US Military Turns to Tunnels to Keep up With ISIS, NKorea

As ISIS and North Korea build sophisticated underground complexes, the U.S. military is trying to keep up by also digging deep, Defense One reported.

On Thursday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced an initiative to find new technology to map, navigate, and search underground.

"Underground settings are becoming increasingly relevant to global security and safety," DARPA program manager Timothy Chung said in a taped segment announcing the move, Defense One reported.

"Rising populations and urbanization are driving the demand to not only build up but also to build down . . . subterranean environments have remained an untapped domain in terms of developing breakthrough technologies for national security," he said.

The need for new technology is urgent — as U.S. adversaries try to evade cameras and sensors the United States can use to photograph and collect intelligence, Defense One noted.

"In all of the areas that I have visited, ISIS dug a complicated network of tunnels," New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi told NPR in March. "And so what they're able to do is they retreat inside the tunnels. And then from there, they're able to send a drone up into the air. So they're completely protected and unseen from our surveillance. And yet, they're able to see."

Much of North Korea's weapons development has also taken place underground, Defense One noted, reporting that in 2015, South Korean military leaders said the North may have built 6,000 to 8,000 underground facilities, including a more than mile-long underground runway to launch planes.

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