DARPA Offers No Food for Thought

frank249 writes "Wired News has an article outlining the US Defense Advanced Research Projects agency's (DARPA) research into ways to keep soldiers fighting for up to 5 days without food. The DARPA project, called 'Metabolic Dominance' or 'peak soldier performance' is part of a wider, future-facing Pentagon research push to develop grunts who are pretty much immune to normal human demands. Perhaps they should call this the Universal Soldier project?"

Comments

What a Waste

[36526542DD]

Science offers us so many incredible possibilities to explore, things that can greatly enhance our everyday lives, and yet our tax dollars go to things like this.

I wish there were a militarily strategic reason to find a cure to cancer, stroke, or diabetes, because they'd all be cured by now just by the amount of money and focus thrown at them.

I also wish there were a law in the U.S. that for every dollar spent on the military, a dollar had to be spent on education.

Re:What a Waste

[b-baggins]

Why should the Feds put more emphasis on education than they do on Defense? Defense is a constitutionally mandated responsiblity of the feds. Education is not. My state can do just fine providing education, thank you, and my governor is a whole heck of a lot more accessible than some DOE bureaucrat.

Re:What a Waste

[Eccles]

I refer you to this article about the fine spending under the Department of Homeland Security. A few choice bits of its budget?

" A new university-based homeland security research center program for Texas A&M, avoiding an open and competitive award process. This was pushed by Republican Whip, Tom DeLay, whose district includes Texas A&M.

$2 million so the Smithsonian can start a 108,000-square-foot building in Maryland to house its collection of fish, frogs, bugs, birds and other animals preserved in alcohol-filled containers.

$5 million to subsidize farmers' markets and roadside produce stands in 31 states.

$2.5 million to map coral reefs in the waters around Hawaii."

As an ex 11B

[SLot]

I can say with authority that we were already asked to do things that were beyond normal human demands.

And I wouldn't exactly call MRE's 'food' anyways, although some of them weren't bad as long as you had hot sauce. :)

Re:Bad news

[Winkhorst]

The Germans pioneered in this research during World War II. They called it "benzedrine."

Re:Think of the uses!

[NtwoO]

During the '80s the South African government was fighting a war in Angola. The special opps teams were supplied with very strong tablets of speed to keep on going for DAYS. They were said to keep on marching with no desire for food.

I wonder if they also had a walkman with some heavy trance running...

Up and Down

[erick99]

When I was working on my Masters degree I was helping out at my mentor's lab at N.I.H. He was working on a pair of medications that would allow the armed forces to first have soldiers sleep deeply during long flights over seas to battle areas and then give them a second medication (close to an analog to cocaine actually) that would keep them fully battle ready and at their peak for 72 hours. It was quite an experience and I have no idea what came of it. When I left we were doing lethality studies with mice with both agents.

Happy Trails!

Erick

Plants hold the key

[genetic_freak]

The only way I could even see this being possible is if we stole a little enginuity from plants. Humans are not able to turn fat directly into the sugar they need to survive (the reason why you can't just starve yourself thin), but plants can.

If someone collect a reasonable set of genes necessary to impliment this metabolic short cut, and then devise a method to insert these genes into the genome (probably of the mitochondria). then we could have soldiers who would rarely have to eat. You would just charge the grunts up with tons of pizza, donuts, and crisco before sending them out to battle. They may be a little fat and out of shape when the step on the battle field, but as they fight they will burn it all off by starving themselves.

I see this project as only taking about 50 years, maybe 100 if things don't go too smoothly.

A slightly more realistic goal may be to have soldiers wear beltpacks filled with a glucose solution and a needle inserted into a convenient vein. probably wouldn't last 5 days, and you'd have to worry about infection and carrying all the liquid weight, but it might be worth it to have an unholy army that could march relentlessly for days on end and then fight without tiring for extended periods of time once the got there.

And one of them bombed Canadian soldiers

[Rascasse]

Apparently the American pilot was on some sort of amphetamine when he bombed Canadian soldiers participating in training exercises in Afghanistan. He ended up killing 4 of them. But he could have sworn they were shooting at him, despite the fact he was told there would be Canadian soldiers in the area doing training exercises. Makes me think about how many friendly-fire or civilian-casualty incidents are caused by soldiers that have been forced to take these drugs.

Re:And one of them bombed Canadian soldiers

[Dr Caleb]

he had a valid target and recived permission to fire.

Quite the opposite. He was told to hold fire, and that permission to fire was denied. He was ordered to leave the area. He refused and dropped his load anyway.

That's why he's facing charges of disobeying a direct order, as well as manslaughter. All you gotta do is research something before trying to bait me.

They already give them amphetamines

[geoswan]

I had read Science Fiction novels where soldiers would be doped up, on purpose, prior to battle. I didn't know it was already SOP.

It came out during the investigation into why the USAF bombed a body of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. It turned out that one of the reasons the USAF's pilots disobeyed orders was that their judgement was impaired because they were high on "speed". These amphetamines were issued to enhance the pilots alertness on long missions.

The trouble was they were so alert they were trigger-happy.