THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE has given millions of dollars to a company you’ve never heard of in order to fund something called Project M, whose aim is “The Use of Modern Sensing and Actuation Technologies Coupled With High Speed Processing to Control Complex Dynamic Systems.” In English, this means three objectives: “active control of vibration, active control of mechanical shock, and active control of magnetic fields.”
But for what purpose? To create an army of Magnetos capable of hurling large metallic objects at the enemy? Not quite. To find the answer, I turned to the recently retired chief of naval research, Rear Admiral Jay M. Cohen.
I had an opportunity to speak with the admiral a few months ago when I first heard of the possible military applications for magnetic-levitation technology. Cohen, in a phone interview, explained how the Navy’s interest in MagLev originated with the need for silencing machinery aboard ships. “Throughout history,” he said, “we had used rubber mounts” to reduce noise and vibration. “What all navies have traditionally done is put heavy, large cables all around the perimeter of the ship. We then pass electric currents through them to try and nullify the electromagnetic feature of the steel hulls.”
But what if you could drastically reduce the amount of noise a ship makes directly at the source? One small company in Alexandria, Virginia, was proposing just that. The result was Project M.
Vibration & Sound Solutions Limited (VSSL) suggested placing mag-lev sensors at the source of the electromagnetic fields, such as motors. The idea was to actually levitate the machinery with an array of electromagnets while using a small amount of power. “The technology really worked,” says Admiral Cohen. “But, like other technologies, it was ahead of its time.” He described the innovation as a “disruptive technology” that goes “against the more tried and true ways of doing things.” And “for whatever reason, the decision was taken to not pursue at that time that very promising technology.” (Cohen was quick to point out the decision was not his but, as he called it, “Big Navy’s.”)
There would, however, be other opportunities. According to a recent study by the Naval Health Research Center, “Boat operators and crew of U.S. Navy Special Warfare combatant craft are routinely exposed to severe boat-wave impacts as part of their mission training and execution.” Since 9/11, there has been a growing need for littoral operations–taking place on shores and coastlines and requiring fast-moving transports and the deployment of SEAL teams. But en route to missions, riding on high-speed vessels such as the Mark V, said Cohen, “You find that we’re bracing ourselves, either standing and holding on to a bar or backbrace . . . or we’re [resting] on passive shock-mitigating seats. It occurred to me that we were doing damage.”
Indeed, as a Mark V hits the waves at 45 knots, those on board can experience up to 8 G’s of pressure. “And that’s vertical on their spine,” notes the admiral. “You can imagine the tap-tap-tap. . . .” The successor to the Mark V is the Sea Fighter (formerly the X-Craft), a 262-foot, 1,000-ton, aluminum catamaran that travels up to 50 knots on the high seas. This led Cohen to “look at decoupling the human from the impact of the craft using this magnetic levitation, and that was sort of the genesis of the seats that you see today.”
THE SHOCK-MITIGATING SEATS were developed by VSSL, and fast-tracked under the Office of Naval Research’s “Swampworks” program. As Cohen explained it, “the first seat we did was what we call a semipassive seat. It denses the acceleration but then reduces it. It takes us from about 8 G’s to 2 to 3 G’s, and it has removed the rapid shock, the bang–and it worked well.” Secondly, “you have a wave-height sensor forward on the small ship and you could anticipate what the reaction of the ship would be to its meeting that wave. You could then pre-position that seat to get the optimum G-force reduction.”
Not only did I sit on one of the prototype shock-mitigating seats at VSSL’s facility–an unassuming 23,000-square-foot low-rise office that consumes at least one block–but I also watched the company’s “Six Degree-Of-Freedom Motion Simulator” at work. The test rig is impressively equipped with solid-state electromagnetic drivers and able to produce an effective shock environment. That’s not all they are working on.
ADMIRAL COHEN was eager to tell me about a project involving, among others, Penske, Ford, and VSSL. It’s called ULTRA: “We took, with Ford’s help, . . . an F-350 frame and diesel engine–now that’s not the end product, but we’re just taking a stock frame that can carry the weight and we’re adding a four-passenger compartment that looks a little bit like the lunar module. The reason we did that is that the bottom and top are sloped so if a landmine should go off under it, it dissipates the blast and you deflect incoming weapons like RPG’s. But this is heavily armored and lighter than a Humvee . . . and the four passengers sit with their back to a center post and the driver is sitting facing forward between the wheels so the wheels don’t get blown into him. . . . And then we have a cupola for a turret gunner.”
What Cohen found most disturbing is that in Iraq, despite riding in “up-armored” Humvees, “the passengers in some cases end up dying not from shrapnel but from the lateral acceleration of the blast [of an IED]. It’s like shaken-baby syndrome.” Cohen tasked VSSL to develop shock-mitigating seats for this vehicle. He’s also looked at the potential for such seats aboard helicopters. “Instead of having these bench seats, we’d have a light seat but have a battery pack like from a motorcycle, a squib, and an acceleration sensor. What would happen would be as the helicopter were falling out of the sky, and you sensed this high rate of acceleration, the squib would fire and . . . the seat would pre-position, be levitated, so that when you crashed, instead of having the instantaneous G-loading, the seat would have a more linear G-loading, to reduce the G’s on the passengers or pilot.”
(VSSL, meanwhile, has also developed a hydraulic knee-brace containing sensors that would help ease the mobility of U.S. troops in mountainous terrain. The brace would be worn to prevent blown-out knees and would act, in effect, like part of an exoskeleton.)
TALKING WITH COHEN is a little bit like talking to “Q” from the James Bond movies. Often times the admiral can barely contain his excitement about the latest technologies. But he also understood the nature of his job and the enormous challenges the modern battlefield presents.
Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
