Paul Scharre, director of the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security, and Keith Maxwell, the project manager of Lockheed Martin’s Onyx Exoskeleton, discuss the company’s new powered lower-body suit that helps improve soldier endurance and performance as well as other efforts to enhance the capabilities of future troops with Defense & Aerospace Editor Vago Muradian. The interview followed the launch of the last report in CNAS’ Super Soldier series aimed at highlighting opportunities to bolster the endurance, capabilities and protection for future ground forces. Our coverage is in partnership with CNAS.
Paul Scharre, CNAS
Keith Maxwell, Lockheed Martin
Center for a New American Security
December 2018
Vago Muradian: Welcome to the Defense and Aerospace Report. I’m Vago Muradian here at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC at the conclusion of a fantastic event, part of this think tank’s series on Super Soldiers concluded today. Something led by Paul Scharre who heads the Technology and National Security program here at CNAS. And Keith Maxwell, who is with Lockheed Martin, the Program Manager of the Onyx System, the exoskeleton which is just awesome. Keith, you’ve got the best pants in Washington today, by an order of magnitude. It’s totally outstanding, and congratulations on the Popular Science Award for Greatest Military Technology as well as a $7 million contract. Christmas came early for you guys.
Keith Maxwell: It did. We’re very excited about it.
Mr. Muradian: Paul, let me come to you and talk to you about the Super Soldiers series. You’ve been working this for many years. A decorated soldier, you were Special Operations, Reconnaissance Team leader, 3rdRangers. You were also 75thRanger Training and everything else. Iraq and Afghanistan deployments. Keith, you’re also a highly-experienced operator in your right.
Talk to us a little bit about augmentation, the technology, the soldier of the future. Because there are two parts of this that you guys made clear in the event. One is on the operational side, making soldiers, you know, increase their endurance, increasing their ability to lift and to move, but also not to injure themselves. Because there isn’t a soldier I don’t know, especially in the combat arms, who doesn’t come away with some form of disability at the end of the day. In fact you’re —
Phil Scharre: I’m one of them, yeah.
Mr. Muradian: Exactly, that’s who we were talking about, and you had to have surgery in order to repair something that was a service-related injury.
Talk to us about the findings of the series and some of the concrete recommendations you’re making to the department which is already thinking about this topic in part because you were in the department, forcing them to think about this issue.
Mr. Scharre:We’re wrapping up today the culmination of our Super Soldier series. Seven reports that look at ways to improve individual warfighter survivability. We’ve looked at a range of different technologies and policy solutions, exoskeletons, robot team mates, human enhancement, ways to lighten the load of what people are already carrying today.
What’s really motivating is we’re in a place today where Infantry, a very small percentage of our force, less than four percent of the military, disproportionately suffers the casualties in U.S. conflicts. Over 80 percent of U.S. casualties since World War II have been in the Infantry. So how do we change this paradigm? How do we leverage technology to better protect individual warfighters right out there on the front lines?
Load is part of it. We’ve added all sorts of new whiz-bang technologies. Things like body armor, night vision, better optics on your rifle. These things make people more effective but they also add weight. Body armor alone, despite really important efforts the Army has done to trim the weight of armor, it still accounts for over half of the recommended 50-pound fighting load that people carry. So they carry a heck of a lot more than that today and it slows people down.
I kid you not, I did a mission in Afghanistan, we carried 160 pounds up a mountain one time. We didn’t go very far. And that decrease in mobility then comes at a price. Our troops are getting out-maneuvered by the enemy, the enemy is initiating attacks that’s [very] normal, and that’s not an isolated incident.
We look at the average load the soldiers and marines are carrying overseas in current wars, 117 to 119 pounds That’s just incredible, and that’s not sustainable.
So there are lots of ways to deal with this. One is off-loading weight to robotic team mates. There’s a lot of opportunity there. Another one is exoskeletons, we’re very excited to bring in an exoskeleton prototype today that Keith was able to demonstrate at this event here at CNAS to let people see that there’s actually real technology today. It’s matured a lot in the past couple of years, and we’re in a place now where the Army’s looking at the system and taking it out and doing some testing to develop it further.
