Page 123 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky

The Nautilus is the ultimate Buck Rogers death ray.
Abandoning analog for digital has multiplied the velocity and scope of military data
transmissions (and eavesdropping). The Battlefield Optical Surveillance System (BOSS)
mounted on trucks and Humvees scans and deciphers the landscape with lasers and sensors; once
it recognizes a watch-list retina, it “paints” the target with a laser beam and the target dies.
Boomerang uses an array of microphones to decipher the speed and direction of a shot and
recognizes not just where the shot came from but what kind of weapon. The Large Area
Coverage Optical Search-while-Track and Engage (LACOSTE) is imaging technology for day or
night tactical surveillance of all moving vehicles and humans in urban areas. 64
Ships like the 97,000-ton nuclear-powered U.S.S. Harry S. Truman are armed with an
electromagnetic rail gun capable of firing a projectile 230 miles with a Mach 7 muzzle velocity
and Mach 5 impact velocity—sheer kinetic energy, not conventional explosives—as its point
droppers in the Strike Intelligence Analysis Center examine digital real-time black-and-white
feed from Predator drones at 20,000 feet in search of Hellfire missile targets.
Air defense radar, C4 computers, CBW (chemical / biological weapons) storage and
production units, underground weapons bunkers— Americans have given the store, and more, to
their military.
While all weapons (including nonlethals) are designed to maim or kill, the small bombs that
stay around long after the battle to maim curious children are particularly pernicious. Cluster and
carpet bombs open in mid-air and disperse hundreds of small sub-munitions over an area as large
as several football fields. B-52s deliver carpet bombs to “soften” enemies before Special Forces
teams enter, the hope being that after the dust and smoke clear, they will be walking in circles
and mumbling, blood oozing from their ears and noses. The United States has refused to sign an
international ban on these small bombs. Israel prefers DIMEs (dense inert metal explosive),
carbon fiber casings packed with tungsten powder that produce an intense explosion in a small
space, then dissolve human tissue. And don’t forget the IEDs (improvised explosive devices).
Some drones have been specifically created to sniff out these bombs and defuse them.
Thermobaric weapons like the fuel-air bomb use heat and pressure to kill, the first stage
being to disperse a gas or chemical agent in an enclosure the gas will fill, the second being
ignition. What kills is the pressure wave and subsequent vacuum that ruptures ears, lungs, and
organs. Fuels for solid fuel-air explosives (FAEs) like ethylene oxide and propylene oxide are
highly toxic and if undetonated will burn personnel to death. Optimized to create blast over heat,
its deceptive code name is light anti-structure munition.
SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems) is a land-
based robot standing a meter high whose soldier operator is a half-mile away in VR (virtual
reality) goggles. Unlike Talon and Packbot robots that disarm bombs, SWORDS carries a
machine gun with an electronic aim. QinetiQ Group, a joint venture of the UK Ministry of
Defense and the shadowy Carlyle Group, owns SWORDS designer Foster-Miller of Waltham,
Massachusetts. (In Chapter 6, we will examine DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive
Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program modeling artificial brains after the human brain
for robots.)
MAV [micro air vehicle] explosive robotic insects silently fly and hop and crawl into
buildings while their human pilots sit in climate-controlled trailers outside Las Vegas.
Reconnaissance MAVs like WASPs can be fitted with a C4 mission-specific payload for
functional defeat—say a cloud of metal-coated fibers that destroy computers or shut down
electronic power. WASP and A160 Hummingbird drones weigh less than a pound but pack a 1.8