This was a very interesting little article that Doug sent me the other day. The Slate took this one off of the various other blogs that have done similar stories about this topic. It is kind of common sense to me, that a military that can stay awake longest and be fully functional will win. But like with any kind of drug, there is always a risk attached with going down that route, and I think drugs are really not the way to be fully combat effective.
In Iraq, the only stuff I would ever take to stay awake, was caffeine in the form of coffee. Lots of a dehydrated coffee. Although I have to admit, I was able to get my hands on some real coffee every once in awhile, and that was a real treat. But back to staying awake.
For me, the best way for me to stay awake during those long 12 hour shifts at night, was to have a good sleep pattern and system during the day. I also had lots of coffee with me during those long warm nights, and I drank lots of water. After all, falling asleep on post is not an option and I was not going to let down my team. And when I went back to my hooch during the days, I tried really hard to make an optimum sleep environment and get a minimum of 8 hours sleep. Ear plugs, eye patches, silence, anything to create the proper sleep environment, all so I could do my job at night and be alert.
But sometimes stuff happens, and you have to suffer through a night fighting sleepiness. It’s a bitch, but that’s the job and you gotta do what you gotta do. And the way we solved that issue was doing sleep shifts, if possible. Drugs could be an option to keep everyone up, but I have some serious reservations in taking ‘uppers’ or any hard drugs to keep me going. The simple reason is that your body has to be able to sleep after the shift. And because these drugs impact your bio-chemistry, then now you have introduced something that you must be dependent on in our sleep/operational cycle. Hell, if I don’t have my coffee in the morning, I go ballistic. Imagine if coffee was replaced with crank or something similar? And imagine operating without that drug? Could I be effective without this drug, and especially behind a gun or in a management position?
So I guess there are the arguments of ‘you have to do, what you gotta do’ to win? Yes, that is true for maybe a one time deal. But today’s wars are not one time deals. Do you take the drug once, and then never take it again?..Hopefully? Do you risk the possible abuses of the drugs within a unit, by introducing this into operations? Maybe pilots and special forces guys might have special circumstances, and might be able to adopt to drugs like this, but an entire military and security contracting force? I don’t think so. You want to be in complete control of your body and mind in a war zone, and these drugs add an element that might hinder that control. Will it be a drug that you have to have in order to operate or function in life? To me, I will just stick to coffee thank you.
I guess the other supplement/drug out there is Hydroxycut (with it’s various pick me up herbs in it–ephedra). As a smokejumper, I used to take these types of supplements and they work to an extent. But they are dangerous, because they pump your heart up to a million miles per hour and it is messing with your biochemistry. And when you run out of the stuff, you come down, just like any other drug. They call it a supplement, but I have seen some guys react to it like it was meth or something. Like I said, when you take that stuff, you become dependent on it. So what happens when you run out or you become a casualty because you abused it? But yeah, because it is legal and available, a lot of guys use it to stay awake and this stuff is equal to a strong cup of coffee. But it can be abused, just like any drug out there.
This will be interesting to watch, and if the military thinks it can safely introduce these new drugs into the mix, then they will be going down a very dangerous path. I personally think that getting sleepy is a good thing, because like pain or fear, it tells you that your body an important message–it needs to shut down to recharge. We should be more focused on ensuring that troopers are able to get enough sleep out in the field, so they can be combat effective. And if in fact they have to skip some sleep, I think coffee and supplements are good enough to stay alert. But if we are having to drug our troops up to fight, then all we will be creating is an army of addicts. Hell, we are already depending on way too many drugs to keep guys operational(prozac, etc.) and we should be striving to find healthy natural ways to keep combat effective. And if the enemy wants become drug addicts to stay awake, then all we have to do is bomb their pill factories or hinder their drug supply lines to defeat them. Or if Al Qaeda wants to drug up their bombers with opium before an attack, let them, because more than likely they will screw up their attack because they were too high to figure out what they had to do. But that is just my opinion. –Head Jundi
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Night of the Living Meds
The U.S. military’s sleep-reduction program.
By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, July 16, 2008, at 8:01 AM ET
You don’t have to worry anymore about the possibility of an arms race in pharmaceutical enhancement of combat troops. It’s already here.
The evidence is laid out in “Human Performance,” a report commissioned by the Pentagon’s Office of Defense Research and Engineering. The document, issued by a defense science advisory group known as JASON, was published earlier this year. It was flagged by Secrecy News and came to Slate’s attention through Wired’s military blog, Danger Room.
The report is unclassified because there’s nothing earth-shattering in it. Indeed, it debunks some fanciful brain-augmentation scenarios. What it offers instead is a level-headed account of how cognitive performance-enhancement technology is already entering military practice. The gateway application for this technology isn’t sensory acuity or information processing. It’s sleep reduction.
According to the report, “The most immediate human performance factor in military effectiveness is degradation of performance under stressful conditions, particularly sleep deprivation. If an opposing force had a significant sleep advantage, this would pose a serious threat.” Consequently, “the manipulation and understanding of human sleep is one part of human performance modification where significant breakthroughs could have national security consequences.”
