DARPA Looks Ahead To Fight America's Future Wars

Envision an aircraft carrier in the sky. Drugs that can immediately prepare soldiers for duty at high altitudes. Prosthetic limbs with something approaching real sensitivity. The Pentagon has. DARPA is planning for a long war in which U.S. troops will be expected to face guerrilla adversaries. And just as during the Cold War, DARPA is counting on high-tech Silicon Valley to give U.S. forces the edge. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, who spoke at the DARPA conference via satellite, also predicted that the United States is much closer to the beginning of this long war than to its end. Ideally, DARPA hopes to develop weapons that would allow the United States to one day patrol the "arc of instability" from a high altitude. The aerial platforms in the early stages of development are designed not only to warn of threats, but to neutralize them by delivering what DARPA calls "ultra-precise effects" - smart bombs on steroids - that could be launched from anywhere in the continental United States.