June 22, 1939

Or. John Wheeler

Palmer Physics Laboratory
Princeton University
Princeton, N.J.

Dear Or. Wheeler:

This Is really a followup to my letter of September 18, 1958. ! have had
no acknowledgment of this, and hope this just means that there was nothing much
to rejoin with rather than that the letter went astray.

| brought up the question there of the importance of tools of limited, as
well as of ultimate, warfare. { also suggested that (from my own poor vantage
point) xhak It seemed as if a disproportionately small amount of ‘advanced
project thinking' was going into these, and ¢.g., into the general question of
automation of Infantry functions.

| may have been partly wrong, Judging from recent publicity on ‘the ground
cushion phenomenon', which obviously supplies something of the needed machinery
for transport. But there is also some garbled testimony (see enclosure) by General
Britton that | hope is either irrelevant to, or evena smokescrean for, what Is
really belng thought about. In any case, { hope to bring this to your attention
to help assure that you and your colleagues are pressing for a fundamental considera-
tlon of the actual functions of ''that final man on the ground’' and the extent to
which he can be replaced or amplified by autopata. General Britton's statement
does not sound very convincing to a layman in his field.

q +
The ‘motor' end of this device doesn't Fee to present an@ very serious problems:
perhaps the sensory anmaxdax side does, and you have to do some thinking about
refined systems of IFF. Optimally, this has to akas discriminate four targets,
friend, foe, neutral and surrendered-foe; in many situations, you might settle for
the first two.

You will not want to give me any followup on this, but | hope you can tel! me
enough that the problem is being given adequate review somewhere.

a
Yo i 7
papineestnn /

{Joshua Lederberg Tr