Army's Cut of 'Future Soldier' May Impact Med-Tech

docinthemachine writes "The U.S. Army has decided to axe its $500 Million 'Land Warrior Soldier of the Future' program. If this goes through, the loss of future medical technology will be enormous. Many do not realize the enormous amount of medical technology that trickles down from the military. The program was working on develops new HUDs, 3D vision systems, and bioarmor. Surgeons today are using this technology (via DARPA) to develop new robotic surgery, bioimplants, intelligent prosthetics and more." That's the downside. The reason for the program's cutting is fairly obvious: "Unfortunately, land Warrior is part of the Army's Future Combat System (FCS) Initiative. This is the roadmap for an unprecedented hi-tech modernization of the Army. What new? How about an air force of completely unmanned remote controlled fighters- it's in the budget! Unfortunately, the entire project is so far over budget it becomes a target for cuts. Originally at $60 billion, then $127B, recent estimates have balooned to $300 billion total cost (yes that's billion with a B) and some are calling it the biggest military boondoggle ever."

Comments

the Pen, sir, is mightier

[RunFromRobots]

Give me my country back,
we don't want your military industrial complex
ASSHOLE

Re:FUD

[Sqwubbsy]

If the U.S. didn't get into wars all the time, then wouldn't that both save lives and cost less money?

True, if the US didn't go into wars, Germany would not have invaded France 3x, Japan would never have bombed Pearl Harbor, Kuwaitis would be doing the happy dance every day and the Taliban would make sure that nothing bad ever happened to non-Muslims either in Afghanistan or abroad.
Damn, should have thought of that sooner.

Re:FUD by the Opponents

[An Onerous Coward]

So, what you're saying is, you're in favor of government-subsidized scientific research. Cool.

Please, back up your claim that the Army has made huge advances in the field of education, and that these advances have been widely adopted in places like India and China. As someone who has been through a couple of Army schools, I never saw any particularly advanced educational technology (unless you count the Scantron sheet as an Armed Forces invention). The schools did a good job teaching us, but their methods always seemed pretty straightforward, and I attribute their success to the highly focused, disciplined atmosphere.

I'm less skeptical of your claim that the Armed Services is pioneering new energy sources, but I'd be interested in seeing some backup for that.

Finally, I don't think that the military has been a major force driving computer technology since their widespread adoption by private industry in the 70's and 80's. If they were really the driving force, do you think they'd have let all our semiconducter manufacturing capacity go to Malaysia?

The problem with your claims (besides the fact that they're entirely unsourced, and most of the advances would have been made independent of the military) is that we're dropping $400B into the military every single year! If you throw that much money at a particular set of problems, you can't help but get some interesting advances out of it. The military is a crappy research and development program. The military is a crappy jobs program. The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things, and I don't think it needs to apologize for that. But we spend as much on military expenditures as the rest of the world combined, and there is no need for that.

The military-industrial complex is out of control, and needs to be drastically scaled back. Unchecked government spending is doing grave harm to our national interests, and I believe that drastically reducing military spending is the best way to do that.