Page 124 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky
P. 124

65
               gigapixel camera with SkyGrabbers capturing the feed. Project Anubis  WASPs carry sensors,
               data links, and munitions payloads. Flying at 20,000+ feet, WASPs can follow sixty-five targets
               at a time and learn by mimicry and observation, thanks to their human pilot. Quad-rotor iDrones
               look like flying saucers, and SWARMS (scalable sWarms of autonomous robotics and mobile
               sensors)  move  in  a  pack.  “Drone-swarm”  tech  is  all  about  the  “hive  mind”—micro-drones
               working together as one to make decisions and complete their assignments, like the Perdix drone
               (wingspan 30 cm, Mach 0.6):

                     Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals, they are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain
                     for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature,” said William Roper, director of the Strategic
                     Capabilities Office at the US Department of Defense. 66


                                                                          67
                   Drone-swarm  tech—including  self-aware  killer  robots —comes  under  the  Autonomous
               Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System or ARGUS-IS, named after Argus
               Panoptes, the hundred-eyed giant.
                   We finally arrive at Cerberus, the unmanned mobile integrated tower with mounted sensors
               that guards the gates of Forward Operating Bases, similar to Raytheon’s G-BOSS (ground-based
               operational surveillance system). “Networked, multiple Cerberus towers form a mesh network,
                                                                                       68
               communicating autonomously with each other to act as a virtual fence.”  A virtual fence.  As
               Defense Industry Daily admits about the three-headed mythical dog, “Cerberus permitted souls
               to enter the realm of the dead, but allowed none of them to leave.”
                   Is this our fate with the Space Fence?
                   In  the  next  chapter,  “Mastering  the  Human  Domain,”  I  go  deeply  into  network-centric
               warfare (NCW),  the  cornerstone  of  the  Revolution  in  Military  Affairs  that  has  converted  the
               American military into something very different than it once was.







                  1 Whittinger, John, and Bill Wallace. “Army Says Constitution Lets Satanist Hold Top Secret Job.” San Francisco Chronicle,
               November 3, 1987.
                  2 Peace support operations (PSO) in the UK.
                  3 Vallely, Col. Paul and Maj. Michael A. Aquino. “”From PSYOP to Mind War: The Psychology of Victory.” 7th
               Psychological Operations Group, U.S. Army Reserve, Presidio of San Francisco, 1980.
                  4 McGarth, Lt. Col. John T., U.S. Air Force Academy. “The Conflict Manifold.” Air University Review, May-June 1981.
                  5 Vallely and Aquino, “From PsyOp to Mind War.”
                  6 Tom Carter, “The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual: Part One.” World Socialist Web Site, 3 November 2015.
                  7 Albert J. Mauroni, Where are the WMDs? The Reality of Chem-Bio Threats on the Home Front and Battlefront. Maryland:
               Naval Institute Press, 2006.
                  8 “Department of Defense Weather Programs,” www.ofcm.noaa.gov/fedplan/fp-fy10/pdf/3Sec3c-DOD.pdf. Thanks to Ron
               Angell for directing me to this site.
                  9 Ibid.
                  10 Ibid.
                  11 Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. Simon & Schuster, 2008.
                  12 See James Bamford’s article “The Multibillion-Dollar US Spy Agency You Haven’t Heard of,” Foreign Policy, March 20,
               2017.
                  13 Mohana Ravindranath, “Mission Possible: A Spy Agency Builds A Tech Scout Network.” Nextgov, October 19, 2016.
   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129