[THS] America's Chemically Modified 21st Century Soldiers

[Peter Webster]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050308E.shtml

America's Chemically Modified 21st Century Soldiers
    By Clayton Dach
    Adbusters

    Saturday 03 May 2008

    Armed with potent drugs and new technology, a dangerous breed of
soldiers are being trained to fight America's future wars.

    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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S., 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.

    As the chemical interventions grow bolder and more sophisticated, we
should not be surprised that some are beginning to cast their eyes beyond
droopy eyelids and sore muscles. Chief among the new horizons is the
alluring notion of psychological prophylactics: drugs used to pre-empt the
often nasty effects of combat stress on soldiers, particularly that perennial
veteran's bugaboo known as post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome. In
the U.S., where roughly two-fifths of troops returning from combat
deployments are presenting serious mental health problems, PTSD has
gone political in form of the Psychological Kevlar Act, which would direct the
Secretary of Defense to implement "preventive and early-intervention
measures" to protect troops against "stress-related psychopathologies."

    Proponents of the "Psychological Kevlar" approach to PTSD may have
found a silver bullet in the form of propranolol, a 50-year-old beta-blocker
used on-label to treat high blood pressure, and off-label as a stress-buster
for performers and exam-takers. Ongoing psychiatric research has
intriguingly suggested that a dose of propranolol, taken soon after a
harrowing event, can suppress the victim's stress response and effectively
block the physiological process that makes certain memories intense and
intrusive. That the drug is cheap and well tolerated is icing on the cake.

    Propranolol has already been dubbed the "mourning after pill," largely
by those who argue that its military use amounts to medicating away pangs
of conscience. For the time being, though, we can set aside our dystopian
visions of zombies with guns, since the tranquilizing effects of beta-blockers
are unlikely to permit their widespread use on the battlefield. But
pharmacology moves more swiftly with each passing year - especially when
helped along by defense-research dollars - and we may need to revive
those visions sooner than we think.

    The Mediated Soldier

    In the new model army, brute force and viscera are out. Cutting edge
gadgetry, omniscient surveillance and precision long-distance termination is
in. What motivates it all is the type of war we fear we'll be fighting.

    On this, the strategists have spoken: with Iraq and Afghanistan as the
testing grounds, the conflicts of the future will be guerrilla wars, open-
ended, with no battle lines, no rules of engagement and ambivalent or
openly hostile civilian populations in which any man, woman or child can
turn combatant.

    In breeding a future soldier for these future wars, we will inevitably leave
behind the mere rectification of human weakness and enter into the realm
of the superhuman. Glimpses of this realm have already become
commonplace in the form of ceramic-Kevlar body armor and night-vision
goggles - wizardry that transforms squishy pink men into bullet-proof
creatures of the night.

    Such magic will continue apace under the auspices of dozens of military
development initiatives across the globe, creating a species known variously
as the Future Force Warrior by the U.S., FIST by the British Army, Félin by
the French. All are merely the human components of broader visionary
projects for what has been called "the army after next," the most
noteworthy of which being the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems. With a
budget clocking in at $160 billion or so, FCS is not just one of history's most
costly weapons programs; it is an all-encompassing modernization program,
one that will usher in a total re-imagining of the armed forces. What FCS
and its kin have imagined for soldiers is a battlefield experience increasingly
mediated by technology, insulated in a cocoon of "force multipliers" -
military parlance for anything that allows you to accomplish more with fewer
personnel. In concrete terms, that translates into an array of tools designed
to enhance lethality and survivability: next-generation sidearms; headsets
that provide live command and control, detailed geographic data and the
ability to fire around corners; smart suits equipped with ultralight nanotech
armor, micro-climate conditioning, real-time health monitoring and even
automated medical care like CPR and drug delivery. Also on the docket are
robotic exoskeletons that allow the soldiers wearing them to carry hundreds
of pounds - even while running - without breaking a sweat, as well as
handheld imaging equipment that grants the ability to see targets through
walls.

    None of these are sci-fi pipe dreams. The DARPA-developed Radar
Scope is already in limited deployment, detecting human breathing through
a foot of concrete on two AA batteries. Utah-based robotics company Sarcos
is expected to deliver its prototype exoskeletons to the Army this year, at
roughly the same time that many of the other Future Force Warrior
components begin field testing. Full-scale production of a number of the
systems is scheduled for early in the next decade.

    The Absent Soldier

    It is tempting to say that military technology is steadily transforming war
into a video game. Yet there's a strange irony in the works: as the games
claw themselves even closer to the look and feel of real, down-and-dirty
warfare, real warfare is fluttering away into strategic and technological
abstraction, effectively taking a step back from its own reality.

    For all the PlayStation sexiness of the ultra lethal, force-multiplied
warrior, the true fate of the in-the-flesh soldier is to vanish into the
abstraction.

    The explicit purpose of Future Combat Systems is to progressively
supplement, to the point of ultimately displacing, the human soldier with a
whole array of automated, autonomous and remote technologies - things
like unmanned surveillance drones, long-range and non-line-of-sight
precision-guided munitions, and unmanned air and ground combat
vehicles. Though the latter group may never look anything like
Schwarzenegger minus skin, make no mistake that what we are talking
about here is weaponized robots.

    An oft-quoted U.S. Joint Forces Command study from 2003 (rather
candidly titled Unmanned Effects: Taking the Human Out of the Loop)
predicted that autonomous, networked robots - faster and more lethal than
human combatants - could become the norm by 2025. That may prove
overly confident, but a congressional mandate has already called for one-
third of all U.S. military land vehicles to be unmanned by 2015, increasing
to two-thirds by 2025.

    If the idea of autonomous, homicidal robots dashing into troubled Third-
World slums sends a major chill down your spine, you're certainly not alone.
Well aware of the nightmarish optics, defense contractors and military brass
alike have been presenting a united front, noting that this is about moving
soldiers out of harm's way, not about deleting humans from the "kill chain"
entirely.

    While there is little doubt that protecting soldiers is the central
motivation, shifting troops into a distant pixel-pushing role also performs a
secondary purpose: it neatly removes obstacles for those looking to wage
war overseas while expending as little of their domestic political capital as
possible. You can call it a by-product, or you can call it an ulterior motive,
depending upon how dismal your outlook is.

    Whatever the reasons, as we lose ourselves in the lovely fantasy of
sidestepping the maimed veterans and crying widows, we could be walking
right into an even nastier pile of shit. During the bombing campaign that
accompanied the 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq, satellite-guided munitions
caused scores of accidental civilian deaths. If these people had perished at
the barrel of coalition rifles, their deaths would have been called massacres;
as it stands, they are mere technical glitches and failures of intelligence.

    The moral here is straightforward: once the human presence in the kill
chain is diluted, so too is accountability. The future's soldier could be one
surrounded by an inveigling haze of pharmaceuticals, decision-making
robots, errant bombs and faulty surveillance data; the only thing to emerge
from this haze will be an exhilarating sense of our own guiltlessness. Alas,
the populations against which we use our fancy toys are unlikely to share in
the feeling.

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