The 10 Most Important Theories About Why We Make War

I'm very disappointed, though not surprised, at this analysis. I don't fault the author, but rather the inherent bias of the academic fields involved. Most of these items help explain how people are exploited in order to support war, but none offer the main motivation for war: the health of the state. Government is not somehow the pooling of community resources for the common good under the supervision of society's best and brightest. This is worthless propaganda of the same sort as war propaganda itself, and is well explained by the points listed in the article. Politics is an arrangement by which the most ruthless and violent factions in a socio-cultural environment consolidate their power and violence to gain beneficial economic advantages. Malthusian pressure has nothing to do with war as a direct cause. And, to finish the thought, if there was true Malthusian pressure that social and technological innovation couldn't solve, then the result would be migration. Related: War Machine

Soldier Andrew Garthwaite's mind-control bionic op 25 January 2012Last updated at 12:00 By Sharon Barbour BBC News, Vienna The soldier went to Austria for the first stage of the process to fit him with a bionic arm As the first British serviceman injured in battle to use a new bionic arm, Cpl Andrew Garthwaite's story has already been remarkable. But this week he underwent six hours of surgery at a hospital in Austria at the start of a process to make it even more so - to prepare him to be fitted with an arm he will be able to control with his brain. The 24-year-old, from South Tyneside, was badly injured in Helmand, Afghanistan, in September 2010 when a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade took off his right arm and killed one of his comrades. He first had to learn how to carry out everyday tasks with one arm but was delighted to learn he would have one of the latest models of bionic arms fitted. He could hold a beer and do basic tasks. A technician then designed a new arm so he could ride his motorbike. Rewire nervous system 'Difficult surgery'

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents. Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. Other tactics aimed at individuals are listed here, under the revealing title “discredit a target”:

Neuro-enhancement in the military: far-fetched or an inevitable future? | Science About five years ago, not long after I started up my research group at Cardiff University, something rather strange happened. One morning I came down to my lab to find the door wide open and a suited man standing in the middle of the room, peering around and scribbling on a clipboard. He told me he worked for a private defence firm who were interested in applications of my research on human brain stimulation. Thinking about it afterward, something about the encounter chilled me. Five years later, brain stimulation research has moved far and fast. Different forms of neurostimulation in humans have now been shown to boost our ability to learn and perform motor actions, to pay attention to events in the environment, to recall information in memory, and to exercise self-control. Most of these findings stem from two basic forms of brain stimulation. The second major approach, called transcranial direct current stimulation (or TDCS), works quite differently.

43 Books About War Every Man Should Read Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Ryan Holiday. War is unquestionably mankind at his worst. Yet, paradoxically, it is in war that men — individual men — often show the very best of themselves. I am not a soldier. The greats have been writing and reading about war — its causes, its effects, its heroes, its victims — since the beginning of written text. The study of war is the study of life, because war is life in the rawest sense. As Virgil put it, “the sword decides all.” This is a post about the canon of books about war. I’m certainly not recommending every book about war ever written, or even every book I’ve read on the subject, but instead a collection of the most meaningful. Note: I have them roughly organized by chronology and era but feel free to skip around. There’s no question it is a good thing a full generation has passed in the West without requiring the majority of young people to feel the full brunt of war. They may rear their ugly head tomorrow.

Military Must Prep Now for 'Mutant' Future, Researchers Warn | Danger Room Lockheed Martin tests its Human Universal Load Carrier exoskeleton. Photo: Lockheed Martin The U.S. military is already using, or fast developing, a wide range of technologies meant to give troops what California Polytechnic State University researcher Patrick Lin calls “mutant powers.” But the risk, ethics and policy issues arising out of these so-called “military human enhancements” — including drugs, special nutrition, electroshock, gene therapy and robotic implants and prostheses — are poorly understood, Lin and his colleagues Maxwell Mehlman and Keith Abney posit in a new report for The Greenwall Foundation (.pdf), scheduled for wide release tomorrow. If we don’t, we could find ourselves in big trouble down the road. “With military enhancements and other technologies, the genie’s already out of the bottle: the benefits are too irresistible, and the military-industrial complex still has too much momentum,” Lin says in an e-mail. The ethical concerns certainly have precedent.