Mr. Muradian: And it’s extraordinary technology which is going to change warfare but it’s also going to change society, whether for wounded warriors or even older folks who want to be able to maintain their mobility. And you mentioned some great applications in terms of even on construction and manufacturing.
Keith, walk us through this rig. I remember writing about this more than 20 years ago, and the whole thing was power density, right? How can you power it? They were big and they were bulky and they may have looked cool. I’m not going to mention the comic book hero that everybody’s been invoking today because this is very very different from that at the end of the day.
Walk us through this iteration of the suit, because its capabilities are extraordinary. This is a two-year-old rig. It’s been operating with zero defect for two years. Talk to us a little bit about the architecture and how all of this magic happens. Because you showed some pretty cool dance moves out there during the presentation. I hope we can find the video and show that. But you’ve got full mobility with it. Talk to us a little bit about how you guys made this magic happen.
Mr. Maxwell: This whole program began about ten years ago. We began with a system we called Hulk, and it was, as you described, a big, bulky system. Eight-five pounds. It required six batteries. It lasted for a few hours. It was never going to get us where we needed to be.
Ten years of development later, new partnerships. We’re now working with a company in Canada called B-Temia. We licensed the base technology for this system, the Onyx, from them, and then we’ve been developing steadily, just trying to make it ready for soldiers over that time.
Today you’re looking at a system that weighs 19.5 pounds. It will get lighter as we go through a weight reduction type effort. It may gain some pounds back after we’re done because we’re going to ruggedize it. We want it to be ready for soldier use. We understand the environment. We’ve been there. We do that. So that’s kind of where we’re going with the technology itself.
How do we make guys go further, farther, faster? How do we do that? Right now we believe the Onyx is the answer.
Mr. Muradian: And walk us through, so power wise, talk to us about the endurance. You guys use standard batteries which is a good thing. And so walk us through the power, the endurance, and also how the system works. Because you have extremely powerful electromechanical motors but also an extremely sophisticated sensor system, but in a very elegant package.
Mr. Maxwell: Thanks on the compliment, but the system itself now will get more streamlined. That’s the objective. Get it as tight and conformal to the body as possible. That improves its efficiency on the body and that’s the way we get even better performance out of it.
In terms of the structure of the system, this system is built around these two actuators at the knee. Literally what that’s doing is providing a substitute for my muscles. So as I’m climbing stairs, as I’m going up mountains, as I’m in a low crawl, if I’m going through a culvert or a subterranean tunnel and I’m in a crouch, all those things that burn up my quads, all those things that just eat soldiers up, particularly with load, those things go away because the system is literally providing me the power that allows me to do that as though I was just walking.
Mr. Muradian: So it’s eight hours on two batteries.
Mr. Maxwell: Eight hours on two batteries, up to 16 hours on four batteries, and that’s constant utility. That’s constant motion.
Mr. Muradian: With load.
Mr. Maxwell: With load. So that’s a constant activity with just a small battery on here I’m operating all day. I’m not doing anything that labor intensive. And again, that’s one of those things. I don’t want the system to be consuming energy when it doesn’t have to. I want it to be providing me with support when I ask for it.
Mr. Muradian: You used a great analogy that first you put it on it was sort of like having an animal on you or something like that.
Mr. Maxwell: It did. It felt a lot like having a live animal. If you’ve ever ridden a horse before you understand what that’s like to kind of be steering something else that’s outside of you.
Over time it becomes literally a part of me. I don’t think about it anymore. I simply walk, I simply squat, I simply do all the things that I would normally do in my daily life and the machine moves with me.
What I realize over time is, it’s providing me with all this additional energy, all this additional augmentation, that it just becomes a natural extension of my body.
Mr. Muradian: And give us that analogy you gave where there were a bunch of soldiers who were using it and what they were able to do with and without the suit in terms of doing those lifts at the end of the day.
