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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?"
Ready commander?
;)
...wait a sec.... *looks around* A mob of zealots! Aaaiiii!
LOL, sorry I now have Starcraft marines running through my head. Stimpacks and all.
Nothing scarier than a mob of stimmed marines with range and strength enhancements.
Actually, I'm lying. A similar sized mob of zealots. *shivers*
*run away*
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Insert obligatory "I'll be able to code for days straight!" joke.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
But I'm sure the DARPA solution will be much more expensive.
We need a DARPA-sponsored program to keep kernel developers active and efficient for 5 days without food. And without do_mremap bugs, too...
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
"So Darpa, the U.S. military's far-out research arm, wants scientists to figure out if soldiers can operate at top levels -- without lunch breaks."
Sounds like my job requirements.
My old sig was REALLY stoopid.
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.
LATEST NEWS: Dolph Lundgren and Van Damme have both said yes to become beta testers.
Only if we can rename the Missile Defense Agency to Skynet.
I do security
That's true, but then they are just depressed. I think DARPA is looking for enhanced aggressiveness along with this not-eating-for-five-days thing. Although, it would be funny to have a whole mess of depressed soldiers on the front line. "Soldier! I gave you an order!" "I know, just give me a second.. my girl left me, my dog died, and I'm going through some pretty hard times." at least they would all have bright country music careers upon coming home, instead of becoming derranged shell-shocked shells of people. -Andy in Chi
Any bets on how long before this becomes a competitor to Atkins and South Beach?
This ain't Ryouga Hibiki we're talking about. They don't become massively powerful when they get depressed.
/. discussion of super-soldiers.
Oi, I can't believe I'm talking about anime in a
I need to go get a life.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
AFAIK the germans developed something like this in the last century, they called it the drug of heroes, or HEROIN. It didn't turn out to be awefully useful but still is a commercial success.
its called cocaine
The best part of the article for me was reading the following section: The agency has a couple of ideas on how this might be done: A cocktail of nutrients or so-called "nutraceuticals" could help build endurance, and then realizing that the ad to the right of the text was an ad for Absolut Vodka.
I predict military enrollment numbers will soar.
--
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Check out Datatek, Inc.
is that considered food? if not, then i can survive without food for 5 day easily. :)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Um, experimental treatments to deny military personnel their basic needs would not be a good recruiting tool.
Instead, they should spend their research money building these.
THAT would make me want to join the army!
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I read the jokes about Universal Soldier, super soldiers etc etc...but once we start down that path, how far are we from genetically engineered soldiers?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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.
Putting aside any military/war/ethics concerns, there are several interesting civilian benefits that jump out from the article:
* "But [burning fat] for extended periods can produce toxins and can dial down the amount of energy the brain receives. Darpa wants to see if there are ways to burn fats without the side effects."
There's a mega-million-dollar industry in burning off fat, mostly by ingesting snake oil products. Obvious spinoffs here.
* "Mitochondria supplies energy to the cells; the agency would like to see if the powerhouses could be temporarily increased."
Again, weight loss... but beyond that, aren't there metabolism-related illnesses that this would help cure?
* "Increased body heat can boost the production of certain proteins, and these can trigger apoptosis -- programmed cellular death. Darpa wants to find a way to control these proteins..."
Programmed cellular death is the two-edged sword of middle and old age. If it doesn't happen at all, you can get cancer. But if it happens faster than cellular reproduction, you get aging. Any research into this topic will help on both counts.
* "...anaerobic metabolism produces lactic acid -- which is why you feel your biceps burn after lifting dumbbells. Scientists wonder if production of the acid can be slowed or dissipated quicker."
This sort of advance would be snapped up by athletes, but you can also imagine the benefits for others who exert themselves regularly -- from firefighters to construction workers. And exercise is another way to lose weight... though it's laziness, not muscle pain, that keeps *me* from working on my spare tire.
* "And the agency is looking at nutraceuticals, natural products and traditional nutritional supplements to give the body what it requires when there's no food around."
Well, that sounds like the meal-in-a-pill that's been bounced around for a hundred years, from the World's Fair to Willy Wonka. I hear they still have problems with the blueberry dessert.
And speaking of dessert...
* "...$900,000 grant to examine the effects of echinacea and other plants. He believes extracts from the herb can be added to rations -- and that should give soldiers an extra oomph."
Be careful with those herbs... the military wants to eliminate the need for food, but some herbs are known to cause the opposite effect!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Great, now our military goes to war with a sandwich strapped to their buttocks. Where is the dignity in that?
