From Bug Drones to Disease Assassins, Super Weapons Rule U.S. War Game

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The X-47B combat drone during testing. Photo: Northrop Grumman

The Great Robot War of 2025

Robots are already central to the American way of war. The drones of 2025 will have computing capacity a billion times greater than today’s models, he predicted. More computing means more autonomy, more capability and versatility and less human control. The trick, said Peter Singer, one of the war game’s organizers, is figuring out how to use these smarter, more independent machines. “We choose right, and we develop the 21st-century Blitzkrieg,” stressed Singer, an author and robotics expert who oversees Danger Room editor Noah Shachtman’s work as director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative the Brookings Institution. “We choose wrong and we create the 21st-century Maginot Line,” a reference to France’s failed defensive fortifications during World War II.
In the war game’s theoretical tank battle in an occupied city, the gamers unleashed history’s first all-robot army, aiming to isolate, harass and disarm the enemy. Only after the bad guys had been all but defeated would an American infantry brigade roll in to officially liberate the occupied city.
The gamers first deployed fast, missile-armed pilotless warplanes similar to today’s prototype advanced combat drones to clear the skies of enemy jet fighters. Next came high-endurance spy drones — essentially evolved versions of the current Global Hawk or Phantom Eye — to pinpoint the locations of enemy forces.
Intelligence in hand, the real robot attack began, with swarms of insect-size micro-drones eating away the tires of enemy vehicles, both stranding the city’s occupiers and cutting them off from resupply. Other flying ‘bots orbited overhead broadcasting radio messages to the increasingly starved enemy troops, reminding them that surrender is a viable alternative to slow destruction.
Enemy troops who did not surrender were subjected to a robotic aerial onslaught an order of magnitude more lethal than today’s pinpoint Predator and Reaper strikes. Autonomous warplanes fired missiles and dropped bombs on the remaining armored vehicles as the spy drones kept a running tally of the damage. The U.S. infantry brigade arrived to round up surrendering combatants and clean up the damage.
It was as tidy a scenario as has ever existed in the history of American warfare — but only on its face. The real cost of the robot campaign was evident in the media … and in the Pentagon’s budget. Gamers pointed out that developing, deploying and supporting an all-robot army could cost billions more than an equivalent human force and also require a top-down reorganization of the U.S. military, which is not currently configured for autonomous warfare. Robots, after all, actually require lots of people on the back-end to maintain them and process the data they gather. And the communications bandwidth these ‘bots might consume? Unprecedented.
Even in the tidiest military campaign, civilians are sure to get caught in the crossfire — particularly in urban fighting. It’s one thing when a human soldier accidentally kills a non-combatant. Procedures are in place to hold the shooter accountable. It’s quite another when a robot goes rogue and slaughters innocent men, women and children. Who’s responsible then?
Plus there’s what roboticists call the “Terminator effect” — the heightened fear among everyday people of out-of-control robot killers. In 2007 and 2008 rumors circulated that the Army’s SWORDS armed ground-robot, deployed to Iraq for testing, had pointed its gun without being told. SWORDS hadn’t opened fire and certainly hadn’t hurt anyone, but the bad PR was enough to effectively end the SWORDS experiment.
Barring deep cultural changes, civilian deaths during the 2025 battle could turn the American public against its own robot army. “Cultural mores are important,” said one bio expert at the NexTech war game, who also played the role of group conscience. “We’re very uncomfortable with automation.”
That discomfort, and money, could prove to be the biggest obstacles to Singer’s unmanned revolution and the great robot victory of 2025.

