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DARPA Chief Outlines Array of Future Projects
coondoggie writes to tell us that DARPA announced a wide array of new projects in a report to the House Armed Services Committee that they will be funding in the near future. "everything from advanced network and communications implementations to powerful laser and unmanned aircraft development as well as developing techniques to help military personnel survive myriad dangerous situations"
Don't you think it's interesting that for four years, the US and UK military forces in the Iraq sustained a pretty stready rate of casualties whilst the country slowly unraveled around them and a de-facto civil war / ethnic cleansing / religious genocide killed thousands of people, despite all the UAVs, ECM to jam EIDs, superstrong ballistic armour on people and vehicles, digital data and comms that have all contributed to the > $1T cost. Then in the last year or so things have quietened down considerably, due to a combination of layer-8 events - more US boots on the ground, the Sunni revolt against Al Qaeda (Iraq), Muqtada al-Sadr's ceasefire and alleged withdrawal into Iran, tighter border controls in Saudi and Syria reducing the flood of eager young Jihadists, and so on and on. (Of course it can and very likely will go tango uniform again at some point in the next five years, but we'll see.) Anyway, the point is that the gadgets can certainly help win the high-intensity phase of such a conflict, but they don't help with hearts & minds.
Winning the hearts and minds is completely orthogonal to the technology. Technology won't rescue you from awful strategies or misguided goals. But it still helps save lives, and I'm sure there are a lot of soldiers out there who are glad to be alive and owe it to some of the technology that's come out of DARPA.
E pluribus unum