warfare

Emergency medical care for soldiers wounded on the battlefield has come a long way since Hawkeye and Hot Lips. But for Special Forces troopers operating deep behind enemy lines, that care often remains out of reach. Blood loss in particular makes seconds count, and imperils commandos operating far away from friendly bases.

To help with the problem of blood loss from traumatic wounds, the military has started field-testing a device more Mandalorian than M.A.S.H.: a plasma knife.

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Like most Army commanders, Lt. General Rick Lynch says that he needed more troops in Iraq, and that they would have saved the lives of men lost under his command. Unlike most commanders though, Lynch isn't demanding flesh and blood soldiers, but steel and rubber robotic infantrymen.

Speaking at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference, Lynch said that robot systems already in place could have saved 122 of the 155 men who died during his time in Iraq.

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On the battlefield, communication is key. So while improving comms between our troops is a vital part of the military's technological mission, the mad scientists over at DARPA are scheming up a new way to deny communication to the enemy in a very precise way. DARPA is seeking proposals for a way to use an array of low-power transmitter nodes in the sky and on the ground to perform "surgical jamming" that will knock out communications signals "on the order of a city block corner" while leaving surrounding areas unaffected.

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As unmanned drones become a larger part of how America makes war, fully autonomous fighting robots seem less a possibility than an eventuality. But how do we ensure that these future autonomous weapons conform to the ethics we would expect from a human combatant?

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The mission changes for Charlie Company seconds after the soldiers roll off the base. The dreary night patrol around Balad, a shambling Shi'ite town in north-central Iraq, has just been canceled. It's time instead to hightail it west, to the Sunni neighborhood of Ad Duluiyah. "Alpha Company is taking direct fire," a voice crackles over the radio in First Lt. Brian Feldmayer's Humvee. "I need you to expedite."

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