The War on Sleep
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There’s a military arms race to build soldiers who fight without fatigue.
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All over the world, scientists are experimenting on soldiers to keep them awake beyond the limits of normal endurance. Researchers are engineering, and militaries are deploying, chemically enhanced troops. Of all the superpowers we’ve imagined, the one that has turned out to be most attainable—so attainable we’re already using it—is the ability to go without sleep.
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Why has functioning without sleep, unlike other fantasized human enhancements, become real? Because the immediate goal is modestly defined, demonstrably achievable, and easy to measure in experiments. We don’t have to keep you awake forever. We just have to compensate, partially and temporarily, for the cognitive impairment caused by your lack of sleep. In a way, we aren’t enhancing your performance. We’re just raising it back to your normal level—the level at which you function when you’re wide awake. The published experimental reports propose to “sustain,” “maintain,” or “restore” what they call “baseline,” or “pre-deprivation” performance. They aim to “attenuate,” “alleviate,” or “reverse” the “deficits,” “decrements,” and “degradations” caused by sleep deprivation. They speak of modafinil as a “countermeasure” to the “negative effects” of long shifts.
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That’s where the logic of enhancement begins. What used to be normal—needing eight hours of sleep each night—is now understood as a fatal flaw. An Israeli report, “Psychostimulants and Military Operations,” examines this “human-machine conflict,” lamenting, “Although an aircraft can mechanically function effectively throughout long hours, pilots cannot.” Canadian defense scientists also highlight this “discrepancy between human need and technological capability.” A U.S. Air Force document warns of disastrous “sleep attacks”—exhausted personnel nodding off on the job. We are the defect. We must be cured. (via Sleep deprivation in the military: Modafinil and the arms race for soldiers without fatigue. - Slate Magazine)