The Pentagon's Brain (41 page)

For the Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) program, DARPA requested from Congress $28 million to develop computer algorithms to allow machines to scour a vast array of text-based messages from “free-text or semi-structured reports, messages, documents or databases,” so as to pull “actionable intelligence” out of ambiguously worded messages. “A key DEFT emphasis is to determine the implied and hidden meaning in text through probabilistic inference, anomaly detection and disfluency analysis.” The only way to determine if a person’s message or part of a message was anomalous or irregular would be to have a much larger database of that user’s messages to compare it to. How DEFT is used in the United States is classified, and DARPA declined to answer general questions. These are just three out of nearly three hundred DARPA programs that were in development for fiscal year 2015, with a requested budget of $2.91 billion, not counting classified budgets.

It is impossible for American citizens to know about and to comprehend more than a fraction of the advanced science and technology programs that DARPA is developing for the government. And at the same time, it is becoming more possible for the federal government to monitor what American citizens are doing and saying, where they are going, what they are buying, who they are communicating with, what they are reading, what they are writing, and how healthy they are.

All this raises an important question. Is the world transforming into a war zone and America into a police state, and is it DARPA that is making them so?

I
n May 2013, President Barack Obama gave a long-anticipated speech at the National Defense University, at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., in which he said it was time to bring the war on terror to a close. “This war, like all wars, must end,” he said, and quoted the 1795 warning by James Madison, who stated, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” It was President Obama’s first war speech of his second term.

In the context of the history of the modern American war machine—the advanced science and technology of which is spearheaded by DARPA—there was significance in the president’s words and symmetry in the locale. It was here at Fort McNair that, fifty-five years earlier, twenty-two defense scientists gathered to produce ARPA Study No. 1, the first of thousands of secret and unclassified DARPA studies outlining which weapons would best serve the United States in coming wars.

“America is at a crossroads,” President Obama said. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle”—meaning the war on terror—“or else it will define us.” Much of the rest of the president’s
speech focused on the use of armed drones. He mentioned drone strikes on fourteen separate occasions in his roughly fifteen-minute talk. The summary point reported across news outlets was that President Obama was curtailing the use of drones.

He was doing no such thing, nor, really, did the president say he was. He merely said, “I’ve insisted on strong oversight of all lethal action,” meaning that White House and CIA lawyers would continue to be in the loop before individual terrorists were targeted for assassination by unmanned systems, including American citizens living overseas. As commander in chief, the president had twice endorsed significant Department of Defense reports, “Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY 2011–2036” and “Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY 2013–2038,” which called for the amplification, not the curtailment, of the Pentagon’s pursuit of robotic warfare. These two reports, roughly three hundred pages in total, made clear that Pentagon drones were positioned to lead the way forward over the next twenty-five years of war.

DARPA’s vast weapon systems of the future will involve an entire army of drones. They will include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), unmanned ground systems (UGS), unmanned surface vehicles (USV), unmanned maritime systems (UMS), and unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), weapons that reach from the depths of the ocean into outer space. At present and in the future, the Pentagon’s drones will fly, swim, crawl, walk, run, and swarm as they conduct missions around the globe. Some of these drones will be cyborgs, or what DARPA calls “biohybrids,” which are part animal and part machine. And the technology, which has been building for decades, is closer than the average citizen might think.

In the very heart of Washington, D.C., across the street from the White House, sits a public park called Lafayette Square, so named to honor the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette.
The park has a storied history. It briefly housed a graveyard and for a while a racetrack. Slaves were sold here. During the War of 1812, the seven-acre park served as a soldiers’ encampment. In the modern era it has become home to war protests. It was here, during an antiwar rally in the fall of 2007, that Bernard Crane, a prominent Washington, D.C., attorney, saw one of the strangest things he had ever seen in his life.

“My daughter had asked me to take her to the demonstration, so I did,” Crane explains. “I certainly wouldn’t have been there on my own. I was half-paying attention to what was going on onstage and half-looking around when I saw three incredibly large dragonflies overhead,” says Crane. “They moved in unison, as if they were in lockstep. My first thought was, ‘Are those dragonflies mechanical? Or are they alive?’”

Nearby, someone shouted, “Oh my God, look at those!” Many people looked up. Vanessa Alarcon, a college student from New York, recalled her reaction. “I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters.” But she felt certain about one thing. “Those are not insects,” Alarcon said.

Likewise, Bernard Crane surmised that the creatures were not hatched of this world. “All three moved together,” says Crane. “They would move to the left together, then they would move to the right together.” It was bizarre. “I had just returned from a two-week vacation at a lake house in Maine,” Crane says. “I’d spent a lot of time lying on my back watching dragonflies. I’d become familiar with how they move. How they hover. How they generally fly alone. Dragonflies are not like carpenter ants. They don’t do the same thing as the next dragonfly over, certainly not at the same time.”

