Newhouse News Service October 12, 2001
Researchers Ready New High-Tech Weapons
By Kevin Coughlin
An extended campaign in Afghanistan could see a slew of new high-tech weapons, from satellites that peer through camouflage to stun guns that heat flesh with a beam of microwaves.
Weapons in the pipeline range from frightful to fanciful. They include rifles that lob laser-guided grenades, and squadrons of unmanned MAVs Micro Air Vehicles deployed like flocks of birds, to peek over hilltops or sniff for biochemical agents.
If the war on terrorism wears on, these and other prototypes could enhance the huge technical edge experts say U.S. Special Operations forces already bring to their hunt for Osama bin Laden. "Our ability to have situation awareness in an isolated region depends completely on our technology," said Jack Spencer, defense analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "It will give us our situational awareness. It will be a combination of basic soldiering and technology."
Pilotless drones and other reconnaissance technologies may be pivotal, providing electronic eyes to locate bin Laden in a haystack as vast as Texas. High-tech reconnaissance should help U.S. commandos strike with surgical precision, said analyst John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org.
"I don't think they'll be doing much crawling around," said Pike. "They'll wake up late in the afternoon, get their satellite imagery, make sure the Predator drone is locked onto the objective, get into a helicopter soon after dark, adjust their night vision goggles, kill or capture the people they're after, get back in the helicopter and come home."
Predators, unmanned planes with 49-foot wingspans, reportedly are reprising their Kosovo and Iraq spy missions in Afghan skies. Eventually, soldiers may get a bird's eye view from flying machines no bigger than model airplanes.
The Rand Corp., MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have studied ways to shrink cameras, chemical sensors, communications gear and weapons onto mini-drones.
These whirling dervishes would supply "information on demand, where and when it is needed (for) tagging, targeting and communications," for tracking hazardous chemical clouds, and even for poking inside buildings, according to the agency's Web site.
"MAVs should be thought of as aerial robots ... whose mobility can deploy a useful micro payload to a remote or otherwise hazardous location where it may perform any of a variety of missions," wrote researchers James McMichael and Michael Francis, a retired Air Force colonel.
They said the technology's future depends on advances in fuel cell batteries, lightweight satellite guidance systems, and MEMs "micro-electromechanical" components like the sensors that trigger automobile airbags.
The agency is spending $35 million over four years to come up with cheap 6-inch vehicles that can fly for two hours at 90 mph and relay images for six miles. They might be launched by hand, shot from weapons and catapults, or scattered from other aircraft.
Test MAVs have names like Kolibri and Black Widow and weigh as little as 11 ounces. An Ohio firm, IGR Inc., is perfecting a tiny fuel cell; MIT is devising a turbojet engine the size of a shirt button.
In July, the agency announced $6 million in grants to create even more advanced mini-drones called Organic Air Vehicles, or OAVs. They will be designed to operate on their own, without instructions from soldiers. The Army expects them to land and take off vertically from ledges or windowsills, and hopscotch across war zones.
"You can think of these vehicles as re-locatable sensors," Sam Wilson, project manager for the defense research agency, said in a prepared statement.
Similar projects include Dragon Eyes, a do-it-yourself battlefield drone for the Marines, and Robofly, the nickname for a Navy-funded "micromechanical flying insect." Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley hope to cause a buzz by 2004 with their palm-sized invention, which flaps its metal wings at 150 beats per second. The Pentagon also anticipates big things from larger drones like the Predator and Global Hawk.
Future Predators, from General Atomics Aeronautical Systems of San Diego, could be cloaked to evade radar and fitted to carry weapons. In tests, a Predator destroyed a tank.
Groomed as a successor to U2 spy planes, the pilotless Global Hawk from Northrop Grumman has flown from America to Australia. It boasts three different sensors to see through bad weather, day or night, from a lofty 65,000 feet.
Images from such flights could be processed by a new chip from the Sarnoff Corp. of West Windsor, N.J., and Pyramid Vision Technologies, a spinoff. The chip works with Windows software to overlay target images onto maps for precise targeting. This system replaces costly, custom-built computers that stitched together aerial images from Kosovo and Rwanda, said Sarnoff spokesman Tom Lento.
Best known for inventing color TV, Sarnoff also has a video system that lets troops record what they see in their night scopes. Enhanced images can be transmitted wirelessly to a command center, Lento said.
Once reconnaissance finds terrorists, of course, they must be captured or killed.
The Objective Individual Combat Weapon, or OICW, promises plenty of firepower. A laser focuses on the enemy and a grenade is sprung over his head, raining deadly shrapnel. The OICW doubles as a rifle, and is expected to replace the venerable M16 by 2006.
Earlier this year, the Air Force and Marine Corps described ray guns meant to repel, not kill. A microwave beam penetrates the skin, causing water molecules to vibrate. The Air Force likens the sensation to touching a light bulb unpleasant but usually harmless.
"A weapon like this could be particularly useful when adversaries are mixed with innocent persons," said Marine Corps Col. George Fenton, director of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program in Quantico, Va.
Copyright 2001 Newhouse News Service
