Sex, Bombs and Burgers

by Peter Nowak

  Night vision was another technology that had been sitting around for a while. The earliest version of it was invented by the American army during the Second World War and saw small-scale use in sniper-rifle scopes in the Pacific. About three hundred rifles were equipped with the large scopes, but the poor range of only about a hundred metres limited them to defending the perimeter of bases. Nazi scientists also developed night-vision “Vampir” rifles and mounted similar units on a few tanks. The problem with both versions was that they used large infrared searchlights to illuminate targets so that gunners equipped with scopes could see them. This gave away the searchlights’ position, making them easy targets.

  By the Vietnam War, American scientists had improved the technology to use available light, such as moonlight, which again limited use to when weather conditions were good. By 1990 the technology had entered its third generation and evolved to use “forward-looking infrared” (FLIR) image intensifiers, which electronically captured and amplified ambient light onto a display, such as a television monitor or goggles.

  A FLIR device displays a monochrome image, usually green or grey, because it uses light from just below the spectrum visible to the eye. The technology therefore needs no additional light sources and functions well in any sort of weather. The new goggles were small, light, low-power and cheap (you can buy them online today for a couple hundred dollars), which is why the U.S. Army bought them by the truckload for Desert Storm. Night-vision was also incorporated into a lot of the military’s sensor and video technology, including the cameras that captured those green-tinged bombing images broadcast on CNN. If smart bombs were miraculous, the night-vision sights used by pilots and the goggles worn by ground troops were even more so, because they allowed coalition forces to “own the night.” “Our night-vision capability provided the single greatest mismatch of the war,” said one American general.5

  After the war, night-vision technology was adopted quickly by the mainstream, particularly in security. Parking enforcement, highway rest stops, tunnel surveillance, transit systems, ports, prisons, hospitals, power plants and even pest inspectors all found it amazingly useful. The spread of night vision closely paralleled the rise of digital cameras, which also underwent their baptism of fire during the Gulf War. Both technologies became remarkably cheap, remarkably fast and began to converge, with night vision becoming a standard feature of video cameras early in the new millennium. As prices continued to drop on both technologies, they soon became standard in just about every camera available, which means that anyone can now create their own green-tinged Paris Hilton–style sex video.

  On the military front, night-vision technology continues to evolve, with scientists currently working on doubling the field of view and adding thermal-imaging abilities to goggles. Lord only knows what sort of sex videos will come out of that.

  The “Technology War”

  The coalition forces had one other fancy new enemy-locating technology at their disposal: the Global Positioning System or GPS we have all grown to know and love. GPS units allowed troops to locate enemy positions and movements with pinpoint accuracy, further increasing the efficacy of smart bombs and units equipped with night-vision. It was a new holy triumvirate of American weaponry that reinforced the old saying, “You can run, but you can’t hide.” If one technology didn’t find you, the others would.

  GPS had its origins in Navsat, a satellite navigation system first tested by the U.S. Navy in 1960. The original system used five satellites and only provided a fix on the user’s location once an hour. The technology was slowly upgraded throughout the seventies and early eighties, when tragedy hit. In 1983 a Korean Air Lines flight was shot down for straying too far into Soviet air space, prompting President Reagan to declare that the GPS, which could prevent such disasters, would become available for civilian use when it was completed. The twenty-four second-generation GPS satellites were scheduled for launch between 1989 and 2000. When the war started in 1991, however, only sixteen had been launched, eight short of the required number to provide worldwide coverage. Nevertheless, the incomplete system—which still provided three-dimensional navigation for twenty hours a day—was pressed into service at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado. In the Kuwaiti desert, which was largely devoid of landmarks or way posts, GPS finally delivered on space technology’s long-held promise of making conflicts on Earth easier to fight. “It was the first war in which space systems really played a major role in terms of the average soldier, sailor, airman and Marine,” said a general with the U.S. Air Force Space Command. “This was the first time that space affected the way our troops fought in the battle.”6

