Government Executive - Authors - Bruce Falconer

Defense research agency seeks to create supersoldiers

Bruce Falconer — Mon, 10 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500

But even this, it seems, was too little, too late to appease an outraged Congress: House and Senate appropriations conferees working on the Defense budget have since voted to abolish large portions of the agency's Terrorism Information Awareness program. The program-of which FutureMAP was a small part-was designed to mine private databases for information on terrorist suspects.

DARPA, meanwhile, soldiers on with the kind of "blue-sky" thinking that is its charge. Indeed, the Pentagon agency that underwrote the development of some of the world's most advanced technologies, such as the Internet, the Global Positioning System, and stealth aircraft, is now looking at technologies that will help U.S. troops soldier on, and on, and on.

DARPA thinkers are saying that maybe humans themselves need an upgrade. "The human is becoming the weakest link," DARPA warned last year in an unclassified report. "Sustaining and augmenting human performance will have significant impact on Defense missions and systems." A review of the agency's latest budget request reveals a host of projects aimed squarely at making soldiers smarter, tougher, faster, and stronger-in short, superhuman.

DARPA-funded researchers, for example, have recently begun to crack the brain's neural codes. This research provides glimpses into a future when people will be able to manipulate complicated machinery, or remote-controlled weapons, just by thinking. No touching required.

In an early success for the two-year, $19 million, Brain Machine Interfaces program, a research team led by Duke University neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis outfitted the brain of a small, South American owl monkey with 100 hair-like sensors. The sensors allowed the researchers to analyze the monkey's neural impulses as the animal manipulated a joystick to match a cursor with a series of lights displayed on a nearby computer screen. The impulses were then converted into code that computers could understand. The monkey repeated the motion-only this time, two robotic arms (one in an adjacent room and another 600 miles away in a Boston laboratory) also moved in response to the wireless signals sent straight from the monkey's brain.

In a similar, more recent experiment, the same scientists taught a macaque to direct a cursor to illuminated targets on a computer monitor. When scientists disabled the joystick, the monkey gradually stopped moving its arm altogether and learned to do the experiment just by thinking. "Our immediate goal is to help a person who has been paralyzed...to operate a wheelchair or a robotic limb," wrote Nicolelis and fellow researcher John K. Chapin in the October 2002 issue of Scientific American. "Someday, the research could also help such a patient regain control over a natural arm or leg, with the aid of wireless communication between implants in the brain and the limb."

The military implications are also numerous and revolutionary. Imagine, for example, pilots who could fly high-performance fighter aircraft from the ground using only their thoughts, or soldiers who could communicate with one another telepathically, downloading the latest tactical intelligence directly into their brains. Researchers in other parts of the program are even testing the viability of storing human memories on implantable microchips, a Matrix-like advance that would eliminate the need for training by allowing soldiers to upload someone else's technical know-how or combat experience. Without question, such radical advances are still decades away (at the very least). But DARPA's research is already challenging contemporary notions of what is possible.

Even as some programs concentrate on strengthening the mind, others are focusing on the body. One such DARPA effort-Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation-could transform today's infantry "grunts" into high-tech supersoldiers similar to those imagined by Robert Heinlein's 1959 science-fiction classic Starship Troopers. The $40 million program-already midway through its six-year run-is experimenting with power suits meant to increase by orders of magnitude the toughness and lethality of the average foot soldier. DARPA's plans call for the exoskeleton to be built around a "haptic interface," a series of sensors distributed throughout the suit to read and amplify even the smallest of human muscle movements. According to the agency's Web site, soldiers encased in this futuristic battle armor will be able to "handle more firepower, wear more ballistic protection, carry larger-caliber weapons and more ammunition, and carry supplies greater distances." They might also be able to jump to extreme heights and even fly short distances. Peter Parker's "spidey sense" is tingling just thinking about it.

The exoskeleton research has met with at least a few notable, if modest, successes. At the University of California (Berkeley) Human Engineering Laboratory, a team of researchers has built what might ultimately become the legs of tomorrow's robo-warrior. According to the lab's Web site, the "Lower Extremity Enhancer" gives its owner the "ability to carry weights on the order of 120 pounds over any sort of terrain for extended periods of time without undue effort."

But even bionic legs may be overshadowed by other exoskeletal advances. Another DARPA contractor-a small, California-based outfit called Trek Aerospace-used its $5.1 million federal research grant to develop and test an awkward-looking flying machine that could one day render the term "ground troops" obsolete. The company envisions a one-man rotor-driven craft that could cruise at 60 mph at an altitude of up to 6,300 feet, or could hover over a battlefield for up to an hour and a half.

