Biotechnology and war: the new challenge

Military Technology
Biotechnology and War
The New Challenge
The body is the first and most natural tool of man. It is often said that science fiction is a genre of cognitive estrangement, a combi- nation of the cognitive (the rational, scientific) and estrangement (translated as alienation from the familiar and the every-day). Yet most science fiction writing is an extension, or extrapolation, of the present. If science fiction were concerned only with estrangement, we would not understand it. If it were only about cognition, it would be a work of science rather than of science fiction. It is the combination of the two that al ows science fiction to chal enge the ordinary and what we take for granted.
Looking at the future of war in 1908, we would have learnt much from a book written by H. G. Wells, in which he predicted the coming of an atomic war. The novel is set in 1958 (pretty accurate timing) but its novelty ends there. In Wel s’s tale, the planes that bomb America’s cities are the biplanes of 1908 and the bombs are hand bombs dropped over the side of the aircraft by the pilots. If we want to glimpse the future of war today, where do we go? We could start with Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, in which we find that the training of soldiers in their early years takes the form of ‘games’ in a special Game Room. The government has taken to breeding military geniuses and then training them in the art of war.
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Another influential science-fiction book is Leo Frankowski’s A Boy and His Tank, which tells of a group of colonists on a planet combining Virtual Reality with tank warfare. Frankowski’s world is one in which warriors bond with their tanks, and their tanks with them. One of the most telling lines in the book is, ‘kid, if your tank is loyal you don’t have to be!’. Significantly, the books by Card and Frankowski are both used inside the current American military. Card’s novel is used to teach in the leadership course at the Marine Corps University at Quantico. In 1991, Frankowski’s A Boy and His Tank was proofread by a soldier from the First Cavalry Division while he was deployed in the Gulf, awaiting Operation Desert Storm.
Both of the above novels illustrate the new forces that are transforming the face of war. Three revolutions have shaped armed conflict since 1945: the atomic revo- lution, the information revolution and the biotechnology revolution. Although, according to some commentators, we may have entered a post–Cold War ‘second nuclear age’, atomic weapons are stil not employable by states. For most thinkers on future warfare, then, it is the information and biotechnology revolutions that are of the greatest importance in the 21st century. For Western societies that are forever sensitive to public distaste for military action, both of these revolutions may offer practical opportunities for the pursuit of war in the future.
The Convergence of the Biotechnology
and Information Revolutions
Although the theme of this article is biotechnology, it is becoming clear that the information technology and biotechnology revolutions are not distinct. Indeed, digital biology is likely to be the key to the future in almost every walk of life. The decoding of the human genome would have been impossible without the increase of computing power provided by the information revolution. Genetic manipulation requires the decoding and recombining of information codes of living matter, and this process is made possible only by an exponential increase in processing power. Conversely, the language of the information technology age has been significantly influenced by nature. What the human genome project reveals is that we have almost the same number of genes as the chimpanzee. What makes us different—what makes us the intelligent creatures that we are—is the networking and recombining capacity of our cel s, particularly our brain cel s, through mil ions of electrochemical connections. It would seem that, in terms of networking and feedback loops (the basis of cybernetics), the human brain is similar to the Internet that dominates our In time, scientists who understand the processes of nature—especially those that know how complex adaptive systems work—wil be able to build computers that can evolve (rather than solve) most conceivable problems. In computer programming, page 126  Volume II, Number 1  Australian Army Journal
‘evolutionary algorithms’—programs that permit evolution in computer space—are dictating the pace of change. In an attempt to create more complex computer ‘brains’, scientists are also studying complex neural networks in the human brain in the expectation of constructing ‘digital chromosomes’ with many of the same features as our own DNA. When it comes to war, digital biology is already redrawing the rules of engagement. Instrumental y, war is being defined in biological terms. Existential y, re-engineering, which promise him or her the chance to breed out the imperfections of the past, the chance to breed true.
