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MilSpec Biotech
Glurx writes: "The US Army commissioned a report so they could explore how the biotechnology revolution can enhance their ability to execute their missions on battlefields in the next few decades. The SF Chronicle has a story about it. You can read the report here."
The UN Truth comission reported that 90% of all terrorist acts in the 1980's were committed by the US, a futher 5% were sponsered by them. Don't take my word for it. Stop watching the television/newspapers and do some research. Listen to some Chomsky mp3s, read some of his books, get educated.
Have a nice day.
The problem is that in major conflicts it seems that the outcome is always worse when the US doesn't intervene. The first world war was extended by several years because the US did not want to be the worlds police. The second one was caused because the US could no longer support a country being distroyed by the French.
This is the present world. we can send a missle anywhere in the world by pointing to it on a map (not that we SHOULD be able to, just that we can).
We dont HAVE to send ground troops anymore!
The world economy is so intertwined that not even China, a country I find more irresponsibly than most in regarding its citizenry (freedom, human rights and such), is willing to make agressive maneuvers, because its economy is so heavily dependent on the 'western world'. Global war is LESS likely than 20 years ago.
the groups that seem to be making the most noise these days are like fringe Islamic groups that consider the USA as 'The Great Satan' or whatnot, countries in which we like to practice our 'foreign policy'. We should leave them the hell alone and *SHAZZAM* they stop getting pissed at us!
That's a 300 level critique? Good grief! The US education system is in a worse state than I imagined.
So... once we crossbreed humans with cockroaches, we'll have the perfect soldiers?
Don't get me wrong, biotechnology might have some interesting applications here, but it's easy to see how this could be taken too far. Quite readily taken WAY too far.
Personally, I'd be more in favor of CLONING the perfect soldier than actually creating something non-human. Somehow I find that less frighteningly creepy.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, if you look at the history of modern armies in the last 200 years, you will see that the vast majority of the time spent by the vast majority of soldiers is spent in the barracks or training.
Enhanced abilities to execute a mission, is simply another way of saying, "We are more capable than anyone else's army, so don't mess with us."
Nice try at trolling though, or perhaps it's a lack of understanding of how a modern army works. For a better understanding of that, look into military history books by Keegan, he always does a good job and he taught military history at Sandhurst.
That's exactly what they are doing. Technology like this will enable problems to be dealt with quickly and efficiency, with minimal loss of life and collateral damage. And it will act as a deterrent. If you want peace, you must prepare for war.
Yes, but we are ALREADY paying for the military, so why not let them get some free training while helping.
Having a small(which even today translates into 'weak',) is one of the fastest ways to become the victim of aggression.
James Ray Kenney mailto:jrkenney@swbell.net
And I sure hope that no one on Slashdot considers bacteria to be intelligent on any level.
I'd consider bacteria more intelligent than the average slashdot poster...
they have those already, they are just technically illegal. of course, killing is illegal also, unless it's wartime and you are a soldier. i think it would be to the soldier's advantage to load themselves up with some cocaine or PCP (cocaine for the speed effect, PCP to "feel no pain").
couple that with some armour, and maybe a biological MechWarrior[TM] suit, and you'd be set.
of course, a single well placed explosive can neutralize almost any situation. why not just genetically engineer a beetle to be able to carry a small payload, and then remote explode it? that's some biological warfare.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
That doesn't make sense. The Army's job is to do the fighting, period. The politicians are the ones who should worry about how to not fight. Any studies or research into this area would not be done by the Army, for obvious reasons.
Anyway, do you know that such research is in fact not being done?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Beautifully written troll.
Actually, I would liken it more to the use of animals to pull wagons, chase down criminals and fight to the death for our amusement in Tiauana.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Sorry, couldn't resist the obligatory jab at M$...
Well, you have to consider this from the military point of view. One of the primary issues involved in military planning is the question of Morale! This is of extreme importance to a commanding officer because troops with bad morale do not fight well -- if at all.
You also have to consider that wounded men going back are, when all is said and done, trained killers.
As I used to tell my Corporals when I was a Sergeant, "You can't just throw your weight around. You need them to believe in you. After all, if we go in the dill, you will have men following you who all all carrying loaded weapons!"Perhaps you should consider looking for positive uses, rather than concentrating only on the bad possibilities?
if only he could use his trolling for good instead of evil...
