Pentagon Launches New Push For Tunnel-Warfare Tech
Both North Korea and ISIL have massive tunnel complexes. They are a good way to avoid US surveillance.
As potential adversaries build out sophisticated underground complexes, the U.S. military will try to keep up by going down.
ISIS and the North Korean regime share at least one tactic in common: both have sought to counter the U.S.military’s monitor-and-strike capabilities by building vast subterranean tunnel complexes. They’re not the only potential adversaries to do so. On Thursday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced a new grand challenge in search of new tech to map, navigate, and search underground.
Tunneling is once again rising in importance as adversaries seek to evade the ever-growing number of cameras and sensors that the U.S. can employ to photograph and collect intelligence on the Earth’s surface. In 2015, ISIS made a practice of attacking buildings, street intersections, and other targets via underground passageways rigged with explosives. “The use of tunnels for IEDs and other purposes will continue to provide a low risk strategic advantage to extremist organizations and therefore requires continued development efforts and fielding of effective mitigation techniques,” according to a 2015 brief from the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization.
As the war continued, ISIS’s use of tunnels evolved as a means to launch sneak attacks and collect intelligence with cheap drones.