  With the war concluded, President Bill Clinton signed the system’s dual military-civilian use into law in 1996. Civilian access, however, was not as accurate as the pinpoint precision enjoyed by the military, a discrepancy the government fixed in 2000 to enhance GPS’s usefulness to the public. The amendment made consumer GPS devices ten times more accurate, to the point where location could be determined within a few metres. “Emergency teams responding to a cry for help can now determine what side of the highway they must respond to, thereby saving precious minutes,” Clinton said. “This increase in accuracy will allow new GPS applications to emerge and continue to enhance the lives of people around the world.”7

  Right there to take advantage of the newly opened market was Garmin, a company started in Kansas in 1989 by two electrical engineers. Gary Burrell, a native of Wichita, and Taiwan-born Min Kao—the company’s name is a contraction of their first names—spent much of their early careers working for military contractors. Their first product, launched in 1990, was a dashboard-mounted GPS for marine use that sold for $2,500, while a follow-up handheld unit proved popular with troops in Desert Storm. The company wasted no time in jumping into the consumer market and has since ridden the quickly growing market to riches. As of 2008 the company had sold more than forty-eight million personal navigation devices,8 more than half of the total worldwide market, which is expected to continue growing by 20 percent a year until 2013, when it will exceed $75 billion.9 A substantial part of that growth will come from the current wave of “smartphones,” which since 2004 have incorporated cellular-assisted GPS chips.

  All of the new sensor and navigational technology meant there was a ton of electronic data pouring in, but this could only be turned into useful intelligence if there was some way to crunch it all. As luck would have it, the war coincided perfectly with the rise of personal computers. While the first desktop computers were made available in the late seventies, sales didn’t begin to really ramp until the early nineties when the devices became standardized and simple enough for the average user. Among the first major business or “enterprise” buyers was the U.S. military, which used PCs during the Gulf War for everything from organizing the movement of troops to sorting through satellite photos for targets. American brass even used computers to simulate Iraqi responses to their battle plans, some of which turned out to be more efficient than the actual reactions.

  By 1990, the U.S. military was spending $30 billion a year on desktop computers.10 One of the biggest beneficiaries of this huge outlay was Microsoft, which was in the process of standardizing the operating system that personal computers run on. The third version of Windows, released in May 1990, was the first to have a slick visual interface that required minimal training to learn, and the first to really take off with users. By 1991 Windows 3.0 had sold more than fifteen million copies, a good portion to the military, and helped give Microsoft three-quarters of the operating system business worldwide.11 After combat ended, General Schwarzkopf gave appropriate credit. Calling Desert Storm “the technology war,” he said, “I couldn’t have done it all without the computers.”12

  The Gulf War was indeed the first technology war and it set an interesting precedent. The entire conflict lasted less than three months, while the ground campaign took only a hundred hours. Coalition casualties were low and the end result was total vic
tory for American-led forces. It was easy to view the Gulf War as the perfect war, if such a thing could exist. Certainly Schwarzkopf saw it that way and his crediting of new weapons and tools as the key to victory cemented a long-held belief in American policy, that technology was the country’s biggest advantage over the rest of the world—not just in war, but in business as well.

  The average Joe sitting on his couch watching the war on CNN couldn’t help but agree. The Vietnam War had dragged on for years, took a high casualty toll and looked like plain hell, with its grime and misery. The Gulf War, on the other hand, was quick, painless, and quite simply, looked good on TV. The green-hued battles, the first-person bomb views, the alien-looking stealth bombers—it was like a slick, Michael Bay–directed science-fiction movie come to life. Americans came home every night from work and turned on the tube to watch their boys, decked out in all the latest high-tech gear, kick Iraqi butt. It was a far cry from seeing them flee in disgrace from Vietnam. No wonder American morale, both military and public, was riding high after the war. Technology had re-established itself as America’s not-so-secret weapon.

