'Kill-Proofing' the Soldier: Environmental Threats, Anticipation, and US Military Biomedical Armor Programs

摘要

While vigorously exploring new and improved external protection technologies, the US military has long focused on ways to internally armor the soldier through biomedical interventions. The goal of these projects is to create a new kind of soldier with different expectations of performance, capabilities, and survivability. Much of the focus of US military biomedical performance-enhancement programs is on the impact of environmental threats and infectious disease and how soldiers break down due to these stressors. Zeroing in on this trend, I examine two US military biomedical armor projects intended to protect soldiers against the environment and disease. Employing a kind of anticipatory military biomedicine, both projects call for the embedding of "inbuilt" and "unseen" biomedical technologies and prophylaxes in the body of the soldier. As I discuss here, US military biomedical research is intended to provide soldiers with protections to allow them to deploy in any condition or climate around the world and to protect them from any and all pathogens they might encounter on the battlefield. As the US military increasingly sees the entire globe as a battlefield, it must anticipate, imagine, and design new ways to protect soldiers in order to make them deployable anywhere in the world.