The soldier of the future will be "flooded with pain-numbing stimulants," cybernetically enhanced, and, one official sort-of joked, must be eventually "terminated."
I'm not sure how much of what is suggested in that article is possible, but it is chilling nonetheless. They reference all these heroic characters from movies while (maybe) not realizing that they sound just like the villains from those same films.
Might not be possible now, but that doesn't mean it won't be possible in the near future. A lot of what science has advanced takes a lot of money and basic research to get there. That's something the military is good at bcz they don't care how much money they spend.
Unfortunately, they're operating under the assumption of, everybody else is doing it too, so we need yo do it first.
Holy shit so I remember when I was first stationed at Redstone Arsenal and they had this introductory lecture about RA and tech we were working towards (future tech) and they had this dude come out in this Bollywood Universal Soldier getup and all I could do was laugh out loud. It was the dumbest most out of touch shit I had ever seen.
Anyway 24 years later and we are still not getting that tech.
That rationale of projecting the prisoner's dilemma onto literally everything is really dangerous. It makes me think of that one episode of Rick and Morty where they're split between these increasingly fragmented eigenstates and all the Ricks start trying to kill one another because they figure if they don't the others will kill them first.
If everybody abandons their morality because they're pretty sure everyone else will do it first if they don't, we definitely get a worse outcome. Like, okay, even if eventually some like Chinese Bene Gesserit space marines push for military dominance, we'd be better off making some little pocket of life on Earth that isn't rushing the dystopian options and eventually losing it than just making everything terrible to make sure we own the ruins.