Revolutions in brain-machine communication and physical performance would radically change the nature of warfare, but even these technologies would be confined by the natural boundaries of human endurance. After all, war fighting is a tiring business, and armies have always been slowed by the need for sleep. Since World War II, American pilots have relied on stimulants to sustain them through long combat missions. Fighter pilots in the 1991 Gulf War and the more recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were routinely issued "go-pills" (usually about 5 to 10 milligrams of Dexedrine) to be used at their own discretion. But amphetamines, while effective in the short term, have nasty side effects that can seriously impair a pilot's judgment. Just last year, for example, two pill-taking American F-16 pilots nearing the end of a 10-hour mission over Afghanistan dropped laser-guided bombs on a group of Canadian troops that they mistook for a hostile Taliban unit. Four Canadians died and eight were wounded in the incident.

Avoiding these sorts of accidents while simultaneously prolonging the combat effectiveness of American troops are the animating forces behind DARPA's ongoing effort to break the sleep barrier. The $20 million Continuous Assisted Performance program "is investigating ways to prevent fatigue and enable soldiers to stay awake, alert, and effective for up to seven consecutive days without suffering any deleterious mental or physical effects and without using any of the current generation of stimulants," said DARPA Director Tony Tether last spring in a written statement to the House Government Reform Committee.

In early investigations, some scientists have shown particular interest in learning how other animal species (such as dolphins, whales, and birds) routinely forgo sleep. Meanwhile, researchers in other parts of the program, such as Yaakov Stern, a neuropsychologist at Columbia University, are exploring ways to stimulate the brain to forestall feelings of fatigue. Stern and his colleagues envision a time when sleep-deprived pilots might be able to "zap" their brains with electronic currents at the push of a button, instantly stimulating key neurons and regaining full alertness by fooling the brain into feeling rested.

Wading through DARPA's budget request feels like entering an alternate universe, a fantasy world of sorts, where anything and everything is possible. It is, therefore, easy to forget that an estimated 85 percent of DARPA projects end in failure. But that is not necessarily a problem, according to DARPA spokesperson Jan Walker. "Our mission is to look outside of the box, to be revolutionary," she told National Journal. "You can't be revolutionary by being conservative. They're contradictory."

Dr. Paul Saffo, research director at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., agrees. "When you do [DARPA's] kind of work, if you're not failing part of the time, you're not in the right place," he said. "By definition, you've got to be on the ragged edge of chaos, and a significant percentage of your projects have to fail in interesting ways."

That said, others have wondered whether DARPA doesn't sometimes wander too far off into the realm of "what-if"-such as it did with FutureMAP. The agency's bioresearch programs, for example, could pack a far larger ethical punch than FutureMAP because they raise fundamental questions about what it means to be human. A reader of DARPA's latest budget request easily becomes desensitized to terms such as "human augmentation" and "assisted performance," which, through sheer force of repetition, begin to lose their philosophical complexity. Dr. Steven G. Wax, acting director of DARPA's Defense Sciences Office, said that the agency prefers to view such programs in terms of "maintaining the type of capability that the soldier arrives with." In other words, research about exoskeletons and sleep deprivation seeks mainly to prevent the degradation of soldiers' natural capabilities in the field.

But serious moral and ethical concerns about these projects remain. DARPA itself recently invited a bio-ethicist to speak to program managers about issues associated with human augmentation, and Wax says that the agency carefully weighs these concerns when choosing which projects to fund. Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists suggests that Congress also has a vital role to play. The Armed Services committees that authorize the agency and the defense appropriations committees that fund it, he said, "need to do some internal self-assessment as to whether they are getting enough information from DARPA and whether they have the internal staff resources to devote to carefully scrutinizing DARPA programs."

Still, futurists warn against the temptation to become overly cautious. "Human augmentation is coming; the only question is how soon," said Saffo. "This stuff is being worked on in all sorts of places all over the world. I'll give you three options. We can stay in it and be state of the art and deal with the moral issues. We can get out of it completely and be bystanders. Or we can do this half-assed thing in the middle. Now, of those three options, which one do you think is rational?"

