Vignettes
Sketching a future of intelligence and defense breakthroughs.
HAPPYMAX: bring-your-own-device defense force.
A fully software driven defense force would look odd, a Ready Player One meets Amazon Basics mashup, simultaneously mass customizable and mass produced.
With HAPPYMAX, I imagine vehicles of all different types, acquired from all over, in various states of repair, each with its own strengths. The drone from Montana is good with alpine winds, the Sao Paolo-developed patrol boat glides in shallow waters, and the Canadian ice cutter plows the way for Arctic trade routes. There are no rifles because there are no soldiers to carry them.
Each vehicle (let’s call them End Effect Platforms, EEPs, because you still need a good acronym to transform something from an experiment to a program of record), is unmanned and fully autonomous. After acquisition, the memory is flashed and loaded with the latest version of milOS.
It’s now part of the country’s military operating system, a new node in the network. It’s not just vehicles — comms devices, energy systems, etc, are all part of the HAPPYMAX world. As long as you can flash milOS onto it, it’s good to go.
The fact that it was designed Brazil (or China) has no bearing on who can use it because it’s useless without software, as dumb as a bricked iPhone.
HOTWATER: high side systems at home.
It’s both funny and sad that intelligence officers can access the most advanced tech in the world, but can’t do email at home. With few exceptions, they can’t “access the system” outside the building at all.
HOTWATER is a trusted network that allows intelligence officers to do their jobs outside of trusted facilities, en masse. It can continuously verify both identity and intent.
That is to say, the network can understand on a continuous basis: are you who you say you are, and are you doing what you say you’re doing?
Major tech breakthroughs enable HOTWATER: wicked-fast secure multiparty computation, realtime and dynamic social verification, safe brain-machine interfacing, and advanced materials for bio-coupling.
The platform will not look like a computer that we’re used to today — no keyboard, monitor, hard drive, or other traditional hardware — but it will get close to the level of connectivity we’ve grown accustomed to.
HIGHTIDE: putting weather to work.
HIGHTIDE is programmable weather, made possible by decades of research, and made necessary by climate change.
Weather doesn’t have to be catastrophic to be effective for military purposes. HIGHTIDE can create sustained cloud cover (helping computer-vision based targeting systems by dulling shadows), mild dust storms (degrading UAV motors in a warzone), lightening strikes (disrupting space launches), rough seas and heavy fog (delaying naval movements), or simply lack of sun (undermining morale). It can also disrupt crop yields, wreaking havoc on commodity prices and trade balances.
Weather modification is not new. The 1960s/70s were a heyday for the science, resulting in successful cloud seeding, hurricane manipulation, hail prevention, and other modifications.
In our warming climate, we’ll likely use HIGHTIDE for humanitarian purposes. We could save lives by weakening a hurricane, and improve livelihoods by lengthening a rainy season for farming. A key question — debated previously, but which will undoubtedly come up again — is whether weather should be considered as a tool for military purposes.