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
I forsee a situation whereby future soldiers are fubar-ed by all of these shenanigans, much like 'Gulf War Syndrome', and they are turned into drooling wrecks. Lawyers, start your engines now... And while I'm here, imagine a Beowulf clust...
"This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time."
They might first want to start an educational program to make certain that every soldier is familiar with Murphy's Laws of Combat.
The Germans pioneered in this research during World War II. They called it "benzedrine."
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Seriously, if the US had more civil protection training, Iraq would be a safer place.
This isn't a rant against anyone in the US armed forces - they don't get to choose their training, and I'm certain no-one in the US forces would tell them their troops are so poorly trained in those areas.
Spending billions on finding ways to stop soldiers pooing and getting hungry isn't going to stop people suicide-bombing checkpoints next month. Decent training for the job at hand will, however.
You can't solve problems by throwing money at them.
(ps. posting AC as you can never tell how USans react when discussing their armed forces - no offense)
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Even more importantly, this could be useful in disaster relief situations, especially where the transportation infrastructure is damaged or there's still a dangerous condition that limits the number or type of vehicles that can get in to the affected area. A helicopter or a HMMWV or an armored vehicle could be used to carry emergency supplies to the victims of a disaster, or to beseiged civilians in a war zone.
So now I have to compete with people who can play Diablo for 5 days without even taking a bathroom break????
We should skip the chemical enhancments and actually train harder. I was in the Marine Corps for over 8 years and the average Marine is in better shape than the average solider/sailor/airman but there's the elite Force Recon/Recon Marines who are already light years better than your average Marine.
How about thinning down the non-combat support types in the military and focusing on training the hell out of what we have left? Longer enlistments, better pay, and you're out if you don't meet physical training standards. Plus skip all of the extra duty billets that take away from your fighting ability/training like recruiting and drill instructor duty
This guy is way out there
Although DARPA might rejigger people's appetites and metabolism to avoid the need for food, they can't avoid the the physical constraints of conservation of energy. Even if a soldier is just waiting in a fox hole, they need 2000 calories per day of energy. If the fighting is intense (the time when no eating is possible) then they might need more tha 5000 calories per day of energy.
This means a soldiers needs between 10,000 and 25,000 of energy reserves for a 5-day stint. This means that these soldiers wil need 3 to 7 pounds of excess body fat (more if the soldiers is expected to last several rounds of 5-day food deprivation). Without excess body fat, the body will start mateabolizing muscle tissue and that won't be very good for military readiness.
Maybe all those overweight American kids might make good soldiers after all.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Acute lead poisioning = Getting shot.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Wait, the US brought two wars to Germany?
Wow. I guess you can blame anything on the US if you try hard enough...
--RJ
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.
Rice University Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology- "Engineering the freaks of tomorrow"
I'm sure a number of you will remember the friendly fire incident in Afghanistan about two years ago. An American pilot dropped a bomb on a live-fire Canadian training exercise. I'm not going to say anything about whether he should've been charged, but the fact is he and his co-pilot were on some kind of uppers. Apparently this is relatively common in the Air Force to keep pilots awake during long night missions. Whether this was a factor in the mistake, I don't know.
But it certainly raises questions. Soliders may be able to go 5 days without food and still operate, but there will always be side effects, subtle or obvious, to messing with human biology. I would NOT trust someone to drive a tank, or man a patriot missle battery, who hadn't eaten, and that applies even more if he's been on drugs for that purpose!
Keep it simple. Spend money on peace-keeper training and foreign-aid, not super-soldiers. As always, just because we can, doesn't mean we should.
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.
The scary thing is that this is absolutely true. Here is a the DARPA goal summary.
New Science for National Security: Defense Sciences Office Overview
Page 6 -
Brain Machine Interfaces - Beyond acting on thoughts to having thoughts act.
Enhanced Human Performance - Beyond frailties of life to super physiological performance.
Go zerg
There's lots more on "Foodless Fighters" at Defense Tech.
While I'm against fundamentally altering the human biological structure to create some sort of super soldier, it's not that difficult to go without food for a few days. While I've never fasted for longer than three consecutive days, there's plenty of people who do.
Do any of you remember spirulina? In I think the mid 80s it was marketed as a food replacement, said to contain all the nutrients the body needed to survive in just a few tablets a day. I only heard about from the ultralight backpacking perspective, but for a while there were some backpackers who would go out into the woods for a week at a time with nothing more to eat than about eight spirulina pills per day. They claimed to have all sorts of energy on these expidition. This worked well untill the same backpackers just tried going out and fasting during their backpacking trips, and what do you know, they reported again having all sorts of energy.