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Calling All Companies

Bruce Falconer — Mon, 15 Sep 2003 00:00:00 -0400

A little-known secure communications link connects the Homeland Security Department to corporate leaders.

n April, about 20 senior officials from the Homeland Security Department, the U.S. Surgeon General's Office, and state and local governments quietly gathered in downtown Washington with an equal number of private sector CEOs. They were there to play a war game involving a frightening scenario: Terrorists had hacked into the computer systems of two large financial institutions in New York, causing investors around the world to panic and threatening to deal a huge blow to an already ailing U.S. economy. Meanwhile, reports out of Chicago warned that a biological contagion was spreading rapidly through the local population. The two events were taking place simultaneously-a hallmark of previous al Qaeda attacks against U.S. interests both at home and overseas-leaving little doubt that a major terrorist operation was under way.

With the initial damage already done, the challenge was to avoid the kind of panic-driven, self-inflicted wounds that historically have conspired to compound terrorism's destructive effects. Because panic feeds on irrationality and fear, the best way to contain it is through the fluid exchange of information-and not just among relevant federal agencies. With investors fleeing New York's markets in droves and hospitals in Chicago quickly filling up with terrified patients, leaders of the financial and information services industries would need to be kept closely informed, as would officials in the public health system, if the response was to succeed.

Players at the tabletop war game-sponsored in part by the Business Roundtable, a consortium of CEOs from the nation's 150 largest corporations-grappled with the innumerable risks and uncertainties involved in managing a crisis of this scale. During two stressful days in Washington, information was sometimes scarce. But according to war game participants, one device worked remarkably well at bringing the right people-both inside and outside the federal government-together at the right time, and it wasn't some new high-tech gadget invented at great expense by a secretive federal agency. It was the telephone.

In November 2001, even as the underground fires still smoldered in Manhattan, then-Homeland Security Adviser Tom Ridge met with a group of about 40 Roundtable executives in Washington. Out of that meeting came the idea for a system that would allow high-level federal and private sector officials to quickly and effectively share information in the event of another terrorist attack. The result was the Critical Emergency Operations Communications Link, known as CEO COM Link. The system is shrouded in mystery, due largely to the reluctance of Homeland Security and Roundtable officials to discuss its operational details. Numerous requests for interviews to the Homeland Security Department went unfulfilled, and Roundtable executives contacted for this story declined to comment on basic details, such as the system's cost, staffing requirements and the types of information shared among COM Link users.

But the details that are known-gathered from interviews and news media accounts-make it clear that COM Link is, in essence, a secure conference call. As such, it borrows heavily from pre-existing technologies and requires little additional investment aside from the creation of caller authentication procedures-procedures developed by AT&T and paid for by the Roundtable, which has assumed this and all other related costs.

Before COM Link, no formal system existed that would allow federal officials to contact their private industry counterparts in times of crisis. Since its creation, COM Link has been used at least four times (and probably many more) to give corporate officials advance warning of increases in the terrorist threat level. But in the wake of any future terrorist strikes, Ridge, within minutes, will be able to speak directly with the Roundtable's entire CEO membership, whose companies oversee a significant amount of U.S. critical infrastructure and collectively account for an estimated $3.5 trillion in annual revenues.

The system's architecture is simple. Ridge and a few other high-level officials at Homeland Security and the Business Roundtable have the authority to initiate a COM Link call. Once the decision is made, word goes out to CEOs through a series of telephone calls and e-mails requesting that they dial into the system. Each CEO-pre-screened and credentialed-calls into COM Link and undergoes a series of validations before being permitted to join in the conversation. Assuming that phone lines are clogged, as they were following the attacks on Sept. 11, CEOs can access the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (GETS) with a card that grants them priority access to congested phone lines.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

According to C. Michael Armstrong, chairman of Comcast and head of the Business Roundtable's security task force, Com Link has already proved its value. Speaking at the McGraw-Hill Homeland Security Summit and Exposition in Arlington, Va., in May, Armstrong raved about COM Link's performance in the April war game. "The difference between doing it [using COM Link] and not doing it saved over a million lives in the war game," Armstrong said.

Armstrong's claim, viewed with some skepticism by sources contacted for this article, cannot be independently verified, as the official war game results remain unavailable to the public. But almost everyone agrees that connecting federal and corporate decision-makers in times of crisis is a good idea. The experience of Sept. 11 convinced many people inside and outside the federal government that such a connection could be critical in mitigating both the human and financial costs of terrorist attacks. When the Federal Aviation Administration closed the skies on Sept. 11, a four-day shutdown that ultimately cost the American economy about $1.3 billion, commercial airlines and air freight companies such as FedEx and UPS had no idea whether they should lock their airplanes away in secure hangars or prepare them for use in disaster relief missions. "People just didn't know how long airspace would be up or down," Roundtable spokeswoman Marian Hopkins says. "There was just no good way of communicating [with federal officials] or getting answers to critical questions."