It is a chal enge that is typical of the age in which we live, one in which the biolog- ical is privileged more and more over the cultural. It appears, as evolutionary psychologists tell us, that human behaviour is far more genetically determined than we had previously thought, and that, by modifying our genes, we may well be able to enhance the activities we do well and have always done wel as a species. One of the activities that we have excel ed at over the centuries has been war. There is nothing to suggest that we will be going out of the war business; indeed, quite the reverse is the case.
Towards Post-human War: The Challenge of the Future
Biology (but not yet biotechnology) has already changed the way in which we look at military operations, and the use of force in post-military contexts. For example, ‘The Marine Corps After Next’ (MCAN) Branch of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory has been exploring what it calls a ‘biological systems inspiration’ for future warfighting. According to its website: For the last three centuries we have approached war as a Newtonian system. That is, mechanical and ordered. In fact, it is probably not. The more likely model is a complex system that is open ended, paral el and very sensitive to initial conditions and continued ‘inputs’. Those inputs are the ‘fortunes of war’. ¹ The Marine Corps goes on to suggest that, if it is assumed that war will remain a complex and minimally predictable event, the structures and tactics that we employ wil enjoy operational success only if they are dispersed, autonomous, adapt- Australian Army Journal  Volume II, Number 1  page 127
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The characteristics of an adaptable, complex system are similar to those found in biology. To deal with the biological is to do least damage to the ‘environment’. In armed conflict the environment may be broadly understood to be the social and political, as well as ecological, context within which war is fought. When the term ‘ecology’ was first coined in the 1860s, it described the holistic study of living systems interacting with their environment. Ecologists look at communities of organisms, patterns of life, natural cycles and demographic changes. Such activity is precisely what a new generation of American military strategists is now engaged in doing, and systemic thinking was evident during the Second Gulf War of 2003. The aim of the war was to incapacitate the Iraqi leadership in a swift warfighting campaign while preserving as much of Iraqi society and human environment as possible. The Coalition warfighting campaign succeeded in achieving most of its forces that often fought with adaptability disaster failed to materialise and Iraqi In the future, the influence of biotech- instrumental but rather in the existential inconsistent with the experience of earlier Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs). Most military revolutions, in one way or another, have impacted on the warrior’s view of his own profession. For example, the use of the long bow (fol owed by the introduction of cannon) destroyed the ideas of chivalry and active courage. Courage became more passive in nature; it also became valued in terms of a new currency, namely blows received, not blows given.
The rise of mechanisation on the industrialised battlefields of the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought further change. Machine warfare locked the warrior into a system in which his performance was increasingly evaluated in industrial terms of productivity and predictability. In essence, in mass armies such as those that predominated in Europe after 1870, the warrior became a ‘worker’. Now, in the information age, the military professional has increasingly become an information processor and locked into a cybernetic world. The coming biotechnological revolu- tion promises to transform the profession of arms again, perhaps more radically Of the many technologies that are changing the military professional’s sense of ‘self’, three are essential to the soldier’s ‘post-human’ future. The first is performative and involves the phenomenology of human–machine interaction. The interface page 128  Volume II, Number 1  Australian Army Journal
between humans and machines is changing as computers become more interactive and sophisticated in military operations. The second technology is behavioural, in the sense that we have begun to turn the analytical methods of molecular biology tive and refers to the ways in which synthetic drugs may eventually influence the way in which military professionals conceive of their interactions with enemies. In al three cases—performative, behav- ioural and normative—technological advances no longer involve an extension of the human body as has been the case since the first tools and weapons were invented. Technology in all three cases is being incorporated or assimilated into the human The Human–Machine Interface
The interaction of soldiers, sailors and aviators with machines has been a feature of the military profession for a century and is likely to accelerate in the future. The US military has been working on fusing the human body and various machines functionally rather than attempting to mesh them physically. For example, systems analysis, social psychology, computer-mediated systems and, above all, personnel management techniques have all been designed to help pilots use machines more effectively in order to enhance the parameters of human performance.
