From hunter-gatherer warbands to contemporary military personnel, what substances have warriors used to enhance their psychological or physical performance?
As one datum, I’ve heard of fighter pilots using amphetamine. Cite: U.S. Combat Pilots on Speed - ABC News
“Amphetamines, a prescription drug, are known on the street as uppers or speed. Yet, a 20/20 investigation has found, the amphetamines, the speed pills, are now standard issue to U.S. Air Force combat pilots, to help them stay awake on long combat sorties.”
There was Peter Döbler, an East German man, who in July of 1971 fled from East Germany to West Germany by swimming 48 kilometers nonstop in 50 hours through the Baltic Sea, evading East German Navy boats and frogmen. Döbler trained for this stunt every day for two years, and he took amphetamines to keep himself awake (he is a medical doctor, so had access to these drugs).
My dad was a gunner in a battleship turret and told me that it was common practice in the Navy in WWII to pass out amphetamines to the troops prior to an invasion. Those battles would go on for days as the enemy positions where shelled around the clock.
Psilocybin for increased vision and pattern recognition? Would be great for snipers. Of course if you take too much you’re more likely to hug people than shoot them, so you got to keep the dosage low.
That’s a pretty sensationalist treatment of a mundane reality. Or at least a reality that was mundane in my era. The intended use of the stuff was not for combat performance enhancement, but simply for staying awake on very long flights.
All pilot trainees were issued one dose of a fairly typical amphetamine (Benzadrine or Dexadrine or ??? I don’t recall) with instructions to take it Saturday after breakfast and pay attention to your reaction throughout the day. And there was a list of unlikely side effects for which you were supposed to report to the hospital. I took mine as instructed and IIRC my reaction was about equal to a pot of diner coffee. Mildly unpleasant, but not debilitating.
The next time I encountered the stuff was several years later when we were deploying a squadron of F-16s nonstop from Las Vegas to Germany. That’s a long time to hand-fly a twitchy airplane solo while sitting on a rock-hard seat unable to move your butt more than an inch or so. Plus aerial refuel every 90 minutes for all 15 hours of the flight. Much of which was at night.
Everybody got two doses, IIRC to be taken at no closer than 6 hour intervals if needed. I took one after about 10 hours in the saddle. By the time we landed I’d been awake for about 20 hours. We all got there intact and nobody fell asleep at the stick or was turned into a drug fiend.
So I’d interpret the word “routine” in any writeup about this stuff as more meaning “ordinary” or “per long-standing well-researched policies”, rather than as “commonplace” or “frequent” or “done willy nilly”.
II figured it get used for long combat missions which would be performance enhancement. Even the performance of someone who doesn’t lack sleep can be improved by amphetamine so I’m wondering if it’s used on combat missions that don’t deprive personnel of sleep.
That certainly wasn’t the use for it in my era. I have no better knowledge of current era practice than you plus Google do.
There’s no evidence I’ve heard of that performance in the kinds of tasks required for combat flying is/are enhanced by amphetamines. Jittery and excitable isn’t good and “speed” doesn’t make you faster. Calm and focused are the watchwords.
Were not the originals the assassins? murderers who got ready by smoking hashish? although i doubt the story-cannabis makes you silly and less violent.
That one is pretty clearly trash-talking about Ismailis by their non-Ismaili enemies (taken as literally true by Europeans).
One version of the story was that the “Hasishin” (or Ismaili fanatics) didn’t actually take the drug for killing people. Rather, they were in effect fooled by their leaders. The leaders would drug them up, take them into a place full of pretty women while they were high, and convince them that this was “paradise” and that they (the leaders) had the power to take them there permanently - if they died on a mission to kill someone the leaders wanted dead. Then, the leaders would send them out to kill.
It is, of course, hard to guard against a killer who doesn’t care if they are caught and killed.
Thing is, as the modern ME demonstrates, people don’t need to be fooled by drugs to kill via suicide in the name of religion.
Not only does the military use drugs, they have the BEST drugs. I’m on Modafinil to address drowsiness caused by my other meds. It’s hi-test speed developed primarily for the air force and astronauts and allows you to spend astonishing amounts of time awake - as in upwards of 100 hours - with no significant loss of mental alertness or concentration, and the side effects are trivial, especially compared to speed. I’m no fan of the military-industrial complex but damn, they’ll be putting this stuff in the drinking water in 10 years.
I suspect Rangers and Seals often take anabolic steroids. They tend to have exceptional amounts of muscle mass, and a lot of the endurance training tends to make people smaller, preventing them from retaining that much mass. I would expect that commanders usually turn a blind eye to it, and normal military drug tests do not screen for anabolics - they have to pay a lot more money and send the specimens to a special lab. I don’t see any reason why SOCOM would do this.
This is essentially the story that Marco Polo told, as written in the book “The Travels of Marco Polo”. The guerilla warrior leader is called “The Old Man of the Mountain”, and he was said to have recruited his terrorist warriors as Malthus describes here.
Really? Because most of the special ops characters I’ve known tended to have lean and wiry body types. Modern soldiers don’t really need that much muscle mass, especially in their upper bodies, where it’s just more dead weight for their legs to carry. If endurance training is making them smaller, maybe there’s a reason for that.
They surely have more muscle mass than most people but not an exceptional amount. Big muscles, especially the kind you would get taking steroids, are mainly about ostentation.
How else do they tend to be physically? I do say “tend” because I’m aware that there can be variations,