From Bug Drones to Disease Assassins, Super Weapons Rule U.S. War Game

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A plane simulates a biological attack on Navy ships in a June exercise. Photo: Navy

Kill Switch

In another scenario, two mighty fleets sailed toward each other off the coast of a disputed island. On one side, two American aircraft carriers with their attendant destroyers, cruisers and submarines and as many as 140 aircraft combined. On the other side, an enemy carrier with 60 planes and an escort force numbering 24 warships. Including the U.S. and enemy fleets, as many as 20,000 sailors steamed into the kill zone. Once the shooting started, the seas would run red.
Rather than risk a naval massacre, the gamers decided to stop the enemy fleet before it was within range of U.S. forces and the contested island. A combination of drones, submarines and underwater mines fitted with microwave pulse emitters could represent an “overwhelming, unstoppable ability to shut down the electrical and mechanical systems on a ship,” in the words of one war-game participant.
In short, the Pentagon could flip a kill switch and turn off the enemy’s systems with little or no loss of life. (Affected aircraft could crash.)
That’s no techno-fantasy. Given adequate power, a microwave can function like an electromagnetic pulse weapon, frying any circuitry within a certain range, according to Dr. John Geis, deputy director of the U.S. Air Force Research Institute and NexTech’s directed-energy expert. Today’s non-explosive microwave emitters are limited to a range of tens to hundreds of meters, but with better emitters and power sources, and increasing use of more vulnerable electronics, the useful distance is increasing on a “double exponential curve,” Geis said.
The gamers arrayed their microwave weapons in a series of picket lines for “escalating degradation.” The first electronic attack occurred while the enemy fleet was still in port. A stealthy drone, perhaps the successor to the Air Force’s RQ-170, penetrated the port’s air defenses and made several low-level passes over the rival flattop, using a microwave weapon to short out key systems aboard the ship — radars, radios, deck lighting — before being shot down.
Maybe the enemy was able to repair the carrier. Maybe the admirals calculated the remaining portion of the fleet possessed enough firepower even without their aerial backup. In any event, the rival fleet pressed on toward the disputed island and a potentially apocalyptic confrontation with the U.S. Navy.
Then somewhere in the open ocean, the enemy vessels crossed over the second picket line, this one composed of smart subsurface mines programmed to bob to the surface and blast passing ships with microwave pulses. This “humane” attack combined with the earlier electronic assault idled most of the enemy ships and, equally importantly, threw their command structure into disarray, ending the modern era’s greatest sea battle before it even began.
But just in case a ship or two slipped through with intentions of making a suicide run, the gamers prepared a insurance policy: an American submarine with its own microwave weapon. The sub would have to get close to its target and raise a mast above the water to emit the pulses — a dangerous proposition for the hundreds of crew members, but preferable to exposing the entire fleet to the enemy’s weapons.
Some gamers objected. Pointing out that the enemy in the naval scenario is analogous to China, they insisted Chinese forces would deliberately avoid over-reliance on electronic systems in any major conflict — specifically because of America’s overwhelming advantage in that arena. The more the enemy fleet falls back on simple mechanical systems, the less vulnerable it would be to the microwave kill switch. Indeed, any rival military advanced enough to be susceptible to microwave pulses would likely possess microwave weapons of its own.

From Bug Drones to Disease Assassins, Super Weapons Rule U.S. War Game

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Factory in a Box

A 7.0 earthquake has struck an impoverished, poorly governed equatorial nation. Thousands have died. Tens of thousands are homeless and without food, water, power and medical assistance. A U.S. Marine Corps battalion rushes to provide immediate aid.
The first 48 hours following a natural disaster are the most critical. After two days without help, the death toll spikes. It was the gamers’ task to plan the Pentagon’s actions during these crucial hours — and bring to bear a potentially world-changing new technology: 3-D printing.
Also known as additive manufacturing, 3-D printing is the process of making a three-dimensional solid object out of essentially two-dimensional raw material by “filling” a digital mold.
Methods vary. 3-D printing can involve actual inkjet printers laying down layer upon layer of solidifying liquids or powders. It can also entail a laser or ultrasound stimulating liquids to form into solids. Whatever the method, 3-D printing could spark a “new industrial revolution,” in the words of one NexTech gamer, by decoupling manufacturing from big, expensive factories and turning any desktop with an electrical outlet into a flexible industrial workshop.
In the ground combat, naval war and bio-terror scenarios, the war game players found only a few, indirect uses for 3-D printing — mostly in repairing damaged weapon systems. But in the aftermath of the earthquake, with the country’s infrastructure in ruins, 3-D printing became the most important tech in the military’s arsenal.
Much in the way that U.S. Air Force air controllers and U.S. Marines “invaded” Haiti’s wrecked ports and airport in a desperate but ultimately successful effort to jump-start the country’s transportation network in the hours following the January 2010 earthquake, in the NexTech scenario players proposed deploying teams of military engineers with 3-D printers strapped to their backs. Their mission: to repair the ancient mechanical and electrical patchwork that is the power and water grid, using rapid-prototyping techniques and their 3-D printers to replace unique components.
With 3-D printing, duplicating and installing, say, a shattered electrical transformer could take just days instead of weeks or months, dramatically compressing the years-long process of repairing destroyed national infrastructure and saving potentially billions of dollars and thousands of lives along along the way.
Just don’t leave the 3-D printers behind, some gamers advised. As with any disaster relief effort, the goal is to end the intervention as quickly and cleanly as possible and allow the afflicted country to return to its normal pace of economic development. Permanently installing additive-manufacturing workshops could actually cause long-term harm by displacing laborers who depend on old-school factories for their jobs.