Mr. Maxwell: Kind of a remarkable event. I’m at AP Hill there in Virginia, and we’re with a group of operators, and these guys from early in the morning until late in the afternoon are going through their daily drill. We’ve got the early precursor of this suit on a bunch of the guys. At the end of the day, after marching for miles, running up and down five floors of a building, going through the subterranean tunnels, all that kind of stuff, the beginning of the morning the guy does 26 repetitions without the system with a 185-pound load. Twenty-six squats. At the end of the day after having done all that different activity, with the system, he does 72. So right there it tells you everything you need to know about what the system is doing. Not only am I better performing, but I have so much more energy at the end of the day than I started with. So I’m in a better place.
Mr. Muradian: And also the manhole cover lift thing, right?
Mr. Maxwell: Extraordinary. Normally that’s a two-man lift. It’s 350-400 pound manhole, and the guys are doing down into the hole. One guy goes over there, he’s wearing this kit, put the key in, pulls the cover right off the hole, and down the guys go in their full MOP kit. That ability to take one more guy away from doing the lift and keeping him on security where he’s got a rifle in his hands, it may be the difference between observing a threat or not. And that’s keeping guys alive.
Mr. Muradian: Exactly. And you’re lifting with your legs, which is a key part of it.
Let me go, Paul, to you in terms of sort of the future of warfare, right? That’s something that you focus on and you’ve been looking at this.
The first thing is, even in this iteration it’s game-changing because now it has useful battery life, right? Standard batteries so that you can easily recharge them and use them in the field for what would be sort of a typical day and carry some more batteries, and you solve the challenge for even having greater coverage.
What are the next phases of this? I know there are parts of this that are highly classified in terms of the kind of armoring and integration and other things that can happen with the system, but talk to us about how you foresee this as a combat Infantryman, as a Special Operator who was out there and done the job, what are sort of the next iterations that you see being fielded rapidly? Because troops are engaged in contact right now doing missions all over the world where that endurance, the speed and the strength is going to be something that’s going to be vital and make the difference.
Mr. Scharre: One of the things we found in this Super Soldiers project is that there are a lot of technologies where making investments are going to pay off 15-20 years down the road. You’ve got to make the investments. But there are also things like this exoskeleton that are viable today that can be put in the hands of people on the ground and they start to have a meaningful impact. Not just exoskeletons, but also things like robotic team mates that can carry your gear. Small drones that can go inside buildings, navigate on their own, map out buildings. So you wouldn’t have to have a team rushing through the fatal funnel themselves. Things like human performance enhancement technology that exist, that are real, both cognitive and physical performance enhancement that are opportunities for us to grab a hold of.
And all of this stuff adds up. All of this stuff gets to a place where you can get a meaningful advantage on our adversaries and sort of tilt this balance, make sure that when our troops are on the front lines engaged in firefights, they’re the ones that are winning those fights and are coming home safe.
Mr. Muradian: There was an Army Special Operator, a dear friend of mine, and we were talking about lightweight equipment. He said 500 pounds of lightweight equipment is still 500 pounds of lightweight equipment. You can saw your handle off the toothbrush. At the end of the day, if you have enough crap it’s still heavy.
How are you applying your warrior acumen to this? You and your team, to make sure that you’re tailoring this in the right way for it to be adaptable, flexible, you’ve got soldiers of all sizes. You guys want to get rid of the Allen Keys, for example, that go with this. Walk us through how that experience is shaping it and what sort of Gen 2, Gen 3, Gen 4. Because Lockheed doesn’t do anything that’s just Gen 1.
Mr. Maxwell: Basically when you look at this, and we talked a little bit about the toolless future of the system, we don’t want soldiers carrying additional tools. Right? They’ve got enough tools for their rifle. They don’t need any more than that so we want to take that out of the equation, make it very, very simple for them to resize, give to the next guy, be able to use across the spectrum of the soldiers. When I don’t have it, you can use it. That’s kind of important.
But we also need to ruggedize this thing. We need to get it to the point where we can immerse it in water. We put it in all the different environments in which soldiers can expect to operate. Shock, vibration, water immersion, saturation, salt spray, all those different things that soldiers are exposed to, the systems have to operate in, and they can’t fail.
So the one thing we know is, failure’s not an option on this equipment.
Mr. Muradian: And you’ll have to change the color because that is actually Lockheed blue.
Mr. Maxwell: It is Lockheed blue, but I can guarantee you, we do have multi-cam and it will be on the systems that go up to 10thMountain.
