By ROGER FRANKLIN Herald correspondent
NEW YORK - When the commandos took up their positions in the wee hours at the foot of the ridge on which the terrorists were holed up, the squad's commanding officer offered a silent prayer of thanks.
He was a veteran, a man who first took up arms in his country's service back in the early years of the 21st century, when this objective would have been one tough and bloody nut to crack.
Above him, dug in among the rubble, the enemy waited behind an array of obstacles. The first was a minefield intended to stall any conventional assault in a broad and unobstructed killing zone that would be swept by two heavy machine-guns firing from a pair of concrete bunkers.
Summoning his technical sergeant to his side, the officer laid out his plan.
First, reconnaissance.
The non-com flipped open a miniature computer, one that was almost indistinguishable for a civilian Palm Pilot. He tapped in some numbers and logged on via an encrypted wireless connection to a military website linked to a network of satellites.
Meanwhile, a corporal snapped the wings on a miniature aeroplane powered by a silent electric motor. Scarcely larger than a dinner plate, it weighed no more than a packet of cigarettes.
At the officer's command, the tiny drone skimmed silently up the slope towards the enemy position, beaming images of what it saw and sensed to one of the orbiting "birds," which relayed the images to the pocketsize monitor in the sergeant's hand.
At the same time, another soldier crawled almost to the top of the ridge, where he scattered dozens of tiny, six-legged robots that resembled nothing so much as electronic cockroaches.
Unaided, and guided only by their own built-in logic boards, they fanned out to sniff the ground with supersensitive electronic noses that could detect the plastic explosive in the array of mines buried just beneath the surface. Whenever one was found, the tin bugs stopped dead, primed their fuses and awaited orders to explode.
Other cockroaches - these ones equipped with aerosol packs of sedative gas - went further, creeping to within a metre or so of the bunkers' gun slits.
Meanwhile, two more attackers slipped into their flying suits - carbon-fibre frames topped by a pair of ducted fans driven by miniature jet turbines.
When the shooting started, they would take up position high above the village, eyes in the sky to report the enemy's defensive movements and, if the impending attack went well, the foe's line of retreat.
And at the very foot of the hill, half-a-dozen attackers suited up in their exoskeletons - articulated combat suits that fused human flesh with the muscle of batteries and servomotors. To take the village, the attackers would need to dismantle a roadblock of junked cars.
With the mechanically enhanced brawn of the exoskeletons, it would not be a problem: a single soldier, even a slight female GI, could toss the burned-out vehicles aside like empty cereal boxes.
As for the deep, wide trenches surrounding the terrorist encampment, the spring-heeled exoskeletons allowed their wearers to take those obstacles, quite literally, in their stride.
When the order to attack was given, everything went like clockwork: the cockroaches detonated, setting off the landmines and clearing the way for the infantry to advance rapidly over the open ground.
The microlight drone's infrared sensors detected a previously unnoticed bunker, which was cleared by another legion of exploding bugs programmed to go off whenever they sensed the warmth of a human body.
Later, with the engagement over and the village taken, the officer repeated his quiet prayer.
"Thank you, God," he muttered. "Thank you, Lord, for giving the Pentagon the wisdom to create Darpa."
Science fiction? Yes, but only just.
While the Flash Gordon flying suits, robot bugs and microlight flying spies have yet to be deployed in actual combat, every single one of those futuristic systems is either under development or already being tested by an agency of the United States armed forces that may well be the most remarkable, and certainly the most innovative, weaponsmith in the history of warfare, the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency - Darpa for short.
"I think, dollar for dollar, the American taxpayer gets phenomenal value out of Darpa, which has always taken a refreshingly different attitude to weapons development," said Rodney Brooks, the Australian-born Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticist whose pioneering work on simple "insect machines" paved the way for the exploding cockroaches.
At a time when President George W. Bush is asking American taxpayers to pour what may well turn out to be a trillion dollars into a controversial missile shield that is supposed to protect the US from nuclear attack, Darpa's approach stands in stark contrast - not least because, unlike the Strategic Defence Initiative, its brainchildren actually work.
Established by President Eisenhower in 1958, the low-key agency was spawned by the panic that swept through the Pentagon when the Soviets surprised the world by launching Sputnik.
The brass wanted a massive spending blitz to retake the high ground of space, which Eisenhower gave them. But he also hedged his bets.
When the Pentagon demanded control of the federal agency that would soon be renamed Nasa, Eisenhower demurred.
