Last weekend, Iron Man kicked off the summer blockbuster season with a whopping $100 million dollar box office return. A Stan Lee creation and Marvel comic book from the Vietnam War era, Iron Man tells the story of Tony Stark, a billionaire weapons inventor for the US government whose capture by enemy forces inspires him to create a robotic exoskelaton that he uses to fight his captors and launch himself a few hundred feet to freedom. Then he goes home to perfect his combat suit.

The updated version, as you surely know, changes Stark's location to Afghanistan, and his captors to Middle Eastern insurgents. He's good, they're evil. He kills a lot of them and escapes. Depending on your politics, this is where you want to either shout for joy or sit the whole film crew down and explain how this plot-point is an offensive, jingoistic, one-sided depiction of our involvement in the "War on Terror."

After all, the treatment Stark receives in the deep recesses of his cave-prison isn't far off from the way the US government treats its own captives at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the many other "secret" prisons around the world.

But I'll leave the film's politics alone for now. Instead, let's think about the Iron Man character itself: a man-cum-superhero through MacGyver-like wizardry.

The conceit is that Tony Stark is a scientific genius, and can thus create a suit that even his peers can't replicate. But maybe Stark isn't so advanced after all, and Iron Man is less a sci-fi romp than a glimpse at what our military isn't far from realizing.

As Clayton Dach writes in the May/June issue of Adbusters, the (near)future soldier will have "next-generation sidearms; headsets that provide live command and control, detailed geographic data and the ability to fire around corners; smart suits equipped with ultralight nanotech armor, micro-climate conditioning, real-time health monitoring and even automated medical care like CPR and drug delivery. Also on the docket are robotic exoskeletons that allow the soldiers wearing them to carry hundreds of pounds - even while running - without breaking a sweat, as well as handheld imaging equipment that grants the ability to see targets through walls."

And this isn't Dach's imagination at work. It comes right from the Future Combat Systems, or FCS, i.e., the real Tony Stark of the US Army.

Dach also describes how drugs, from amphetamines to anti-anxiety pills, have long been used to aid soldiers, both during and after combat. No news there. But he ends his piece with an indictment of our military's use of technology to effectively create "absent" soldiers -- or the ability to fight entirely via automated, autonomous, and remote technologies. By taking the human factor out of the equation, asks Dach, where will we place accountability?

"The future's soldier could be one surrounded by an inveigling haze of pharmaceuticals, decision-making robots, errant bombs and faulty surveillance data," he writes. "The only thing to emerge from this haze will be an exhilarating sense of our own guiltlessness. Alas, the populations against which we use our fancy toys are unlikely to share in the feeling."

[Image: Corsiworld]