Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt said during a trip to Baghdad this week that Iraq’s stabilization could lead to business opportunities in the country.
Mr. Schmidt was part of a delegation, led by Peter Pace, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to encourage business development in Iraq.
On a warm spring evening in Iraq this April, months before Iranians made global headlines with angry Twitter posts, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and several other American tech leaders sipped wine with Barham Salih in the garden of his Baghdad home.
If you wanted to pick the moment when the American news business went on suicide watch, it was almost exactly three years ago.
More than just conventional wisdom, it has become almost a cliché to say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved “how technology doesn’t have a big place in any doctrine of future war,” as one security analyst told me in 2007. But if anything, new technology has and will continue to redefine modern warfare.
If there’s a subject that’s as contentious as war itself, it might be a video game about war.
It’s been just over a week since the release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, the latest chapter in the popular video game series about a covert military agent named Solid Snake.
The House is set for hearings on one of the hottest–and most contentious–topics in Pentagon research today.
Every arm of the Pentagon’s vast research complex is scrambling to figure out how to turn social and cultural networks into military advantage. Social scientists are being embedded in combat brigades, to explore Iraq and Afghanistan’s “human terrain.” Computer labs back at home are trying to model foreign cultures like the weather and predict the next epicenter of unrest. But all of these projects are loaded with controversy. One of the biggest academic groups in social science has condemned the Human Terrain System program as unethical; prominent researchers and officers think the prediction project is pie-in-the-sky, at best.
… The days of patrol leaders operating half-blind on the deadly streets of Iraq are drawing to a close. After a two-year rush program by the Pentagon’s research arm, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, troops are now getting what might be described as Google Maps for the Iraq counterinsurgency. There is nothing cutting-edge about the underlying technology: software that runs on PCs and taps multiple distributed databases. But the trove of information the system delivers is of central importance in the daily lives of soldiers. The new technology–called the Tactical Ground Reporting System, or TIGR–is a map-centric application that junior officers (the young sergeants and lieutenants who command patrols) can study before going on patrol and add to upon returning.
The most memorable reporting I’ve encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called “Cherry Blossoms.” I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the top; they were connected to a detonation device linked to a global-positioning system receiver.
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