Size Matters: Constructing the High-Performance Warfighter through Nanotechnology

摘要

How is the soldier defined within network-centric warfare? How does the United States Military propose to use advanced technologies to enhance soldier performance? This paper begins to answer these questions by examining the way in which politics, technology, and discourse combine in the creation of the digital soldier. The emerging concept of NBIC (integrated nano, bio, info, and cognitive technologies) dovetails with the military's emphasis on network-centric warfare (NCW). The associated concepts of distributed networking, self-synchronization, and peer-to-peer information sharing integrate the human and technological components of combat power, and accelerate the ongoing revolution in military affairs (RMA). This paper uses discourse analysis to analyze how stakeholders attempt to stabilize this new approach to national security, and to design a human soldier for the distributed front. Its overarching conceptual framework envisions the military as a complex adaptive system in which human and technological factors must co-evolve in response to the ecosystem perturbation of asymmetric warfare. The paper concludes that while much attention is given to the macro-level drivers of military transformation and the functional possibilities of NBIC, the ethics of ramping up soldier performance far beyond the constraints of normal human physiology has not yet received adequate attention.