Wars giving boost to cutting edge technologies

By Stew Magnuson

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. — More than 100 small business leaders crowded into a dining hall here recently to hear military researchers pitch their cutting edge technologies as potential money makers in civilian markets.

One by one, the scientists stood up to give five-minute presentations on everything from portable fuel cells to such complicated concepts as “ultra-sensitive trace detection based on indirect infrared absorption spectroscopy,” which is used to monitor chemical vapors.

Many of the presentations focused on new armor, explosive, chemical and biological material detection, all acute needs in homeland defense and the current conflicts in Southwest Asia.

The ultimate hope is that organizations such as the Army Research Laboratory can issue licenses to private partners, who take the financial risk to spin off the technology to civilian markets. The research labs will then receive royalties, and their research can continue.

Technology transfer from military to civilian use is nothing new and vital to the U.S. economy, experts say.

The U.S. military has problems to solve. And for hundreds of years, it has looked to technology to solve these problems. Wars, both conventional and unconventional, have driven the development of some technologies to where they have become ubiquitous in everyday life.

While wars cause incalculable suffering and loss of human life, an unintended consequence has always been transformational technologies that ultimately spin off to civilian use, according to Michael d’Arcy, lecturer at the Centre for Science and Security Studies at King’s College London.

“There always are in conflicts, and this one will be no different, that’s for sure,” he added.

The need for faster and better aircraft drove jet-engine development in the second half of the 20th Century. The Internet, which transformed seemingly overnight how ordinary citizens communicate, had its origins in the Defense Department. The Cold War, an unconventional conflict, pushed the development of space technology from science fiction to science fact within a few short decades. The result is the global positioning system, satellite communications and the ability to monitor the environment and the weather from space.

Even canned food, found in almost every kitchen cabinet, was the result of a military need to get unspoiled meals to troops during the Civil War.

So what will be next? What technologies needed to win the shooting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the unconventional global “war on terrorism” will emerge to find their way into the lives of ordinary citizens?

D’Arcy and two noted futurists gave their predictions to National Defense.

James Canton, chairman and chief executive officer of the San Francisco-based Institute for Global Futures, estimates that half of the U.S. gross domestic product is driven by “innovative” industries, and about 75 percent of them are being addressing the needs of the military.

“The irony of 9/11 is that we’re going to accelerate many innovations,” Canton said. “In many ways, our economy will be more productive. We’re back on that innovation bandwagon, if you will. And it’s going to be a new game.”

Daniel Burrus, of Hartland, Wis.-based Burrus Research, said one of the key military technologies to make the jump to civilian use will be unmanned aviation. Autopilot systems have been used for years to fly commercial aircraft between airports. Landing and taking off in many military aircraft are now automated.

Would the general public want to fly in a jet with no pilot on board? No, he said. At least one pilot would have to be present to oversee the operation. Ultimately, automation would make for safer aircraft and eliminate human errors, he said.

“There are things a robot surgeon can do that a human surgeon can’t do, but I want to make sure there’s a human controlling the robot,” Burrus gave as an example.

Aerial drones and other mobile autonomous technology will arrive in the marketplace “battle tested,” Canton said. “It will be more rigorously proved up when it comes into the consumer market.”

“People may have a hard time understanding how we would use mobile, autonomous robots, but there’s dozens of reasons.” They can be used for cleaning, security, maintenance and the detection of bio-toxins. These applications are only five to 10 years away, he added.

Robots will see the convergence of information technology, computing and nanotechnology.

The military’s need to reduce casualties is driving the research and development into robotics and autonomy. It’s accepted that Japan is ahead of the United States in robotics, but both Canton and Burrus said the two nations have different goals. Japan needs to solve a labor shortage, while the U.S. is looking toward security.

The military’s desire for a more inter-connected communications on the battlefield and in its daily operations will also be a driver of technology transfers.