Mr. Muradian: It’s quite fetching, unless you want to be screaming Go Navy all the time. The game is coming up, although I think Army’s going to feel pretty confident this year. But I digress.
Paul, what’s the state of the art of this technology in other nations around the world? Sam Bendett who’s a frequent guest on our web site, out of Center for Naval Analyses, talked a little bit about the Russians and how fast they’ve been moving in this space, almost getting close to fielding it in combat in Syria, their version of the exoskeleton.
Walk us through what the state of the art of this technology is around the world.
Mr. Scharre: The Russians have fielded, as Sam had mentioned, an exoskeleton prototype. I think what’s worth keeping in mind is that a lot of the underlying enablers of this come out of advanced computer processing power, robotics that are widely distributed around the world. They are widely available. The U.S. is not the only country that has access to the underlying technology here. There’s some really impressive engineering that goes behind this, but those kind of advanced chips and processing power, anybody else can get a hold of that. So we’re going to have to live with a world where our major nation state competitors like Russia, like China, eventually are going to be able to build this kind of technology.
The real trick here is moving faster. How do we operate in a world where this technology is so available? We’ve got to be able to move faster, advance prototypes, do testing, do evaluation, and then spin this into our force very quickly. We can’t be building things on 20- or 30-year time lines. It’s going to be too late. And so we’ve got to make sure that we get this stuff out to the field quickly.
Mr. Muradian: Let me ask you an upper body question because I know that came up. It’s a two-part question. One is an upper body question and then the other one is the ankles. You left the ankles unsupported for the moment in order to be able to give you that ease of mobility. Foot plates can get very complicated, and you talked about the importance of gait. Talk to us about the upper body portion of this.
And then also there is a feature you can put on this that actually will dramatically increase your load-carrying capability, but not actually change how you walk.
Mr. Maxwell: Right. We’ve already got a prototype of the system that drives the load to the ground. So here the waist would be solid instead of flexible. And that would go into the spine, and that spine would support the load of the ruck. It goes down into the hip, goes down into the architecture of the legs, goes to the ground. The load is supported.
That’s a pretty simple solution. We’ve done it before. We’ve got prototypes of it now. This is really about driving out fatigue. It’s not necessarily about transporting more load to ground. We’re not even encouraging people to take more load to ground.
Really the reason why that’s so important is think about it this way. If a soldier cannot carry it without the system, what happens in the event that the system is shot up? What happens when it’s broken and it’s no longer there? That load can’t be distributed across soldiers any longer, it’s just too much.
So we want to keep it in a domain of human capable technology. That’s really the important thing, and we hope the Army is hearing what we say when we say that.
The upper body part, we have prototypes of upper body technologies. Mostly it’s about pick and place. Pick things up, heavy things, and carry them. We’re not looking at that in terms of this round, mostly because they’re so energy intensive. We have so many different, you know, range of motion in the leg. The upper body is many, many more joints and you’ve got to augment all of them in order to make that work so it’s an energy hog at the moment and the technology’s just not there to support it.
Mr. Muradian: And what’s it feel like when it’s turned off to walk? Because it would look like it’s well distributed, isn’t it?
Mr. Maxwell: I just turned it off and it feels like walking in water.
Mr. Muradian: And it doesn’t even feel like a burden.
Mr. Maxwell: No, not a real burden at all.
Mr. Muradian: Let me carry off on something that Keith said in the demonstration. You started it off by making a human growth, that if you wanted to turn this into a sort of meat monsters you could do that with bovine hormones, for example. But that’s not what we’re doing as the United States. We’re doing this through mechanical augmentation and a man/machine interface.
There is a concern, Paul, and I know because you and I’ve talked about it and I know you’re researched this, that our adversaries may not be as squeamish, for example, I mean there’s the recent medical experiment that a Chinese scientist just unveiled which has many geneticists and other scientists alarmed even in China for basically creating human life through an altered gene form.
What are the ways that we need to think about this as a nation that’s ethical? We have done some of our own augmentation work, but that’s more been through drugs that give you added strength and endurance. But then we’ve also, you know, Special Operators are familiar with the downsides of that as well, which can be bad. So we’ve always sought greater physical fitness in systems like this.
