IntelliTech Microsystems' Kestreleye

DEFENSE: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) never seems to sleep in its attempts to better prepare and protect the American soldier in combat (CD 12/5). Here are some of its latest new tricks, some that make the news and some that don’t. Drones over Pakistan are in the headlines most every day, but there are two others including satellites for the grunts and new protection for their armored vehicles.

THE DRONE WAR: With a wink and a nod from Pakistan, the U.S. government has been carrying on a clandestine drone war over Pakistan for nearly two years. Now the question is whether those operations may expand to include drone strikes to the southern province of Baluchistan, where the Taliban’s Quetta shura maintains a leadership base.

According to Greg Miller and Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, the administration is leaning toward expanding the drone war to places like Quetta, Baluchistan’s sprawling capital city. “The concern has created tension among Obama administration officials over whether unmanned aircraft strikes in a city of 850,000 are a realistic option,” they write.

“Proponents, including some military leaders, argue that attacking the Taliban in Quetta -- or at least threatening to do so -- is crucial to the success of the revised war strategy for the combat operations in Afghanistan that President Obama unveiled last week.”

A MESSAGE: A senior U.S. official involved in the deliberations tells the LAT that it’s all about sending a message to the Taliban. “What the Pakistanis have to do is tell the Taliban that there is too much pressure from the U.S.,” the officials said. “We can’t allow you to have sanctuary inside Pakistan anymore.”

Mark Hosenball of Newsweek has been following the same internal discussions. But he says Obama has nixed the expansion. “Five administration officials tell Newsweek that the president has sided with political and diplomatic advisers who argue that widening the scope of the drone attacks would be risky and unwise,” he writes.

“Obama is concerned that firing missiles into urban areas like Quetta, where intelligence reports suggest that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and other high-level militants have sometimes taken shelter, would greatly increase the risk of civilian casualties.”

TRANSPARENCY: Wired Magazine says, “Whether or not this campaign will in fact widen, it’s worth stating the obvious: There has been a stunning lack of transparency when it comes to this war as well as the internal deliberations that have driven it. And that goes for the Obama administration as well as the administration of George W. Bush.”

“And while the American public doesn’t seem to be too exercised about it -- that seems to be one of the benefits of war by remote control -- the drone strikes have been massively controversial in Pakistan. If the strikes are in fact expanded, it will be essential to track the reaction on the ground.”

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SATELLITES FOR GRUNTS: The Pentagon loves its giant satellites -- the bigger and more expensive, the better. The culmination was Keyhole-12; at an estimated twenty tons, it’s believed to be about as large as the massive Hubble Space Telescope. But these orbiting behemoths are increasingly coming under criticism by those who believe the job can be done better, faster, and cheaper by constellations of small satellites.

The new Darpa catch-phrase is Operationally Responsive Space Access. This is the source of the Army’s Kestrel Eye spy satellite program, which is exploring the possibilities offered by smaller sats.

Big satellites are expensive to build and launch. So you can only have a few of them in orbit at once. They may not be in the right place when you need them. Operationally Responsive Space is supposed to fix that, by sending satellites into space as needed, depending on the requirements at the time. Making them smaller and cheaper means that large numbers can be put up, giving continuous coverage rather than a snapshot with every ninety-minute orbit.

DOWNLINK SYSTEM: Kestrel Eye, which is being built by IntelliTech Microsystems, grew out of a Darpa project for a twenty-pound imaging satellite equipped with a ten-inch telescope. The downlink system can send back two images a second, each covering an area five miles square with a resolution of five feet.

That does not count as high-resolution in the reconnaissance world, and it’s only about a tenth of what can be delivered by Keyhole-12. But it’s enough to identify individual building and vehicles. And that could be extremely helpful to the grunt on the ground.

“Kestrel Eye will be taskable directly by the war-fighter under fire and transmit 1.5-meter resolution images directly to his back-packable ground station. A constellation of 30 satellites will provide global 24/7 coverage,” Steve Fujikawa, president of IntelliTech Microsystems Inc., told the Military Space and Missile Forum. But rather than being used by one unit, the imagery is likely to be fed into a set of imagery servers, so the pictures can be shared by any number of users.

ON THE CHEAP: As with other small satellites, the key is to make it cheap. Kestrel Eye is supposed to cost around $1 million per satellite. That’s a bargain, considering a Predator drone is about $5 million. Even a constellation of thirty of Kestrel Eyes will cost a fraction of a large satellite.

