Building Tomorrow's Soldier Today

FleaPlus writes "Wired reports on a glove developed by Stanford researchers Dennis Grahn and Craig Heller which combines a cooling system with a vacuum in order to chill blood vessels and drastically reduce fatigue. Besides the obvious military and athletics applications, the technology is also potentially useful for firefighters, stroke victims, and people with multiple sclerosis. The Wired article also describes a number of other human enhancement projects intended to advance battlefield technology. Examples include military exoskeletons, projects designed to increase cognition or decrease the need for sleep, and studies that may one day allow single soldiers to operate multiple aerial drones. Many of these were opposed by the President's Council on Bioethics."

Comments

Great way to win the War on Terror on the Cheap

[Marxist Hacker 42]

But what will we do with the overtrained soldiers after the war is over?

Re:Great way to win the War on Terror on the Cheap

[TubeSteak]

This is an excellent example of why we as a society need fiction (especially science fiction).

We have to explore or ethics as a culture very carefully before making leaps such as these, and fiction lets us do that.

I don't see what fiction has anything to do with the matter.

It was a forseeable consequence that soldiers dealing with combat violence would eventually become conditioned to using an armed response as their only response. The problem is nobody in the military was willing to study it and throw money at the problem to solve it.

Hell, the army didn't do anything serious about reintegrating soldiers until after the first Gulf War. They finally setup a program when the reports of soldiers suiciding and beating/killing their wives began to spike.

10+ years later, they extended that program overseas when soldiers in Iraq started suiciding in unusually large numbers during Gulf War 2. Then they had to overhaul it from top to bottom when the GW2 soldiers started coming home and beating their wives, abusing drugs/alcohol and killing themselves.

Historicaly, the military has done shit for soldiers.
The Walter Reed scandal has a chance of changing that.
Mostly because what's happened at Walter Reed isn't fiction.

Re:Great way to win the War on Terror on the Cheap

[KDR_11k]

You just start another war. Has the USA ever been without an enemy to unite the nation?

Re:Great way to win the War on Terror on the Cheap

[GundamFan]

What fiction lets us do is take these lessons out of the controversial context of history. Sometimes allegory is a useful tool to explore the ramifications of certain hypothetical or historical events or to ask ourselves "what if".

While it is true that fiction is simply someone else's perspective on history (in a way all human thought is just a perspective on history) being able to understand another persons perspective (or that there are other perspectives) is a very important skill that many people lack. Fiction is a way to see the world through someone else's eyes.

I admit there is a massive amount of crap out there in the category of fiction but to throw the good out with the bad is just foolish.

I don't have the presumption to think that I have an unbiased or complete view of human history but no one does. The best I can do is to try to share the experiences of others who have bee3n kind enough to write it all down

Re:What the hell is a Solider?

[stratjakt]

Spellcheck won't help. Solider is a word, a bad one (more solid), but a word.

No, you need editors with some sort of cognitive functions, an ability to proofread, and some semblance of pride in their work.

From what I see on TV

[cliffski]

That money would be better spent on teaching soldiers some arabic. Seriously.
Modern war isnt about tanks and pitch battles between rival fleets of helicopter gunships. Modern warfare is fought in a city, in amongst a civilian population, who may or may not be hostile to US troops.
teaching some basic arabic for beginners to soldiers so they can understand what the locals are saying is going to save more lives, and lead to a better outcome, than any l33t new nano-engineered hi tech gubbins that will most likely fail the moment it gets exposed to heat and sand.

Re:From what I see on TV

[drooling-dog]

Someone mod this up, please.

The problem, if there is one, is not that soldiers aren't physically up to the demands that will be made of them. The problem is with the politicians who send them unprepared on ill-advised and ill-defined (but profitable, for them) missions, often for dubious reasons that are unrelated to our national security.

If that could actually happen, I mean.

Re:From what I see on TV

[ArcherB]

That money would be better spent on teaching soldiers some arabic. Seriously.
Modern war isnt about tanks and pitch battles between rival fleets of helicopter gunships. Modern warfare is fought in a city, in amongst a civilian population, who may or may not be hostile to US troops.
teaching some basic arabic for beginners to soldiers so they can understand what the locals are saying is going to save more lives, and lead to a better outcome, than any l33t new nano-engineered hi tech gubbins that will most likely fail the moment it gets exposed to heat and sand.