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
The Main benefit of this, in addition to Friend or Foe ID, is in the event a US soldier/airman is a POW. This would enable the ability of our soldiers/airmen, etc... at risk of capture to ingest such a device prior to a mission, and assist in identifying location, initiating recovery, etc...
Encoding a low powered signal would be the best way to conceal the device from the enemy's reception equipment, while having more sensitive reception abilities would be the way to acquire the signal.
A potential for POW status, such as in special operations where exposure is greater, also explains the need to have it ingestible for at-risk personnel, as opposed to externally worn. Such a device would have enabled the recovery of our pilot in Mogadishu and the pilots and others who were captured during the large desert warfare exercise we had a few years back.
War is a fact of life and of history. It is inevitable. But it can be controlled and the likelihood reduced. The only way to reduce it, though, is to make warfare cheap for oneself and expensive for the other guy--this means that he would be a fool to start hostilities.
The higher ups aren't the ones doing the dying, but they're the ones calling the shots. Some of the brass spends their entire lives preparing for war, and you can bet that can sometimes create a desire to have one. They want to prove themselves, their theories, their plans, it's human nature.
Naturally this isn't a generalization about everyone in the upper echelons.
Applied Digital Solutions, an e-business-to-business solutions provider, acquired the patent rights to the miniature digital transceiver it has named "Digital Angel®." The company plans to market the device for a number of uses, including as a "tamper-proof means of identification for enhanced e-business security."
[source]
Some technology they're looking at
Want Root?
Brain implants? I knew a Captain who could have used one of those...
don't you mean cmdr?
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
brain implants, real- time monitoring of gene expression and performance-enhancing drugs.
maybe allow sensor equipped snipers to distinguish friend from foe God help the poor soldier that takes a shit and leaves the device behind. Even worse, someone suggested tracking POW's with it. I can see our special forces going in to rescue POW's as their unerring soldier tracking devices leads them directly to a latrine.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
... but unfortunately, sometimes their politics override their common sense. "Just what circumstances might warrant tracking a soldier's DNA, for example, were not spelled out in any detail. " Um, we're already doing this, and have been for some years: if nothing else, it's useful for identifying badly mutilated corpses. The idea is that there will be no more Unknown Soldiers. Modern warfare doesn't just kill people, it destroys them. Families have both a right and a need to know if anonymous body parts recovered from the battlefield belong to their sons and daughters.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Grad: Hmmm, well MegaTech Inc are offering me the chance to work on cutting edge technology, a massive salary, pension, health plan, car and other benefits, so why should I sign up for the armed forces?
Captain: We can make you bionic!
I know I'd be tempted ; )
Nothing wrong with that, as long as the Department of Defense focuses on defense.
Sorry but this begs the obvious quote:
"The best defense is a good offense." - Vince Lombardi
Offensive deterence is a way better defense than any kind of literal defense, IMHO.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Also, if you'd have looked at the Army report, you would have seen that the things they're talking about using aren't living organisms, but proteins, DNA, RNA, antibodies, and such. I didn't read the report fully, but the most that they might have been considering using living organism was using bacteria to make holographic materials with some interesting properties (and even then I think it was probably using proteins from the bacteria). And I sure hope that no one on Slashdot considers bacteria to be intelligent on any level.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
It also allows enemy sensor equipped snipers to have a field day...
-- Wrist-top biosensors to guard against germ warfare, combined perhaps with vaccines that could be developed rapidly in the field and "functional food" rations laced with edible vaccines."
The anti-ebola tastes best when you add the reto-virus ketchup.
-- Armor as flexible as skin, tough as an abalone shell and enhanced with "living characteristics," such as the ability to heal itself when torn.
This damn armor healed itself when I went to the latrine and now my **** is stuck!
-- Even more far-out possibilities fall under the general heading of biology- based "performance enhancement" for soldiers, including brain implants...
Brain implants? I knew a Captain who could have used one of those...