COM Link is designed to meet that need. While it is intended primarily to serve as a crisis management tool for use during or after a terrorist attack, COM Link's design leaves open the possibility that officials at Homeland Security could use it to disseminate threat information in advance of an attack. But companies are unlikely to get specific information about impending attacks. "If you ever have hard information, the likelihood is that the FBI, the intelligence community, a hybrid of both, or DHS would directly reach out to that constituency," says a former high-ranking federal official involved with homeland security-related issues, who requested anonymity. "If we knew when and where, we wouldn't have a communications issue. We would prevent [the attack] and pre-empt it."

COM Link is more likely to be used for generalized warnings, such as advance notice of changes in the national terrorism threat level. This has already happened on at least one occasion. In February, the St. Petersburg Times reported that an hour before a news conference at which Ridge publicly raised the threat level from yellow (elevated) to orange (high), he activated COM Link to convey several messages to the Business Roundtable's membership: hire more guards, secure entrances and exits to vulnerable facilities, pay added attention to trucks and parking garages, and take whatever steps are necessary to protect ventilation systems from chemical or biological contamination.

Some people are unconvinced such messages are much help. After all, unless the information relayed over COM Link relates to specific industries or targets, it probably has limited value beyond what business leaders could gather through news reports or good old-fashioned common sense. And in any case, although the system allows Ridge to communicate quickly with Roundtable members, it doesn't grant him broader access to companies that fall outside the group's membership. "Why should the Business Roundtable or any other exclusive group be the ones to reap any potential benefit?" asks Charles Pena, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank. "It's clear how [the Roundtable] would determine who should participate [in COM Link] for their own market-driven reasons. But in the event of a real emergency or terrorist attack, should the Business Roundtable be dictating where the information flows?"

The Roundtable's Hopkins acknowledges that COM Link's users are primarily member CEOs, but she is quick to defend the system's integrity as a crisis response tool. "It was never intended for the exclusive use of the Business Roundtable," she says, adding that the organization has already partnered with the financial and chemical industries' trade associations and intends to expand COM Link's membership further. Hopkins offers no further details, however, on when these expansions might occur or which companies or industries they might involve.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Sharing information about potential terrorist attacks is a hot-button issue in Washington these days, but it is not a new idea. In the mid- to late 1990s, the federal government took several steps to protect critical infrastructures from attack. An estimated 85 percent of these infrastructures-telecommunications, electricity, energy, water and transportation systems, to name just a few-fall under the immediate control of the private sector, meaning that federal agencies must encourage the free flow of information from corporations if they hope to protect them.

President Clinton's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection issued an influential report in 1997 calling for the establishment of industry-specific councils that would collect and analyze vulnerability information and serve as clearinghouses for the dissemination of this material to both federal agencies and other industries. Sixteen of these National Infrastructure Advisory Councils (ISACs) were subsequently created, but with mixed success. A May 2003 General Accounting Office report (GAO-03-715T) found that many ISACs are faltering because companies are loath to share with federal officials information that could be used as evidence in antitrust suits or be released to their competitors or the public under the 1966 Freedom of Information Act.

The 2002 Homeland Security Act suggests limits on how federal, state and local governments use critical infrastructure information voluntarily provided by industry. Earlier this year, DHS issued a call for comment on its proposed rules for how such information might be protected under FOIA exemptions. At the time of this writing, however, the details of any new provisions remained unclear, as was their likely effect on the willingness of industry to share potentially sensitive information with the federal government.

Ultimately, the success or failure of information sharing will rest on the federal government's ability to foster trust among companies. But whether agencies are up to that challenge remains an open question. By bringing federal officials and corporate CEOs together to exchange information in real time, COM Link's backers hope it will set the stage for a broader dialogue. After all, according to the former high-ranking federal official, "You can't tell the private sector what to do, and you can't tell them what steps to take. What you can do is provide some information and provide some guidance in terms of guidelines and steps that they may want to consider. The question is how do you build that partnership, and you can only build [it] by opening up communication."

Bruce Falconer is an editorial analyst with The Atlantic Monthly in Washington.

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