The technological gap between the United States and its rivals gets smaller every year. The U.S. hopes to widen this gap by harnessing the power of Silicon Valley to create the next generation of intelligent war machines.

Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, are a core component of the insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2006 there were more than 2,500 IED attacks each month — the leading cause of casualties for U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. To this day, IEDs continue to pose the greatest of threats to the aims and overall military strategy of the United States and its allies.

The soldiers charged with locating and disarming IEDs belong to units called EOD: Explosive Ordinance Disposals. EOD teams are integral in the effort to suppress these kinds of destructive attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, disposing of about two bombs a day. An impression of how vital these soldiers are to forwarding the military ambitions of America in Iraq and Afghanistan is the $50,000 bounty that insurgent leadership has put on each EOD soldier’s head.

On a typical day in Iraq, the telltale signs of an IED — the wires, the piping, the roadside location — are detected, and the EOD team is called in to handle it. Unfortunately, on this particular day, the story would not end well. Generally, one must be about 150 feet away from an explosive device when it detonates to avoid injury or death. On this occasion, the soldier charged with disarming the bomb was almost on top of it. When the IED detonated, the soldier was engulfed in flames — by the time the rest of the team caught up, there was little left.

When it came time for the unit’s commander to write back to the United States and report on what had happened, he told of how his team had lost one of its bravest members. He spoke of how many times this particular member had saved the unit and how the team had been affected by the loss of their teammate.

When the Iraq war began, the U.S. military had only a handful of drones at its disposal and had no unmanned ground vehicles. As of January 2014, it operated close to ten thousand drones with hundreds of thousands of hours of airtime each year, as well as more than ten thousand unmanned ground vehicles that have detected and disposed of thousands of IEDs. The U.S. is looking at increasing the responsibility of unmanned vehicles in battle roles with the idea that automation and artificial intelligence will guide these missions with a minimal human interface. The principle of Moore’s Law — that each year technology develops at an exponential rate — applies with deadly consequences. We won’t simply be seeing tens of thousands of today’s robots operating on the battlefield, but tens of thousands of futuristic robots, harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence, making life and death decisions.

We are on the cusp of a historical revolution in warfare.

When the machine gun was invented, it radically changed the way war was conducted, and along with it came vast numbers of casualties. Militaries completely reassessed their strategies. The atomic bomb changed the way war was conducted again, with Cold War-like conflicts in place of full-scale warfare, with the ultimate strategy guided by the lingering threat of nuclear Armageddon. The introduction of robotics will be different: It’s no longer about the how — what goes faster or what makes a bigger boom — but the who.

In February this year, Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), addressed the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, a council made up of members of the U.S. House of Representatives. For nearly six decades, DARPA has played an essential role in maintaining the technological supremacy of the United States military. In particular, his DARPA colleagues “pursue extremely challenging but potentially paradigm-shifting technologies in support of national security,” according to Prabhakar. In short, DARPA is responsible for creating technology that only exists in the realms of science fiction.

“We are at a time where the United States isn’t the only one with the access to superior technology.”

From its research on jetpacks, teleportation, mind control, and robots, DARPA has long attracted the attention of conspiracy theorists for its top-secret projects and its “black budget” to conduct far-reaching technological research. Almost everyone in the world is reaping the rewards of DARPA’s efforts to bend the arc of technological history — both GPS and the internet are right at the top of the organization’s list of achievements.

February’s meeting was called so that Prabhakar could outline the military and technological goals of DARPA for the next few years.

This is the most advanced military technology agency in the world, explaining the future of warfare and the technology in the battlegrounds of tomorrow.

The future of warfare is being driven by different factors. The United States has traditionally been, technologically speaking, several decades ahead of its adversaries. This is due to offset strategies developed on behalf of the Department of Defense that sought to thwart the closing of the gap between the U.S. and its principal rivals.

The first offset strategy was initiated by President Dwight Eisenhower and involved the mass proliferation of nuclear warheads to act as a deterrent for the rapidly growing and mechanized Soviet Army. Once the USSR had reached parity in nuclear weapon technology, a second offset strategy was developed: The implementation of stealth technology, precision guidance for aircraft and complex weapons, and information networks. The technological superiority of the U.S. during this period allowed it considerable success in 1991 and 2003, in both Gulf Wars. This strategy also provided the U.S. a way to maintain its military superiority despite a period of declining military spending following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

The world is rapidly changing, with technological advances and new geopolitical threats emerging. In order for the United States to continue to defend its interests and those of its allies, a third offset strategy is being developed. According to Prabhakar, “The daily fare is a noxious stew of violent extremism, terrorism, and cross-border criminal activity. At the same time, the actions and the intentions of nation-states in every region also demand our focus and attention. The Department has embarked on an important shift in recent years to reenergize its ability to invent, experiment with, and operationalize advanced military capabilities that will be critical to deter and defeat if necessary the emerging great powers of this century.”

