Financial Times January 22, 2003
US looks to citizens for defence innovations
By Thomas Catán
As every James Bond fan knows, winning the war against global villainy is all about the gadgets. And in the field of high-tech gadgetry, the US has long been an unrivalled power.
Military operations from the Gulf to the Balkans have shown off its technological superiority. But like so much else, September 11 changed all that. The Pentagon's arsenal of state-of-the-art weaponry designed for the cold war looked useless against a new enemy, the stateless terrorist.
To address the new-found gadget gap, the Pentagon decided it needed to enlist a powerful ally - the ingenuity of US citizens.
On October 25 2001, the Department of Defence appealed for Americans to submit any inventions that could be fielded in the approaching "war on terrorism".
Specifically, it said it "seeks help in combating terrorism, defeating difficult targets, conducting protracted operations in remote areas and developing countermeasures to weapons of mass destruction".
The announcement did little to reassure Americans. Some media commentators said the official request - known as a Broad Agency Announcement - meant simply "Help!"
But 15 months on, US officials say the effort is yielding a new crop of high-tech inventions to fight terrorism, many of which may also become highly successful commercial products. In just two months, the Pentagon got 12,500 proposals, more than six times the number it usually gets when it calls for bids. Between 50 and 60 contracts will be awarded by the defence department, worth about $60m.
The department has been equally encouraged by the source of the submissions: more than half came from people and companies with which it had never worked before.
"Usually there are corporations and organisations that the DoD signs contracts with on a regular basis," says Patrick Garrett, defence analyst at Globalsecurity.org, pointing to giants such as Dyncorp or Northrop-Grumman. In this instance, however, "it sounds like all these other companies they're signing on with are providing unique services they can't get anywhere else".
As well as the wider range of companies, the proverbial "guy in his garage" is playing a role this time. The DoD says it is planning to award a contract to a lone inventor who came up with a brilliant idea. But it is experiencing some unconventional delays.
"He had a great idea but no infrastructure to perform it," says Jeff David, deputy director of the Technical Support Working Group, the obscure government agency spearheading the effort. "It's taking a little while for him to actually create a company so that he can do the work he proposed."
Other ideas set to receive funding from the Pentagon include myriad new gadgets for US special forces, from communication tools to video enhancement and image stabilisation systems. One new device enables bomb-disposal units to zap improvised explosives such as suitcase bombs in yet-to-be-disclosed ways.
Dentist Dr Barry Mersky is another inventor who has stretched his ingenuity, producing his high-tech Tooth Phone Communications System.
Sensatex, a New York company, is getting funding for its SmartShirt ("the shirt that thinks"), made from a new "intelligent fabric" that can be wired with any number of sensors to monitor everything from the wearer's heart rate to the number of calories burned. The data is gathered by the shirt and sent wirelessly to a base station for remote monitoring.
"If you're sending someone into a hostile environment - whether that's a soldier going into a [battle] or a firefighter going into a chem-bio incident - you can monitor his heart rate, respiration, possibly his blood oxygen levels," says Mr David. "You can integrate communications antennae with it - you're limited by just your imagination."
The SmartShirt should be commercially available in the summer, when the company hopes it will be used by everyone from athletes to elderly people who live alone.
The Pentagon is also funding new products to detect exposure to weapons of mass destruction. These include a credit-card sized, colour-coded radiation detector thin enough to be placed in a wallet. The cards are undergoing field tests and could be commercially-available by the summer.
Critics might argue that terrorism is an inherently different - and more complex - adversary that cannot be defeated simply by using technology. The September 11 attackers used extremely low-tech weapons for the hijacks.
In other areas, too, the US has found that technology does not always offer a solution.
After September 11, intelligence officials admitted they had become too reliant on electronic surveillance to the detriment of old-fashioned "human intelligence" - spies.
Mr David is not about to mock inventors' unconventional ideas, saying aircraft in visible to radar would have seemed laughable as recently as the 1970s. "Who's that next person coming in with an idea that seems impossible today, but maybe he can do it?"
Copyright © 2003, Financial Times
