The U.S. Army has deployed a number of rapid prototyping labs into Afghanistan. The labs are packed into standard 20-foot shipping containers, each with their own generator and method of climate control. The $2.8 million worth of goodies stuffed inside each container includes 3D Printers and CNC Machines as well as plasma cutters, welders, magnetic mounted drill-presses, electric hacksaws, routers, circular saws and jig saws.
The labs are part of the Army's continuing effort to meet the immediate needs of front-line soldiers. "It's really difficult to connect the guy who is building the product to the kid who really needed it to begin with, so what we went after is to connect the scientist to the soldier," said Col. Pete Newell, commander of the Army's Rapid Equipping Force at Fort Belvoir, Va. "Rather than bringing the soldier home to the scientist, we have uprooted the scientist and the engineer and brought them to the soldier."
Each development pod does come complete with a senior scientist and an assistant, ready to take on the requests of G.I.'s in the field. With the prototyping equipment at their fingertips they can turn around a usable product within a matter of days. If the deployed scientists can't find a way to make what the soldiers need, they can connect to a network of 6,000 other military engineers who are ready to lend a hand.
Col. Newell also stated that in the future labs of this type could be used in disaster relief efforts. Being able to drop a pod after Hurricane Katrina for example, could have helped a lot of people. One thing is for certain though; the Army is so happy with the performance of the mobile development labs they plan to use them long past 2014, when our soldiers are scheduled to come home from Afghanistan.
At 10 a.m., I climbed up to the observation deck on the Alabinsky Range. There was already a crowd of 30 soldiers carrying walkie-talkies and wearing armbands with labels like, “Simulation Assistant,” and, “Deputy Chief Supervisor.”
I had an extraordinary view from the observation deck. Four tanks with red, blue, yellow and green colors were lined up in the foreground. A plain with fabricated mounds and potholes stretched in the background.
There was a warm, light breeze. The plain was enveloped by a mist, which made it impossible to see either the targets or the roadway — two important components of the biathlon.
While the judges were discussing something, I spoke with a member of the competition’s organizing committee — a retired colonel, who, for some reason, requested that his name not be published.
“Why was tank biathlon invented?” I asked.
The colonel explained: “So that the troops can manifest a spirit of competition, to get away from the daily routine of the army. Before this, exercises were simple and boring: The soldiers drove up, shot and went back. But now here they have obstacles, range practice shooting, and, in general, they compete against one another!”
On test rides, the crews had to complete a small circuit with an obstacle course, while shooting at targets. The colonel explained that these circuits were made to test the T-72B tanks in action, which the visitors used.
Then the command: “Action Stations!” Test rides began with entertaining numbers. The announcer greeted the audience, stirring music began to play and a group of boys and girls ran to the concrete launching ground in the center of the polygon.
This tank biathlon epidemic struck the army in July: Each military district selected three of their best tank platoons to take part in the finals in Alabino near Moscow. The best Russian crew was a team from the Western Military District, which took part in the international competition and won.
The military officers were awarded the competition’s trophy — a model of a T-34 tank. Crews from Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan were awarded medals from the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation, “For Strengthening Military Cooperation.”
“Dancers,” they told me. Then four spotted tanks appeared, forming a shape similar to a flower. The four tanks began to circle around, coyly shaking their guns.
Dancers, who heard only some fragments of the “Sabre Dance,” tried to dance, but it was clear that the roar of the engines blocked all other sounds. Nevertheless, after five minutes, the audience forgot about the music, as a howitzer drove onto the range and slowly but surely raised its gun barrel.
A gun volley rang out, so powerful that one of the dancers collapsed on the concrete polygon next to the howitzer, clasping her arms around her head.
Finally, it was time for the biathlon. I went back to the observation deck, where the judges took their places at the tables and observers lined up behind them—each with a binocular telescope.
“Armor units to starting positions!” This was heard on the walkie-talkies. Multi-colored tanks came to life, roared and became shrouded in a cloud of smoke.
“Here we go!” the commentator shouted wildly.
Having easily passed the “snake” test, the tanks lined up at the firing line and began to charge their guns with anti-tank ammunition. The first target was a full-size, mock-up tank. It stood at a distance of 1.5 miles from where we were standing, and, in my opinion, it was impossible to see.
Apparently, the crew of the red tank shared my opinion: In three shots, the tank did not hit the target even once, and was sent to the “penalty circle.”
Meanwhile, the other tanks were already overcoming other obstacles: the fording site, the treadway bridge and an escarpment. All was going well and the tanks began attacking the second target—a mock-up helicopter. They shot at it from a distance of 5,250 feet, using anti-aircraft machine guns.
In the third round, the green and blue tanks managed to pass part of the way moving side-by-side, with one almost cutting in front of the other. The commentator was delighted, but the faces of the judges showed disapproval.
The tanks had shot at the third target (which was in the shape of a hut), passed over the rest of the circuit and lined up in front of the command post. The leader of the test run became the yellow tank, which passed through all the stages in 5 minutes and 28 seconds.
“Well done, men!” exulted the commentator.
One-by-one, the tank crews came out through the hatches, ran across the parade ground and lined up at the entrance to the command center. From the observation deck, we could see their heads in round helmets, swaying like sunflowers.
When I came down from the tower, the silhouettes of tank crews were visible on the slope of the mound. After this difficult test, they started returning to their units. Bickering, they went out of sight.
The parade ground became completely deserted; there remained standing only a lonely army tent with a thrown-back canopy. It was dark inside, while, outside, a banner that read, “Welcome to the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation!” was fluttering in the wind.
