Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/356
54 Feb 2009 Be More Than You Can Be in the New Enhanced Army U S Military culture is famously weird (to civilians), and infamously effi cient at fueling our war-making organizations. With the exception of melodramatic and shallow takes on warrior's rituals as presented in popular media, the culture is largely closed to civilians, and very dear to the men and women in uniform. even the very modern rites and rituals of warriors have roots that can be traced back hundreds or thousands of years. The tradition of single combat, for instance, is still alive in the "grudge matches" of US Army Infantrymen. The sometimes lethal hazing of sailors "crossing the line" (equator) in the 1800s has meandered into gentler forms of pollywog abuse, oft involving Jell-o or cheese… and bare-bellied Chief Petty offi cers. The new network-centric warriors of the post-Rumsfeld era live in a military culture that straddles the traditions between yesterday and the techno-savvy warriors that they are expected to become for tomorrow's confl icts. The tools that today's warriors now must use edges them closer, individually and collectively, toward a transhuman state. This practical instantiation of (some of the grosser elements of) transhumanism still run aground of the older military mindset and culture. how do you maintain a strict hierarchical chain of command in an organization moving toward the valuation of a networked ethos? Let's look at some of these likely hotspots for cognitive dissonance, and consider their effects. InFoRMATIon WoRTh KILLIng FoR one of the most hotly sought and traded coin in the .mil culture is free and open non-classifi ed metadata sharing. Military movers and shakers are seeking and using information generated by civilian non-profi ts, corporations, or government agencies to solve problems like food distribution in the Irrawaddy Delta post- nargis; relationships between income and disease vectors in Asadabad; or the creation of smart fi rebreak patterns in SoCal. The realization that much mission-essential information has been created and published online, to be shared freely, by non-military groups, is a profound point with serious reverberations throughout military and allied organizations. It brings up questions about the possibility of operational inference by "free and open" info-sharing allies. but there is also, very naturally, a less hippie-cum-latte, more aggressive side to military information management. Personal x-ray devices for seeing through mud walls and concrete bunkers, forced synaesthetic abilities (like the navy SeAL who sees bodies in the water by tasting the saltwater with his cybergear), pocket-sized forward entry devices (PFeDs) for coordinating air strikes with infantry rushes, networked night-vision monocles, and other person-level information tools bring technology into near-embodiment onto — and within — the soldier. Sharing of this tactical data is strictly intranet, and its use is not usually as humane as the work of an anthropologist in a human Terrain Team trying to fi gure up the best route to run a sewage ditch. WooDY eVAnS