The Drugs That Built a Super Soldier Genetic and biological Enhancement of Soldiers

[cerberus]

The Drugs That Built a Super Soldier : Past

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military plied its servicemen with speed, steroids, and painkillers to help them handle extended combat.

Some historians call Vietnam the “last modern war,” others the “first postmodern war.” Either way, it was irregular: Vietnam was not a conventional war with the frontlines, rears, enemy mobilizing its forces for an attack, or a territory to be conquered and occupied. Instead, it was a formless conflict in which former strategic and tactical principles did not apply. The Vietcong were fighting in an unexpected, surprising, and deceptive way to negate Americans’ strengths and exploit their weaknesses, making the Vietnam War perhaps the best example of asymmetrical warfare of the 20th century.

The conflict was distinct in another way, too—over time, it came to be known as the first “pharmacological war,” so called because the level of consumption of psychoactive substances by military personnel was unprecedented in American history. The British philosopher Nick Land aptly described the Vietnam War as “a decisive point of intersection between pharmacology and the technology of violence.”

Since World War II, little research had determined whether amphetamine had a positive impact on soldiers’ performance, yet the American military readily supplied its troops in Vietnam with speed. “Pep pills” were usually distributed to men leaving for long-range reconnaissance missions and ambushes. The standard army instruction (20 milligrams of dextroamphetamine for 48 hours of combat readiness) was rarely followed; doses of amphetamine were issued, as one veteran put it, “like candies,” with no attention given to recommended dose or frequency of administration. In 1971, a report by the House Select Committee on Crime revealed that from 1966 to 1969, the armed forces had used 225 million tablets of stimulants, mostly Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine), an amphetamine derivative that is nearly twice as strong as the Benzedrine used in the Second World War. The annual consumption of Dexedrine per person was 21.1 pills in the navy, 17.5 in the air force, and 13.8 in the army.

“We had the best amphetamines available and they were supplied by the U.S. government,” said Elton Manzione, a member of a long-range reconnaissance platoon (or Lurp). He recalled a description he’d heard from a navy commando, who said that the drugs “gave you a sense of bravado as well as keeping you awake. Every sight and sound was heightened. You were wired into it all and at times you felt really invulnerable.” Soldiers in units infiltrating Laos for a four-day mission received a medical kit that contained, among other items, 12 tablets of Darvon (a mild painkiller), 24 tablets of codeine (an opioid analgesic), and six pills of Dexedrine. Before leaving for a long and demanding expedition, members of special units were also administered steroid injections.

Amphetamine, as many veterans claimed, increased aggression as well as alertness.
Research has found that 3.2 percent of soldiers arriving in Vietnam were heavy amphetamine users; however, after one year of deployment, this rate rose to 5.2 percent. In short, the administration of stimulants by the military contributed to the spread of drug habits that sometimes had tragic consequences—because amphetamine, as many veterans claimed, increased aggression as well as alertness. Some remembered that when the effect of speed faded away, they were so irritated that they felt like shooting “children in the streets.”

Psychoactive substances were issued not only to boost the fighters, but also to reduce the harmful impact of combat on their psyche. In order to prevent soldiers’ mental breakdowns from combat stress, the Department of Defense employed sedatives and neuroleptics. By and large, writes David Grossman in his book On Killing, Vietnam was “the first war in which the forces of modern pharmacology were directed to empower the battlefield soldier.” For the first time in military history, the prescription of potent antipsychotic drugs like chlorpromazine, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline under the brand name Thorazine, became routine. The massive use of psychopharmacology and the deployment of a large number of military psychiatrists help explain the unprecedentedly low rate of combat trauma recorded in wartime: Whereas the rate of mental breakdowns among American soldiers was 10 percent during the Second World War (101 cases per 1,000 troops) and 4 percent in the Korean War (37 cases per 1,000 troops), in Vietnam it fell to just 1 percent (12 cases per 1,000 troops).