Wide-area networking, sometimes called Wi-Fi on steroids, is where every computer or handheld has a 50-terabyte capability, and each device is a fully mobile and secure Internet node itself, Canton said. There are huge implications for e-commerce, he added.

Future warrior concepts envision soldiers who are wearing computers.

“Some might ask, ‘Who would want to wear a PC?’” Burrus said. “Someone who needs access to information while they’re standing up and doing something.”

Warehouse workers, those on the road or people doing things that require them to be paying attention while being mobile, will wear these systems.“The future warrior system is going to spill over to the future salesman or the future warehouse worker,” Burrus said.

“We’re on the edge of a material science revolution,” added Canton. It will be a convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology, and the military will employ these new fabrics and suits first. Consumers will want them next, though. A shirt that can detect poor air or bio-hazards might cost another $20, he said.

Cheaper micro-processors and small radios can combine to make “intelligent” tires. A sensor attached to a military truck or aircraft’s tires or an engine part can inform a computer when it needs repair. A part can be ordered autonomously through an advanced logistics system, and a technician can be dispatched to replace it just before it wears out, Burrus said. This technology can be applied to bridges, roads, engines, anything that suffers from wear and tear.

“We need to ask ourselves, ‘what is it we want to be intelligent because of how cheap micro-processors are, and the fact that we can wirelessly connect them with nodes?’”

The development of new vaccines, anti-viral drugs and antibiotics in an effort to prevent biological attacks could have enormous public health benefits, d’Arcy said.

“We’ve had very few new antibiotics developed in the last 30 years,” he added.

The need to patch injured soldiers together will inevitably lead to advances in treating trauma, Burrus said.

In the homeland defense sector, there has been an acute need for identity verification, or biometrics, in the five years since 9/11. “Much of that technology is reaching maturity,” d’Arcy said.

“Ever since 9/11, there’s been a big push on technologies that can help us identify people,” Burrus said. “And the military is funding a lot of that.”

Blood vessels in the palm, for example, can be read to confirm identification, he said. “It’s fast, easy and can’t be faked.”

The military has sophisticated needs for database search and has developed technologies that go beyond Yahoo and Google, the futurists said.

“That can spill over and raise the bar in our ability to find things and get information quickly … and give us an competitive edge,” Burrus added.

To locate insurgents in urban battlefields, the military is developing sophisticated surveillance, reconnaissance and other spying devices.

Those, along with search engines that can do high-speed data mining and advances in biometrics, give pause to civil libertarians.

Intelligent surveillance — computers linked to cameras that autonomously scan areas for suspicious movement — are already being used for security at Air Force bases, d’Arcy said. “There’s talk of that being applied to civilian law enforcement,” he said.

Terrorists who detonated bombs in the London subway last year were caught on camera multiple times. “If we had this intelligent surveillance perhaps we could have picked up that they were congregating … and looking suspicious.”

Such technology could be used to identify kinds of behavior that aren’t necessarily nefarious, he added.

Some won’t see it that way, the futurists said.

“Never blame the technology ... It’s not the tool; it’s how you use the tool,” Burrus said.

Canton agreed. “We’re going to be trading more of our privacy for security. That’s inevitable. We need to strike the right balance on surveillance technology that will become more invasive and more intrusive.”

“I don’t think we’re there yet on that balance. This is a very healthy debate to have,” he added. But “while we’re debating all this, the innovation train doesn’t stop.”

At Aberdeen, the train of scientists and researchers looking for entrepreneurs to take their ideas and run with them didn’t stop until late afternoon. Most of what they showed on PowerPoint slides had homeland security applications – chemical and biological detectors, sensors to detect gunshots and airport screening devices.

Steven Fritz, director of technology transfer of the Maryland Technology Development Corp., said the goal of the event was to prevent innovations from entering “the valley of death where interesting new technologies go to die.”

If history is any indication, some of the military funded innovations will not only live, but make a positive impact on society as a whole and drive the U.S. economy throughout the coming decades, the futurists said.