The Register carried this article about "hopping, self-healing" land mines, which is just one of the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) projects that are trying to bridge the gap between technology and biology (other projects hope to create robotic fighting units and devices for linking soldiers' brains directly to equipment). The web site for the self-healing minefield project showcases the mines in several media, including a Flash simulation and several videos of tests of the mines (look under "Teams" and then the individual company pages).


I timed out and lost the last half of my post :(, but I'll recap here. So much of war is fought (or represented as being fought) between technologies (missile to missile; bomb to structure; etc.), that the body becomes distanced from the action in many ways. Advances in technology seem to be riding the wave of the moral outrage at loss of life, even as total deaths in wars are decreasing. in other words, technology is seen as making it possible to avoid the loss of life. The avoidance of loss of life is also a large part of Bush's stance on pre-emption. Agencies like the IAO are benificiaries of this rhetoric as well, since their goal is to create technology that will intervene before war/terrorism becomes a reality. I wonder, though, if we would be at war if our technological advantage was not so great.