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The USA has been researching ways to enhance the biology and performance of soldiers for decades.
Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work warned that America would soon lose its military competitive advantage if it does not pursue technologies such as employing artificial intelligence.
Altering human beings from the inside to more effectively fight in combat is claimed to presents ethical dilemmas for American scientists and military planners.
Work says those ethical concerns typically don't apply to authoritarian governments like Russia's or China's, but their lack of hesitation in developing EHOs may force America's hand.
Previous US human augmentation research
DARPA had started work on a super-soldier suit called TALOS (Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit) unlike anything in the history of warfare. Engineered with full-body ballistics protection; integrated heating and cooling systems; embedded sensors, antennas, and computers; 3D audio (to indicate where a fellow warfighter is by the sound of his voice); optics for vision in various light conditions; life-saving oxygen and hemorrhage controls; and more, TALOS is strikingly close to the futuristic exoskeleton that Gorman first envisioned for DARPA 25 years ago, and aims to be “fully functional” by 2018.
It was the collapse of the Soviet Union that accelerated many of DARPA’s most radical super-soldier science programs. The revelation that the Soviets had developed an extensive biological-weapons program caused DARPA to bring biologists into its ranks, and with the life sciences at the fore, DARPA began to look inside the human body, toward a scientific capability that could transform soldiers from the inside out.
DARPA's Defense Sciences Office (DSO) investigated a mind-altering pain vaccine. Once injected into a soldier who had been shot, the vaccine would theoretically reduce the pain from inflammation and swelling. After 30 seconds of agony, the soldier would feel no pain for 30 days. As long as the bleeding was contained the soldier could keep fighting.
The government's research into halting the bleeding yielded another program that involved injecting millions of microscopic magnets into a person, which could later be brought together into a single area to stop bleeding with the wave of a wand.
DARPA has also studied whales and dolphins—mammals that don't need to sleep in long chunks like humans do—as inspiration for creating a soldier who requires little to no sleep for a week or more. Whales and dolphins independently control the left and right lobes of their brains, keeping one alert while the other sleeps. It's not known if DAPRA scientists made any progress with human lobe control, but they did explore powerful anti-sleep drugs like Modafini
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Next Big Future
