DARPA creating a race of robo-grunts

I'm taking little white pills
And my eyes are open wide
I just passed a Jimmy and a White...
I've been passin' every thing in sight.
Six days on the road, and I'm gonna make it home tonight.
--Dave Dudley

The Defense Sciences Office of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking for a few good proposals to exploit soldiers in ways Rommel and Tojo could only have dreamed of.

Imagine divisions of grunts able to go without food and sleep for days on end while performing at peak level. That's the perverse dream of the Defense Sciences Office's new Metabolic Dominance Program.

"The vision for the Metabolic Dominance Program is to develop novel strategies that exploit and control the mechanisms of energy production, metabolism, and utilization during short periods of deployment requiring unprecedented levels of physical demand. The ultimate goal is to enable superior physical and physiological performance by controlling energy metabolism on demand," DARPA explains.

Much of this will be a matter of uncapping the natural safety mechanisms against excessive strain that humans have evolved with - overclocking the grunt, so to speak. But the DoD doesn't seem much concerned by the potential ill effects; nowhere in the call for proposals is there a request for a long-term health impact study. The long-term effects will apparently be discovered the old-fashioned way.

Entire article on The-Register.co.uk

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Whoa... What are your thoughts on that? I think it's better that they do such research, instead of just research on creating always more and more powerfull Weapon of Mass Destruction.

Who wouldn't want to be a super soldier? lol...

(I searched and haven't seen anything related to this article, if something about this was already posted recently, then sorry, my bad.)


[Edited on 23-2-2004 by m0rbid]

Just make them all good, hard and sexy cyborg bodies. No need to alter a soldier's metabolysm which may harm his health permanently.

I thought the US already gives their military personnell 'uppers' when they are on mission. I read somewhere that pilots of combat fighters regularly use a speed derivative. Don't know how true it is though. Maybe anyone with military knowledge can confirm or deny this.

It probably is true, pisky. Another excerpt of the text on the register.

This will be accomplished without the traditional stimulants and the nervous edge they create. Firing up soldiers with amphetamines has had its drawbacks, illustrated most recently in Afghanistan, where two speed-addled US pilots panicked and attacked a group of Canadians on a training exercise, killing four and wounding eight.

Seems like drugging them might not have been such a good idea.

Originally posted by Johnny
No need to alter a soldier's metabolysm which may harm his health permanently.

I don't think they really care about their health. They are disposable and replacable.

" we can build him better, faster, stronger. We can build the first bionic man" I'm sure super-soldiers are just around the corner. Put enough money into then and they could stop being a person, and just thought of as equipment.

Universal Soldier comes to mind...

There are actually several cases on file of Special Forces soldiers who were part of such programs, some of whom still can barely sleep to this day...though largely, the reports aren't in mainstream media...

We may not need soilders one day. Computers and machines will dominate. I hope that never happens.