Enabling Battlespace Persistent Surveillance: The Form, Function, and Future of Smart Dust

摘要

In 2025, the military's need for persistent surveillance applications will extend beyond current airborne platforms such as Global Hawk and Predator. The future of 2025 contains potential enemies with a material and information focus capable of conducting regular and irregular warfare on foreign lands as well as the continental United States. The U.S. military must invest its energy and money today into researching enabling technologies such as nanotechnology, wireless networks, and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). Nanotechnology reduces today's technology to the molecular level. Wireless networks can link people, computers, and sensors beyond the borders of nations without the need for costly hardware-intensive infrastructure. Finally, MEMS have the capability to act as independent or networked sensors. Fused together, these technologies can produce a network of nanosized particles -- Smart Dust -- that can be distributed over the battlefield to measure, collect, and disseminate information, Smart Dust will transform persistent surveillance for the warfighter. The U.S. military should lead the research and development of these enabling technologies so that Smart Dust will be a viable application by 2025.