This outcome, however, was short-sighted. By merely alleviating soldiers’ symptoms, antipsychotic medicines and narcotics brought immediate but temporary relief. Drugs taken without proper psychotherapy only assuage, suppress, or freeze the problems that remain deeply embedded in the psyche. Years later, those problems can explode unexpectedly with multiplied force.

Intoxicants do not eliminate the causes of stress.
Intoxicants do not eliminate the causes of stress. Instead, observes Grossman, they do “what insulin does for a diabetic: They treat the symptoms, but the disease is still there.” That is precisely why, compared with previous wars, very few soldiers in Vietnam required medical evacuation because of combat-stress breakdowns. By the same token, however, the armed forces contributed to the unprecedentedly widespread outbreak of PTSD among veterans in the aftermath of the conflict. This resulted, to a large extent, from reckless use of pharmaceuticals and drugs. The precise number of Vietnam veterans who suffered from PTSD remains unknown, but estimates range from 400,000 to 1.5 million. According to the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study published in 1990, as many as 15.2 percent of soldiers who experienced combat in Southeast Asia suffered from PTSD.

In her book Flashback, Penny Coleman quotes a military psychologist who says that if drugs are given while the stressor is still being experienced, they will arrest or supercede the development of effective coping mechanisms, resulting in an increase in the long-term trauma from the stress. What happened in Vietnam is the moral equivalent of giving a soldier a local anesthetic for a gunshot wound and then sending him back into combat.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/04/the-drugs-that-built-a-super-soldier/477183/


DARPA: Genetically Modified Humans For A Super Soldier Army

You’ve seen it as science-fiction on TV or in the movies, but now it’s science-fact. I’m talking about the Pentagon’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) creation of a super soldier army with super human abilities achieved through genetic modification. Going on for some years, shrouded in secrecy, these mutants will make future wars totally different games.

The genetic modification of specific human genes will give these soldiers certain characteristics advantageous on the battlefield, giving rise to the most amazing abilities and performances.

Smarter, sharper, more focused and more physically stronger than their enemy counterparts these soldiers will be capable of telepathy, run faster than Olympic champions, lift record-breaking weights through the development of exoskeletons, re-grow limbs lost in combat, possess a super-strong immune system, go for days and days without food or sleep… Then there’s the emotional side. These soldiers will have the empathy genes deleted and show no mercy, while devoid of fear… Even more disturbingly, the “Human Assisted Neural Devices program” involving brain control allows the ‘joystick’ remote operation of soldiers from some far away control center.

All this has been revealed, even in mainstream media. In spite of the secrecy, äction writer Simon Conway was allowed into the Pentagon’s DARPA and given a guided tour… Doesn’t this suggest that DARPA are well into the änal stages and they want us to get used to the idea of a genetically modiäed super soldier army? The type of super human characteristics that have been developed (or are in the development stages) in the soldiers is indicated by funding allocations. For example, DARPA has handed out a $40 million grant to California and Pennsylvania Universities to develop memory-controlling implants.

It has also been revealed that DARPA awarded $9.9 million to the Institute for Preclinical Studies Texas A&M University to develop a means of surviving signiäcant blood loss. This would overcome the normal difäculties in requiring life-saving medical treatment immediately after combat injury which is known to be difäcult to give during the complications and dangers encountered on the battleäeld.


Another characteristic in development is having the soldiers genetically modiäed to hibernate throughout winter. There is a gene in squirrels that produces an enzyme in the pancreas which enables this ability. This gene can be taken from the squirrel and inserted into solders…

 

[cerberus]

DARPA Investing $32M Into DNA Manufacturing: Super Soldiers On The Way?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just awarded a five-year $32 million contract to the Foundry as part of the agency's program known as "Living Foundries: 1000 Molecules."

The said program aims to establish facilities where scientists can rapidly engineer cells as a way of producing chemicals and materials which are otherwise not produced naturally.

