PopSci Investigation: What Kind Of Top-Secret Assassination Tech Does $58 Billion Buy

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PopSci Investigation: What Kind Of Top-Secret Assassination Tech Does $58 Billion Buy?

Not since the end of the Cold War has the Pentagon spent so much to develop and deploy secret weapons. But now military researchers have turned their attention from mass destruction to a far more precise challenge: finding, tracking, and killing individuals

Under Cover The Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel, an unmanned reconnaissance drone, is the most recent aircraft to emerge from the military's "black" budget. Nick Kaloterakis

Every year, tens of billions of Pentagon dollars go missing. The money vanishes not because of fraud, waste or abuse, but because U.S. military planners have appropriated it to secretly develop advanced weapons and fund clandestine operations. Next year, this so-called black budget will be even larger than it was in the Cold War days of1987, when the leading black-budget watchdog, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), began gathering reliable estimates. The current total is staggering: $58 billion—enough to pay for two complete Manhattan Projects.
Where does the money go? Tracking the black budget has always been a challenge. Constantly shifting project names that seem to be randomly generated by computers—Tractor Cage, Tractor Card, Tractor Dirt, Tractor Hike and Tractor Hip are all real examples—make linking dollar amounts to technologies impossible for outsiders. But there are clues.
According to Todd Harrison, an analyst at the CSBA, the allocations for classified operations in the 2011 federal budget include $19.4 billion for research and development across all four branches of the military (funding for the CIA, including its drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is contained within the Defense Department black budget), another $16.9 billion for procurement, and $14.6 billion for “operations and maintenance.” This latter category, Harrison notes, has been expanding quickly. This may suggest that many classified technologies are now moving from the laboratory to the battlefield.
In fact, the rise in classified defense spending accompanies a fundamental change in American military strategy. After the attacks of September 11, the Pentagon began a shift away from its late Cold War–era “two-war strategy,” premised on maintaining the ability to conduct two major military operations simultaneously, and began to focus instead on irregular warfare against individuals and groups. That strategic shift most likely coincides with an investment shift, away from technology that enables large-scale, possibly nuclear, war against superpower states and toward technology that helps military planners hunt and kill individuals. Each branch of the military uses different language to describe this process. Pentagon officials have spoken openly about their desire to use advanced technology to “reduce sensor-to-shooter time” in situations involving “time-sensitive targets.” The head of U.S. Special Operations Command talks about “high-tech manhunting,” while Air Force officials describe plans to compress the “kill chain.”
Even inside the Pentagon, few people know the precise details of the black budget. But by combining what is known about Pentagon goals and what is known about the most recent advances in military technology, we can begin to sketch its general contours.

Satellites On Demand: The Pentagon’s desire for pervasive battlefield surveillance doesn’t end with drones. Another goal is reconnaissance satellites that can be launched within a few days of a request, a drastic abbreviation of a process that today takes one to two years. Satellites have at least two significant advantages over drones: They can stay in the air 365 days a year, and they’re exempt from concerns about international airspace. Conducting drone-quality surveillance from a satellite requires advanced imaging technology like that found on an experimental satellite the Air Force launched last year, TacSat-3. TacSat-3 is equipped with hyperspectral sensors, which capture electromagnetic radiation across such a wide spectrum that they can detect the disturbed earth covering a buried roadside bomb. It’s an early step toward satellites that could find and identify individual people. Jon Proctor

Tagging and Tracking: The U.S. military may already be surreptitiously “tagging” enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan with chemicals, sensors or bioreactive agents and then tracking them from a distance. It may also be using wireless-enabled sensors smaller than a grain of rice, each complete with a minuscule computer chip, to do the same thing. Kris Pister, a researcher who conducted early work on “smart dust”—tiny tracking devices that can be showered onto people or vehicles—says that scattering sensors onto targets from drones is “straightforward.” Jon Proctor

Microwave Weapons: The Pentagon has spent billions of dollars developing directed-energy weapons that can disarm or disable individuals, including the Counter-Electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), an effort (unclassified but based on research conducted in secret) to develop a UAV-mounted microwave weapon to fry enemy electronics. Another example is the Active Denial System, a truck-mounted less-than-lethal weapon that uses microwaves to heat the top layer of a person’s skin. These programs are almost certainly just the beginning. In late spring, Pentagon officials told USA Today that the U.S. was attempting to deploy an energy-beam weapon in Afghanistan that could detonate hidden explosives from a distance. An industry source who has worked for years on counter-IED technology says it’s probably a system called Max Power, which blasts microwaves to mimic the electromagnetic pulse released by a nuclear explosion. Jon Proctor

Prompt Global Strike: The intercontinental ballistic missile is the only publicly acknowledged weapon capable of striking any point on the planet in less than an hour. Yet because Russia possesses defenses that would perceive the launch of an ICBM as the beginning of a nuclear war, launching even a non-nuclear ICBM is inadvisable. An alternative: hypersonic cruise missiles, which could travel at several times the speed of sound without appearing on radar as an existential threat. The Pentagon has at least five active hypersonic programs today. One of them, the rocket-launched HTV-2, is designed to break Mach 20; it was test-launched in April. Jon Proctor