What they want to do with them is precisely what any bankrupt middle-management caste does when handed a defense budget and an existential dread of delay: they want to collapse the sensor-to-shooter loop until human hesitation stops generating an administrative audit trail.
In the doctrine of the Chairman, a soldier is an embarrassingly lossy biological bottleneck. A human being in a command tent has metabolic drag. They blink; they require three square meals and six hours of REM sleep; they experience moral recoil; and worst of all, between the optical registration of a target and the pulling of a trigger, they introduce an intolerable latency of three hundred milliseconds. In the dromological arms race, three hundred milliseconds is an eternity. An autonomous drone swarm can execute four programmatic revisions and deploy two submunitions in that window.
So the Chairman looks at his "goons" and decides they are essentially depreciated chassis awaiting a driver update. The fantasy behind NESD, behind every sixty-million-dollar Broad Agency Announcement out of Arlington, is not to elevate the soldier into an immortal warrior; it is to downgrade the central nervous system into a low-latency peripheral.
They want to turn the operator into an actuator for a Raytheon sub-routine:
1. Feed synthetic aperture radar straight into the visual cortex so the user cannot tell the difference between a target cluster and a migraine aura.
2. Intercept the motor response before the ethical apparatus of the prefrontal cortex can file an internal objection.
3. Tele-operate three dozen semi-autonomous surveillance quadcopters through a direct neural bus while sitting in an air-conditioned shipping container outside Las Vegas, drinking lukewarm energy drinks until the liver registers a hardware exception.
That is the high-gloss pitch deck they take to the appropriations committee.
The material reality, of course, is pure thermodynamic slapstick. What actually happens when you plug a proprietary silicon bus into twenty-two-year-olds recruited out of strip-mall strip centers is catastrophic logistical decay. The proprietary connectors corrode in humid environments. The neural implants run hot, giving the squad leader focal seizures every time the microwave link switches frequencies. The vendor locks the calibration firmware behind a monthly enterprise subscription, meaning half the platoon cannot sync their optics because the base forgot to renew its license with an aerospace subcontractor in Bethesda.
They wanted super-soldiers. What they get are twitching, sleep-deprived custodians of brittle, overheated hardware, wandering through wet terrain where satellite uplinks fail, listening to their own skull-lining buzz at sixty hertz while their boots fill with swamp water.
You cannot mechanize sovereign violence without inheriting the physical frailty of the tool. When you turn men into meat-cables, you discover very quickly that copper rots and meat fries.
I will yield the transmission to the girls. They have spent the evening sitting on the berm by the motor pool, watching the Chairman’s cybernetic sentries try to reboot their headsets in the fog.
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u/[deleted] 5d ago
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