Follow my leader
by David Hambling
[ opinion - february 05 ]
Few people realise just how much modern technology has its roots in the military. In fact, warfare has always been a major driver of progress, and this trend looks more than ever set to continue. If you want to see the future of the civilian world, look at what the military are doing now.
This is evident even from the way we talk about the different eras in human history. The Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age, which was succeeded by the age of gunpowder, and now we have our own era - variously called the space age, the nuclear age, the computer age, the Internet age.
When bronze replaced stone and iron replaced bronze, the ancient metal-workers were not making trinkets. Bronze was mainly prized for making better spear points, arrowheads and armour, not cloak-fastenings or ornaments. Steel was valuable because it meant a sword could be made stronger and sharper than ever before. Ploughs and axes were important for tilling the soil and clearing woodland, but the symbol of power is not the plough but the sword. In both Europe and Asia, swordsmiths were working with literally cutting edge technology.
What about the great innovations that have been used to define the modern age - space travel, nuclear power, computing, the Internet? Military, every one of them.
And as for the next age, who knows? But whether it is the Nanotechnology Age, the Artificial Intelligence Age or some other unguessable technology, chances are we can already see its precursors in the military labs of today.
Rocket science
Before WWII, rocketry was a hobby indulged in by back-yard enthusiasts. Robert Goddard famously launched his first liquid-fuelled rocket in 1928. This was an epoch-making event: the equations showed that such a rocket, unlike one powered by gunpowder, could be made powerful enough to escape the earth's gravitational field. Goddard had proved that liquid-fuelled rockets were practically as well as theoretically possible, and mankind would be able to conquer space... and then Goddard went to retrieve the rocket from his aunt's cabbage patch. There was no great fanfare, no rush of funding from government or industry. Space rockets remained the province of enthusiasts and science fiction writers.
This did not change until the members of the German Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (Society for Space Travel) found themselves conscripted by the Army. A loophole in the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI prohibited Germany from developing long-range artillery, but said nothing about rockets. In 1936 the Wehrmacht's set out to build the Aggregate-4 or A-4, a giant rocket capable of carrying a one-ton payload to a distance of 250 kilometres. By 1942 they had carried out a successful test launch. In 1944, after the expenditure of the equivalent of perhaps a billion dollars and the lives of thousands of slave labourers, the rocket, now named V-2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2, Revenge Weapon 2), was used in action. It proved unreliable and inaccurate, and its main effect was on morale, and it had no influence on the course of the war.
The V-2 was a failure as a weapon, but the potential of the rocket was obvious. After the war, German rockets and rocket scientists were hijacked by both the US and Russia for their own programs. Both nations developed missiles for carrying nuclear warheads, but for geopolitical reasons the Russians were forced to build larger, longer-ranged missiles. In 1957 they successfully launched an R-7 rocket, known to NATO as the SS-6 or Sapwood. Then the R-7 was used for a new payload: Sputnik, the first satellite to be put into earth orbit.
In order to recover prestige in the face of heavy public criticism, the US embarked on an emergency program to launch their own satellite. The first launch attempt, by the US Navy, was based on the Redstone ballistic missile, and blew up on the launch pad. The second effort was undertaken by the US Army, using a similar rocket, and was a success.
The leader of the successful team was Wernher von Braun, who had worked on the V-2 rocket. When the competing American military teams were combined together into NASA, von Braun was to continue to play an important role. Everything that has followed on from there, from the first man on the moon to the satellite TV dishes and global communications that we now take for granted, flowed from the wartime V-2 project. Without it, the space age would literally never have got off the ground.
Computers
Ask a British person who built the first computer was, and they are likely to give the credit to the Bletchley Park team who cracked the Enigma code. Ask an American, and they might mention ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, or possibly the Harvard Mark 1. Any of these could be correct, depending on exactly how you define 'first computer' but all three have one thing in common: all were developed by the military.
The first of these was the Harvard Mark 1. This was not electronic but an electro-mechanical device with old-fashioned switches which sounded like "a roomful of ladies knitting" when it was running. Properly called the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, it was completed in 1943, and credit for it is generally spread around between Harvard, IBM and Howard Aiken who designed it. However, most overlook that this was a US Navy project, sponsored by the military for their own ends.
The US Navy needed a machine to calculate navigation tables quickly and efficiently. These tables note the positions of the stars and planets for navigational purposes, and had to be updated annually. This was an immensely time-consuming task, and one of great importance: one error would be enough to send a ship on to a reef or a rock. Without the imperative of the US Navy driving it, the Mark 1 would never have been built.
It's the same story with ENIAC. In June 1943, the US Army Ordnance Corps contracted with the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering for R&D to the tune of $61,700. Their specific requirement was for a machine to calculate artillery shell trajectories faster than existing methods. Like navigation tables, artillery tables took a huge amount of manual effort, and each new weapon or type of ammunition had to have its own set of trajectories calculated. The project was, quite incidentally, to be a ground-breaking first in digital electronic computing.
ENIAC faced many technical problems and took longer and cost more to develop than planned - at eight times the original cost and too late to help the war effort, it was only a qualified success for its intended role. But the gave the Pentagon a tremendous new computing resource, and played an important role in the design of nuclear weapons and rockets as well as calculating artillery tables.
ENIAC was quickly replaced by more advanced versions, and the technology moved into the civilian sphere in 1951 with the construction of UNIVAC. The military had paved the way, and the road was open for commerce.
In Britain, the wartime code breakers at Bletchley Park have achieved a certain fame after decades of secrecy. However, their achievement of building Colossus, an electronic computer which pre-dated ENIAC, did not have the same commercial consequences. British military computing was kept under wraps for reasons of national security, and the spin-off benefits were lost.