From Bug Drones to Disease Assassins, Super Weapons Rule U.S. War Game

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An Air Force sergeant trains a Kyrgyz soldier in bio defense techniques. Photo: Air Force

Giving Bacteria the Flu

Having resolved a city siege, a naval showdown and a post-earthquake recovery, the NexTech players turned their attention to what was arguably the most dire scenario of them all: eliminating a rogue state’s bio weapons without sparking a devastating war. The Pentagon would need some way of containing, destroying or canceling the bio agent development — and quietly. A direct assault could trigger a biological reprisal or a long campaign of proxy terror attacks.
America and Israel used a campaign of online sabotage – including the Stuxnet worm — to slow down Iran’s nuclear program. Singer wondered, if there was a “Stuxnet-like equivalent against a biological program?”
The rogue state’s WMD program is spread across many facilities, some of which are hardened and secret and others of which also perform legitimate commercial work. The program is led by five known senior officials. Even with that level of dispersal and redundancy, a successful cyber-attack à la Stuxnet is still possible. “Any large computer-controlled system will have enough layers of complexity to have some discoverable vulnerabilities,” said Allan Friedman, a Brookings Institution scholar and the event’s software expert.
A real virus might also work. The game’s biology expert proposed infecting the rogue state’s bio-agent stocks with … another bio-agent — one specifically tailored to neutralize the original weapon. “There are viruses that only infect bacteria,” he explained. And by 2025 it could be practical to weaponize them into a sort of disease assassin.
First, the Pentagon would need to know exactly what kinds of agents the enemy was developing. One gamer proposed tracking one of the program managers using a Radio-Frequency Identification, or RFID, tag. “There are ways to RFID their clothing,” the gamer explained, without elaborating.
If you can precisely locate a person, you can begin to figure out which cellphones they’re using — and track those, too. In that way, it might be possible to map the human network underpinning the bio-weapons program. With that information, the military would have options — first for determining exactly what bio-agent the enemy is developing, and then infecting it with the right counter-agent.
Again, a gamer offered up specially modified clothing as the best vehicle. “We replace the clothing of the workers and let it become a sensor,” they said. A worker’s clothing could also be used to deliver the counter-agent, the bio expert added.
But the gamer sounded a note of caution. Using biological weapons, even defensively, is illegal under U.S. and international law, he said. If the American efforts were exposed by foreign operatives, the press or a WikiLeaks-style information infiltration, the consequences could be devastating to U.S. national security. “You want to be careful about opening those doors,” the bio expert said.
The two-day war game had been all about what the U.S. could do with the projected cutting-edge military technology of 2025, but what the U.S. should do is another question entirely. “We assume [technology] enhances our control, that leaders can be more deliberate,” Singer said, bringing to this reporter’s mind the atom bombs that ended World War II only to open a dangerous new chapter in human history. “Historically, however, every time we’ve had a game-changing technology, it has added to the speed and chaos of war.”