Transporting US troops to the front lines usually takes weeks and requires massive airfields and seaports. Logistics will get even more hellacious when the Department of Defense eventually replaces the current system of battalions and brigades with 1,800-person "units of action" -?infantry plus their armor and air support. But Darpa, the Pentagon's mad science division, has a plan: a gi-normous airship that can take a unit of action anywhere in the world, without infrastructure, in four days.
The scheme, code-named Walrus, is just getting off the ground. But the agency is clear about what it wants: a prototype "tri-phibian" (air, land, sea) zeppelin with a range of 6,000 nautical miles, ready to go aloft by 2008. "The program will not repackage 1930s technology or upscale the more limited commercial dirigibles of today," Darpa promised in its proposal. The Walrus will rely on new technologies, like static ion propulsion, says Preston Carter, the program manager.
They'll need the high tech assist. The Pentagon's current go-to airborne hauler, the C-130 Hercules cargo plane, holds about 22 tons. Darpa's hoping for a Walrus that will someday lug 500 to 1,000 tons. That'd make it about the size of an aircraft carrier - not exactly stealthy, and only useful for dropping a unit of action into a war zone that the Air Force has already, ahem, pacified.
- Noah Shachtman
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