The U.S. Army spends $1.4 billion each year on elaborate virtual reality simulations, and in the past decade the electronic arts have taken the luster off live training, or what one of the Army's top simulation experts refers to as "go out in the woods and mess around." Today's motto? "All but war is simulation."

University of Southern California researchers are developing an immersive, virtual reality environment similar to MMPORGs that will help train U.S. soldiers to speak Arabic.

The U.S. Army is funding research and development of flexible solar panels that will allow soldiers to power essential communications equipment while also reducing weight and their visibility to the enemy.

The U.S. Army, riding the success of its action video game America's Army, has set up a video-game studio with industry veterans to write other kinds of software to simulate training for a variety of armed forces and government projects.

The U.S. military expects advances in nanotechnology to impact every major weapons system and is spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on various research programs, according to a senior military science adviser.

The author looks at the potential of hydrogen fuel cells to not only "transform the future energy needs of the United States and the US Air Force, but also to change how and why we fight."

Pentagon war planners have revised plans for potential wars on the Korean peninsula, in the Middle East and elsewhere based on assumptions that conflicts could be fought more quickly and with fewer troops than previously thought.

"The current trend toward a hydrogen economy presents DOD with some special challenges, because a pure hydrogen fuel likely will not satisfy many DOD requirements. The resolution of this problem will take decades. DOD should engage on this issue in the near term in order to influence and leverage the national hydrogen initiative and to have in place an infrastructure to assure that DOD energy needs are met, in particular those related to fuel requirements for low-altitude, high-performance aircraft missions."

The role of nanotechnology and nanoscale materials in military operations is still limited but the U.S. military is ramping up nanotech research and development efforts for the next war.

President Bush has signed a secret directive ordering the government to develop, for the first time, national-level guidance for determining when and how the United States would launch cyber-attacks against enemy computer networks, according to administration officials.