  Humans 2.0

  American morale, however, took a massive blow with the destruction of the World Trade Center in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Whatever smugness was left over from the Gulf War quickly turned to a desire for revenge. The people responsible for the attacks, the al Qaeda terrorist network, would feel the full fury of America’s technological arsenal. Once again, the weapons developed in the decade since the Gulf War would be unleashed for field testing against the country’s enemies.

  While the weapons were first deployed in 2001 in Afghanistan, where al Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden was apparently hiding out, they again found their way to Iraq with a second invasion in 2003. The situation again played itself out as if it were a movie, a sequel to the original Gulf War. And, like all sequels, the second go-round was bigger, louder, deadlier and ultimately less successful than the original. The new two-front war posed some unique challenges to the American-led coalition forces. In Afghanistan, the enemies were holed up in mountains and caves, making it difficult to find them and get to them. In Iraq, the invasion was relatively quick, but it soon morphed into an urban insurgency where guerrillas disguised themselves as civilians and melted into the city throngs. Smart bombs, night vision and GPS were handy, but new-and-improved technologies were needed to tackle these challenges.

  Some of the technologies deployed so far in Afghanistan and Iraq, like the robots we heard about in chapter nine, have already begun to spin off into commercial uses. As both conflicts drag on, however, more and more new technologies will be developed and tried out. With some of them, their potential commercial applications can only be guessed at, while others have more obvious uses. One example of the latter are bionics and prosthetics, which are in some ways by-products of all the work being done on robotics. DARPA’s work on prosthetic limbs to help amputee veterans has been nothing short of spectacular. Scientists working for the agency have in recent years designed a Terminator-like robotic arm that displays a range of function far beyond that of even the best conventional prosthetics, allowing the user to open doors, eat soup, reach above their head and open a bottle with an opener, not to mention fire and field strip an M16 rifle. The prototype arm only weighs four kilos, has ten powered degrees of freedom with individually moving fingers, eleven hours of battery life, and like the arm I tried out at the robotics conference in Boston, has force-feedback so the amputee can actually “feel” what he or she is touching. The arm entered advanced clinical trials in 2009 with commercial availability expected to follow soon after. The next phase of the program, DARPA says, is to implant a chip in the patient’s brain so that he or she can control the arm neurally. The chip will transmit signals to the arm wirelessly, allowing the amputee to manipulate the arm with mere thoughts. The idea isn’t science fiction—DARPA expects to make submissions to the Food and Drug Administration for approval in 2010.

  In a similar vein, defence contractor Lockheed Martin unveiled its Human Universal Load Carrier exoskeleton system in 2009. The HULC, which is the only name it could possibly have, allows soldiers to carry up to a hundred kilos with minimal effort. Presumably, like the green-skinned comic-book character, it will also let them “smash puny humans.” The exoskeleton transfers weight to the ground through battery-powered titanium legs while an on-board computer makes sure the whole thing moves in sync with the wearer’s body. The HULC is surprisingly nimble, too, allowing the soldier to squat or crawl with ease.

  The exoskeleton is designed to alleviate soldier fatigue while carrying heavy loads across long distances, but Lockheed is already investigating industrial and medical applications, some of which are obvious. Like the giant exoskeleton used by Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, a juiced-up version of the HULC could easily find work in docks and factories where heavy lifting is required. Honda, in fact, is testing a similar system, but its device has no arms, only legs. The carmaker’s assisted-walking device, which looks like a bicycle seat connected to a pair of ostrich legs, is designed to support body weight, reduce stress on the knees and help people get up steps and stay in crouching positions. For workers who spend the whole day on their feet, like my mom the hairdresser, such a device would be fantastic. “This should be as easy to use as a bicycle,” a Honda engineer said. “It reduces stress and you should feel less tired.”13

  Not to be outdone, Lockheed competitor Raytheon—the folks who brought us the microwave—is also getting in on the action. The company says it too has an exoskeleton that, like Lockheed’s, can lift a hundred kilos but is also agile enough to kick a soccer ball, punch a speed bag and climb stairs with ease. The company began work on the system in 2000 when it realized that “if humans could work alongside robots, they should also be able to work inside robots.”14 The media dubbed Raytheon’s exoskeleton “Iron Man,” after the comic book character, which should prove the perfect foil to Lockheed’s HULC. (I wonder what a smackdown between the two would look like?)

