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tkaehler
  - Joined on 08-28-2007
- Posts 1
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The Million-to-One Ratio is Our Challenge
We may not be able to meet the current threats to our culture and way of life with a technical solution. Here is a good article that puts it in perspective. San Francisco ChronicleAugust 26, 2007 Special Military Group Looks Ahead To Fight America's Future Wars By Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer Envision an aircraft carrier in the sky. Drugs that can immediatelyprepare soldiers for duty at high altitudes. Prosthetic limbs withsomething approaching real sensitivity. The Pentagon has. For half a century, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - alow-profile but vital division of the Defense Department - has developedtechnologies to confound America's foes and comfort its friends. Theagency has been the force behind dozens of weapons, from the M-16 rifleand night-vision goggles to smart bombs and stealth aircraft. Now, DARPA is planning for a long war in which U.S. troops will beexpected to face guerrilla adversaries. And just as during the Cold War,DARPA is counting on high-tech Silicon Valley to give U.S. forces theedge. "We need to anticipate all of the challenges and discover the technicalmeans to conquer those challenges," Anthony Tether, DARPA director, toldmore than 3,000 scientists, entrepreneurs and military leaders whogathered in Anaheim earlier this month for the agency's 50th anniversaryconference. Best known for sponsoring the early research that led to the Internet,DARPA has long supported cutting-edge projects with civilian as well asmilitary applications. The agency is operating on a $3.1 billion budget, up 8 percent fromfiscal 2006. Virtually every Silicon Valley company, from the obvious candidates likeLockheed Martin Missiles and Space to who'd-a-thunk it outfits likeGoogle, has been touched in some way by DARPA. "Almost every great digital oak has a DARPA acorn at the bottom," saidfuturist Paul Saffo. During three days in Anaheim, DARPA and Pentagon officials made 60presentations, painting a picture of a future in which the United Stateswill have to spend $1 million on countermeasures for every dollarshelled out by bomb-building guerrillas like those U.S. forces areencountering in Iraq. "We are like a lion up against bees that are very effective wheneverthey swarm," said Daniel Newman, a DARPA official involved in some ofthe agency's most ambitious projects. According to Marine Lt. Gen. James Amos, military planners are girdingfor 20 years of sporadic guerrilla wars fought in what he called an "arcof instability" circling the globe around the equator, with a detourinto the Middle East. Amos said this war will be driven by natural disasters and economicfailures that force desperate migrations, or by ideological or religiousgrudges. And as has been the case in Iraq, these irregular forces willbe unable to defeat the United States in pitched battles. "We haven'tlost a face-to-face battle in five years of fighting," Amos said ofIraq, and so they will continue to rely on shadowy tactics like suicideattacks and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, who spoke at the DARPAconference via satellite, also predicted that the United States is muchcloser to the beginning of this long war than to its end. Ideally, DARPA hopes to develop weapons that would allow the UnitedStates to one day patrol the "arc of instability" from a high altitude. The aerial platforms in the early stages of development are designed notonly to warn of threats, but to neutralize them by delivering what DARPAcalls "ultra-precise effects" - smart bombs on steroids - that could belaunched from anywhere in the continental United States, with minimalharm to distant civilians, according to Thomas Bussing, another DARPAleader. "Think of an aircraft carrier in the sky," Newman said. Amos sketched out the most likely scenarios of how ground forces - warfighters in military parlance - would carry out missions: in 13-personsquads, often commanded by a senior sergeant or junior officer,patrolling towns of 100,000 people with little or no way ofdistinguishing friend from foe. Most of DARPA's research projects are designed to support this scenarioby giving these American teams the most complete and constantsurveillance possible. Imagine a hemisphere of awareness, dropped over a battlefield through anetwork of satellite and aerial platforms. Sensing and communicationgizmos become the extended eyes and ears of those 13 troops on theground. "When you're on the battlefield," Amos told his audience,"nothing is more frightening than being alone and not knowing where yourbuddies are." DARPA official Michael Callahan challenged university and industryscientists to help develop drugs that would, for instance, acclimateU.S.troops to extreme environments like the high altitudes of Afghanistan,so they can hop off jets and jump into firefights. Amos also remindedthe scientists and engineers that, today in Iraq, American troops aresweating under the weight of "60 to 70 pounds of body armor andammunition" that makes it nearly impossible for them to react nimbly. "We protect them to the point where they can't do their business," Amossaid, urging the assembled brainiacs to invent body armor "that is aquarter-inch thick and about a quarter of what it weighs now." The whole idea, according to DARPA official Stephen Welby, is to "doeverything in our power to keep our war fighters out of harm's way." The emotional high point of the event came when Amos brought out aformer Marine staff sergeant from Iraq who had been in a convoy bombedby IEDs that burned three-quarters of his body, blew off one hand andleft the other dangling uselessly at his side. But the wounded soldiertold the audience he counted himself lucky compared to his commandingofficer, "a big man, about 6-foot-3," who, he said, "had to be picked upby shovels." As the DARPA community rose to applaud the battle-scarred Marine, Amoscursed such deadly explosives and their builders. "They are the onlyweapon that they've been able to beat us with," he said. But DARPA's high-tech dreams have their critics, who view its "visions"as boondoggles the nation can't afford. "I think it (DARPA) is basically a jobs program," said Chalmers Johnson,a retired University of California political scientist and author whopublishes under The American Empire Project label. Johnson's latestbook,"Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic," argues that theUnited States has succumbed to a costly policy of militarism. "Thanks to DARPA, we're toying with bankruptcy in this country," saidJohnson, who believes that because the United States hopes to minimizecasualties to its own troops, it has increasingly been adopting thecostly high-tech approach to warfare outlined in Anaheim. "Does this make the country more secure?" he asked, arguing the reverse:that just as the United States won the Cold War in part by using itssuperior economic muscle to outspend the Soviet Union in the arms race,America's suicide-bomb adversaries are forcing this nation onto aspending trajectory it cannot sustain. "We are now on the verge of duplicating the same collapse," Johnsonwarned. Deputy Secretary of Defense England acknowledged that no matter howsmart the technology, it will never be able to stamp out the dangerposed by guerrilla warfare. "We spend billions of dollars to develop and procure innovativesolutions ... but at the end of the day, it's still not possible for usto completely defeat these very basic technologies and approaches ouradversaries are choosing," England said. "And of course there's a hugecost disadvantage, probably a million to one between our outlays andwhat an IED builder spends on readily available parts." Can the United States afford such lopsided bills? Not for long,according to military strategist Thomas Barnett, author of "ThePentagon's New Map," one of the treatises that lay out the scenario forthese asymmetrical wars that planners expect. "The million-to-one (ratio) is unsustainable," Barnett said, althoughit's difficult for him or anyone else to explain how the United Statesmight be able to end its dependency on high-tech weapons that allow itto project power without putting U.S. forces in harm's way.
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