The biggest pitfall for any military is training to fight the last war. Poland in the 1930s is a prime example. They were ready to fight a WWI army when Hitler invaded. Unfortunately for the Poles, the German war machine spent its time getting ready for the NEXT war and wiped the Poles out!

Urban warfare is always a messy business. However, regardless of what you hear on the news, our soldiers are doing a hell of a job in the Iraqi cities. The problem is that when compared to the bang-up job they did in the deserts, their performance in the cities looks atrocious. We have lost a minuscule amount of troops in the cities, but those numbers overshadow the casualty rate in getting to the cities in the first place. We lost more training for D-Day than we have lost in both gulf wars combined. If we had taken huge numbers of casualties overthrowing Iraq, the press would be marveled at how well we are doing in the urban areas. But as it stands, the public didn't expect casualty rates to rise after heavy combat operations ceased. The press has only fueled this perception by following the "if it bleeds, it leads" philosophy and completely ignoring any successes in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Re:From what I see on TV

[SirWhoopass]

"Interesting"? That's the most idiotic thing I've heard. That it is completely false. In no way does the US military discourage personnel from learning Arabic. In fact, the US Army is offering $20,000 bonuses for Arabic speakers who enlist.

Re:From what I see on TV

[fredrated]

"But as it stands, the public didn't expect casualty rates to rise after heavy combat operations ceased."

Did "Mission Accomplished" have anything to do with that?

Re:From what I see on TV

[timeOday]

Let's not go over-generalizing from Iraq and re-build our military around occupation and nation building. It's a pointless and unjustified mission. The solution is not to do that in the first place.

The idea of a smaller, hi-tech military is a very good one - for national defense, e.g. repelling an armed invasion of us or an ally. "But that kind of military is irrelevant for combatting terrorism!!" That's right, basically. The idea of stemming terrorism through massive invasions is fundamentally invalid. A "war" on terror is a false premise. Anti-terrorism is really about intelligence and police work, executed in conjunction with other nations around the world. Ocassionally we'll need a few highly trained and equipped special forces to eliminate terrorist cells when we find them. This whole approach of killing a mosquito with a sledgehammer has proven so destructive and costly, not to mention ineffective.

Re:Okay, this is a cheap shot as well

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, you first. Please get your wife pregnant and then kill it off before its born so we can use that to further science... OH wait, we've already been doing that and NO PROGRESS has been made using Fetal Stem Cells. Adult Stem cells have seen tons of progress, but why confuse the baby-killer crowd with facts....

This is not what we need.

[amper]

Why is it that it never seems to occur to the people in a position to actually do anything about that what we need is not more high technology for our soldiers, but more good, old-fashioned, well-trained human brain power and muscle power on the ground? Don't get me wrong, there is a place for technology on the battlefield, but it's the people that make it all work.

Re:Okay, this is a cheap shot

[PowerEdge]

The only mindless zombies I see on a regular basis are the ones that assume everything Bush does is somehow inherently evil, destroying the constitution, causing global warming, etc. Those are the people I find who lack logic and reason and possess an inability to think beyond some handed down meme they read somewhere or heard somewhere and get patted on the backend by their circle of yes men. Conformity through anti-conformity or what have you. Leftists (I can't call them Liberals because that would mean free thinking people) are some of the most close minded, anti-freespeech people I have ever had an occasion to converse with.

Re:May be solving the wrong problem

[amper]

No, it's not the US military that's lousy at that kind of warfare. It's the civilian US politicians and bureaucrats that are lousy at it. The US military has known how to fight that kind of war all the way back to the Revolution and before.

Re:Okay, this is a cheap shot as well

[HolyCrapSCOsux]

Let's be rational for a little bit.
World Population: 6,525,170,264
I, personally, could give a rats hairy ass about abortion one way or the other. However, overpopulation is as big an issue as bioethics.

And before you say, "Well, what if your mother had aborted you?"
Well, then I wouldn't be here to care, now would I?

Damn kneejerk activists...

Started with fire.

[iceperson]

been going downhill ever since...