  Scientists working for the military have also made significant strides in health and medicine over the past few years. DARPA researchers have even managed to come up with a simple cold medicine. In trying to alleviate the cold and flu symptoms soldiers often experience after strenuous exertion, researchers discovered the natural anti-oxidant Quercetin. In an experiment that involved three days of hard exercise, they found that half of one control group became ill with colds and flu. The incidence in the other control group, which took the anti-oxidant, was only 5 percent. Quercetin has since been commercialized as RealFX Q-Plus chewable pills.

  On a grander scale, DARPA is also influencing the way pandemics are fought. The impetus behind the agency’s Accelerated Manufacturing of Pharmaceuticals program was to greatly reduce the length of time between when a pathogen is identified and when a treatment is widely available, which has typically been a very long fifteen years. DARPA is seeking to reduce that to a mere sixteen weeks or less, simply by changing the way vaccines are produced. While treatments have traditionally been grown in chicken eggs, DARPA scientists are experimenting with growing them in plant cells and have found that a single hydroponic rack, about five metres by three metres by three metres tall, can produce sufficient protein for one million vaccine doses, thus doing the work of about three million chicken eggs at a fraction of the cost. Moreover, the plants are ready within six weeks of seeding and produce vaccines that eggs can’t, like one to fight a strain of avian flu. The new technique is inspiring pharmaceutical companies to try different approaches. In November 2009 Switzerland’s Novartis, for example, won German regulatory approval for Celtura, an H1N1 vaccine manufactured using dog kidney cells.

  There’s also a gizmo known simply as “the Glove.” It looks like a coffee pot except it has a cool-to-the-touch metal hemisphere inside, where users place their palm. Researchers at Stanford started working on the device in the late nineties and got DARPA funding in 2003. They h
ad developed the theory that human muscles don’t get tired because they use up all their sugars, but rather because they get too hot. When users place their hand inside the Glove, their body temperature cools rapidly, allowing them to resume in short order whatever physical activity they were performing. The net result is that the user can exercise more. “It’s like giving a Honda the radiator of a Mack truck,” says Craig Heller, the biologist behind the device.

  One of Heller’s lab technicians incorporated the glove into his workout regime. When he started, he was managing 100 pull-ups per session, but by using the device he was able to do more sets. Within six weeks, he was doing 180 pull-ups and in another six weeks he was doing more than 600. Heller himself used the glove to do 1,000 push-ups on his sixtieth birthday.15 The Glove’s military uses are obvious—because it effectively duplicates the effects of steroids, which allow users to train harder and more frequently, it’s going to result in stronger and faster soldiers. Its commercial applications are also apparent; every athlete and gym in the world is going to want one. If we thought athletes jacked up on steroids were playing havoc with sports records, wait till they get hold of the Glove. The device also has humanitarian potential, because it works in reverse. It can rapidly increase body temperature as well, which means it could save people suffering from hypothermia and exposure.

  Then there’s the questionable stuff. DARPA has historically steered clear of biological research, but everything changed after September 11. Tony Tether, DARPA’s director at the time, adopted a more open attitude toward bioengineering and picked a fellow named Michael Goldblatt to lead the charge. The move was perhaps the best example yet of a bombs-meets-burgers crossover as Goldblatt had spent more than a decade working for McDonald’s, most recently as the company’s vice-president of science and technology. The same man who tested low-fat burgers for McDonald’s was all of a sudden in charge of bioengineering better soldiers. Goldblatt even referenced his past while spelling out his priorities at the annual DARPAtech convention in 2002: