A press release emerged yesterday from USJFCOM (that is to say, United States Joint Forces Command, one of 9 Commands in the Dept. of Defense and the one that’s in charge of defense transformation). The snappy title of the release:
U.S. Joint Forces Command’s (USJFCOM) two-year cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with Raytheon studied non-lethal weapons and crowd behavior.
Well, I thought, this sounds fun: being interested in social network analysis and all, I’m always intrigued by computer models of social behaviour such as how crowds behave and the like.
Ah, was I in for a surprise…
The press release chunters chirpily on about the intricacies of the procurement process, such as the fact that USJFCOM’s greater understanding of the capabilities of current crowd modeling technologies had come
…as a result of work completed over the two years under a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA), a flexible non-Federal Acquisition Regulation-based partnership agreement between USJFCOM and Raytheon
Well, I’m glad it was a flexible agreement. And I’m all in favour of partnership. What else? Well, according to USJFCOM’s Dan Judy,
This partnership agreement provided for a flexible and continuous engagement where our irregular warfare urban operations warfighting and analytical expertise was coupled with the scientific and engineering capabilities of our Raytheon partners. The result was the establishment of a substantive, persistent environment where USJFCOM guided and evaluated research efforts.
Excellent. Well done indeed, all concerned. So what exactly did we learn about crowd behaviour? Seven paragraphs in and we’re still working up to it…
Mark Vinyard, USJFCOM’s principal investigator for the CRADA with Raytheon, said the command’s team met with representatives from Raytheon to focus on crowd simulation and the effects of using non-lethal directed energy systems on crowds. These systems emit focused energy to help control and disperse crowds.
Um – focused energy? Like a water cannon? Not exactly…
“We set up weekly telephone conferences attended by direct participants and the community of interest at large,” said Vinyard. “Topics ranged from the underlying principles of modeling a crowd in a dynamic environment to technological hurdles in accurately modeling a directed energy system.”
A directed energy system?
Tina Gaumond, Raytheon’s modeling, simulation and analysis lead for the Net-Centric Integration and Experimentation Center Tidewater, described different aspects of the modeling and simulation (M&S). “We modeled non-lethal weapons, kinetic energy weapons and directed energy weapons,” Gaumond said. “With the analysis side of it we captured all the data that was put on the network and we used the DIAG [data instrumentation analysis graphic use interface] to capture different graphs of different social behaviors of the crowd, whether they were fearful, running away, hiding and so forth.”
By this point, I was really intrigued. “Fearful, running away, hiding and so forth”?
From what? Godzilla?
The press release coyly refuses to say more about these weapons, though you’ve got to love the way that JFCOM just sorta slips in the fact that oh yeah, we’ve invented a death ray too.
But over at Wikipedia it transpires that there’s a regular directed energy weapon party underway. Not only are death rays and laser beams well into development – they’re also already tackling nitty gritty technical hurdles as:
– Plasma breakdown in the air (“causes the laser to defocus and disperse energy in the atmosphere”; can be overcome by using mirrors or micrometre sized antennae, apparently);
– Evaporated target material shading the target (don’t you find it just so annoying when the fog of vapourised baddies gets in the way of your shot); and
– High power consumption (well, thank goodness someone’s thinking of the environmental dimension here. Maybe we could get a version of the energy beam certified by the Rainforest Alliance?)
So there you go. You start reading a press release about crowd behaviour, and stumble upon the fact that riot policy are about to start using death rays.
Marvellous what they can do with technology these days.