We are at a time where the United States isn’t the only nation with access to superior technology, where anyone with access to an iPad and off-the-shelf components can construct their own military-style drone. With the advent of the internet, humans are sharing information at a speed that has never before been achieved; technologies like 3-D printing and a boom in advanced manufacturing processes makes it easy for anyone to access information and the necessary components to construct technologies that were once only possessed by governments with limitless money and power.

This democratization of technology has been helped along by the commercial sector, which, for the last ten years or so has aided the proliferation of cutting-edge technology. Silicon Valley, with companies of the likes of Google and Apple with innovative investment in technology, has outstripped the governments of the world with affordable yet highly advanced pieces of consumer-level hardware. Terrorists are no longer fighting with outdated Cold War-era weapons but with technology that can be bought off Amazon. They are using iPads and weaponized consumer-level drones, and this situation is sure to become increasingly commonplace.

When we talk about future battlegrounds, we are talking about Al Qaeda 2.0 and the end of mankind’s 5,000-year-old monopoly on war. And unlike an atomic bomb or a fighter jet, you don’t need a huge manufacturing industry to create robotics. Already there is a Jihadi website that allows readers to sit at home and detonate an IED without ever leaving your seat. There is also no need to convince a robot that it will receive 72 virgins to get it to blow itself up.

To react to this growing threat, the third military offset strategy from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) involves working closely with the private sector — particularly those companies that innovate in the area of information technology and robotics — and repurposing that technology for warfare. That means tablets with added encryption for close air support, to state-of-the-art digital electronics with added unique radio chips for leapfrog radio frequency (RF) systems.

“A theme is, if you combine access to some leading-edge commercial technology and deeply integrate it with DoD secret sauce, that’s where you get phenomenal advances and capabilities,” says Prabhakar of DARPA’s intentions to work closely with commercial companies.

“Inventions that are already being tested for military use include crewless destroyers and drone swarms.”

The experimental culture of Silicon Valley, with its reputation for rapid, competition-fueled innovation, makes it the heartland for advances in military technology, and the government is banking on this. Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla, has apparently already been part of “high-level talks” at the Pentagon to give his advice on how best to break new ground and unlock the secrets of successful tech start-ups to apply them in a military context.

His advice? “Having an incentive structure that rewards innovation is extremely important,” he said in an interview after the meeting. “It’s economics 101. Whatever you reward will happen.”

Already the Department of Defense has opened an outreach center in Silicon Valley in an effort to convince bright, innovative start-ups to turn their minds to national-security measures. So far, it has had mixed results, and after just one year was overhauled with new leadership. Nevertheless, the Pentagon plans to invest $18 billion on the Third Offset and it is apparent that advances in artificial-intelligence technology and autonomous-warfare systems are going to lead the new era of human-machine collaboration and combat teaming.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work has proclaimed that “network-on-network” warfare against emerging rivals China and Russia may be the future. The aim is integration between humans and robots, to enhance human capabilities, rather than replace them. The goal is not “killer robots that roam the battlefield,” says Work. “I think more in terms of Iron Man — the ability of a machine to assist a human, where the human is still in control in all matters, but the machine makes the human much more powerful and much more capable.”

The inventions that are already being tested for military use include crewless submarines, frigates, destroyers, pilotless helicopters, and drone “swarms” — miniature drones that can be dropped by a fighter jet and fly together and disperse at the command of a pilot thousands of miles away. This is the unmanned future of war.

It brings to the fore a series of moral dilemmas that have never been considered in the arenas of warfare. As we increasingly move toward an era of automation, we are saving troops by taking boots off the ground.  At the same time, as machines become the front line of our offensive strategies, we risk becoming disconnected from the reality of war. If we begin to view the cost of war as less because of the reduction in human involvement, this could bring the barrier of launching a conflict even lower, resulting in seeking out violent solutions more readily than peaceful ones.

Pandora’s Box has already been opened. Technological advances in all areas will bring about a new era of unknown advantages, and along with it, questions that we don’t yet have answers for. It is especially important that we consider the effects of technological developments in the arenas of war. With them will come life-saving technologies that have the potential to improve on the brutality of war, but there will be costs that should be well-understood before we go too far and too fast.