Through cognitive engineering, the US Air Force (USAF) has gone further than any other service in seeking an interface between human and machine. In trying to modify the cognitive processes of its pilots, the USAF has sought to make its aviators more operational y efficient. In the high-performance, computer-based aircraft of the 21st century, pilots have to be capable of split-second responses. Given the complexity Australian Army Journal  Volume II, Number 1  page 129
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of technology, the minds of pilots have to be made more machine-friendly than ever before. Increasingly, the goal of military training is ‘design oriented’—that is, it is aimed at producing operators that can process information faster, and thus design their reactions in combat with greater speed and skill.
Functionally, we are already wired into digital networks that enhance our ability to process large amounts of information. The Internet is the case in point. Some of the research projects in the United States already under way may be harbingers of the military future. One of the most famous is the McDonald Douglas ‘Pilot Associate’, which has been an ongoing program since 1986. This program is designed to allow ‘expert systems’ to evaluate the input from external sensors as well as monitor and diagnose all the aircraft’s on-board subsystems—including the pilot—and it will be able to initiate actions if the pilot is unable to take decisions himself.
What is new in the early 21st century, however, is the reality that we are now exploring ways in which to mesh machine and body not only functionally, but also physical y. Today a range of words and terms are employed to describe our evolving cyborg status, from biotelemetry to ‘human–machine interfaces’ and bionics (the copying of natural systems). Increasingly, engineering is being transformed into a biologically based discipline. Currently, in the Massachussetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, robots are assembled from silicon, steel and living cells. The activators of these simple devices are muscle cells culti- vated in the laboratory, the precursors of the prostheses that wil one day be instal ed seamlessly into disabled human bodies. Surgical body modification and biochemical alterations (for example, through the use of botulinum toxin) are already common- place. Within fifty years, or even earlier, these developments could be applied to enhance the abilities of tomorrow’s military professionals.
One popular science-fiction vision of the biotechnological future is the way in which people interact with computers by incorporating silicon into their bodies. In Wil iam Gibson’s ‘cyber punk’ stories, data is transferred via ‘wet-wired brain implants’ or computer chips into human brains. These and other futuristic visions promise a world in which there wil be a sophisticated interface between our nervous system and silicon—a world in which neural implants wil enhance visual and auditory percep- tion as wel as interpretation, memory and reasoning. It wil be a world, too, in which the distinction between computers and humans wil be gradual y blurred.
Fibre-optic projectors can already throw images onto our retinas, thus allowing us to see directly without the intervening medium of a television or computer screen. Moreover, research is wel under way to help enhance human auditory senses through implants in the ear. True to science fiction writer, William Gibson’s vision of the future, the USAF is investigating growing neurons in silicon chips in order to improve the communication between humans and machines, in effect allowing chips to be activated by hormones and neural electrical stimulation. The Defense page 130  Volume II, Number 1  Australian Army Journal
Program that, in its own words, aims ‘to to access non-invasive codes in the brain peripheral device or systems operation’. ² In plain English, this aim involves enhancing the brain controls movement and using the brain to control external devices, trans- mitting (as has been done successful y with monkeys) brain signals over the Internet in order to operate a robotic arm hundreds of miles away. This experiment by DARPA may herald the coming of a future age in which a warrior’s brain—perhaps part carbon, part silicon—may be able to operate weapons by the power of thought.
Technicity: The Rise of Cyborg Warriors?
Colonel Frederick Timmerman, Director of the US Center for Army Leadership and former editor-in-chief of Military Review, has stated, ‘that there will be future warriors is the only certainty’. Timmernan’s future belongs to those countries—prin- cipally, of course, the United States—that will be able to ‘transform and extend the soldier’s physiological capability’ by revolutionising the way in which technology is applied. If war is to remain central to human culture in the future, then the soldiers’ bodies, as well as their personalities, may have to be reconfigured. In this regard, the cyborg condition has enormous implications for our humanity and our cultural idea of war. For if endurance can be artificially enhanced, wil we have to rewrite the ethos of the warrior cyborgs are not quite what science-fiction writers would like us to imagine—at least, not yet. The popular view of the military cyborg can be found in two recent Hol ywood films, Robocop and Universal Soldier. In the first film, the cyborg is a product of the Detroit Police Department, a subsidiary of OmniConsumer Products (OSP). The ‘Unisols’ (another industrial brand name) that appear in the second film, Robert Emmerich’s 1992 Universal Soldier, are cyborgs of a different stamp. Their hyper-accelerating bodies turn dead flesh into living Australian Army Journal  Volume II, Number 1  page 131
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tissue. Following their death in Vietnam, the two principal combatants in the film are flown back home to be packaged in ice, surgically eviscerated and refilled with cybernetic equipment, thereby being transformed into true 21st-century soldiers. A serum injected into the back of their skulls voids their memories. They represent the ultimate killing machines, devoid of fear in the face of death largely because, to all intents and purposes, they are already dead to themselves.