"Society relies on many products from the natural world that have intricate material and chemical structures, from chemicals such as antibiotics to materials like wood," said Christopher Voigt, a biological engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "We've been limited in our ability to program living cells to redesign these products. I want to change the scale of genetic engineering to access anything biology can do."

Two years ago, the Foundry started to work on a project that focused on the assembly of massive genetic systems wherein a number of genes are involved. The facility is formed as a result of a joint venture by Broad Technology Labs and MIT's Synthetic Biology Center where Voigt is a co-director. It earned a total of $7 million in seed funding from DARPA.

In order for it to meet its goal with the needed efficiency and technological innovation, the Foundry has sought to work in collaboration with partners from the academic and industry sectors. One of its academic partners is associate professor Michael Fischbach of the University of California in San Francisco.

"The Foundry has made it possible to do something that used to be a figment of my imagination," said Fischbach.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/8...a-manufacturing-super-soldiers-on-the-way.htm


Soldiers Have Used Drugs to Enhance Their Killing Capabilities in Basically Every War

In November 2008, ten members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamic militant group, carried out a series of 12 shooting and bombing attacks, killing 164 people and wounding another 300. For almost 60 hours, in the aftermath of the destruction they had wreaked, they were able to hold off hundreds of India's best-trained special forces, before they were eventually killed or captured.

The Lashkar-e-Taiba members had received months of commando-style training. They were an elite fighting unit. But they were also high. Evidence from the scene, as well as later blood tests, found that at least some of the men had been using cocaine, LSD, and steroids. It now seems clear that it was the use of drugs that allowed the group to repel a force many times their size for over two days with no food or sleep, even when some of them had life-threatening injuries.

In his new book Shooting Up, the Polish historian Lukasz Kamienski demonstrates that since warfare began, men and women have used drugs to enhance their military capabilities. Kamienski says the Mumbai attackers, whose battle fever was topped up by a steady supply of psychoactive substances, are just the latest in a long line of high combatants: from Viking berserkers driven into a trance-like frenzy by mushrooms to Inca warriors sustained by coca leaves to American Civil War soldiers hooked on morphine and the speed-fueled Wehrmacht.

In the 1980s, the military historian John Keegan responded to the question, "Why do soldiers fight?" with three answers: "inducement, coercion, narcosis." While Keegan later decided this theory was too simple, Kamienski argues that, on top of the inducement provided by dehumanizing training regimes and the coercion that sees nations force people to fight in their name, "narcosis" can be read literally: in order to kill other people, human beings need to put themselves in a different frame of mind. Drugs can make soldiers do things they otherwise never would: leave their humanity behind and becoming the fighting apparatus of an army.

"The anthropological evidence shows us that we are not warlike people," Kamienski tells me over the phone from his home in Poland. "It is very difficult to cross the line where we become able to kill fellow humans. The question is about turning a civilian into a soldier who can kill without that having too much of a psychological impact."


Shooting Up takes a chronological approach, taking us from pre-modern times to the present day. At the beginning of the book, we hear about Greek hoplites hopped up on wine, Homeric heroes swimming away from their sorrows by drinking opium and mushroom-eating Siberian tribes. But all that pales compared to the most famous mushroom-warriors, the Vikings.

Clad in bear pelt, Viking warriors were feared like few other forces in the history of war. "God save us from the Fury of the Northmen" ran the prayers of anyone who lived within striking distance. At the time it was thought that Viking warriors were seized by a fury given to them by Odin, a fury that would double their strength, remove their humanity and render them immune to pain. They bit their shields, howled like wolves and cut down anything that crossed their path. But Kamienski shows how the Vikings achieved this state, in part, by drinking Amanita mushrooms. He quotes the toxicologist Erich Hesse, who writes, "the intoxicated person imagines himself to have been changed into some animal, and the hallucination is completed by the sensation of the growing of feathers and hair."