Gen. Sergei Shoigu, defense minister of the Russian Federation, congratulated the winners of the first All-Army Tank Biathlon Competitions and expressed his hope that such competitions will become a tradition, as well as a powerful factor in strengthening ties of friendship and trust between the states. “Hopefully, more teams will participate next year. In any case, our colleagues from the U.S. and Italy have responded to our invitations, and we are waiting for a response from Germany,” said the minister, noting that, if these countries participate, this would become “quite a different competition.”
Abridged and rewritten. First published in Russian in Vedomosti.
In theater productions of Peter Pan, there’s a scene where Tinkerbell is dying. Peter exhorts the audience to clap their hands to save her. If everyone just claps harder and says “I believe in fairies!” Tink will be restored to life by the power of faith and love.
Progressive calls to defeat corporate power and the warfare-surveillance state through more enthusiastic engagement in electoral politics sound about equally plausible.
In 2008, progressives attempted to achieve these goals by voting for the most anti-war, anti-police state Democrat in decades. Obama entered the primaries as a challenger from Hillary Clinton’s left, packaging himself as the alternative to her national security establishmentarian brand. He opposed the Iraq war, promised to shut down Gitmo and denounced warrantless domestic wiretapping by the NSA.
In 2013, we see this “progressive” superstar, who all but promised to usher in a 21st century Church Committee, presiding over the massive expansion of illegal drone warfare around the world and the largest expansion of the surveillance state in history. We see this man, who promised the “most transparent administration in history,” pursuing vindictive reprisals — on a scale rivaling Woodrow Wilson or Richard Nixon — against whistleblowers who expose the surveillance state’s terrifying scope.
In short, progressives voted harder in 2008 than they had in decades, electing a man who promised to radically scale back the total warfare and surveillance state and rein in corporate power. And the man they elected went 180 degrees opposite every last expectation.
Worse, some of Obama’s most diehard “progressive” supporters have become a Kool-Aid cult defending him against any and all criticism of his reversals of position. These people, including both the “pragmatic progressive” communities on Twitter and in the blogosphere and most of the establishment liberals on MSNBC, denounce critics from Obama’s left as Republican dupes in tones reminiscent of the Democratic establishment’s treatment of Ralph Nader a decade ago. The very people who should be holding Obama’s feet to the fire instead react like Gollum to the desecration of their Precious.
So, to summarize: 1) The biggest grass-roots progressive effort in decades to elect an anti-war, anti-police state president successfully elected a man who immediately proceeded to do the direct opposite of what he promised; and 2) some of the people who elected him are the most strident defenders of his betrayals.
Do you really think voting even harder next time is the solution? No. All of this just shows what a monumental waste of effort and resources it is trying to capture the state.
The lobbyists of the military-industrial complex, security-industrial complex, and other corporate interests will always have more time and money for influencing policy than their opponents. The internal influence of the “permanent government” of the military and security bureaucracies will always have more influence on government policy than the public. Trying to outcompete these interests and stage a hostile takeover of the commanding heights of the state is as foolish as it would have been for Heinz Guderian to attempt a head-on assault on the Maginot Line in 1940.
Fortunately, we don’t have to storm the barricades and capture the giant corporations and the state. We don’t need them. We don’t need enormous concentrations of capital or giant hierarchical institutions for coordinating things. The prerequisites for building the kind of society we want — open-source garage micromanufacturing technology, permaculture, encrypted currencies, free software — are all dirt cheap and getting ever cheaper. The only thing the state and the corporations it serves can do is try to impede us.
Fortunately it’s much, much cheaper to develop technologies for evading the law and the state’s enforcement apparatus than it is to try to influence the state and change the law. Trying to get “a seat at the table” alongside the RIAA and MPAA to influence a few punctuation changes in the next global copyright treaty is an almost total waste of time. Developing file-sharing and encryption technologies to break such laws with impunity is not only doable — it’s already been done.
We don’t need to capture the state or the corporate economy. Leave them to rot. We’ll build the new society in their ruins.
Part of HRL's Information and Systems Sciences Laboratory, the Center for Neural and Emergent Systems (CNES) is dedicated to exploring and developing an innovative neural & emergent computing paradigm for creating intelligent, efficient machines that can interact with, react and adapt to, evolve, and learn from their environments.
CNES was founded on the principle that all intelligent systems are open thermodynamic systems capable of self-organization, whereby structural order emerges from disorder as a natural consequence of exchanging energy, matter or entropy with their environments.
These systems exist in a state far from equilibrium where the evolution of complex behaviors cannot be readily predicted from purely local interactions between the system's parts. Rather, the emergent order and structure of the system arises from manifold interactions of its parts. These emergent systems contain amplifying-damping loops as a result of which very small perturbations can cause large effects or no effect at all. They become adaptive when the component relationships within the system become tuned for a particular set of tasks.
CNES promotes the idea that the neural system in the brain is an example of such a complex adaptive system. A key goal of CNES is to explain how computations in the brain can help explain the realization of complex behaviors such as perception, planning, decision making and navigation due to brain-body-environment interactions.
We seek to apply the thermodynamic basis of self-organization to study a broader class of problems via physical manifestations of intelligence that may one day explain the emergence of behaviors in a wide range of complex physical systems—from animate systems, financial networks, social networks and other very large-scale complex systems.
CNES will exploit this understanding to engineer prototype intelligent systems for real-world applications, such as Intelligent surveillance and reconnaissance, unmanned autonomous systems, robotics for manufacturing and urban combat-and-rescue missions, autonomous driving and other applications.