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Deadly Designs

U.S. military spending accounts for about 39 percent of all global military spending. While much of that is allocated to sustaining overseas ground wars, a figure as big as that means some powerful weapons are currently in development. Here are some of the most terrifying designs the United States military has to offer.

1 — Photon Cannon: Working in collaboration with Boeing, the military has developed a direct-energy weapon that emits a ten-kilowatt beam of energy capable of taking down missiles and mortar fire. It’s called the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator, or HEL MD.

2 — Electromagnetic Rail Gun: An EM Rail Gun works through a set of parallel conductive rails and a sliding armature. When a charge is passed through the rails, electromagnetic effect drives the armature to fire a projectile without the use of gunpowder or explosives. For a long time it wasn’t possible; however, recently British defense conglomerate BAE has designed a working prototype with an impressive muzzle velocity of 5,700 mph and a range of over 125 miles.

3 — Precision Guided Firearm: Texas-based TrackingPoint has created a rifle, dubbed the Linux Gun, that uses an onboard computer to calculate variables such as wind speed and target speed to communicate to the user where the bullet will land. All of this at a range of 1,800 yards. According to the TrackingPoint market official, the gun hits 70 percent of its targets from around 1,000 yards, even if fired by “inexperienced” users. TrackingPoint’s website specifically mentions defense against Islamic extremists.

 4 — TALOS: Otherwise known as the “Iron Man Suit,” the Tactical Light Operator Suit can repel bullets, help lift heavy objects, and provide lifesaving oxygen. The suit uses a form of liquid armor to stop bullets that can be activated on command via an electromagnetic current. Even Barack Obama couldn’t resist the reference, announcing, “we’re building Iron Man,” in a press conference. TALOS is still in development, but is set to hit the battlefield in 2018.

 5 — Hybrid Insect MEMS: Part machine, part insect. This project aims to implant small mechanical systems inside insects during the coccoon or pupal phase with the aim of gaining full control over the insect’s body upon metamorphosis. The robo-insect would be able to be “operated” using a remote control. Sensors and audio-detection instruments would also be embedded for the purpose of data collection.

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Did you know…

Ever wonder where the internet came from, or stealth airplanes, or even your trusty GPS? The answer, in some part, is DARPA — America’s military agency responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. It’s what happens when you give a government military agency unlimited funds. DARPA is responsible for many of the most groundbreaking technologies we use in our everyday lives.

The Internet:  What began as a project to help U.S. research scientists communicate with each other turned into one of the most significant technological advances of our time.

The internet was created in 1969 under the supervision of visionaries like Bob Taylor for the U.S. Department of Defense. DARPA allowed researchers to experiment with methods for computers to communicate with each other. Their creation, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), originally linked only four separate computer sites at U.S. universities and research institutes, where it was used primarily by scientists.

At 10:30 p.m. on October 29, 1969, the first host-to-host connection between computers was established, creating the first ever network. The first email was sent across in 1972, and people started referring to it as “The Internet” (in capitals) in 1973.

GPS: There are two technologies developed by DARPA that the world couldn’t function without today.

One is the internet, and the other is GPS; if either were to be switched off, everything from global commerce to national defense systems would be compromised to the point of potential collapse.

The Global Positioning System project dates back to 1973, and was originally very much a military system, funded and created by the U.S. Department of Defense. However, the concept dates back even further, to the very early days of DARPA itself.

SIRI: Originally developed to offer better tools for soldiers in the field, Siri is an offshoot of the DARPA-funded CALO, an artificial-intelligence project that attempted to integrate numerous AI technologies into a cognitive assistant. It was developed to provide a translation of foreign languages and extract contextual information from those translations — and by doing so enable troops in the field to maintain fluent bilingual communication without previous knowledge of the language.

The Siri voice-recognition system embedded in the latest iPhone was born out of DARPA research.

Google Maps: The ability to zoom in on Google maps and virtually walk down streets has its roots in a DARPA-funded team at MIT.

The team beat Google to the street-view business by three decades with its “Aspen Movie Map.”

In the 1970s, the team mounted cameras on cars and drove around Aspen, Colorado, and then combined it with other data, still photographs, and audio.

“Its goal was to create so immersive and realistic a ‘first visit’ that newcomers would literally feel at home, or that they had been there before,” said Andy Lippman, who worked on the project.

PHOTOS: Photos: ISTOCK / DARPA