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Perhaps we could have killed Osama bin-Laden with a drone, but since he rarely left his compound, our soldiers had to go in and get him instead. In Whitley’s new novel Hybrids, he writes about machine-men who are engineered to be soldiers. The US seems pretty complacent about using drones for warfare, but the UK isn’t quite so sanguine about it: They think that growing use of unmanned aircraft in combat situations raises huge moral and legal issues. They also worry that wars will become more common once armed robots take over the fighting.
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The military is one of our biggest users of fossil fuels and they want to reduce costs and make units in the field less vulnerable to attacks on supply lines necessary to transport petroleum-based fuels. To do this, they have invented solar cells that soldiers can roll up like a mat, transport, and unroll in a new location to start generating electricity on the spot. It’s a matter of life or death: A recent study using data from 2007 found that the US military loses one person–killed or wounded–for every 24 fuel envoys it runs in Afghanistan. Engineer Dennis Helder says, "The bottom line is, we want to save some lives.read more

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Why do soldiers risk their lives in wars, and then come home and kill themselves? The US Army has recently announced that there were a record number of suicides among soldiers last month. If this keeps up, more soldiers will have killed themselves last month than died in combat.

In CNN.com, Barbara Starr and Mike Mount quotes an Army official as saying, “This is terrifying. We do not know what is going on.”
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It has been reported that more Gulf War Vets got Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), which gradually leads to complete paralysis, than the general public. Those soldiers blamed it on bioterrorism from Saddam, while current soldiers in Iraq fear they may get it from the vaccinations they’re forced to take, which are often not yet approved for the general public. Now it’s been discovered that not just Gulf War Vets, but ALL Vets are more likely to get the disease.
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