David Hambling - November 14, 2008

The Secret Service is tasked with protecting the President of the United States from assailants; and given that President-elect Obama has already been the target of assassination plots they may have their work cut out after January. But they have more than earpiece radios and armored limos to help them; the Secret Service can call on the very latest technology. Documents from a recent court case indicate that they have advanced directed-energy devices which are highly classified.

You may remember Donald Friedman, who claims that government agencies are misusing non-lethal directed-energy weapons. It’s easy to dismiss him as a crank. But his obsessive digging has turned up valuable information. For instance, one of his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests unearthed a 1998 U.S. Army program looking at a microwave device to beam sound directly into the target’s skull which the rest of us had missed. (The same technology underlies the Medusa non-lethal weapon.)

Now he’s found something else. Friedman’s current court case involves attempts to extract information about any directed-energy weapons such as lasers and microwaves used by the Secret Service. Do they really have anything of the kind? A “Motion for an Enlargement of Time” (in other words, a request for a few more weeks) by the Secret Service’s attorney indicates that they have something, and it’s pretty secret:

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David Hambling - October 10, 2008

After years of testing, the Active Denial System — the pain ray which drives off rioters with a microwave-like beam — could finally have its day. The Army is buying five of the truck-mounted systems for $25 million. But the energy weapon may face new hurdles, before it’s shipped off to the battlefield; a new report details how the supposedly non-lethal blaster could be turned into a flesh-frying killer.

The contract for the pain ray trucks is “expected to be awarded by year’s end,” Aviation Week notes. “A year after the contract is signed, the combination vehicle/weapons will start be fielded at the rate of one per month.”

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Aamer Madhani - September 14, 2008

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio — It may look like a futuristic arcade game, but it’s a scene from an official Air Force animated video: Bad guys of indiscernible origin being shadowed, from a careful distance, by small robotic drones designed to resemble birds and insects.

When one of the bad guys opens his apartment door, a tiny robo-bug, looking like a garage door opener with wings, sneaks in to spy. In another scene, a bug—the Air Force calls them Micro Air Vehicles, or MAVs—creeps into a sniper’s roost and delivers a deadly shot to the back of his head.

It might sound far-fetched. But top Air Force officials believe that MAVs could be a significant part of the Defense Department’s arsenal in the not-so-distant future.

Civilian researchers and airmen at the Air Force Research Laboratory, based at this installation just outside Dayton, have set a 2015 deadline to roll out the first generation of MAVs. This first group, they hope, will be the size of birds and able to operate several days without recharging.

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It’s probably not the game-changing, “secret weapon” of the Iraq war. But it could help win the next one: a stealth sniper scope for invisible assassination.

Battles are increasingly about taking out a few select enemies, not large numbers of foes. If you want a device that allows you to locate, target and kill a subject, you need look no further than DARPA’s Super-Resolution Vision System (SRVS), which I looked at recently in the New Scientist technology blog.

Heat haze ordinarily throws off snipers. But SRVS changes heat haze from an obstruction into a means of enhancing the view. An effect called ” turbulence-induced micro-lensing” means that every instant the heated air acts as a series of lenses; at a given moment you may be able to look right through them and see a magnified view of the scene beyond. The trick is to use digital technology to identify the “lucky regions” or “lucky frames” when a clear view appears and assemble them into a complete picture.

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Soldiers barking orders at each other is so 20th Century. That’s why the U.S. Army has just awarded a $4 million contract to begin developing “thought helmets” that would harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops. Ultimately, the Army hopes the project will “lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone.”

If this sounds insane, it would have been as recently as a few years ago. But improvements in computing power and a better understanding of how the brain works have scientists busy hunting for the distinctive neural fingerprints that flash through a brain when a person is talking to himself. The Army’s initial goal is to capture those brain waves with incredibly sophisticated software that then translates the waves into audible radio messages for other troops in the field. “It’d be radio without a microphone, ” says Dr. Elmar Schmeisser, the Army neuroscientist overseeing the program. “Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.”

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I think he’s nailed it…

Much more convincing than my attempt.

Paul Joseph Watson asks “What Is The Secret Killing Weapon In Iraq?” My guess is Robobugs.

Robert Michelson of Georgia Tech holds a simplified model of the "entomopter," a flapping, four-winged robotic flier.

The hints given by Woodward on Larry King Live, suggest to me, the new weapon likely has an advanced targeting capability. Either it finds and attacks specific targets with ease like never before, or it has capabilities to get close enough to call in the missiles - probably a combination of both.

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