Earlier today, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced sweeping changes to the United States defense budget, putting the Pentagon on a track to mount counter-insurgency attacks, as opposed to fighting conventional military forces.

Included in these the changes: cuts to the Army's Future Combat Systems program, a $92 Billion program that was designed to upgrade the military with manned and unmanned vehicles, as well as to introduce such programs as the Future Force Warrior, which explored such concepts such as exo-skeletons and nano technology. The idea was to create a highly mobile fighting force that would use superior communications and technology to gain an edge in battle.

Introduced in 2003, the program was first introduced with the intent to redesign elements of the US armed forces to better conform to network-centric warfare, as well as introducing new vehicles and equipment for soldiers to use. Originally, the plan called for the equipping of 15 brigades, or around 3,000 soldiers, over the next two decades. However, as early as 2005, the program's costs began to skyrocket, and the program has been plagued with technical problems along the way. The entire cost of the program do date is estimated to be around $296 billion, which has left a number of its supporters within the government looking for a way out. Critics of the program have called for its end, saying that the combined technological advances would be too complicated to integrate and put into the battlefield.

A slowdown in funding for the program, along with other elements, means that we're not going to be seeing any powered-armor soldiers jumping between streets in Baghdad any time soon, but it also means the military is adapting to ongoing changes. The futuristic suits that soldiers were envisioned to wear went away as program costs skyrocketed, as well as some of the other requirements that the program had started out with, according to Wired Magazine. But, while this might be a disappointment to science fiction fans who were waiting for the day that Starship Troopers came to life, this move is not necessarily a bad one for the military to make.

If anything, the War on Terror, or whatever we're supposed to call it nowadays, has shown that technology doesn't necessarily equal superiority on the battlefield. Robert Baer's 2003 book, See No Evil, points out that while there was much funding for high tech surveillance, none of it replaces the value of an operative in the field. P.W. Singer's latest book, Wired For War, also brings up the problems inherent on the battlefield with network centric warfare, from computer problems to chain of command issues. Army Col. Thomas Hammes, in his book The Sling and the Stone, cites this very issue as a problem with modern warfare, as the United States sought to fight an Iraqi insurgency, using a high-tech army in a conventional manner.

In a nutshell, right now, the United States fields one of the most advanced militaries in the world, and the need to overhaul how we fight isn't as pressing at the moment, and the money that would otherwise be used for this goal could certainly be used for tools that we know work.

So will we ever see the dawn of exoskeletons and power armor? Probably, because these ideas certainly have merit, but with the constraints of modern technology and the changing nature of how wars are fought, it's always a good idea to question the use of a system that does not necessarily provide an inherent advantage over enemy forces armed with technology from the 1970s.

Image Credits: Infantry, US Army, Tank, Defense Industry Daily

The Canadian military paid Schroeder to write Crisis In Zefra in 2005. It's a war novel set in a fictional African country 20 years from now. Peacekeepers have to prepare the city for its first democratic vote while fighting off an insurgency. The good guys win, says Schroeder, but "not without consequences." One of the fantastic bits of future tech the soldiers have access to is "smart dust," which lets you set up ad-hoc communications networks wherever you go.

The book has done well enough that the Army has run out of copies. And now the Canadians are hiring Schroeder to write a sequel, Zefra II, all about the challenges Canadian soldiers may face in the year 2040.

Says Lt. Col. Mike Rostek:

It's actually just part of marketing, to say, ‘Hey, we're out there; we're thinking about these things for the future, trying to get better bang for the buck and thinking about what it is that we're going to be doing in the future as part of Canada's national power structure.' The idea is just to put that out there and say, ‘OK, this is fictional. It's science fiction. So have fun with it.'

Schroeder says he was raised as a pacifist, thanks to his Mennonite background, but he does believe that the state has a duty to intervene when there's a crisis in other countries, whether it's a natural disaster or a military crisis. "And, actually, Canada has acted on that philosophy for a number of years, and as a way of employing the army, I'm entirely in favour if it."

It's almost impossible to predict what the world will really be like in 2040, Schroeder admits. But Rostek has a few ideas, including nanotechnology and space elevators. [The Chronicle Herald]

It's like a dream come true — or maybe a nightmare. Soldiers could be sent back to the battlefield over and over again after near-maimings and minor mutilations. One experiment succeeded in growing back a soldier's fingertip after it got cut off, thanks to a "Extracellular Matrix" or "magic dust," made out of cells from the intestinal lining and urinary bladder. It stimulates the body's natural self-repair ability, by making the body think it's back in the womb.

Another breakthrough is an engineered skin substitute from a patient's own — you can grow a postage-stamp-sized piece, and it grows to be large enough to cover a burn or wound, or even large damaged regions of the body. The military is working on nerve and vein transplants. And they've pioneered a biodegradable splint, or scaffold, made of ceramic, that can help regrow missing or damaged bone. (So far they've only regrown about three centimeters of missing bone in rat clincial trials, but they hope to get up to five centimeters within a few years.)

And then there's BEAR (pictured right), a robot that can retrieve injured people from the battlefield, so they can have their wounds miraculously healed. Another robot is Packbot, a voice-controlled bot that can do explosives removal and surveillance. [CNN]