[...] from 20,000 leagues down [...]

Somewhere, Phil Hartman and Kelsey Grammer are still having this debate:

Mr. Land: So now we're really 20,000 leagues under the sea?

Captain Nemo: Well, actually, no, that's a bit of a misnomer. I misspoke. A league is actually a measure of distance traveled, and not a measure of depth, you see.

Mr. Land: But, Captain, we're so deep! Surely, we must be 20,000 leagues under the sea by now!

First Mate: Yesss. 20,000 leaguesss! Under the sea!

The US military is an expensive toy that isn't even capable of conquering a small, weak nation so we can steal it's natural resources. In this post 1945 age when a person with a smuggled nuclear weapon can wipe out a city, things like aircraft carriers, tanks, and jets are about as useful as badly trained sharks.

It is all a boondoggle, but it isn't going away anytime soon.

Irony: a media outlet that exists solely because of the work of DARPA, slamming DARPA for doing blue-sky research.

At least they've stopped using dolphins (porpoises). Dolphins were too smart.

By using sharks, they're dealing with an animal that has a lower IQ - just like the people exploiting them.

The researchers working with the sharks probably want their ideas to actually be used for war about as much as I do (which is to say, not at all). They also know that the likelyhood of this actually happening is quite small.

I would bet that the researchers working on this project are much more interested in solving deep questions on how the brain and body work together.

As a phd student in a large research university, I know many researchers funded by DARPA or organizations with military leanings. These researchers would prefer not to get money from these places, but in some sense, as long as they can spin their research in terms of benefit to the military, there are no strings attached. That's a good thing for science. This is exactly how the internet was created.

I'd better put on a helmet, lest I be pummeled by all the jerking knees around here. I can't find a problem with the means or the ends here.

Funding for research into brain function is good - a previous poster has already pointed out that DARPA research is frequently aimed at nonmilitary uses, and would never happen without the government funding. Also, several posters seem to think that the goal is to train these sharks like the navy has trained seals. It's not; the goal is to turn sharks into remotely controlled devices.

And what, may I ask, would be so bad about accomplishing this task? Do you object to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles? What about research into tiny, insect-like robotic flies that could be used for surveillance? What's so different about these sharks (except from an animal-rights perspective, which doesn't seem to be the criticism thus far)?

Booooooooring. I want sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads!

Tom Engelhardt makes a few good points in his article, but he paints a misleading picture of the way that DARPA funding is allocated and used, based on what I've read. Engelhardt writes that the Pentagon has $440 billion to play with, the implication being that it's wasting enormous amounts of money on projects such as remotely controlled sharks. I don't believe that's the case. Only a small portion of defense funding goes to so-called science and technology--less than $15 billion, from the numbers for previous years that I've seen. While that's a lot of money, it's still only about 3% of $440 billion. Of that $15 billion, only about $1.5 billion goes to basic research, rather than applied research or advanced technology development (though it's not clear what funding category the shark work falls into). What do we get for our money? Over its long history, DARPA is credited with "between a third and a half of all the major innovations in computer science and technology" [Michael Dertouzos, via a talk by the former head of DARPA's information processing technology office]. While some technology applications may be unfortunate, for lots of interesting research there's simply no other funding sources available.

I'm amused by your phrase "20,000 thousand leagues down" as much as it's a refrence to the classic Jules Verne novel, it's also a complet misunderstanding.. 20,000 leagues is the horizontal distance covered by the Nautilus in the book, the seas are barely 3 leagues deep..

Not to mention that you're also giving the military a pittance in the vertical, above sea level, 20 miles is 1/5 of the alititude of the -low- orbit that the space shuttle uses, much less the much higher orbits used by military satalites..