Darpa Chief Speaks

I came across this sneak-peek of an upcoming article in Wired Magazine by Noah Shachtman. This section is a transcript excerpt from an interview with Tony Tether who is involved with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It seems to be a pretty open and frank discussion about a variety of topics, initiatives, and situations DARPA is involved in. Below is an excerpt but to view the full transcript at wired.com...click here.

Darpa Chief Speaks

by Noah Shachtman

"Tony Tether has headed up the Pentagon's way-out research arm, Darpa, since 2001. That makes him the longest-serving director in the agency's nearly 50-year history. He sat down with me for an interview in his office, on the top floor of a blandly menacing Northern Virginia office building, last December....

Noah Shachtman: So, again, thanks for doing this. Let's start with the big picture and talk a little bit about 9/11 -- it's been five years now -- and how, obviously, that has affected defense research hugely. What do you see as Darpa's big contributions to the war on terror? What do you think has been contributed so far, and what do you think is on the horizon that might be the most valuable?

Tony Tether: We have several efforts in use in Iraq and Afghanistan today. There's been somewhat of a misunderstanding that when 9/11 unfolded that Darpa suddenly turned totally toward supplying things for the war. Now, of course, the war made us a great deal more interested in trying to find out what the issues and problems were over there so that we could develop programs along that line. And we have. Those programs are long-range and, for the most part, they're things that won't really come to fruition for several years.

On the other hand, Darpa had started many things in the '90s, because we've been looking at this global terrorist war since probably 1994. At that time we called it the transnational threat --you know, a threat without a country. At the same time, there was a great push to look at the way our forces were developed and move them from huge divisions, force on force, to small units of action, back to the squad... As it turned out, 2001 came and we went into war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and, after the major conflict in Iraq, really small units became the way we were orchestrating that war. And it was probably that way from the very beginning in Afghanistan. So the technologies that we have been developing for four or five years, some of them were already ready to go.

NS: Can you give me an example?

TT: One of the major things we knew a small unit would need, especially in a city, was situational awareness. Knowing what's on the next block -- not what's 10, 15 miles away. So we developed – we already had been developing -- a small platform that we call Wasp. It was based on a multifunctional technology approach. This was in the Defense Sciences Office here. The program manager said, We really want things to be electric-driven because they're very quiet, very efficient. Though, usually, if you put just a battery on an airplane you get only 15 minutes of flight time. But why do we have to do it that way? Why can't we make the structure of the airplane the battery? And if we do that we should be able to get much better performance. Well, he developed a little thing called the Wasp, and in the initial version the wings were actually the battery. He found that by doing it that way, rather than 15 minutes of flight time, we were able to get an hour and a half to two hours of time. Once that happened we realized we could put sensors on it. Then we put a comlink on it and GPS....."

The transcript goes on and talks briefly about Phraselators, Command Posts of the Future, Perceptive Assistants That Learn (PAL), Quantum Computing, Drugs, Experiments, the DARPA Grand Challenge.....all kinds of interesting stuff with likes to more info on many of them.