I can't say that taking them has ever put me in the mood to lay waste to a Norwegian village, but taken in the right quantity and in the right way, mushrooms alter reality to the point where doing unnatural things (raping and pillaging) seems natural. This thinking can be seen in the combination of drugs taken by the Mumbai attackers, too. Coke provided them with the energy, steroids gave them the strength, and acid altered their sense of reality to the point where, like the berserkers, they could fight in frenzy.

For Kamienski, a particularly striking example of the way drugs were used to enhance the performance of soldiers comes from World War II. "I was completely shocked by the fact that the Wehrmacht was so heavily pumped on methamphetamine during the invasion of Poland," he tells me. "It's something you never read in history books."


In public, the Nazi regime took a very hard line against the use of drugs recreationally, but privately, many of the Nazi elite had intimate experience with getting high. Hitler spent much of the war medicated. Goring and Goebbels both loved morphine. When the former tried to offset the effects of the morphine by taking cocaine, he became addicted to that, too.

And they also supplied drugs to German soldiers. During the 1939 invasion of Poland, Pervitin, a version of crystal meth designed to combat stress, stave off fatigue and manufacture euphoria, became the German "assault pill." With Poland conquered, the German army ordered 35 million tablets of Pervitin for the spring 1940 offensive of France.

There was little thought for the welfare of the men. The drug was used to take the Nazi war machine into overdrive. "The Nazis just wanted to make their soldiers better fighters: to fight for longer hours, to be less exhausted, to fuel the blitzkrieg even more," says Kamienski. Many German soldiers became addicted to the drug. When official supplies ran out, they would get it sent from Germany, where it was freely available. "Today I'm writing you mainly to ask for some Pervitin," wrote Hein, a 22-year-old soldier stationed in Poland, to his family at home in Cologne.

The Germans weren't the only fighting force running on speed, though. Everyone was at it: the British, Americans, Japanese, and even the Finns, who were, at this point, the world's largest heroin consumers. "My conclusion would be that the Second World War was fought heavily on speed or meth," Kamienski tells me.


In the 20th century, condemnation of drugs and a worry about these kinds of social effects became more pronounced and resulted in a series of prohibitive laws. Kamienski calls Vietnam "the first pharmacological war" because of the sheer quantity of drugs taken—many historians have suggested that 10-15 percent of American soldiers were addicted to heroin.

In the end, it is only a surprise that a wide-ranging study like Shooting Up has not been produced before. But then again, the use of drugs was an accepted part of culture until relatively recently, and so the use of them in war was hardly surprising. Today, western armies take a more hardline stance against drug use, although many American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan talked about the prevalence of "go pills" like Adderall and energy drinks, as well a wide range of protein powders and supplements to help bulk up. But through the long lens of history, that kind of small-time substance use would make a Viking chuckle.

http://www.vice.com/read/drugs-have-been-used-in-pretty-much-every-war-ever-shooting-up

https://www.quora.com/Do-elite-U-S-...ng-drugs-under-the-supervision-of-a-physician

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Guys What Is your Take In Performance Enhancement Drugs For Soldiers ??
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Military looks to drugs for battle readiness


When Navy fighter pilot "Maverick" and his sidekick "Goose" declare "I feel the need – the need for speed!" in the box-office hit "Top Gun," they're speaking about the capabilities of their fast and furious F-14 Tomcat.

In the air war over Afghanistan, "the need for speed" may have taken on quite a different meaning.

"Speed" is the well-known nickname for amphetamines, the controversial and potentially harmful drug some American pilots are taking in order to enhance their performance. Despite the possibility of addiction and potential side effects that include hypertension and depression, such drugs are needed, military officials believe, in order to stay alert and focused – especially on long-range bombing missions. Such flights can mean nine hours or more alone in expensive, high-performance aircraft. Their lethal weapons are aimed at an elusive enemy that can be (and has been) confused with civilians or friendly troops.