The Internet can similarly trace it roots back to military origins - to the office of Bob Taylor who was appointed as Director of the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) Information Processing Techniques in 1965. ARPA (now DARPA) is the Pentagon's high-tech development arm, tasked with finding new ideas for military technology and making them work.
Arriving at his new office, Taylor found three separate computer terminals. One connected to a machine at MIT, one to Berkeley, and one to Santa Monica.
"The obvious question that would come to anyone's mind," said Taylor later, "'Why don't we just have a network such that we have one terminal and we can go anywhere we want?'"
Connecting the networks was not a simple matter, but Taylor persuaded his bosses to put a million dollars into finding a solution. The end result was a new type of network of networks, called ARPANET. It went live in 1969, and by 1972 the original three computers had increased to thirty-seven host computers. Growth continued into hundreds and then thousands of computers. ARPANET became DARPANET, but in 1973 a new term was used to describe it: Internet.
In 1983 the Internet had expanded to include so many new computers and users that security was becoming a major issue. The military moved their own computers to a physically separate system called MILNET, and the Internet was left entirely in the hands of civilians.
Not just the basic computer hardware and the Internet, but much of the software behind it also originated with the military. And even the silicon chip, the heart of the computer, was first built for military purposes.
Nuclear power
We have known since Einstein's celebrated equation of 1905 that e=mc2, meaning that small amounts of matter could be converted into vast quantities of power, and by 1939 discoveries by Otto Hahn and others had the press talking excitedly about the prospects for atomic energy. But it was never going to happen without the tremendous investment of money and resources that could only come from the military.
The British were already working on an atomic bomb program but lacked the resources to carry it out. Then Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt:
"...This new phenomenon could also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable - though much less certain - that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the entire port together with some of the surrounding territory."
The risk that Germany might develop such a weapon was too great a threat to ignore, and the Americans joined in with the British effort. Under the Quebec Agreement of 1943, a team of top British nuclear scientists were sent to Los Alamos to work with the US on the Manhattan Project and the construction of the first atomic bomb began in earnest.
A legendary group of scientists was assembled for the task, including Neils Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman and Robert Oppenheimer. At its peak, the project employed 130,000 people and cost over $2 billion - more than $20 billion in current-day terms.
By July 1945 the team had overcome numerous technical issues and the first atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico. The nuclear era had begun. It was to be ten years afterwards, in 1954, that the Russians opened the first nuclear power station in Oblinisk. Nuclear energy now accounts for one-sixth of the world's power consumption, and issues over global warming and carbon dioxide emissions mean that it might still become more important.
However the technology for extracting and purifying radioactive Uranium-235 is still considered military. As recent developments in Iran show, uses of uranium in weapons overshadow its peaceful uses, and this is one technology that has never been fully brought into the civilian sphere.
The future
What comes after the Internet Age - the Mobile Phone Age perhaps? (Mobile phones also have a military pedigree, and can be traced directly back to the mobile radios of WWII and the Motorola company which designed them). Or perhaps the SUV age, named after the Sports Utility Vehicles which now infest our cities, a surprisingly successful civilian spin-off from the wartime Jeep.
As far as technology goes, perhaps the hottest areas are nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Both of these are the subject large-scale investment and intensive research programs by the military, and the US military in particular.
The Pentagon's current aim is 'full spectrum dominance', in short the ability to defeat any other force, anywhere and at any time. This will require capabilities far in excess of what exists today, which can only be gained by leveraging technological advantage to the greatest possible extent. The emphasis is on 'leap-ahead' technologies which will put the US a full generation ahead of other powers.
Nanotechnology promises materials that outperform anything seen before: tougher armour, more powerful explosives, deadlier bullets. In the medium term it means machinery on a microscopic scale, from fuses and guidance systems to shape-changing aircraft and swarms of miniature attack robots. In the longer term, the world-devouring 'grey goo' (technically, a mass of replicating assemblers) that so alarms environmentalists and others could be the ultimate unstoppable weapon of mass destruction, and the ultimate arms factory.
Artificial intelligence is already giving the US military an edge, and its uses are growing and expanding. At the moment, so-called 'smart' missiles rely on humans to identify targets for them; the next generation will be able to seek out targets for themselves. This kind of pattern-recognition capability will have huge implications, for everything from industrial robots which need to pick up one piece from a pile, to domestic droids that need to recognise the difference between a piece of furniture and a shadow.
Within the next few years, pilots will have robotic wingmen, unmanned aircraft that carry out verbal instructions. When language recognition is a matter of life and death and multi-million dollar planes are at stake, the development is far more advanced than civilian researchers can afford. But in time the techniques developed by the military will find their way into the civilian marketplace, and systems which can easily handle voice commands will start to appear everywhere.
Biotechnology also deserves a mention, although the military angle is much harder to explore. There is plenty of research taking place in this area, but details are largely lacking for security reasons. However, there is little doubt that major discoveries will spill over into civilian medicine. Fighting biological warfare is essentially similar to fighting other types of disease, and the same methods may be applicable. In fact, modern antibiotics owe much to the military. Alexander Fleming's original strain of penicillin could not be produced on a large scale, and it was only with the exploitation new strains and techniques by the US War Production Board during WWII that it could be effectively mass-produced, with yields increasing tenfold.
Nobody can tell what the future holds, and would-be prophets are almost invariably left looking foolish. Few predicted the rise of the all-conquering Internet even decades after it started to grow. But it is a safe bet to assume that the pattern of military progress will continue, and that our future technology will also be 'weapons grade'.