That’s the theory. But it’s not just a theory, the report notes; it’s a proven pattern in military history.
Sleep deprivation is known to have significantly harmful impact on physical performance, alertness, and the ability to perform complex cognitive tasks. In planning their campaigns, battlefield commanders have to weigh carefully the negative impact on the effectiveness of their forces of extended periods of wakefulness and combat. In addition, under appropriate conditions on the tactical battlefield, sleep deprivation and exhaustion can be and has been exploited militarily as a specific mechanism to weaken opposing forces. This observation … is illustrated by accounts of General George Patton’s almost legendary pattern of driving his army with extreme aggressiveness in World War II, based on his stated conviction that it was the way to reach his goal more rapidly and with fewer casualties. The point is to maximally exploit the state of exhaustion of one’s enemy. It seems intuitive that, in combat between two armies at comparable levels of sleep deprivation, the advantage is with the force on offense in its ability to stress the opposition’s state of exhaustion.
Deprivation. Degradation. Exhaustion. Harmful impact. All of these terms imply a deficit, a reduction from normal performance. This is another reason why sleep modification is the gateway app for cognitive military enhancement. We can tell ourselves and the rest of the world that we’re not really making our troops superhuman; we’re just restoring their natural powers. In the report’s words:
If we take as a given that soldiers on the battlefield will always need to undergo sleep deprivation, sometimes severe, and given that such sleep deprivation leads to large performance degradation, it follows that any method for improving how soldiers behave under sleep deprivation will have significant consequences for either our own forces or an adversary that learns to solve this problem.
In concrete terms, sleep modification will save lives. This is the trump card for any controversial biotechnology. The report calculates:
[T]he maximum casualty rate depends strongly on the individual’s sleep need, ?0. Hence any effort to improve human performance to minimize ?0 for given tasks can lead to a significant decrease in the casualty rate, of [about] 20 percent. … Suppose a human could be engineered who slept for the same amount of time as a giraffe (1.9 hours per night). This would lead to an approximately twofold decrease in the casualty rate. An adversary would need an approximately 40 percent increase in the troop level to compensate for this advantage.
Massively reduced casualties—how could anyone oppose that? In the face of these numbers, sleep modification, if practical, ceases to be an option. It becomes an obligation. Foregoing it begins to feel as derelict as failing to supply our troops with adequate body armor.
But is it practical? Will it harm our brave young men and women? Relax. Our brave young men and women are already doing it. The report notes:
The use of supplements, primarily to ameliorate sleep deprivation and to improve physical performance, is report[ed] to be common among US military personnel. This behavior is a cultural norm in the US and is recognized, but not endorsed, by the US military. For instance the PX at most military bases stock popular supplements.
The part about the military not “endorsing” these chemicals is pretty rich. The armed forces are up to their eyeballs in research on drugs to facilitate sleep reduction. The report cites a recent study, conducted by the Military Nutrition Division of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, which
involved tests of the effects of caffeine on performance for a group of Navy SEALS, following 72 hours of intense training activity with almost total sleep deprivation. A variety of metrics were used, including computer-based tests of reaction speed and mental acuity, psychiatric self-assessment surveys, and marksmanship tests. The test was to determine the optimal caffeine dose to ameliorate the effects of fatigue and stress.
The study concluded that caffeine “significantly improved visual vigilance, choice reaction time, repeated acquisition, self-reported fatigue and sleepiness.”
But caffeine was only the beginning. “The US military … has a long-standing effort in tracking and evaluating popular supplements,” says the report. “To date, 86 proposed ergogenic and cognitive aids have been evaluated.” These apparently include “amphetamines and modafinil,” which “are known to be effective for combating the effects of sleep deficit.” But the hot target now is a class of chemicals called ampakines. On this subject, the report cites several studies funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, particularly a paper called “Facilitation of Task Performance and Removal of the Effects of Sleep Deprivation by an Ampakine (CX717) in Nonhuman Primates.” The report notes that the study found
a clear improvement in performance, correlated with changes in fMRI patterns, when the monkeys were treated with ampakines. … Repeating the tasks with sleep-deprived monkeys that had been administered ampakines … restored performance to levels comparable to or better than those for well-rested monkeys without ampakine treatment.
Clearly, we’re well on our way to systematizing sleep reduction. But we don’t want to be accused of starting the pharmaceutical arms race. So let’s blame it on somebody else. Let’s say we’re doing this research not to enhance our troops, but to prepare for the possibility that our enemies will enhance theirs first. Accordingly, the report advises the armed forces to
Monitor enemy activities in sleep research, and maintain close understanding of open source sleep research. Use in-house military research on the safety and effectiveness of newly developing drugs for ameliorating the effects of sleep deprivation, such as ampakines, as a baseline for evaluating potential activities of adversaries.
There you have it: To make the world safe from sleep reduction, we’re working night and day on the world’s most advanced program in sleep reduction. You can rest easy, knowing our troops are wide awake.