As a former general himself, not to mention the man who orchestrated the D-Day invasion of Europe, Eisenhower was no stranger to the ways in which a braid-encrusted bureaucracy can transform sound and simple ideas into gold-plated debacles. Computers, he reasoned, would shape future warfare, just as the machinegun and tank had rewritten the strategy manuals after each of the century's two global conflicts.
If there were to be a third world war, the West would need technologically advanced weapons systems - ones that worked.
Quietly, while giving the generals what they wanted with one hand, Eisenhower used the other to beckon some of the greatest technical minds from America's leading universities to Washington. Their orders were simple: Return to their ivory towers and dream up the sort of high-tech stuff that would see America safely into the next century.
And just to make life a little easier, the charter that Eisenhower granted placed Darpa's scientists under no obligation to tell Congress what they were up to. Now that may sound somewhat sinister, but Eisenhower had his reasons: If the pork merchants on Capitol Hill didn't know where, and on what, the money was being spent, they would be unable to meddle in an effort to have those weapons built in their own electorates.
"Darpa contracts were awarded by competent technical experts on a merit basis only," said J. T. Rodgers, a Silicon Valley titan whose own postgraduate work in the 1960s on advanced transistors was funded directly by a Darpa grant. "They were able to concentrate on getting the science right, not on winning public relations victories and schmoozing congressmen."
The agency's first triumph, though little noticed at the time, was not long in coming. Reasoning that it would be nice to share their ideas and communicate instantaneously, the original generation of Darpa scientists decided to hook up their universities computers in a nationwide network.
Today, the great-great-great-greatgrandchildren of that original communication system is the internet, whose vital component parts - routers, servers, switches, and all manner of programming protocols - Darpa specialists also pioneered.
"Generally, the taxpayer doesn't get much to show for the money that goes into the Pentagon, except a reassuring sense of security," Rodgers noted. "With Darpa, it's like the penny stock that became a blue chip."
These days, while many of its advanced computer-programming and chip-development programmes remain highly classified - particularly its research on "cyberwar" strategies to crash the computers that control an enemy's command, communications and control infrastructure - an increasing amount of Darpa's work is open to public scrutiny.
Take the exoskeleton project, for example, which promises to produce a new generation of soldiers that will look like the mechanically enhanced supermen of author Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (the book not the movie). While a full suit has yet to be assembled, individual limbs and lightweight armour have all been tested - including one prolonged exercise in which a volunteer wearing a pair of powered legs reportedly managed to maintain an average speed of almost 30 km/h for better than 40 minutes.
The price tag? Around $US50 million ($115 million) to take the project - also featuring "sensory enhancers" to expand the wearer's field of vision and amplify his hearing - from drawingboard to finished prototype in under four years.
If that seems a lot, consider this: the Marine Corps has spent more than two decades and $US40 billion (yes, billion!) on a cross between an aeroplane and a helicopter that it calls the Osprey.
While it looks sleek and shiny in the press kits that the Pentagon loves to hand out, the Osprey also falls out of the sky with such alarming regularity that even the pork-addicted politicians on Capitol Hill are likely to axe the programme this year. A deluge of defence dollars pouring into their districts is one thing; the sons of their constituents returning home in body bags quite another.
Another Darpa innovation is an "exploded tank" that turns the traditional logic of armoured warfare on its head.
When Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, one of the reasons the counter-attack took so long to mount was the fact that the Pentagon could fit only one of its M-1 Abrams tanks into its largest transport plane.
Darpa hopes to solve that problem by breaking the tanks of tomorrow into small, unmanned components: the gun and turret will be mounted on a low-profile, hard-to-hit vehicle designed to scoot about under the control of a "driver" who could be sitting half a world away.
The target locator will be on another autonomous unit, which will feed video images of the battlefield to satellites that can relay it to the remote operator.
If one component breaks down or is taken out by enemy fire, computers would automatically switch the target-finder's data to a surviving gun.
"We looked at reducing the size and weight of the Abrams tank but, using the most sophisticated light-weight materials, we couldn't realistically get it under 40 tonnes," said Darpa researchers Michael Andrews.
"By breaking the tank into its essential components, we get flexibility, survivability, lower costs, and eliminate human casualties - and the whole thing weighs less than 20 tonnes."
Now undergoing testing at the Army's tank training ground at Fort Hood in Texas, the first "exploded" tanks should be available for deployment by 2006.
"History teaches us that effective innovation is the most potent weapon," said Rodgers. "In Darpa's willingness to think outside the box, we have the sharpest cutting edge of them all."
Flights of fancy nearer than you think
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