Kestrel Eye will be the Army’s second nano-satellite program. The first is an ongoing test project called SMDC One. It consists of eight satellites, each about the size of a tube of Pringles. SMDC One is aimed at proving the technology and some of the concepts involved in operating small satellites.

Major elements of Kestrel Eye, including the avionics and the solar power array, have already been prototyped. Other elements, including the camera and the data transmission system are expected to be ready for a launch in 2011. However, this will depend on an ongoing design review.

NEW PARADIGM: It’s no exaggeration that Kestrel Eye will be a new paradigm for satellite surveillance. If successful, it will open the way for many more small, cheap satellites. These could include more reconnaissance satellites with infra-red as well as visible-wavelength capability, as well as LADAR and other sensors. There is also the possibility of communications nano-satellites so that extra bandwidth can be added.

It’s a bold new venture for the US Army. However, in this case the military is lagging somewhat behind the commercial world, where the potential of constellations smaller and more capable satellites is already being realized.

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TRUCK PROTECTION: The U.S. military’s toughest trucks are getting a new layer of protection -- against rocket-propelled grenades. The Army recently awarded an $8 million contract to equip MRAP (mine resistant ambush protected) armored trucks with Iron Curtain. It’s a protection system which blasts incoming rockets before they can hit the vehicle. If the system works, it could go all long way towards neutralizing one of the deadliest threats American troops face in Iraq especially, and overseas in general.

The contract calls for the Iron Curtain with Darpa’s sniper-detection system, CROSSHAIRS. It detects and locates enemy shooters using radar and acoustic sensors, and is intended to work against Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs), missiles, bullets and mortar rounds. Iron Curtain itself is currently designed to deal with RPGs, and the makers Artis LLC is planning future developments to deal with more challenging threats.

RADAR: Iron Curtain system detects and tracks the incoming rocket with a radar, which then cues an optical sensor -- a smart camera, essentially. The optical sensor identifies and classifies the threat -- pinpointing the location of the rocket with an accuracy of about half an inch -- and selects an aim point.

A row of explosive counter-measures is mounted on a rail running around the top of the vehicle. The system selects the best one of counter-measures, and fires it vertically downwards at the exact moment the rocket is passing. This does not destroy the warhead but ‘duds’ it so that the warhead deflagrates, rather than exploding properly. By the end of the collision of RPG and countermeasure, Artis claims, the warhead bounces off of the vehicle’s side. In field tests mounted on up-armored Humvees, Iron Curtain has proven its effectiveness against RPGs, so the maker is confident it will be effective.

COMPETING SYSTEMS: Iron Curtain is one of many, many competing systems for RPG protection, ranging from metal slats and bars to Kevlar airbags and missile-firing Active protection Systems. Iron Curtain is at the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, and one of its most distinctive features is how the counter-measures work.

Collateral damage is a major issue for “active” protective systems like Iron Curtain. Whatever you fire at the incoming round is going to end up somewhere, and it may do real damage. Systems that spray out shrapnel are likely to be a major hazard for anyone in the immediate vicinity. This can included dismounted troops who have just stepped out of the vehicle or local civilians if an attack takes place in a crowded area.

SHRAPNEL: One way around this is to use Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME), basically micro-shrapnel made of powdered dense metal which only travels a few feet. Another approach is to have shrapnel made of Reactive Material which burns up in the air and only gets a short distance before it complete vaporizes.

The Iron Curtain approach -- of simply firing downwards -- could be safer than either of these and should ensure that the countermeasures only hit what they’re aimed at.

It’s not clear how the system could defend against attacks from above, but the makers’ web site says that Iron Curtain “can be configured to protect almost any surface, from just the sides of a vehicle to all-around protection, including top.”

LOOP MODES: The integration with CROSSHAIRS makes this more than just a system to protect one vehicle. The aim of CROSSHAIRS is to “engage enemy shooters” with both automatic and man-in-the-loop modes. And it might even go one step further than that, according to Darpa: “Additionally, the program is investigating the feasibility of a variety of technologies to detect enemy shooters before the firing of a weapon.”

This suggests that in principle, a CROSSHAIRS-equipped vehicle with a convoy could open fire on any potential ambushers before they fire a shot. Or it might just engage them with something like a non-lethal laser dazzler, which could avert an ambush without risking shooting the wrong people.

It could be a useful capability, and one that can’t be delivered fast enough: the MRAP vehicles equipped with Iron Curtain and CROSSHAIRS should be ready for testing in July 2010. Meanwhile, there are also studies to integrate Iron Curtain with Hummers and with the LAV’s operated by the Marine Corps.

Images: Artis, LLC