Five potentially watershed military projects being cooked up by DARPA

THE US government’s science and research wing is dreaming up some seriously scary ideas to maintain the country’s edge in the battlefield.

THE United States spends more on its military and related research than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, United Kingdom, and Japan combined.

Part of that money goes to a special organisation tasked with dreaming up the most elaborate and innovative new technologies, and often, their potential military application.

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, is the Pentagon’s science and research arm and develops the country’s most cutting edge technologies.

Here is just some of what the secretive agency has been working on in recent years that could change the way we fight wars.

SELF GUIDING BULLETS

A project to develop a self guided bullet could make US snipers unthinkably deadly in the field. It sounds like science fiction but the autonomous bullets could soon nullify misfiring problems related to weather conditions, wind or simple shooter errors.

The bullet imitative is part of DARPA’s Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program. For the past few years researchers have been developing a .50 caliber ammunition that can manoeuvre in flight, changing direction after being fired from a weapon.

A post on DARPA’s website describes EXACTO’s specially designed bullet as using a “real-time optical guidance system” that tracks and directs the bullets right to their targets.

In 2014, DARPA demonstrated its guided sniper bullets for the first time. The video showed the EXACTO bullets, changing direction in mid-flight like it was almost following its target.

‘GREMLIN’ DRONE SWARMS

DARPA is progressing toward its plan to demonstrate airborne launch and recovery of multiple unmanned aerial systems (UASs), the organisation says.

It is currently testing the feasibility of having groups of low-cost, reusable drones perform a variety of roles before being collected in air by US war planes, essentially turning the planes into flying aircraft carriers.

The goal of the program — internally referred to as Gremlins — is to develop a full-scale technology demonstration featuring the air recovery of multiple UASs, or gremlins.

“Early flight tests have given us confidence we can meet our objective to recover four gremlins in 30 minutes,” said Scott Wierzbanowski, program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office.

The capability is projected for readiness in 2019.

HYPERSONIC WEAPONS

As it stands DARPA and the US Air Force have two hypersonic weapon concepts in the works.

The first is a Tactical Boost Glide weapon — a system that operates at five times the speed of sound and offers military operations longer ranges with shorter response times.

Essentially a rocket accelerates its payload to high speeds, then separates and allows it to glide unpowered to its target destination.

The second project is hypersonic air-breathing weapon concept (HAWC) which uses the technology of a scramjet engine — enabling hypersonic flight by taking in air at supersonic speeds and burning it without reducing it to below the speed of sound.

Russia has been trying to match the US with its own hypersonic missiles.

MILITARY SATELLITE CONSTELLATIONS IN LOW EARTH ORBIT

Last year DARPA launched a project known as Blackjack with the goal to develop a low Earth orbit constellation of satellites to provide global persistent communications coverage for military operations.

DARPA has long wanted to lay the path for the military to transition from huge satellites in geostationary earth orbit to constellations of smaller platforms in low Earth orbit.

It’s basically the same idea proposed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and would provide global surveillance and communications for US military personnel.

DARPA has been accepting bids from space industry vendors with the submissino date ending this week on June 6.

TIME CRYSTALS

Something known as time crystals — where a web of atoms spin in a perpetual loop — has become the focus of new research by the US military. Time crystals are systems of atoms that maintain a periodic ticking behaviour in the presence of an added electromagnetic pulse.

They offer a unique window to the behaviour of the infintessimally small quantum-scale universe.

From unhackable internet to radar that can tell you all there is to know about any approaching aircraft, the astounding behaviour of the universe’s fundamental building blocks have unimaginable potential. And the unusual resilience of time crystals could help make these a reality.

The idea they could exist was only thought up in 2012 and it was little more than a year ago when researchers announced they’d actually created these bizarre crystals in the lab for the first time.

DARPA has admitted it allocated some of its researchers and resources to examine the implications of this breakthrough.

Time crystals — where atoms resonate in a perpetual loop.

In time crystals, a web of atoms spin in a perpetual loop. Their steady spins will switch directions under the pulse of an electromagnetic force but, as with all things quantum, their reaction is odd. The timing of their switch doesn’t always match the pulse.

To cut a long story short, this means they become more stable in the face of outside influences once they are given a little external push — just as a moving hand can keep a broomstick standing upright in the face of gravity.

This area of research is for a lot further down the road.

- With Jamie Seidel