No Zen is good zen
Don't be silly. Ground forces are vital to any armed conflict, for reasons too numerous and obvious for me to detail here. Besides, Great Britain already tried to commit to a "missiles-only" military (and failed). But I'm sure your implementation is far superior to whatever feeble plan those silly Brits came up with.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
And the best thing is: Everybody else is doing exactly the same
It's just a fact of life!!!
<RANT>
Now WHAT REALLY GETS ON MY NERVES is all those self-righteous (US; non-US; martians; i don't care) that come around saying
Oh, we're all goody-goody and our weapons are only for show so that all those mean foreign baddies don't do us any harm...
Please ... either you're a fool or you think everybody else is a fool
</RANT>
The brain implant idea might cause a little trouble for their recruiting, or maybe they can cut a deal with the prison system.
The US Army have already tried this. They did it the wrong way round with Mr McVeigh though.
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
I don't know about anyone else out here, but I've seen almost everything mentioned in the Chronicle article before. Be it in one of the CP Chrome Books, Shadowrun's "Shadowtech" or "Man and Machine", or various other supplements or websites relating to near-future role-playing games. Still, nice of the military to summarise it all for us ;-)
On a slightly more serious note, it's not really any surprise that a large number of things being considered have already been seen in speculative fiction of one sort or another. Consider Arthur C. Clarke's (et al.) visionary contribution to the space program. Other fields certainly aren't immune.
and if there is a thief / killer on the loose we all expect the police to be a little more on the offence ... not just "guard better"
... the neighborhoods just a little bigger.
Same with the military
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Some things that were mentioned in the article are permanent/semi-permanent. While it is laudable to "improve your fighting capabilities," does anything think that these things are going to be implanted through volunteering only?
I sure as one dont think so. In the armed forces mentality, these enhancements would probably be an "all-or-nuttin" bid -- every soldier under their command will have it done. How could this actually be forced on them? Instead of talking to their buddies in 50 years about this shot they took in their arm, they can talk about the permanent "brain enhancement" they experienced...
We infect more people before 6AM than you'll infect all day!"
-OzJuggler
Life's a buffer; you can only get out of it what you put into it! C:-)
Karma whorin' since 1999
"I think the US has done it's share of good in shortening conflicts by intervening,"
With Nagasaki and Hiroshima being the prime examples on how to cut short the agony.
*TSZST* "Ohh yeah, that's the stuff!"
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
"enhance their ability to execute their missions on battlefields"?
more like "enhance their ability to execute their enemies on battlefields"
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"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I really just wanted to find something that translated "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori". I didn't look at the page I ended up with very hard though -- it just translated it as "it is sweet to die for one's country" and not "it is sweet /and proper/..." (et decorum).
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(a little explanation)
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*cough* *cough* Army Corp of Engineers *cough*
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Capt:
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
The problem is that in major conflicts it seems that the outcome is always worse when the US doesn't intervene.
Yes... Think how much worse Vietnam could have been if the US wouldn't have intervened... Oh wait...
Seriously though, I think the US has done it's share of good in shortening conflicts by intervening, but this is by no means always a good idea.
I guess the plan is: 1. Recruit soldiers to defend America. 2. Invent weapons of mass destruction to defend America. 3. Invent vaccinations against effects of weapons of mass destruction, to be used by soldiers that were recruited to fight and defend America. 4. War breaks out. 5. Weapons of mass destruction deployed. 6. Vaccinated soldiers have no one left to defend.
Apparently Digital Angel combines a muscle-activated power supply, a GPS receiver, and some sort of transmitter. (If it didn't have a transmitter, it couldn't broadcast your location.) For most civilian purposes, that could be a cell-phone transmitter. But remember, holding a cell phone near your head for a half-hour a day has been neither proven safe nor proven dangerous. Having it implanted under your skin and on 24x7 is rather more likely to be dangerous. And it will need a little extra transmitting power to get the signal out.
But for military applications, this thing has to work where there is no cell-phone network (or the USAF has just targeted all the towers to make sure the other guys aren't using encrypted cell-phones to communicate or even to tie together detection networks). So you need a transmitter powerful enough to reach a satellite. I don't know, but I suspect that is quite a few watts, as compared to the 5mW peak signal of a cell phone. That burning sensation? It's your tracking device cooking your biceps...
