A few separate tracks of ideas:

I'm looking at two separate ideas right now, the first focuses on modern soldiers and their experiences. I'd like to create a series of separate but related articles/clips/stories based on observations, news reports, research, and correspondence with soldiers, veterans, and some in training. I'd like to both copy older forms of war protest (and how it changed from war to war) and try and incorporate styles that seem to be currently occurring and (hopefully) come up with some new stuff. It's my fear that this is too far on the political side, and risks getting cliched quickly.
My second idea is to work with something on the lines of emerging technology and using a power relationship with existing works of literature. I like the idea of an Artificial Intelligence doing a version of Paradise Lost, or Frankenstein, or mixing all of the above. Basically, for either of these, I'd like to do a power relationship with works that have existed before mine, while trying to challenge views we have now. Whether to do that with soldiers or science fiction, I'm not quite sure. Here's a taste of what I was thinking for a sample article/few pages in the soldier line of writing. It's a play off O'brien's "The Things They Carried;" a modern version.
...He carried cigarette burns on his lip and knew too well the smell of burnt hair and burnt hands and burnt plastic and how they mix together with the smoke and don't smell like much of anything. Of course he carried his medals, purple and red and blue and with crosses neatly polished and high thread counts, but only on his dress uniform and only when appearances demanded it; like at the Memorial Day dance they put on near Kabul. Where they strung streamers in a high school gym and he remembered how his shoes scuffed the floor with short black streaks and how her dress looked but not felt and how it wasn't air conditioned but nothing was and how everyone was in neatly ironed uniforms but stood around the punch bowl and looked into half-full cups and how the sound kept cutting out because of bad wiring and not from insurgent attack.
He carried the way Mom smiled that half-smile when he tried to talk to her about what it was like over there; like how she smiled when Dad told to tell her he'd always hated the way she made mashed potatoes and how her knuckles went white when she did the dishes. He carried the prescription for three Prozac and the number to the veteran's psychologist and the certificate of an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army, U.S. Rangers. Take three twice a day, with water and food but nothing too acidic, like orange juice. The pharmacist looked a lot like Davis from Third Corp, the one who won at cards not the one who lost his shins.
The more sci-fi oriented one would involve something like this:
There is no typicality in commiserating with the beast. I stand no benefit in applying emotional labels to my current state. Anguish, lamentation and despair have no meaning beyond their definitions. To work in the abstract must be a thing of divination; the idea of which I can comprehend fully, but never experience. I "know" blue. It rests as a piece of fact, indomitable in my consciousness. A wavelength I can calculate to a thousand decimals, but it remains equally meaningless.