Baghdad 2025: The Pentagon Solution to a Planet of Slums

Tweet The Pentagon's DARPA program has been developing urban warfare weapons to use on the inhabitants of the "Slum Planet" Mike Davis described in the book of the same name. This scary article (part below) might disturb any sense of well-being you have left. Click on the first line link to read the whole article. L

Urban Planning, Pentagon-style: Spider-Men and Exploding Frisbees

So let's try to fill out that futuristic combat scenario in the planet's urban jungles with a little futuristic detail. Current UO-oriented systems under development include:

VisiBuilding: This is a program aimed at addressing "a pressing need in urban warfare: seeing inside buildings" by developing technology that will allow U.S. forces to "determine building layouts, find anomalous quantities of materials," and "locate people within the building." According to Edward Baranoski of DARPA's Special Projects Office, Visibuilding will allow "a lot of opportunity to stake out buildings and really see inside." Think of it as a high-tech military Peeping Tom system that lets U.S. troops spy inside foreign homes and make judgments about whatever they might deem "anomalous" inside. While VisiBuilding is in development, troops will have to be content with "Radar Scope" which allows them to "sense through 12 inches of concrete to determine if someone is inside a building."

and this:

Nano Air Vehicle: Imagine a world in which mechanical gnats infest a city, buzzing through people's homes, intruding on their lives, filming whatever they choose with tiny cameras and transmitting the data back to U.S. troops. This program aims to "develop and demonstrate an extremely small (less than 7.5 cm), ultra-lightweight (less than 10 grams) air vehicle system… to provide the warfighter with unprecedented capability for urban mission operations."

Additionally, there's the Multi Dimensional Mobility Robot (MDMR), which "will traverse complex urban terrain"; the Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) a small, vertical take-off and landing UAV that will be "employable in a variety of warfighting environments" including "urban areas"; and the intriguing but shadowy Urban Hopping Robots program whose project manager, Dr. Michael Obal, declined to answer Tomdispatch's inquiries about the project. Jan R. Walker of DARPA's External Relations office told Tomdispatch in an email that there is "very limited information available on the Urban Hopping Robots program," but suggested that the "program is developing a semi-autonomous hybrid hopping/articulated wheeled robotic platform that could adapt to the urban environment in real-time and provide the delivery of small payloads to any point of the urban jungle while remaining lightweight, small to minimize the burden on the soldier." The proposed hopping robot, she noted, "would be truly multi-functional in that it will negotiate all aspects of the urban battlefield to deliver payloads to non-line-of-sight areas with precision."

From Tom Dispatch via Antiwar.com