What both of these films offer the viewer is a vision of a future in which biotech- nology is pioneered by the private sector. In this respect, technology is beginning to transform the ontology, or the science of being in war, as we have traditionally understood it. It is important to recognise that biotechnology can take three forms. First, it can be restorative by recreating normal functions through replacement of lost limbs and organs. Second, biotechnology can be reconfiguring, creating post-human possibilities by adapting humans to the environment. It is interesting to note that the original work of Manfred Clynes, who first coined the term ‘cyborg’, was on how to adapt humans to outer space. The final form of biotechnology is that of enhancing human abilities, and this form is likely to be the aim of much military research in the future. It is this third option that is probably central to the future of war, especially if science can enable us to escape the constraints of Darwinian evolution.
The question that arises is: by re-engineering themselves, will soldiers develop a self-image as members of an exclusive caste? The process of ‘technologising’—in which bodies are reassembled in order that they can function optimal y, with excel- lence enhanced—is central to the cyberpunk science-fiction of William Gibson. In Gibson’s imaginary world, cyborgs are creatures whose identities are no longer determined by social criteria such as class, ethnicity or even nationality but by tech- nicity—that is, by the new architecture of the body.
In Gibson’s world, cryogenic processes and enhanced digitalised senses redefine identity, just as cyberspace produces its own virtual communities. In one of Gibson’s short stories, Johnny Mnemonic, a principal character, has electronically upgraded vision and prosthetised fingers that house a set of razor-sharp, double-edged scal- pels, myo-electrically wired into her enhanced nervous system. She is no longer an individual born into a social or ethnic group from which she derives her sense of self. Rather, she is a customised and functional product of a cyborg culture, and she has little respect for others that are not like her. What Gibson offers us is a vision of a separate caste—a world in which the respect one warrior has traditionally given another is no longer a product of culture but of bio-engineering. What his cyborgs admire in each other, writes David Tomas, is technical virtuosity and operational speed—attributes that have been directly integrated into their own prosthetic and page 132  Volume II, Number 1  Australian Army Journal
‘Natural Born’ Killers: Biotechnology
and the Warrior Culture
The Human Genome Project represents one of the most significant steps in our evolution. On one level, the project allows us to subject our humanity, which we have taken as a given, to biotechnological intervention. In theory, it might be possible to breed a warrior DNA, or manufacture a race of warriors, or ‘natural born’ killers. This is the promise of such novels as Ender’s Game. The object would be twofold: first, to make soldiers impervious to fear, fright or anxiety, and thus to make them more courageous (or foolhardy) in battle; second, to make military professionals more effective at killing. In pursuing the first objective, of course, one For the ‘born’ warrior is a kil er, as wel as one that is prepared—if necessary—to lay his life on the line. In an opening paragraph in her much-acclaimed book, An Intimate History of Kil ing, Joanna Bourke writes that ‘the characteristic act of men at war is not dying, it is killing’, and it is as well always to keep that rubric in the forefront of one’s mind. The soldier–killers analysed by J. Glenn Gray in his seminal 1959 study, The Warriors, are among the most formidable and terrifying warriors of all. They are men devoid of remorse or reflection, and they exist in all armies at all times. Homer’s Achil es was the supreme kil ing machine; so too was the Alexander depicted so vividly in Arrian’s history of the Macedonian campaigns. Kil ing, Arrian tells us without a trace of irony, is what Alexander did consummately well.
