Fanciful DARPA projects to eliminate battlefield evacuation of the wounded near reality: “‘It sounds coldhearted, but a wounded soldier can be more disruptive than a dead one. At minimum, you need a couple of guys to carry him out. And once he’s out, it hurts unit cohesion,’ said Jim Lewis, with the Center for Strategic & International Studies. ‘So the more you can do upfront to stabilize someone — and the more that person can do for themselves — the better.'”

…The technologies, developed under a broad Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency effort called Persistence in Combat (PDF), all sound pretty far-fetched: a painkiller soldiers could take — before they get hurt; a sensor that scans the eye for internal trauma; a bandage that stimulates skin repair with electrical impulses.” Wired News