Introduction: The Sunny Myth and the Surprising Reality of Biomimicry
When most of us hear “biomimicry,” we picture a hopeful future where human innovation works in harmony with nature. We think of engineers studying gecko feet to inspire new adhesives for 3M, or designers mimicking sharkskin to create antimicrobial hospital materials. It’s a field that seems dedicated to creating elegant, sustainable solutions—a testament to learning from 3.8 billion years of evolution’s R&D. But the birthplace of one of its most emblematic creations tells a different story. It wasn’t an ultra-modern lab of science fiction, but damp, cluttered rooms housed in the shell of a WWII bunker, with scientists shuttling between the bunker and a converted military barrack.
Duration of evolutionary R&D that biomimicry seeks to replicate
That stark image reveals a surprising and consequential history. For decades, one of the most significant drivers of biomimicry hasn’t been the green movement, but the U.S. military. This hidden history reveals a radically different motivation for copying nature—not to sustain the planet, but to achieve dominance on the battlefield. This post explores the most stunning takeaways from this history, using the strange case of the “RoboLobster” to understand how the Pentagon is turning the natural world into its design lab.
The Military, Not Environmentalism, Kickstarted the Biomimicry Boom
While the rise of biomimicry is often linked to the growing public desire for sustainable design, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has played a far more significant role in the field’s development and legitimation. And while other forces, from industrial capitalism to colonial extraction, have also shaped the field, the DoD’s influence has been uniquely foundational and strategic. Long before biomimicry became a buzzword in green technology circles, military strategists were looking to the animal kingdom for inspiration.
For the military, the environment is not something that requires salvation, but something that must be adapted to in order to survive and win. This perspective reframes nature as a collection of high-performance solutions to tactical problems. An organism that has thrived for millennia in a harsh environment is seen as a living blueprint for technology that can give soldiers a decisive edge.
The Goal Isn’t to Conquer Nature Anymore—It’s to Copy It
For most of the 20th century, military strategy focused on manipulating environmental conditions for tactical advantage. Armies built coastal fortifications, cleared forests, and engineered landscapes to make them more suitable for troops and machinery. It was a war against the environment as much as it was against an enemy.
The primary engine of military-funded biological research
However, in the post-Cold War era, a strategic pivot known as the “biological turn” occurred. The focus shifted from trying to bend environments to suit soldiers to learning from the organisms that had already perfected survival in those same hostile conditions. Instead of building a better vehicle to cross a turbulent shoreline, military strategists began asking: what animal has already mastered this exact problem? This mindset was perfectly captured by Alan Rudolph, a key program director at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA):
“…soldiers on a battlefield are required to ‘sense changes in their environment’ in order to ‘adapt and survive’… all [cockroaches] do is adapt and survive.”
This shift turned a menagerie of nonhuman organisms—from geckos and flies to cockroaches and lobsters—into advisors for a new generation of military technology.
To Build a Truly Smart Robot, You Have to Program in Chaos
Enter the RoboLobster. Its mission was to solve a vexing naval problem: finding and detonating underwater mines in the “littoral zone”—the turbulent, unpredictable coastal waters where waves, currents, and a changing seafloor make operations incredibly difficult for both humans and machines.
Simply building a robot shaped like a lobster wasn’t enough to navigate this chaotic space. The true breakthrough came from the work of neuroethologist Joseph Ayers, who set out to reverse-engineer the lobster’s nervous system. In doing so, he discovered that the key to the lobster’s resilience wasn’t perfect, rigid programming, but something far more counter-intuitive.
The chaotic coastal environment where RoboLobster was designed to operate
Ayers identified “clear regimes of chaotic activity” in the firing patterns of lobster neurons. This biological “chaos” is the secret to true adaptation. When a lobster gets stuck, it doesn’t run through a pre-programmed list of escape options; it squirms. That squirming is a product of chaotic neural firing that generates novel, un-programmed behaviors to solve unexpected problems. By building this capacity for chaos into the RoboLobster’s electronic nervous system, Ayers aimed to create a machine that could discover new solutions its programmers never envisioned—a machine that could learn, not just execute commands.
The Modern Battlefield Isn’t a Place—It’s a Laboratory
This approach shatters the traditional definition of warfare. Conflict is no longer just something that happens on a physical battlefield; it is prefigured in the civilian laboratories where biological knowledge is produced. In this new paradigm, the inner workings of an organism are used to make the outer dynamics of an environment knowable. By reverse-engineering a lobster’s nervous system, the military gains operational knowledge of the littoral zone. Bioscience becomes a form of “battlespace knowledge,” turning the earth inside out.
This gives rise to the concept of “bio-operability.” In essence, this means viewing life not for what it is, but for what it can do—its capacity to perform a function or solve a military problem. Organisms and environments are assessed for their potential to be made “workable.” This is a radical shift. Mastery and logics of command and control recede. In their place, the military attempts to build itself a more adaptive technology. The profound consequence is that this moves the locus of responsibility for warfare from soldiers on the front lines to civilian researchers in a lab, and it threatens to naturalize conflict by reducing the political act of war to a technical question of operability.
Conclusion: A New Kind of Arms Race?
Our journey has taken us from the popular image of biomimicry as a tool for sustainability to its deep and complicated roots in military strategy. In this world, the goal isn’t ecological harmony, but operational dominance. The study of life’s incredible diversity is channeled not into preserving it, but into shaping military thinking. The RoboLobster, which remains a prototype, never saw deployment; its true contribution was as a proof of concept that fundamentally transformed the Pentagon’s strategic imagination. The arms race is one of ideas and strategies as much as it is of hardware.
This reframing of the natural world into a military asset isn’t a distant, academic problem. It forces a critical challenge upon us now, demanding we confront how our scientific pursuits are directed and for what purpose. As we stand at this crossroads of biology, technology, and conflict, we must ask ourselves a final question:
“What might life’s superabundant and multiform capacities engender if they were called to participate not on battlefields, but in the constitution of a multi-species common?”