Leathernext: Marines Want Better Networks, Sensors ' And Terminator Vision

Marines might soon see the world the way the Terminator does. Screencap: Atari via IGN

The Marines of the future are all about communication.

The Leathernecks want data networks that can keep them connected all the way from the decks of their ships to the beaches they storm. They want online search tools that rely on natural language instead of keywords (like the rest of us). And they want software that can sift through the oceans of data their wartime sensors and cameras collect ' including tools that can scan through faces in a crowd, like the Terminator, and alert Marines to danger.

That's according to the Corps' blueprint for its science and technology needs over the next 20 years. Communications are a big, gaping hole for the Marines of the present, and the Marines want to hand their successors more seamless, networked ways of talking. That's on top of other wish-list material, like advanced sensors that can sniff drugs and homemade bombs ' oh, and laser-stopping goggles.

The blueprint (.pdf), first published by Inside Defense, doesn't come out and criticize the Corps' current suite of communications tools and sensors. But there's a yawning technological chasm in-between the present-day Marines and where the Leathernecks want to be in 2025.

From 'flagpole to fighting hole,' the blueprint writes, Marines need to be in constant communication: 'The objective is to provide a holistic, end-to-end, turnkey [command-and-control] capability to execute commander's intent, facilitate implicit communications, visualize battlespace reality, promote initiative, enable centralized command and decentralized control, and ultimately accomplish the mission.'

There's a tyranny of distance here. It's easier for Marines to stay in radio contact while on patrol in Helmand or Anbar province than it is for them to talk to a mothership hundreds of nautical miles away. That's why the Corps is already testing out experimental long-range networks to share text, voice, data and imagery from way, way offshore. That prototyped network, the Distributed Tactical Communications System (DTCS), saw its first major test in February during a huge wargame.

A visualization from the Marines' future-tech blueprint of how its next-gen communications tools should work.

The blueprint doesn't necessarily endorse DTCS ' which works via satellite communications ' just the concept of long-range communications. The Corps must 'develop technologies that allow bandwidth limited sensors to exchange data and information with bandwidth restricted tactical users,' it reads, as well as to 'develop technologies to enable small unit leaders to set their own intelligence requirements (IRs) and receive intelligence feeds.'

In other words: the more networked a Marine unit is, the more autonomous it can be. Especially if it has tools to sift through all the intelligence data it needs to operate.

Drinking from the fire hose of data risks 'overwhelming' Marines who need to rapidly make sense of full-motion video and sensor data. 'The ability to intelligently and precisely filter and
automate processing of much of this data is critical to our capacity to ingest it into our decision-making cycle,' the blueprint reads. Alas, it doesn't come up with any suggestions for how to solve the problem ' by contrast, the far-out Pentagon researchers at Darpa are working on a camera suite that uses an algorithm to determine what's important and what's not ' but the Corps has very specific ideas for what it wants its next-generation sensors to collect.

New 'aerial and terrestrial sensors' should distinguish 'armed and unarmed personnel' ' modified metal detectors, perhaps? ' as well as spot 'Homemade Explosives (HME) and narcotics precursors.' It should crunch data into sizes small enough to port over networks in low-bandwidth environments like chaotic warzones. And the databases that store all this intel should 'provide question answering and semantic search capabilities to warfighters and intelligence analysts.' Siri, does that guy have an AK-47?

But perhaps the most ambitious sensing requirement contained in the blueprint would have the Marines 'seeing' the world much as the Terminator does.

New sensors should identify 'individuals of interest that could pose threats.' Not so far out there, theoretically speaking: The U.S. military takes a trove of biometric data from people in warzones that it uses to classify friend and foe; similar facial-recognition tech has already piqued Facebook's interest.

This is way next-step, though. The system would sit on a Marine's helmet 'and then transmit the data to where it can be assessed in near real time.' It would then use a 'feedback mechanism' to alert Marines to an identified threat. 'The system is needed specifically to identify any person-of-interest within a crowd, approaching a checkpoint, etc. that requires closer inspection but ideally would be sufficiently portable to be used by patrolling dismounted Marines. Threat detection beyond 30 meters is desirable.' Just add an eyepiece ' hey, Darpa's working on one ' and suddenly Marines see things like Arnold.

That may not be so far fetched. Other Marine ideas are more questionable. 'Eye protection ' to include optics ' is needed to counter the emerging threat of multi-spectral battlefield lasers,' the blueprint says. Anti-laser goggles would be quite a thing to behold. But if anyone's investing in battlefield lasers, and specifically dazzlers, it's the U.S. military, not its rivals. Unless the Marines are worried about friendly laser fire.

All this is perhaps more of a wish list than a blueprint. It's going to be a long, long time before most of these technologies make it to prototyping, let alone deploying with a Marine air-ground task force. Still, the Marines couldn't express their future communications needs any clearer.