Be More Than You Can Be

[OhioChick]

Heat-resistant. Cold-proof. Tireless. Tomorrow’s soldiers are just like today’s — only better. Inside the Pentagon’s human enhancement project.

The lab is climate-controlled to 104 degrees Fahrenheit and 66 percent humidity. Sitting inside the cramped room, even for a few minutes, is an unpleasantly moist experience. I’ve spent the last 40 minutes on a treadmill angled at a 9 percent grade. My face is chili-red, my shirt soaked with sweat. My breath is coming in short, unsatisfactory gasps. The sushi and sake I had last night are in full revolt. The tiny speakers on the shelf blasting “Living on a Prayer” are definitely not helping.

Then Dennis Grahn, a lumpy Stanford University biologist and former minor-league hockey player, walks into the room. He nods in my direction and smiles at a technician. “Looks like he’s ready,” Grahn says.

Grahn takes my hand and slips it into a clear, coffeepot-looking contraption he calls the Glove. Inside is a hemisphere of metal, cool to the touch. He tightens a seal around my wrist; a vacuum begins pulling blood to the surface of my hand, and the cold metal chills my blood before it travels through my veins back to my core. After five minutes, I feel rejuvenated. Never mind the hangover. Never mind Bon Jovi. I keep going for another half hour.

The test isn’t about my endurance; it’s about the future of the American armed forces. Grahn and his colleagues developed the Glove for the military — specifically, for the Pentagon’s way-out science division, Darpa: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. For nearly 50 years, Darpa has engineered technological breakthroughs from the Internet to stealth jets. But in the early 1990s, as military strategists started worrying about how to defend against germ weapons, the agency began to get interested in biology. “The future was a scary place, the more we looked at it,” says Michael Goldblatt, former head of Darpa’s Defense Sciences Office. “We wanted to learn the capabilities
of nature before others taught them to us.”

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore.html?pg=1&topic=bemore&topic_set=


<Snip> The test isn’t about my endurance; it’s about the future of the American armed forces.
So what goes on in Grahn’s dank little lab at Stanford is part of a much larger push to radically improve the performance, mental capacity, and resilience of American troops — to let them run harder and longer, operate without sleep, overcome deadly injury, and tap the potential of their unconscious minds.

[bryant69]

1. Naturally the developement of Military Technology is to be condemned

at all times.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[OhioChick]

2. I don't have a problem with

military technology, however what I do have a problem with is funding something like this (can't even imagine the price-tag) during war{s} time.....while troops don't even have the neccessary equipment that they need to survive.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. Why bother with soldiers at all? Just play chess and use something called pawns.

They could even build monuments for them for politicians to stand in front of to look sad and constipated while shouting "Support Our Pawns!".

Fred Phelps could protest the symbolic funerals accusing the pawns of being gay.

The "Defense" industry could present a whole range of pawns with really cool uniforms and gear. The generals could go to congress and beg for more money for the "defense" industry and whine about the "pawn" gap. The "defense" lobbyists could take the politicians to lunch and offer the usual brib...er, campaign contributions. And, the generals would still get those nice jobs as "experts" on the "news" shows when they retire.

Naaah. The impact on liquor sales, psychiatrists, hospitals, morticians, and prosthetic device makers would damage the economy.

"War is a racket." Smedley Butler