IEEE Spectrum November, 2007 - 21

The Pentagon is also now granting certain high-priority projects "rapid-acquisition authority." That process allowed warheads for the thermobaric Hellfire missile, used to attack caves
and tunnels, to be developed in just 60 days, rather than the
year it might have taken.
Then there are the robots, like the PackBot and the unmanned
combat air vehicles (UCAVs), which have proved invaluable in Iraq
and elsewhere. Many of these systems are not being developed
as "programs of record"-although they're in wide use, they are
still considered prototypes in the R&D phase. As such, they are
continually being improved and refitted based on real-world experience. The companies that
design the robots tend to be
small, entrepreneurial enterprises, and therefore quick to
respond and change. Already,
some 3000 smaller ground
robots have been deployed in
Iraq and Afghanistan. About
1000 unmanned aerial vehicles of various stripes have
also been deployed-from
hand-launched, low-altitude
surveillance planes to highaltitude, remotely piloted
Reaper UCAVs equipped with infrared, laser, and radar targeting
as well as four air-to-ground Hellfire missiles and two 500-pound
bombs. These machines are probably the closest thing to an
"insurgent-resilient" weapons system that the West has.
The West's reliance on robotic war machines is certain to continue. Back in 2001, Congress mandated, as part of the National
Defense Authorization Act, that "by 2010, one-third of the operating deep-strike aircraft of the Armed Forces are unmanned,
and by 2015, one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles
are unmanned." The danger is that as the cost and complexity of
the robots grow, they will cease to be considered "expendable"
assets. Already, a four-aircraft package of Reapers carries a price
tag of nearly $70 million. It's not hard to imagine the day when
UCAVs will end up costing as much and taking as much time to
develop as the manned systems they're intended to replace.
Growing reliance on robots also raises operational-if not
ethical-questions. "What do you do when women and children
come out with spray cans and hammers and start attacking your
robots?" asks William Lind, a military expert with the Free
Congress Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington,
D.C. "Are you going to shoot them to defend your robots?"
And so, for the most part, such shortcuts in acquisition are
mere Band-Aids. The current approach effectively decouples the
needs of soldiers on the ground from the process of acquiring the
equipment they'll ultimately get. No sustained attempt has been
made to create an insurgent-resilient model of acquisition.

"What do you
do when women
and children
come out with
spray cans and
hammers and
start attacking
your robots?"

a collection of services and capabilities that everyone gets access
to. Think of the Internet and how eBay and Google exploit it.
How would such platforms work in the military sphere?
Consider a project under way at the Space Vehicle Directorate
at Kirtland Air Force Base, in New Mexico. Researchers are
attempting to design inexpensive "plug and play" satellites that
could be fielded in six days or less. Each satellite would be built
from a set of standard components that could then be quickly
programmed to fit the specific mission.
To avoid getting trapped in a one-size-fits-all mentality, says
Jim Lyke, technical advisor to the project and its principal electronics engineer, "We intentionally made it easy to swap out a
small battery for a big battery, [an] X-band radio for a Ku-band
radio, and so on." The concept is sort of like adding components
and loading software onto your PC, depending on whether you
want to create spreadsheets, play games, or listen to music.
"We are waging a battle against complexity," Lyke says. The
six-day target "became a rallying theme to force us way out of
our comfort zone."
Lind of the Free Congress Foundation says it's also important
to capture the innovations going on in the trenches. "There is
a tremendous amount of creativity at the junior level, but there
is no outlet for it. We need to richly resource sergeants and let
them tinker," he says. "The kinds of technology that are useful
in these wars are what I call garage and junkyard technologies." The original armor for Humvees, for instance, was cobbled
together by soldiers in the field, who dubbed it "hillbilly armor."
Once a useful technology has been discovered, Lind adds, that
information can be rapidly conveyed using the military's secure
intranets. The idea is to make use of information and IT just as
the insurgents do.
Meanwhile, what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan is only
a foreshadowing of the types of conflicts that Western countries will likely face in the coming decades. Insurgent learning
will continue long after coalition forces have withdrawn from
those countries. To face this future, it seems clear that the West
urgently needs an insurgent-resilient process for developing and
fielding effective military systems and tactics, along with a radical change in strategic thinking.
"We have to look outside the normal bureaucratic way of doing
things," U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates noted at a
press conference in June. "For every month we delay, scores of
young Americans are going to die." If the United States and its
allies fail to embrace the need for change, they will inevitably
pay the cost in both treasure and blood.
n

abouT The auThor
contributing editor roberT n. chareTTe is an ieee member
and risk-analysis expert in spotsylvania, va. his blog risk
factor is at http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor.
To probe furTher

whaT all This likely means is that when the wars in Iraq and michael kenney's From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and
Afghanistan finally end, the Pentagon's current "cathedral" Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and
approach will envelop robots, UCAVs, and any other interesting Competitive Adaptation (penn state university press, 2007)
technology developed in the heat of battle. "As the war winds looks at the learning styles of terrorists and drug traffickers.
down, the forces of standardization will reassert themselves,"
john robb's Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism
says Rand Corp. vice president Thomas McNaugher, an expert and the End of Globalization (john Wiley & sons, 2007)
on defense acquisition. "That's likely to kill many of the innova- describes the emergence of open-source warfare.
tions now in use on the battlefield."
Transcripts from three of the author's interviews are
Robb says the solution is for defense acquisition to move away available at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/nov07/moreosw.
from what he calls "point innovations"-that is, stand-alone
The author plans to explore the topic of weapons develsystems-to platform-based systems. A platform, he explains, is opment and acquisition in a future issue of IEEE Spectrum.

ieee spectrum | november 2007 | na

www.spectrum.ieee.org

http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/nov07/moreosw http://www.spectrum.ieee.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum November, 2007