Future Soldier

[douglas9]

The Tireless Soldier

Amphetamines and the military first met somewhere in the fog of WWII, when axis and allied forces alike were issued speed tablets to head off fatigue on the battlefield.

More than 60 years later, the US Air Force still doles out dextro-amphetamine to pilots whose duties do not afford them the luxury of sleep.

Through it all, it seems, the human body and its fleshy weaknesses keep getting in the way of warfare. Just as in the health clinics of the nation, the first waypoint in the military effort to redress these foibles is a pharmaceutical one. The catch is, we’re really not that great at it. In the case of speed, the US Drug Enforcement Agency itself notes a few unwanted snags like addiction, anxiety, aggression, paranoia and hallucinations. For side-effects like insomnia, the Air Force issues “no-go” pills like temazepam alongside its “go” pills. Psychosis, though, is a wee bit trickier.

Far from getting discouraged, the working consensus appears to be that we just haven’t gotten the drugs right yet. In recent years, the US, the UK and France – among others – have reportedly been funding investigations into a new line-up of military performance enhancers. The bulk of these drugs are already familiar to us from the lists of substances banned by international sporting bodies, including the stimulant ephedrine, non-stimulant “wakefulness promoting agents” like modafinil (aka Provigil) and erythropoietin, used to improve endurance by boosting the production of red blood cells.

http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/77/Future_Soldier.html

[PetrusMonsFormicarum]

1. Assassins and berserkers

There is actually a long and complicated history of soldiers juicing.

Assassins and berserkers were two other types of historic soldiery that involved the consumption of large quantities of drugs: hashish (the word 'assassin' is derived from 'hashashin', the name of ninja-style dudes that messed with the Knights Templar) and Amanita mushrooms (Amanita muscaria, a deadly variety in N. America, is merely potently hallucinogenic in Europe and the Near East.)

Both of these drugs were consumed in order to give the soldiers a sense of invulnerability and the keen focus on the grisly task at hand.