Do I even need to comment on the stupidity of having our troops walking through the woods while broadcasting a signal anyone with a $25 radio receiver can home in on?
I have a hint for you: The army is trying to promote peace!!! If we have the best weapons, no one will attack us. If they do, the war will be quick and they will be dead with minimal losses on our side. How is that wrong?
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
I bet you are one of those people from Greenpest or similar organization who spout nonsense about anything that is modified by humans. By your reasoning, an ameboa is intelligent on some level and we would be slave owners if we made it, or any other animal work for us. You are also implying that humans are not any better than or worth more than an ameboa either.
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
If this gets modded up, I'm outta here.
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"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
How stupid are you? Let's see shall we?
The problem is that in major conflicts it seems that the outcome is always worse when the US doesn't intervene.
Oh yeah, you're so right. I guess I just imagined Korea and Vietnam then.
The first world war was extended by several years because the US did not want to be the worlds police.
The US played 'see no evil, hear no evil' for almost four years before it got involved in WWI. Even when it did decide to get off its apathetic butt it was slow to commit troops and resources to the field, and arrived in just in time to hear the final whistle. Way to go Uncle Sam.
The second one was caused because the US could no longer support a country being distroyed by the French.
And which country would that be? France, like Poland, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, etc was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany. The French didn't destroy anyone, they were the ones being destroyed.
And the US involvement in WWII didn't come about because of any humanitarian sentiments felt by the American people towards their oldest allies (the French provided the fledgling US with a lot of military aid during the US War of Independence) but because of a certain butt-kicking by Japan at Pearl Harbour. Germany declaring war on the US shortly after Japan kind of sealed the deal.
If you must insist on spouting so much revisionist crap, at least make it sound plausible
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
And my point is what kind of crack are you smoking? If we reduced our military to one percent of its current levels we wouldn't be able to protect Hawaii let alone the rest of the US. 30,000 troops can't defend crap. From the days of the founding fathers till now the defense of this nation has depended almost entirely on our ability to project our forces onto foreign soil. From Tripoli, to Germany, and to Tokyo, we have protected out interests and sovereignty by our ability to project our forces. You may not like it but in the modern world instability anywhere is a threat to our country. We have made mistakes in the past but it can be argued that in our fear of interfering in some instances we have done more harm to ourselves and others than would have been done by stepping in in the first place. If we had been prepared and willing to step in WWI and WW2 would have been much shorter with less loss of life and property on all sides. In evey major conflict we have been in we have been unprepared when it started. That is the most costly mistake a nation can make.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
It is not the militaries job to start or prevent war. Their job is to go, fight and try not to die when told to fight. It is the politicians that are supposed to make those decisions. Then the politicians should get out of the way and allow the military to do what it is trained for. The only real way to avoid war is to have the capability and willingness to use that capabilty to make any nation decide that attacking you is suicidal.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
>Wouldn't it be easier to just pour a much smaller fraction of their budget into discovering ways to, >oh,-I-don't-know, maybe find ways to reduce the need for armed conflict in the first place?
Well, no. Not since President Carter outlawed assassinating heads of state.
Think of all the lives that could have been saved over the years by a couple of good headshots.
Oh yeah, it was a regular worker's paradise in Vietnam when the US left town.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Several HUNDRED feet?? Do you have a reference for this?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
OK, let's say the US withdraws to its borders. It's now a sitting duck. Take out its foreign oil imports and the US is starved into a pre-industrial economic state.
"Coastal forts"? Jesus, what will you recommend next? Cavalry saber charges?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
No, we wouldn't want to protect any foreign interests like, say, oil, upon which we are dependent.
Don't be naive. The United States doesn't get into a war or battle or peacekeeping missions just because it believes thats "the right thing to do." Most of the time, such participation is sparked by a very specific interest. With regards to middle-eastern countries, you can rest assured that the interest is in oil. The United States depends upon it. Take that away, and we are crippled. Why do you think there is a strategic oil reserve that people are reluctant to touch? It's not really there for consumers.