At the protest in Lafayette Square, Bernard Crane scrutinized the flying objects. Around him, protesters led by the antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan waved signs that read “End the War!” Onstage, the Libyan-born surgeon and president of the Muslim American
Society, Dr. Esam Omeish, railed against the U.S. government and insisted that President Bush be impeached. “We must prosecute those who are responsible!” Omeish shouted. “Let us cleanse our State Department, our Congress, and our Pentagon of those who have driven us into this colossal mistake!”

The war in Iraq was at a boiling point in 2007. Despite the recent U.S. troop surge there, violence, mayhem, and death had reached astonishing new levels. One month earlier, in a single day of carnage, terrorists detonated multiple truck bombs in public places, killing 500 people and wounding 1,500 others—the worst coordinated attacks of the war by a factor of three. From the podium in Lafayette Square, Omeish blamed this kind of horror—the “blood of the Middle East people”—on the Bush administration. “Impeach Bush today!” he shouted again and again.

Dr. Esam Omeish was a controversial figure. He served on the board of directors of the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, the Virginia mosque where two of the 9/11 hijackers prayed before the terrorist attacks. Omeish reportedly played a role in hiring the mosque’s imam during that dark time, a radical cleric named Anwar Al-Awlaki. By 2007, Al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, had fled to Yemen, where he was revealed to be a member of the Al Qaeda leadership. From Yemen, Al-Awlaki encouraged Muslims around the world to commit terrorist attacks against the United States. (Some would, including Major Nidal Hasan, who killed thirteen people and injured at least thirty more in a mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.) Al-Awlaki also served as imam at the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque, from January 2001 to April 2002. Not for another four years would Anwar Al-Awlaki become the first U.S. citizen officially assassinated by the U.S. government, in a drone strike on a desert highway in Yemen. Dr. Esam Omeish had been an associate of Anwar Al-Awlaki, through Dar Al-Hijrah, but association is not a crime. Were the dragonflies in Lafayette Park
insect-inspired drones sent to spy on the doctor and the antiwar crowd? Or were they just unusually large dragonflies?

The month after the Lafayette Square rally, the
Washington Post
reported a handful of similar sightings of insect-shaped spy drones flying overhead at political events in Washington and New York. “Some suspect the insect-like drones are high-tech surveillance tools,” wrote
Post
reporter Rick Weiss. “Others think they are, well, dragonflies—an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.” No federal agency would admit to having deployed insect-sized spy drones. “But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying,” wrote Weiss.

By the time of the 2007 antiwar protest, DARPA had been actively developing insect-inspired drones, called micro air vehicles (MAVs), for at least fourteen years. The first DARPA micro air vehicles feasibility study was conducted in 1993, by the RAND Corporation. “Insect-size flying and crawling systems could help give the United States a significant military advantage in the coming years,” the RAND authors wrote. Shortly thereafter, DARPA began soliciting scientists and awarding grants under its Tactical Technology Office.

DARPA’s original insect-drone prototype, called Black Widow, was built by AeroVironment, a defense contractor in Simi Valley, California. The six-inch mini-drone weighed 40 grams and had wings fashioned from plastic model airplane propellers, cut and sanded for better lift. For years, scientists with AeroVironment struggled to get Black Widow to fly with a payload, and by March 1999, with help from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, DARPA finally had its first-generation micro air vehicle able to fly reconnaissance missions. Powered by two lithium batteries, this 56-gram variant of Black Widow carried a black-and-white micro video camera, had excellent maneuverability, and could even hover, or loiter, for
up to twenty-two minutes before returning to its base. Black Widow “cannot be heard above ambient noise at 100 feet,” reported scientists in the field, “and unless you’re specifically looking for [it] you can’t see it.” Even birds were fooled. “It looks more like a bird than an airplane,” the scientists wrote. “We have seen sparrows and seagulls flocking around the MAV several times.”

DARPA was enthusiastic; remember, this was March 1999. “The Black Widow MAV program has been quite successful in proving that a 6-inch aircraft is not only feasible, but that it can perform useful missions that were previously deemed impossible,” read an after-action report. Then came the more important idea. A RAND analyst named Benjamin Lambeth concluded that mini-drones like the Black Widow had enormous potential, not just in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, but ultimately as a means of assassination. Mini-drones disguised as insects, Lambeth wrote, could one day be outfitted with “micro-explosive bombs… able to kill moving targets with just grams of explosive.”