The moral is that humans are capable of functioning at fairly normal levels for a few days without food already.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
happens pretty quickly after a couple of days... the human body absolutely needs sleep.
The human body really requires sleep to function adequately, and you can only accumulate a sleep deficit for a relatively short period of time before serious performace degredation occurs... The military has found that you can operate on 3-4 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period... but only for a few days in a row (4-5 max), and no amount of training will cancel out the performance deficit that results. Believe me... the military has tried all kinds of things to get around this.
When you are running a serious sleep deficit, you get slow, stupid, confused easily, you can't remember things, you suck at complex tasks... some people even hallucinate.
If you want a good example, you should check out somebody who's crashing after being on a methamphetamine run for a couple of days... part of it is simple physical exhaustion and neurotransmitter depletion from the drug... but a big part of it is simple sleep deprivation; they take days to recover.
The same thing happens to troops in the field, or troops in training (ask anyone who's ever been through Ranger camp how much sleep they got, and how numbed and stupid your mind gets after a couple of days).
Most modern special operators are pretty bright folks, who's jobs require a working brain... just being tough isn't enough. They need multitasking ability, and that's one of the first things you lose when you're really tired.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
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.
I'm not sure the military would be greatly interested in the drugs mentioned in the above linked article. Killing on a large scale is a bit different now than in Shaka's day.
Up until a few hundred years ago, war was mostly large groups of men pushing, shoving, chopping and trying to shish-kebab eachother. if you were rich you could also run their arses over with your horse. There are two major groups of reasons why these drugs could be seriously helpful.
Killing someone with hand tools has got to be a lot of hard work. An armored knight of any era was an awesome thing, yet he still had to kill one at a time, maybe two or three at time with luck. A modern tanker could reasonably expect to off four or five people at a time, more depending on a target, with no more effort than shooting one person. An archer is pretty much the same. One arrow might equal one dead person if they are up close and about ready to kill you. Otherwise it is just getting lucky (or unlucky if you get shot). A modern artillery guy has to be working pretty hard to hump all those shells around, I don't think it is the same thing. My point is that a drug that could give short bursts of strength would be good for an old school warrior, and not as good and maybe not worth the downside to a modern guy.
In war done by hand, might made right. In single combat or when things have opened up, and most other things being equal, the most vicious, fearless guy is gonna win. Look at the beserkers. Getting nekked and charging a bunch of guys with sharp sticks isn't my idea of a good time! Yet those guys were a threat. I think that they may have been liquored & drugged up, and that the nudity may have had some religious signifigance. Just the way we use the word "beserk" today is a testament to what one guy that is amped up and thinks he is invincible can do. I'm mostly guessing here, but a tanker or an machine gunner that strips and thinks he is gonna kill them all is just going to die faster. I'm not a vet, and history is kinda thin here, so help me out!
Basically, in old school war, getting hopped up and thinking your are invincible matter, modern war, maybe not so much.
In anybody's book, having the guy next to you puss out and run is bad, right? It opens up a hole that the enemy can go thru and then tear stuff up. That has not changed. The difference is in the old way the guy next to you was right next to you. In some cases you would have been touching and maybe your shield was covering the right half of his body. The effectiveness of your unit largely depended on how tight were and how much they moved as one body.
Look at King Leonidas & Friends vs. The Persians at Thermopylae, for an example. Three hundred were able to hold up tens of thousands because they got in a tight line and didn't puss out.
Ok, so the Spartans were barely literate killers that had done nothing but train for war and had to steal to get their food as kids. It's also important to notice how they were equipped.
A hoplite typically had shin guards, a big round shield & a helmet, sometimes some smaller pieces of armor here and there. The main weapons were a spear and a short sword.
Notice how all the armor is up front? To get an easy kill one one of these guys you are gonna have to stick him in they eye holes of his helmet, knock him over and then stab him, or sneak under a bunch of spears and start hacking away. Doing these things to a supurb athlete that doesn't want you to isn't going to be easy.
In contrast, a hoplite was almost completely bare in the back. Even a group of witless peasants could win if a group of hoplites turned or if they were flanked. When fighting as a group, facing forward and not stepping out of line were maybe the most important things. Almost any drug that gave a person the nerve to do this would be worth giving up a little dexterity & judgement.
I haven't heard a lot of evidence to indicate that the Greeks were big on hallucinogens and pain killers while i
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.