By Shelia Watson
Contributing Writer

Technology is crucial to the military, but the breakthroughs in technology are not always with weapons systems.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which does advanced research for the U.S. Department of Defense, has a mission to “maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military and prevent technological surprise from harming our national security by sponsoring revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and military use.”

Testifying recently before a U.S. House of Representative subcommittee, DARPA director Tony Tether described some high-technology areas currently in the works by the Defense Department. They are:

• Networks: Self-forming, robust, self-defending networks at the strategic and tactical level, key to network-centric warfare.

•  Chip-Scale Atomic Clock: Miniaturizing an atomic clock to fit on a chip to provide accurate time as required, for instance, in assured network communications.

•  Global War on Terrorism: Technologies to identify and defeat terrorist activities such as

the manufacture and deployment of improvised explosive devices.

•  Air Vehicles: Manned and unmanned air vehicles that quickly arrive at their mission station and can remain there for very long periods.

•  High-Productivity Computing Systems: Supercomputing is fundamental to such military operations as from weather forecasting to cryptography to the design of new weapons.

•  Real-Time Accurate Language Translation: Machine-language translation of text and speech with near-expert human translation accuracy.

•  Biological Warfare Defense: Technologies to accelerate the development and production period for vaccines and other medical therapeutics from 12 years to 12 weeks.

•  Prosthetics: Developing prosthetics that can be controlled and perceived by the brain, just as with a natural limb.

•  Quantum Information Science: Exploiting quantum phenomena in the fields of computing, cryptography and communications, with the promise of opening new frontiers in each area.

Source: The Department of Defense

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