DARPA expanded its micro air vehicle program to include at least three research efforts, or “thrusts,” each of which relies on the animal kingdom for inspiration and ideas. The results of these programs are called biosystems, biomimetics, and biohybrids. Biosystems involves the use of living, breathing insects or animals trained for military use. During the Vietnam War, German shepherds were trained to track Vietcong fighters tagged with chemicals. During the Iraq war, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico trained bees to locate buried IEDs. These are two examples of biosystemic programs.

Biomimetics research is a field closely related to bionics. In DARPA’s biomimetics programs, scientists build mechanical systems to imitate creatures from the natural world. DARPA designed biomimetic drones, like the Black Widow MAV, including ones that appear to be hummingbirds, bats, beetles, and flies. If DARPA
has dragonfly drones, they would fall under the rubric of biomimetics. Biomimetic drones have been used by the intelligence community since at least 1972, when the CIA built a prototype dragonfly drone it called “insectothopter.” A miniature engine powered the drone’s wings to move up and down. Insectothopter ran on a thimbleful of gas.

Biohybrids tread on entirely new ground. DARPA’s micro air vehicle programs are built on decades of aviation technology, aerospace engineering, computer science, and nanotechnology, which is the science of making things small. Then at the turn of the twenty-first century, a new field called nanobiology, or nanobiotechnology, came into being. Once relegated to the pages of science fiction, this burgeoning new discipline allows scientists to “couple” biological systems with machines. In 1999 DARPA awarded grants for biohybrid programs. The stated goal was to create cyborgs—part living creatures, part machines.

DARPA’s biohybrid programs remain shrouded in mystery. Biohybrid military applications are largely classified, but a few prototype programs have been unveiled. As nanobiotechnology advanced in the early years of the twenty-first century, tiny machines could realistically be wired into animals’ brains, bodies, and wings. Starting in 2002, DARPA began periodically releasing incremental information into the public domain.

That year, news of an early prototype emerged from a DARPA-funded laboratory at the State University of New York’s Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, led by researcher Sanjiv Talwar. Scientists implanted electrodes in the medial forebrain bundle of a rat’s brain, a region that senses reward. Wires the size of a human hair connected the electrodes to a microprocessor sewn onto the rat’s back, like a backpack. From a laptop 500 meters—a third of a mile—away, Talwar and his team of scientists sent electronic pulses to the rat’s medial forebrain. After using Pavlovian techniques to
train the rat to respond to stimuli, DARPA scientists were able to control the rat, steering it left, right, and forward through a maze via brain stimulation.

Animal rights activists cried foul. “The animal is no longer functioning as an animal,” lamented Gary Francione, an animal welfare expert at Rutgers University School of Law. But for the majority of Americans, lab rats are synonymous with scientific experimentation. The idea being it’s okay to experiment on rats, to control their brains, in the spirit of progress. The rat was not generally perceived as a cyborg per se. It was just a lab rat hooked up to a machine.

Over the next five years, DARPA’s biohybrid programs advanced at an astonishing pace. Microprocessor technology was doubling in capacity every eighteen months. By June 29, 2007, when Apple rereleased its first-generation iPhone, Americans could now carry in their pockets more technology than NASA had when it sent astronauts to the moon.

One of the first insect cyborgs was unveiled in 2009. Inside a DARPA-funded laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Michel Maharbiz and his colleagues coupled a green June beetle with a machine. The scientists implanted electrodes into the brain and wings of a 2-centimeter-long beetle and sewed a radio receiver onto its back. By remotely delivering electrical pulses to the beetle’s brain, they were able to start and stop the beating of the beetle’s wings, thereby steering and controlling the insect in flight.

In 2014, DARPA scientists working at North Carolina State University again broke new ground, this time with the
Manduca sexta
moth, or goliath worm, an insect with a metamorphic life cycle that lasts forty days. During the late pupa stage, DARPA scientist Dr. Alper Bozkurt and his team surgically inserted an electrode in the dorsal thorax of the moth, between its neck and abdomen. “The tissue develops around the implanted electrodes and secures their attachment to the insect’s body over the course of
a few days,” explains team member Alexander Verderber. “The electrodes emerge as a part of the insect’s body in the final adult stage as a moth.” By “taking advantage of the rebuilding of the insect’s entire tissue system during metamorphic development,” says Verderber, the scientists were able to create a steerable cyborg, part insect, part machine. “One use of the biohybrid would be for use in applications such as search and rescue operations,” Bozkurt says. DARPA scientists working on such cyborg programs invariably describe the programs as designed to help society. Certainly, subjects like free will, ethics, and the consequences of manufacturing cyborgs are worthy of and ripe for discussion. Another question: What are DARPA’s plans for augmenting humans with machines?