Talk to us about some of the ethical, intellectual and operational challenges we may face in a space where we have adversaries that are not as constrained morally as we are.
Mr. Scharre: I want to I guess first correct a misperception which is that we’re not doing human performance enhancement in the United States military. That’s not true. We use widely throughout the force, one of the most widely used human performance enhancing drugs on the planet which is caffeine. It increases cognitive performance. It fights fatigue. We use it widely in the military. We’ve got chow halls overseas stocked full of Rip Its. And then we’ve got things like GNC’s on military bases where service members are going and buying products and pumping it [for] their body, all of that in an unregulated fashion.
That is probably today the worst possible way to approach this technology because we’re using the stuff in a way that’s not regulated by a medical professional; we’re not thinking about side effects and balancing risk; we have sleep problems across the force for a variety of reasons, but caffeine is probably a contributor to that. And in particular, there are newer technologies that are better.
Army tests, Army research has shown Modafinil, a fatigue-fighting agent, can keep people up for 40 hours at a time without any degradation of performance and with fewer side effects than caffeine. And less risk of being habit-forming than the Dextroamphetamine that’s been used in the past. So there is stuff that’s out there that’s real, that’s relatively low risk. These are things that we actually should be looking at this technology, evaluating it, and where it makes sense, where the benefits outweigh the risks or tradeoffs, incorporating it into our force.
There are pockets of this going on inside the U.S. military. There’s good research going on at different labs, but there’s no cohesive plan and that’s a real problem because the stuff is not science fiction. There’s a lot of technologies both on the physical and cognitive side. We talk about this in our report, that are real today and that are being used in other settings, in commercial settings, in personal applications, that we want to find ways to capitalize on this.
A lot of the ethical concerns that you see in other areas like in sports, for example, about fairness. Those don’t apply in the military context. Getting an unfair advantage is the whole point. That’s why we try to field our people better equipment, better training, we want to make them better prepared for combat. We want to get an unfair advantage on the enemy.
We need to think about safety. That’s an important factor. For experimental techniques we want to make sure that any use of service members is voluntary, that they’re not coerced. So there are important ethical issues we’ve got to grapple with, but the right way forward is for DoD to take a look at this and to start to deal with these issues and open a comprehensive human performance enhancement program to start to deal with this.
Mr. Muradian: But from a genetic engineering standpoint, a friend of mine who was studying this for somebody very senior in the government, when we were talking about man/machine interface his thing was there are countries that are not encumbered by, he joked, fusing a USB chip to the base of your skull to be able to do that. That’s a little bit more of what folks are a little bit concerned about, is whether it’s China, perhaps even Russia, would have a willingness to do some human engineering things that we may not be comfortable with.
Based on your research, is that a genuine fear, or something that you think is just an overblown —
Mr. Scharre: I think it’s absolutely valid. There are going to be other places, we just saw this Chinese researcher claiming to have edited genomes of babies, growing new genetically engineered babies, modified with CRISPR/Cas9. I think that’s a valid fear. Certainly we see other countries using doping in sports systematically as a country. If they’re going to do it in sports they’re certainly going to do it in military applications.
So I think we do need to be cognizant of that. And just because someone else is doing it doesn’t mean it’s the right idea. Maybe we don’t need to follow suit in that application. But there are a lot of things that are nearer term today that are real, that are safe, where the use/benefits do outweigh the risks, and those are things we need to take a hard look at.
Mr. Muradian: Let me, Keith, bring you into this to sort of wrap it up. Price point for the system. I know that this is a prototype, but if this is something that’s going to get in widespread service what’s the ballpark price that you guys are shooting for? Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands? If somebody said millions, I don’t think —
Mr. Maxwell: Tens of thousands.
Mr. Muradian: And how soon will it be before we start to see this actually in civilian application far more broadly? Because it’s right around the corner isn’t it? Both for elder purposes, and there’s a wounded warrior question I also want to ask.
Mr. Maxwell: In terms of when will you see this in the industrial domain, the 28thof January we have the kickoff of our roundtable of industry partners — major aerospace and automotive players, all coming up with the requirements for what they want these systems to do, hosted by Lockheed Martin.
