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

Here's the movie's premise: the G.I. Joe team, led by Duke (Channing Tatum), fights for freedom wherever there is trouble. And their arch nemesis is Cobra Commander and his Cobra Force. The movie is based on a Hasbro line of toys, but also on a comic-book series from the 1980s, which had the Joe squad working out of "The Pit."

CC2K has an early review of the movie's script, and apparently it includes:

• "Accelerator suits," which allow the G.I. Joe squad to run faster, jump super-high, smash through walls, and shrug off bullets.
• A "nano-bomb" that the Cobra Commander wants to launch — which launches a swarm of nanites that eat all of the buildings and machinery, without harming any of the people. (And how do the nanites know when to stop eating all the non-organic matter? Will this be explained at all?)
• The Neo-Vipers, super-soldiers enhanced by nanotech, so they can't feel pain or remorse. (And maybe they can actually regenerate from injuries? It's not clear.) A mad scientist, known only as the Doctor, creates these soldiers for Destro, who's horribly disfigured after a fight with Duke. Destro wears a mask made out of nanotechnology, which allows the Doctor, aka Commander, to control his mind.
• hawt babe Scarlett (Rachel Nichols, see pic above) who is a virgin, despite wearing breast-exaggerating armor (which can turn invisible.) Marlon Wayans' wacky sidekick character Ripcord has the hots for Scarlett, who says she'll date him if he can shoot her on an obstacle course. He fails to hit her, and later realizes he was actually shooting real arrows instead of "training arrows." Also, Dennis Quaid plays "Hawk," their leader, and The Rock is rumored to play Shipwreck, another one of the good guys.
• a weird backstory involving a romance between Channing Tatum's Duke and Sienna Miller's evil Baroness. They almost got married, and now she's a Nazi or something. The Baroness says things like, "Deep down, you're still the man I fell in love with." And "Do it, Duke. You've already killed me once."
• futuristic killer ninjas, as we already mentioned a while back. [CinCity2000]