Is killing a result of culture or nature? Evolutionary psychology argues that humans are born with a common set of preferences, predispositions and abilities fashioned by natural selection. These abilities enabled us to develop and become the dominant species on the planet. In other words, when we are born, we are pre- equipped with abilities such as the ability to learn a language. We have something violent, some individuals are genetical y of the reasons that, even in the mid-21st century, war is likely to remain a male activity is that, across cultures, men kill other men twenty or forty times more often than women kill other women. The great majority of killers are of an age in Australian Army Journal  Volume II, Number 1  page 133
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which the soldier is at his prime, usually between the years of fifteen and thirty. In this same age group, some men are more inclined to kill than others. In Western society, for example, 7 per cent of young men commit 79 per cent of repeated violent offences. If this is true of society in general, it must surely be true of the military, which in a democracy, at least, tends to be a microcosm same. A good soldier is not the personality type that makes an intractable violent young offender: impulsive, hyperactive, with low intelligence and usually an attention deficit. Unlike soldiers, young offenders are also resistant to discipline. The latter dislike being controlled, and the worst of them are often psychopaths who lack a conscience and are more likely, if they seek war, to be found in paramilitary organisations that set their own rules. Very rarely are young, violent offenders to be found in military units whose members are bound by close fraternal ties and tend, as a result, to enjoy a high degree of self-esteem.
However, one of the interesting phenomena of war is the extent to which a very smal percentage even of professional soldiers kil with any real enthusiasm. It has been calculated, for example, that 1 per cent of fighter pilots accounted for at least 35 per cent of enemy aircraft kil s in World War II. Clearly, they were not only more talented but more aggressive than their counterparts. On the ground the figures are even more remarkable. Take, for example, Lance Sergeant Simo Hyha of the Finnish Army who, in three months in the Winter War of 1939, kil ed 219 Soviet soldiers with a standard-issue service rifle. Another born kil er was Sergeant Alvin York of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I (memorably portrayed in film by Gary Cooper). Sergeant York kil ed twenty-eight Germans in the battle of the Argonne in one day alone, 8 October 1918, a month before the Armistice. Looked at differently, York single-handedly accounted for the equivalent of two German infantry companies. As wel as kil ing twenty-eight soldiers he captured another 182, and as a result York may have transformed a tactical situation along a key sector of the front line.
Killing does not seem to come naturally in all situations to all soldiers, even the most highly trained. Natural born soldiers are not made; they are born—and there are very few of them. That is why the military has preferred the discipline of collec- tive units such as gun crews, which are more easily controlled and which, being often distant from the battlefield, are also less emotionally involved—in a word, they are more ‘mechanical’. The greatest cruelties in war have been the impersonal ones of remote decision, system and routine, especially when they can be justified page 134  Volume II, Number 1  Australian Army Journal
Looking at matters from the perspective of the evolutionary psychologist, we can make a number of assumptions. We are not born to kill, just as we are not born to engage in war. Killing is a contingent strategy connected to complicated circuitry that allows us to compute subconsciously, whether it is in our interest to kill or not. We deploy aggression as a strategy and we do so much less than we have done before. Like war, violence has declined among the rich nations not because of morality or ethical codes. Ethics tend to legitimise, after the fact, the contingent strategies we have already chosen. Ethics are cultural and learnt, and if eyes, at least), it is because we have become more cosmopolitan (or less hostile to strangers) in our outlook. Moreover, the technologies that promote literacy, travel, and knowledge of history have all contributed in different ways to our growing cosmopolitanism. Our social imagination has expanded as a result. Through televi- sion and film, we are able to project ourselves into the daily lives of other people, even though they are remote from us both physically and sometimes emotionally.
Genetics and Military Performance
If our postmodern societies continue to discourage violence or sublimate it through sport, then they may find themselves with a smaller pool of talent from which to recruit natural born soldiers. Thus we may have to manipulate the gene pool if we are to stay in the business of war. Drug enhancement rather than genetic engineering is likely to be a key factor in such a process. It is probably far too early to talk of the genetic engineering of soldiers—something that, if it happens at all, we are more likely to encounter beyond the first half of the 21st century.