GreyPoopon
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GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Bacteria can be engineered to "eat" toxic chemicals in contaminated areas, thus cleaning the place up after an attack from Saddam's illegal stock-piles. There was an army project to do this some years ago, and it was shown to be fesible. (I don't know if they followed through with the idea.)
Though I suspect the original accusation of a double-standard was just a troll to begin with, it's a fair question nonetheless, and somebody had this great rebuttal censored:
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" I'm not sure what you're not understanding about it. Back during the Gulf War, Iraq was tired of the coalition forces kicking its ass, so it agreed to certain sanctions in exchange for a cease-fire. The UN Security Council later decided that Iraq would have to destroy its chemical weapons (among other things) before it would consider lifting the sanctions.
The Iraqi goverment only brought the restrictions on itself by being a destabilizing force in an already shaky region. "
All those old useless gadgets are no different from what the hawks are planning for future recruits. It is supposed to give them a false sense of security as they are being fed to the cannons. A soldier with his legs blown off won't have much need for automatic band-aid.
Gotta give them some credit for their openness. The brain implant idea might cause a little trouble for their recruiting, or maybe they can cut a deal with the prison system.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Nothing wrong with that, as long as the Department of Defense focuses on defense. However, most of the resources seem to go towards making better weapons for offense. Coastal forts, anti-air defense, domestic air force, and a reserve-based army, navy patrols, sub patrols, border patrols should go a long way towards defending U.S. All those blitz wars in foreign countries has nothing to do with defense.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
I have to say that your crack dealer must be a chemical genius.
The military of this nation's primary purpose is to protect the borders of this nation and what lies within them, but their secondary purpose is to protect American interests abroad.
Just like every other military force that has existed throughout history, there is more than one use for our military.
If the military were cut back to 1% of its current size, it would have trouble defending a playground.
Our military's best tactic is intimidation. People who are inclined to cause trouble with us have to think twice because of what our military is capable of. On the whim of the president, any building, any place on the planet can be reduced to rubble within 24 hours.
Even Saddam Hussein's underground bunkers couldn't protect him from our airforce. Having more spare parts than we currently need lead to the development of a bomb built with spare howitzer barrels. Those barrels were heavy and strong enough to penetrate several hundred feet into the ground (through reinforced concrete) to destroy a bunker.
Without that extra inventory some weapons might have been on the drawing board for several years, and some of the conflicts that we've had would have been drawn out, costing many more lives.
Remember you don't have to kill them all if they know that you're capable of doing it.
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
Are you kidding?
After about a decade or two of this I'll happily line up.
I couldn't imagine how my CS kill/death ratio would improve if I could decrease my reaction time by 20-30 ms.
Where do I sign up?
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
Several HUNDRED feet?? Do you have a reference for this?
I saw it on the discovery channel.
I could not tell you the name of the program however.
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
Funny, I thought Saddam Hussein was still in power...
It was not our goal to unseat him. What we wanted was for Saddam to withdraw his forces from Kuwait. Funny, last time I checked, he had.
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
Biotech is godzilla! Ok two things come to mind, does the military really have this much free time to invest in all the goofy stuff they do, the video games I can understand, but the SUV, and this amongst other things, couldn't they do something more worthwhile, like promote peace, love, and linux?
Wouldn't it be easier to just pour a much smaller fraction of their budget into discovering ways to, oh,-I-don't-know, maybe find ways to reduce the need for armed conflict in the first place??!?
'Course, that'd probably not exactly be in the Pentagon's best interests... ($$$)
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Mmm... delicious white marbles...
pretty things like to be stolen, gigantic crazy military and republicans make us sleep better at night. Kinda like when Homer says, "To alcohol: the cause of - and solution to - all of life's problems."
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Being more machine then person would be intersting. Just think of all the cool things darth vader can do. Not to mention if they get that brain implant working, that might lead to a cable to a computer so I can surf the web and play video games by just thinking about it. Actualy I read some where that the older you get, the more exhausting it is to think. So maybe scratch half of that last idea. I'm not to sure about those tracers that you injest though, seems like it would be to easy to kill a soldier, gut it, and duplicate the tracer or use the dead soldier somehow. But I didn't realy read the details on how the thing worked.
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No mate, thats called 'invasion'. 'Defense' is what you do when you stay at home.- -------
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