The great military book is from early China, The Art of War. There is no art of soldiering. You heavy up, go for a walk, look for trouble for a few hours. Or days.

 Pete Newell is a U.S. Army colonel. Soldiering doesn’t change, he says. Technology does.

 “The average weight on a soldier’s back,” says Newell, “is some-where around 104 pounds. 27 of it [is] batteries.”

Colonel Newell is the director of the Rapid Equipping Force – REF – a think tank, hardware store, tech lab for combat soldiers. A perfect solution to a soldier problem – a Humvee redesigned against IEDs, for instance, might take years.

 REF tries to find pretty good answers that already exist, or are about to exist.