This Scientist Wants Tomorrow's Troops to Be Mutant-Powered | Danger Room Andrew Herr in Mongolia. Photo: via Andrew Herr Greater strength and endurance. Enhanced thinking. Better teamwork. New classes of genetic weaponry, able to subvert DNA. It’s warfare waged at the evolutionary level. Qualities that today must be honed by years of training and education could be installed in a relative instant by, say, an injection or a targeted burst of electricity to the brain. These modifications could give rise to new breeds of biologically enhanced troops possessing what one expert in the field calls “mutant powers.” But not if Andrew Herr can help it. A 29-year-old Georgetown-trained researcher with degrees in microbiology, health physics and national security, Herr is one a handful of specialists in the defense community preaching greater U.S. investment in biomods. Another word for that: revolutionary. Whether positive or negative, the impact of routine biomods could be huge. But it’s not clear how closely the government is listening.

Hacking the Human Brain: The Next Domain of Warfare | Wired Opinion It’s been fashionable in military circles to talk about cyberspace as a “fifth domain” for warfare, along with land, space, air and sea. But there’s a sixth and arguably more important warfighting domain emerging: the human brain. This new battlespace is not just about influencing hearts and minds with people seeking information. It’s about involuntarily penetrating, shaping, and coercing the mind in the ultimate realization of Clausewitz’s definition of war: compelling an adversary to submit to one’s will. Chloe Diggins and Clint Arizmendi are research & analysis officers at the Australian army’s Land Warfare Studies Centre. Current BCI work ranges from researchers compiling and interfacing neural data such as in the Human Conectome Project to work by scientists hardening the human brain against rubber hose cryptanalysis to technologists connecting the brain to robotic systems. This new battlespace is not just about influencing hearts and minds.

Darpa's Magic Plan: 'Battlefield Illusions' to Mess With Enemy Minds | Danger Room Arthur C. Clarke once famously quipped that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So perhaps it was inevitable that the Pentagon’s extreme technology arm would eventually start acting like magicians — and try to create illusions on the front lines. In its new budget, unveiled on Monday, Darpa introduced a new $4 million investigation into technologies that will “manage the adversary’s sensory perception” in order to “confuse, delay, inhibit, or misdirect [his] actions.” Darpa calls the project “Battlefield Illusion.” Of course. “The current operational art of human-sensory battlefield deception is largely an ad-hoc practice,” the agency sighs as it lays out the project’s goals. Ultimately, the aim is to “demonstrate and assess the operational effectiveness of advanced human-deceptive technologies on military ground, sea, and airborne systems.” If this all sounds a little outside the military norm, it shouldn’t. Harry Houdini performing.

A.I. Downs Expert Human Fighter Pilot In Dogfights <img src="<a pearltreesdevid="PTD1908" rel="nofollow" href=" class="vglnk">http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-cafODhhaQOlCs.gif</a>" style="display:none" height="1" width="1" alt="Quantcast" /> None

Pentagon Report Predicts Rise of Machine-Enhanced Super Soldiers By 2050, the U.S. military could have the ability to implant sophisticated machine technology into combat troops for enhanced performance capabilities such as super eyesight and advanced brain function for controlling unmanned drones and other weapons systems, according to a recent Defense Department study. In "Cyborg Soldier 2050: Human/Machine Fusion and the Implications for the Future of the DOD," the Biotechnologies for Health and Human Performance Council study group surveyed several current and emerging technologies designed to augment human performance to present the feasibility, military uses, and ethical, legal, and social implications of the technology. "The [study group] predicted that human/machine enhancement technologies will become widely available before the year 2050 and will steadily mature, largely driven by civilian demand and a robust bio-economy that is at its earliest stages of development in today's global market," the report states. © Copyright 2020 Military.com.