What Will Be The Weapons Of The Future?

By Mark Thompson Kathleen Adams

To justify the way they fight, U.S. Military Officers are fond of quoting Confederate general Nathan Forrest's admonition to "git thar fustest with the mostest." But increasingly, even Army generals agree they have been emphasizing the "mostest" at the expense of the "fustest." The Army has a cold war hangover: the war machines of a U.S. armored division tip the scales at 300,000 tons. It took the molasses-like movement of the Army's AH-64 Apache helicopters to Albania during last year's Kosovo conflict to make planners publicly admit this is no way to fight a war in the future. "Our heavy forces are too heavy, and our light forces lack staying power," General Eric Shinseki declared as he assumed command of the Army last year. To make the U.S. military lighter--but still lethal--Shinseki and other Pentagon officials are working on a new arsenal of agile arms that could accompany troops into battle over the next generation.

U.S. pilots--unlike those who led the way into Iraq and Yugoslavia--will no longer have to play hide-and-seek with enemy radar and deadly antiaircraft missiles. Before U.S. troops enter hostile airspace, a fleet of unmanned combat air vehicles will have attacked missile batteries capable of shooting down any troop-carrying aircraft. Sensors aboard each drone will detect targets, which will be attacked--after receipt of a human command--by the aircraft's precision-guided munitions.

U.S. troops will then fly into a foreign hot spot on huge, ungainly tilt-rotor aircraft. The C-130-size "quad tilt-rotor" will be able to carry nearly 100 troops more than 2,000 miles. The rotors, perched at the ends of a pair of big wings, act like a helicopter's for takeoffs and landings, eliminating the need for runways. But once airborne, the rotors tilt forward and pull the plane through the sky at more than 350 m.p.h.

Soldiers pouring from such aircraft will be climbing into wheeled vehicles, not the tracked tanks that have been the backbone of Army armor for more than a half-century. The civilian world's fascination with off-road vehicles has generated improvements the military wants for itself. Twenty years ago, only tracked vehicles could traverse squishy terrain. Today tire pressure can be adjusted from inside the cab--the softer the ground, the softer the tires--meaning heavy, tracked vehicles no longer have a monopoly on mobility. "If technology permits," says Shinseki, in what some of his colleagues see as battlefield blasphemy, "we are prepared to consider going to an all-wheel fleet."

Tomorrow's soldiers will also be outfitted with the Army's new Buck Rogers-like supergun. The lower of its two barrels sprays more standard bullets, but the key to the new rifle--given the catchy Army name of "objective individual combat weapon"--is the 20-mm air-burst round fired by its top barrel. A built-in laser range finder tells the round where in flight to explode, giving it the ability to spray lethal shrapnel in all directions, like a hand grenade, as much as half a mile from the shooter. That translates into a gun that can kill enemy soldiers hidden behind walls or in foxholes.

Silicon-chip warfare takes smarter, smaller weapons--the type that debuted in the Gulf War--and weaves them into an unprecedented net of knowledge about the enemy's whereabouts. These data may do more to change the face of war than any new weapons--so long as G.I.s don't drown in them. Gleaning information on the enemy's whereabouts remains challenging, which is why the Army is striving instead to track, on computers, the location of the good guys. If a unit in the valley below doesn't show up on your screen as a "friendly," you're free to attack it. And rather than spending 15 minutes using the time-consuming radio to call in fire through several layers of command, American troops will be able to send a request by secure e-mail and rain artillery down upon an enemy in a minute or two.

If U.S. soldiers are targeted by enemy Scuds during the conflict, martial lightning bolts--actually oxygen-iodine lasers--will blow the missiles from the sky before they ever get close to their targets. The Air Force wants to outfit a fleet of 747s with lasers. These "Warbirds" could explode enemy missiles shortly after launch, well before they could unleash their batches of warheads on American soldiers or local civilians. Computers on the plane will bend the laser's "rubber mirror" hundreds of times a second to keep the beam fixed on the missile's skin for the three to five seconds needed to destroy it.

A platoon pinned down by enemy fire will be able to pull a bird-size airplane out of a rucksack and use its video camera to spy over the next hill, behind buildings and beyond eyesight. Such micro-air vehicles will fly as far as six miles from their takeoff point for as long as two hours, feeding video images back to special military ground stations that will use the information to coordinate ground attacks and air strikes. Pentagon researchers are busy developing aviation assets even tinier than such mechanical sparrows. They're training honeybees, parasitic wasps and giant sphinx moths to detect land mines and caches of biological and chemical weapons. Outfitted with radio backpacks, each smaller than a grain of rice, the insects will pinpoint the location of such deadly weapons for destruction by U.S. forces.

Such technological marvels set the stage for continued U.S. military hegemony well into the 21st century, so long as the nation's troops--and their leaders--remain state-of-the-art as well. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will keep trying to play catch-up.