According to military sources, the use of such drugs (commonly Dexedrine) is part of a cycle that includes the amphetamines to fight fatigue, and then sedatives to induce sleep between missions. Pilots call them "go pills" and "no-go pills." For most Air Force pilots in the Gulf War (and nearly all pilots in some squadrons), this was the pattern as well.


The drugs are legal, and pilots are not required to take them – although their careers may suffer if they refuse.

Amphetamines follow a pattern that goes back at least 40 years to the early days of the Vietnam War – further back if one counts strong military coffee as a stimulant. But they're also part of a new trend that foresees "performance enhancements" designed to produce "iron bodied and iron willed personnel," as outlined in one document of the US Special Operations Command, which oversees the elite special-operations troops that are part of all the military services.

Indeed, the ability to keep fighting for days at a time without normal periods of rest, to perform in ways that may seem almost superhuman (at least well beyond the level of most people in today's armed services), is seen by military officials as the key to success in future conflicts.

"The capability to resist the mental and physiological effects of sleep deprivation will fundamentally change current military concepts of 'operational tempo' and contemporary orders of battle for the military services," states a document from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). "In short, the capability to operate effectively, without sleep, is no less than a 21st Century revolution in military affairs that results in operational dominance across the whole range of potential U.S. military employments."

A 'radical approach'
What's called for, according to DARPA, is a "radical approach" to achieve "continuous assisted performance" for up to seven days. This would actually involve much more than the "linear, incremental and ... limited" approaches of stimulants like caffeine and amphetamines.

"Futurists say that if anything's going to happen in the way of leaps in technology, it'll be in the field of medicine," says retired Rear Adm. Stephen Baker, the Navy's former chief of operational testing and evaluation, who is now at the Center for Defense Information in Washington. "This 'better warrior through chemistry' field is being looked at very closely," says Admiral Baker, whose career includes more than 1,000 aircraft-carrier landings as a naval aviator. "It's part of the research going on that is very aggressive and wide open."

In a memo outlining technology objectives, the US Special Operations Command notes that the special-forces "operator" of the future can expect to rely on "ergogenic substances" (such as drugs used by some athletes) "to manage environmental and mentally induced stress and to enhance the strength and aerobic endurance of the operator."

The memo continues: "Other physiological enhancements might include ways to overcome sleep deprivation, ways to adjust the circadian rhythms to reduce jet lag, as well as ways to significantly reduce high altitude/under water acclimatization time by the use of blood doping or other methods."

Although the Air Force Surgeon General's office recently acknowledged that "prescribed drugs are sometimes made available to counter the effects of fatigue," it is not publicly known how widespread the practice is or whether special-operations forces on the ground in Afghanistan are taking such drugs.

But it is certainly widely talked about among combat veterans and military experts.

"Given the extent of recreational drug use within the military, and the use of performance-enhancing drugs among athletes, it is very easy to imagine that warriors would consider using any manner of drug they thought would increase their chance of returning home alive," says John Pike, a defense expert with GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va.

During the Gulf War, according to one military study, "pilots quickly learned the characteristics of the stimulant [Dexedrine] and used it efficiently." Pilots were issued the pills and took them if and when they felt the need.

Some people have defended that practice. "If you can't trust them with the medication, then you can't trust them with a $50 million airplane to try and kill someone," says one squadron commander whose unit had the fewest pilots but flew more hours and shot down more Iraqi MIGs than any other squadron.

But military officials, as well as medical experts, warn that the use of amphetamines can clearly have its bad side.

The flight surgeon's guide to "Performance Maintenance During Continuous Flight Operations" (written by the Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola, Fla.) mentions such possible side effects as euphoria, depression, hypertension, and addiction. There's also the possibility of "idiosyncratic reactions" (amphetamines can be associated with feelings of aggression and paranoia) as well as getting hooked on the "cyclic use of a stimulant/sedative combination."

