the Pentagon is now extending its desire to manage information all the way to a soldier’s brain, where DARPA and other research agencies are seeking to exploit neuroscience in pursuit of better battlefield technology. This year DARPA started a project called the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System—more catchily dubbed Luke’s Binoculars (a reference to Luke Skywalker from Star Wars)—that combines advanced optics with an EEG system that monitors brain wave activity in the prefrontal cortex. Certain patterns of activity suggest that the brain has subconsciously detected a threat, and the system will alert the soldier immediately instead of waiting for his conscious mind to finish digesting the entire scene. DARPA anticipates field-testing a prototype in 2010.
Luke’s Binoculars is only one step into the world of neuroscience. The Pentagon is also trying to expand its understanding of the brain in order to detect foes. In an interview, William Schneider, the chairman of the Defense Science Board, a panel that advises the Pentagon’s senior leadership, says that neuroscience can offer a window into the minds of terrorists. “By being able to collect and process a lot of information about individuals that can be leveraged with understanding how the brain operates, there may be things we can do that had not heretofore been possible.” This would include being better able to predict where an individual might be found or to anticipate his behavior.
Schneider’s suggestion is one part of a broader report by the Defense Science Board on 21st-century “strategic technology vectors.” Released earlier this year, the report highlighted “human terrain preparation” as one of the key areas for Pentagon science and technology. This new piece of jargon has rapidly entered the military lexicon, with commanders and technologists alike talking about the “human terrain” to describe the interaction of culture, groups, and people that can, for example, lead to military forces being treated either as liberators or as unwelcome intruders.
The Pentagon does not just want to study this problem, however; it wants to develop a system to combat it. How can it manipulate group psychology so that insurgents, not U.S. forces, are seen by local civilians as the enemy? What interrogation techniques will produce the best results without alienating the local population or international allies? The sorts of technologies this might draw upon are diverse, Schneider says: everything from sensors that monitor the activity of people to software that would guide the actions of military commanders in the field by taking social and psychological factors into account. The Pentagon is funding social scientists to develop “a tool kit that helps combat teams understand the cultural context in which they must operate.” This kit might include handheld devices that will cue soldiers to behave in a culturally attuned manner.