One method of genetic engineering that has been made popular by science fiction writers is cloning—that is, the transplanting of a mature human cel with its ful DNA pattern into a human egg whose nucleus has been removed. Cloning is the way to transmit the genetic signature of one parent to an embryo, thus effectively creating a genetic identical twin of the parents. Cloning has given rise to the fear, stated elegantly by Richard Dawkins, of ‘phalanxes of identical little Hitlers goose-stepping to the same genetic drum’. Nonetheless, current scientific opinion regards that the cloning of human beings wil remain genetical y difficult, if not impossible, for years to come. Instead, cloning is more likely to be used to provide cel banks for the living—for instance, in replacing parts lost on the battlefield. The future of cloning probably lies in spare-part surgery rather than in the replication of human beings.
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A more likely route to the future is manipulation of our genes. By drawing reproduction into a highly selective social process that is far more successful at spreading good genes than sexual competition, we are truly embarking on a new voyage. Within the next fifty years we may be able to modify ourselves, to design our own babies, and possibly produce better soldiers. The technological powers that we used in the past to alter the natural environment can now be directed at changing ourselves by modifying not so much human nature as the behaviour of specific human types, including those of the warrior. Such changes may be made possible by a spectrum of breakthroughs. These breakthroughs include the matrix- like arrays called DNA chips that may soon be able to read 60 000 genes at a time. The manufacture of artificial chromosomes that can now be divided as successfully as their naturally occurring cousins is another breakthrough. Then there are the advances in bio-informatics—that is, the use of computer-driven methodologies in Already we can modify a trait in a directed fashion by altering or selecting partic- ular gene variants. Changing a single gene in an animal is now a routine process. Research in this area has been spurred on by scientists and their claim that they can decipher the relationship between our genes and our behaviour in such areas as criminality, alcoholism, and drug addiction. The key is to identify a combination of gene variants common to many people with similar endowments (such as athletic prowess), and then to manipulate the human genetic system.
With so much genetic information available on every human being—from simple, single-gene disorders to complex, polygenic moods and behaviour traits— it is becoming attractive for employers to use genetic data to select prospective employees. As early as the 1970s, the discovery of the sickle-cell anaemia trait prompted the US military to use genetic screening for the first time. Carriers of the recessive gene—most of them African–Americans—were denied entrance into the US Air Force Academy for fear that they might suffer the weakening of their red blood cells in a reduced-oxygen environment.
The US military purportedly went further in 1992 when it launched an ambitious program to col ect several mil ion DNA samples from its personnel. The exercise was aimed at facilitating the accurate identification of men and women lost in combat. However, in the legal battle that followed a refusal by two Marines to give blood under the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, a fear was expressed that the same genetic samples could be used for biomedical research. Such research might serve to identify the best military genes, or to weed out soldiers with the worst: those most susceptible to fear. If it is becoming possible to isolate genetic traits, then it should also be possible to enhance personality traits such as risk-taking that would be required by Special Forces, and to produce above-average levels of emotional stability for pilots in the virtual spaces that they occupy with computers.
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Traditionally the military has often seen itself as culturally distinct in its attach- ment to a value system that honours duty, concept of honour itself. Yet in a coming scend culture. With the emergence of genetic screening, why demarcate a warrior by class, ethnicity or race? Why not do so on the basis of genotype—on the basis of positive discrimination (isolating certain ‘positive genes’) or negative discrimi- nation (screening to detect predispositions to mood and behavioural instability)? Biotechnology is likely to pose compelling ethical and moral questions to military professionals over the course of the next few decades.