"The risk of drug accumulation from repetitive dosing warrants serious consideration," the guide notes. The "informed consent" form that military pilots must sign notes that "the US Food and Drug Administration has not approved the use of Dexedrine to manage fatigue."

Amnesia on the job?
It's not just the "go pills" that can cause problems in certain individuals. "No-go pills," used to induce sleep, can have dangerous side effects as well – including the possibility of what's called "anterograde amnesia ... amnesia of events during the time the medication has an effect."

"For the military aviator, this raises the possibility of taking the medication, going to a brief, taking off, and then not remembering what he was told to do," according to the lab's report.

But researchers say suchsymptoms "are primarily dose related and are not expected with 5-10 mgs of dextro-amphetamine (Dexedrine)" – the amounts given to pilots in the Gulf War and in Afghanistan.

For the most part, the issue of prescribed drug use by US pilots has gone unreported in the United States. But in England and Canada, it has been raised recently – especially in a possible connection with errant bombings.

In April, four Canadian soldiers were killed and another eight injured when an American F-16 pilot on a long-range mission, thinking he was under attack, dropped a 500-pound laser-guided bomb on an allied military exercise.

"The initial version of the Canadian incident portrayed the pilot as behaving with inexplicable aggression tinged with paranoia, and my first thought was that the poor guy had been eating too much speed," says Mr. Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. Officials are still investigating that accident, and the pilot has been questioned, among other things, about the possibility of drug use.

More recently, concerns have been raised about aggression and violence among soldiers returning from Afghanistan. In three of four cases in which men killed their wives, the accused husbands were in special-forces units based at Fort Bragg, N.C.

"It is quite obvious that someone needs to pose this question in the context of the business at Fort Bragg," says Pike. "This sort of hyper-aggressive behavior is just what one would associate with excessive use of such drugs or from withdrawal from using them."

As the US moves into an era in which national security is likely to mean wars fought from the air – using attack aircraft and small, specially trained units flown long distances to the battlefield – the issue of performance-enhancing drug use by US military personnel is likely to escalate. "The real story here is the ever-extending reach of air power," says Daniel Goure, a military specialist at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "We were flying F-15s out of Lakeheath [a Royal Air Force base] in the United Kingdom during Kosovo. Why? Because we had used up the available landing space everywhere else."

"As asymmetric threats such as ballistic missiles become more available to our adversaries, we are going to stand even farther back," adds Dr. Goure. "That means that this problem [i.e., the need to combat pilot fatigue] can only grow."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0809/p01s04-usmi.html

 

[Hellfire]

We are using Modafinil to 'manage' sleep for shift disruption. IAF keeps it in reserve for pilots who may need to be on standby.

We use acetazolamide for immediate induction of troops into high altitude for troop 'surge'.

Cocaine and amphetamines are good stimulants if used in a calibrated form. However both have a tremendous abuse potential as also are habit forming. Long term use has suicide as a potential adverse effect.

Hence, modafinil exists for now. It has similar action but less abuse potential as less habit forming and decreases appetite therefore ideal for small duration high intensity operations (anyways the innate appetite centers are suppressed due to various hormones and neurogenic stimulations)

 

[Vassnti]

Have to go back a bit before Vietnam. How do you get British soldiers to stand in nice neat ranks while 200 French fire a volley at you "bottle"

During the Napoleonic Wars the British Army gained a reputation of being quite slewed, lushy or malty, as they would say in those days, when going to battle. The daily booze ration for British soldiers back in the days was a gallon (3.78 liters) of beer, a pint of wine or half a pint of spirits, usually rum. When the soldiers wanted to test the quality of the rum they would mix some gunpowder with it and tried to light it. In case of success they were sure there was at least 57% alcohol in their drink.

 

[Dr.Mannan]

Hi every one that type of experiments already proved harmful many times and currently there is no project or research going on in US to enhance human capability in war. US lawmakers made it illegal to conduct any experiment of this nature on human and since no test subject is available US scientist stop these type of research projects.