Mr. Muradian: So it’s a couple of years away, I mean it’s not that far in the future where you’ll be able to maybe acquire one of these for your own personal mobility augmentation or industrial or —
Mr. Maxwell: Exactly. A year to two years.
Mr. Muradian: Wow. Extraordinary.
Paul and Keith, the greatest thing about military medicine — the sad thing about war is that it advances the state of play of military medicine, and military medicine has gotten to an extraordinary point. The casualties that we’ve taken, the fatality counts would be a lot higher if it wasn’t for the extraordinary golden hour rule that we’ve put. And the great thing is people are staying alive. The downside is that oftentimes they’re staying alive at the expense of one or more of their limbs.
There’s a friend of mine who did a study a couple of years ago for the Secretary of Defense’s office which was you can be a double amputee and still have an enormous amount of mobility, but your energy consumption is so high that after the age of 50 it starts to become harder and harder for you to have that mobility.
Talk to us about the application of systems like this, both for the rehabilitation element of it which I think is a little bit of a genesis, so I want you to talk a little bit about that. But also the moral imperative for the nation to try to help those who have given and made that sacrifice, to be able to return some kind of mobility and flexibility in their lives.
Mr. Scharre: We’re in a place today where advances in body armor and medical care have meant that we’re having troops survive injuries that would have killed them in previous conflicts and we see this from the data from these wars. The great thing is we’re able to save people’s lives. The downside is we now have people living with really awful injuries that affect many aspects of their lives. But the technology is advancing, and a lot of people are able to regain mobility. Amputees, double amputees, and there’s been sort of spinoff applications of military inventions that are helping other people with disabilities.
There’s a company that’s got an ankle exoskeleton, a passive one, that came out of military research on prosthetics and is now widely available on the civilian market.
So there are a lot of places where this investment has been able to do good for veterans and many other people as well.
Mr. Muradian: Keith, talk to us a little bit about that.
Mr. Maxwell: The folks down there in San Antonio at the Center for the Intrepid, they’re doing some spectacular work, literally, in trying to get guys rehabilitated and giving them the best equipment in order to do it.
What we’re trying to do is provide some additional assistance. We’ve got a partner company there in Canada, B-Temia, they’re building a product called Keeogo, and that is all about rehabilitation and assistance once you’ve got the osteoarthritis, the other physical injuries, the muscular injuries, some of the illnesses that cause a loss of motor control. So we’re able to use this type of technology there to give soldiers after their tour of duty, after their enlistment, the opportunity to still be standing upright, and there’s nothing like being able to stand upright, walk around, meet people eye-to-eye, and that makes a big difference.
Mr. Muradian: Keith Maxwell, Program Manager of the Onyx System. Absolutely extraordinary, congratulations on the Popular Science Award and the Army contract award. Congratulations. It’s just simply extraordinary, like I said, you’re the man who’s got the coolest pants in Washington or anywhere else that you’re going.
Paul Scharre, head of the Technology and National Security Program here at CNAS. Thanks very much. Thanks for your service and thanks very much for your great work. And folks can still get your book Army of None.
Mr. Scharre: Yes. Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. It’s available everywhere where books are out. And many credits to Jennifer for the title.
Mr. Muradian: That’s right. Our old producer, Jennifer [Lee Oprahouri] who did a tremendous job for us, came up with the name. We were here for an interview I think with you and you asked, hey, what would be a good name for it, and she blurted out Army of None. And it worked.
Mr. Scharre: When you see a success you’ve got to go with it, so all credit to Jennifer on the recommendation of the title. The publisher loved it. It’s doing well.
Mr. Muradian: It’s doing well, and get it for Christmas, guys. Thanks very much again. Outstanding technology and something, obviously, that DoD has got to work on.
Before I go, Secretary Mattis already has convened a panel, hasn’t he, to look at some of these issues actually.
Mr. Scharre: That’s right. Secretary Mattis’ Close Combat Lethality Task Force is focused on this very issue of saving service members’ lives, of those who were out in close combat operations. And I can assure you, they’re well aware of the findings in our study.
Mr. Muradian: Guys, thanks very much again.
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