Defense Focus: Weapons evolution -- Part 4

WASHINGTON, April 23 (UPI) -- Weapons systems in the 21st century are evolving in different directions: They are getting bigger and smaller, vastly more high tech and far simpler -- all at the same time.

Here again, the parallels are striking between the complexity, savagery and rapid adaptations of life forms in nature, and those developed by human designers to kill other people or prevent other people from killing them.

At the top or more spectacular end of the weapons spectrum, the race is to create more brain power and intelligence in weapons systems all the time. But sometimes the pace is so forced that major mistakes are made and entire systems break down.

Some U.S. intelligence analysts and engineers have warned for years that the Pentagon and its defense contractors keep making intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance, and communications, command and control satellites increasingly bigger so each new orbiting platform is carrying many more and increasingly ambitious systems than its predecessors. But the larger the satellite or orbiting platform, the harder it is to maneuver in orbit with a limited amount of fuel and the bigger the target it makes for anti-satellite weapons systems such as the one China successfully demonstrated in January 2007.

Also, the more ambitious the electronics and programming or "brain power" that are installed in satellites, the greater the likelihood that the system will not work. This problem led to the Bush administration scrapping the Future Intelligence Architecture generation of new space ISR systems commissioned by the Clinton administration after $4 billion had already been spent on it. It also explains the failure of GLONASS -- the Russian Global Navigation Satellite System -- that was supposed to make the Kremlin independent of the highly successful U.S. Global Positioning System. Russian high-tech industry simply did not have the resources to match the capabilities of the GPS satellite constellation within a tight timetable that Russia's political masters decreed for it.

Critics make the same charge of unworkable over-complexity against the ambitious Future Combat Systems program of the U.S. Department of Defense that was pushed through by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his lieutenants. The system was originally described as needing 33 million lines of code but will now need at least twice as much.

Armor and protection went out of fashion during the long peace between the great powers. But as armies get involved increasingly in long, bloody and relatively high-casualty counterinsurgency operations like the Russians in Chechnya and the United States in Iraq, the use of simple, low-tech steel for protection is coming back into fashion. Higher-tech variations of the same principle are the upgrades of tanks and armored personal carriers with greater protection, including reactive armor for Main Battle Tanks.

The Israeli army put its revered but venerable Merkava "Chariot" -- MBT through that kind of upgrade after suffering unexpectedly heavy casualties and damages to its MBT force from shaped charge improvised explosive devices in its mini-war with Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon in July 2006.

There is one last lesson to be learned from nature in studying the evolution of weapons systems. Nature loves surprises, and the key to survival is not in being able to anticipate or plan ahead for them -- none can. It is to be able to rapidly adapt to the new challenges and conditions when they come. That is the process that the great U.S. military theorist U.S. Air Force Col. John Boyd called the OODA Loop -- Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action. The OODA principle works in weapons design, too. And it still operates today when the Darwinian struggle for survival between competing weapons systems is faster and more deadly than ever.