Reading too many comic books?
In a well-timed bit of piggybacking, the Brookings Institution has posted an article by Peter Singer on “the Pentagon’s Five Step Plan For Making Iron Man Real”:
Overcoming our human body’s weakness via technology is a vision into which the Pentagon is today investing literally billions of dollars. As former Air Force Chief of Staff General John Jumper describes, “We must give the individual soldier the same capabilities of stealth and standoff that fighter planes have. We must look at the soldier as the system.â€
. . . The home for much of the work on the new technologies of the Future Force Warrior system is the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT. The program was started in 2002, with a $50 million grant from the Army, the largest ever grant in MIT’s history. Among the consortium working with MIT on the soldier systems are traditional defense firms like Raytheon to unexpected players like DuPont, the plastics company, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a leading research hospital of cancer and women’s health issues.
. . . the Future Force Warrior will carry a new “Weapon Subsystem,†that crosses a machine gun with a missile launcher. Most likely using the Metal Storm electrical system, it will shoot either bullets or tiny 15 mm explosive rockets. The advantage of the rockets is that they not only will be able to blow things up, but also are planned to have sensors that guide themselves at any designated target, raising every soldier to the level of an expert marksman. The weapon will also shoot an “electro-dart†that instead of exploding, stuns an enemy with an electrical shock. [. . .]
. . . instead of just regular night vision goggles and a video camera mounted on the rifle, the soldiers will be able have the enhanced MANTIS (Multi-spectral Adaptive Networked Tactical Imaging System) sight. Inspired by research into how insects “see†the world, MANTIS is a system which fuses together all the various images that different sensors (such as infrared light, thermal, etc.) detect into one single image. . . . Each soldier’s helmet in the system is wirelessly linked to those of everyone else in their squad, “so that each person sees what every other person sees.” The system also has “a TiVo-like record and playback capability†that allows the soldiers to rewind what they just saw and give anything that struck them as important an extra look.
All that is just the beginning, as Singer updates us on research into self-supporting armored exoskeletons, ways of manipulating body chemistry and metabolism (“steroids on steroids”), and their implications for future warfare.
Fortunately, the author leavens the gee-whiz tone of what all these innovations might accomplish with reminders of the likelihood of unanticipated consequences and complications — and a rigorous pattern of linking each concept to the comic book or science-fiction novel where it originated (to the extent that copyright infringement is a significant concern of the military researchers — in at least one case, they’re being sued by angry authors.)
(Thanks to Abu Aardvark for the Brookings link.)
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Tags: weird science