Defense Secretary Ashton Carter provided a glimpse into some of the Pentagon’s emerging technologies during his budget preview on Tuesday, discussing capabilities from swarming 3D-printed drones to a targeting kit made from cellphone cameras.
The driving force behind the 2017 budget is the shift to high-end warfare against a sophisticated adversary, Carter said in a speech to the Economic Club of Washington. That entails making investments in innovative technologies, as well as increasing research and development dollars to $71.4 billion.
“We have to do this to stay ahead of future threats in a changing world, as other nations try to catch up with the advantage we’ve enjoyed for decades in areas like precision-guided munitions, stealth, cyber, and space,” he said.
Some of those technologies are being pioneered at the department’s Strategic Capabilities Office, which is tasked with inventing new uses for existing technology—including commercial products—that can give the U.S. military an advantage over its adversary. The office is led by William Roper, a physicist who was handpicked by Carter, who created SCO in 2012.
“The emphasis here was on that enemy, not 10- and 15-year programs, and getting stuff to the field quickly,” Carter said. “The focus here was to keep up with the pace of the world.”
Some of SCO’s technology involves tweaking an existing piece of technology for a different purpose. For instance, it’s taking the hypervelocity projectile used in the Navy’s electromagnetic railgun and putting it to use in other platforms like firing it from the five-inch guns at the front of the DDG-51 destroyer. About a month ago, the office tested shooting the projectile from the Army’s Paladin self-propelled howitzer and found that the munition increases the lethal range of the vehicle.
One SCO project involves putting tiny commercial sensors and cameras–similar to those on an iPhone–onto a small diameter bomb to improve its ability to target a threat. The department eventually wants to turn that technology into a modular kit that can give other munitions an inexpensive off-network targeting capability, he said.
The office is developing an “arsenal plane” that takes an old airplane and turns it into a “flying launch pad” for a slew of conventional weapons, Carter said. In combat, the plane would network with fifth-generation aircraft like the F-35 that would act as its forward sensor. Once the arsenal plane receives targeting information from the Joint Strike Fighter, it would then be able to attack with a range of munitions.
Carter also talked about several unmanned technologies that are currently in the works, such as driverless boats that can network together to conduct missions such as close-in surveillance without needing to put human beings at risk. The SCO built upon the artificial intelligence algorithms NASA used for the Mars lander to make those vessels autonomous, he said.
The office has also demonstrated swarms of fast, resilient micro-drones that can be constructed through a mix of 3D printed and commercial components, he said. “They can fly through heavy winds and be kicked out the back of a fighter jet moving at Mach 0.9, like they did during an operational exercise in Alaska last year, or they can be thrown into the air by a soldier in the middle of the Iraqi desert.”