Military Culture, Neuroscience and the
Implications of Pharmacology
A more profitable subject of speculation—simply because it has been happening for some time—involves the modification, or control, of human behaviour through neural pharmacology. In the immediate future, military authorities may be tempted to try to manipulate the endogenous opiate system in an attempt to decrease sensi- tivity to pain, and thus enhance physical stamina and mental endurance. Already, the genetically modified soldier is part of the Pentagon’s search for an Extended Performance Warfighter—a program that focuses on using devices other than drugs to enhance performance. TMS or electromagnetic energy may allow scientists to ‘zap’ a soldier’s brain, so giving an individual the capability to stay awake, fight and make decisions for a week. In the future, devices attached to clothing may also be employed in order to gauge a soldier’s mood by the number of eye blinks. Internal implants able to monitor the human heartbeat may be able to administer tranquilisers or sedatives without the soldier’s awareness of the process.
Lest all of the above seem far-fetched, it should be noted that the enhancement of athletic abilities by drugs has been with us in sport for at least three decades. For instance, the banned hormone Erythropoietin, which raises the oxygen-carrying capacity of red blood cells, can boost endurance by between 10 and 15 per cent. Metabolic and physiological enhancers are now a central part of professional sport. Apart from sporting ethics, the only questions about the use of such drugs concern the issues of detection and side effects. The social pressure to re-engineer Australian Army Journal  Volume II, Number 1  page 137
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the athlete in order to win, and to win more spectacularly than in the past, has generated a relentless use of pharmacology in sport. Similarly, the equally insistent need to win in war is likely to accelerate to reduce stress and thus improve combat to hand. Alcohol is merely the oldest method. neuroscience, it is proving cheaper, easier anxiety and fear through pharmacological means. Drugs such as Librium and Valium already treat anxiety, while Prozac and Zoloft fight depression. Prescribed drugs have been used to reduce stress and fatigue, and to enhance wakefulness for up to seventy-two hours at a time among USAF pilots and anxiety suppressants have been given to pilots going into combat. According to some reports, Viagra may have been given to some Special Operations Forces to boost testosterone levels and thus aggression.
Manipulating human emotions through the means of pharmacology goes well beyond issues of physical and psychic endurance. In the future, we may even be able to abolish guilt and thus neutralise the often-traumatic consequences of showing courage in combat. What if by swallowing a pill a soldier could immunise himself from a lifetime of crushing remorse? The prospect of a soul absolved by medication is not far-fetched. Feelings of guilt and regret travel neural pathways in a manner that mimics the tracings of ingrained fear, and thus a way of addressing one should address the other. Experiments have been conducted at the University of California at Irvine to inhibit the brain’s hormonal reactions to fear, softening the formation of memories and the emotions that they evoke. The beta- blocker, Propranolol, has been employed to nip the effects of trauma in the bud, in effect short-circuiting Another research team at Columbia University has discovered a gene behind a fear-inhibiting protein, so uncovering the traditional ‘fight or flight’ imperative at a molecular level. The question thus arises, will we in the West soon be able to blunt the human conscience and mediate out of the psyche regret, remorse, pain or guilt? Is the ultimate end of ‘consequence management’ to make the soldier blind to the consequences of his own acts? Is this the thin end of a dangerous wedge: the emergence of a morally anaesthetised soldier? page 138  Volume II, Number 1  Australian Army Journal
Conclusion
It is not in the existential but the metaphysical dimension of war that the influence of biotechnology may be the most radical. The metaphysical dimension is the way in which death is conceived as sacrifice. It is the way in which a soldier interprets the meaning of his death. Frequently that meaning is specific to a particular culture. Inevitably, ethical problems arise when communities have different preferences for ways of living—preferences that we can see as culturally determined. All societies choose the best life possible in the light of their own historical experience and collective self- understanding. It is at this point that ethical differences between communities arise.
demands of human rights, which touch on an altogether-different question—that which the contemporary philosopher Jurgen Habermas cal s our ‘self-understanding as members of the same species’. This self-understanding concerns not culture that is different in every age and every society, but the vision that different cultures have of humanity. In Habermas’s view, the biotechnological revolution threatens this precious self-understanding of our species. Indeed, he believes that recent developments in biotechnology and genetic research threaten to instrumentalise human nature according to technical preferences. The most obvious example is that of parents who want children of a certain skin or hair colour, or who are prepared to breed out what they consider human imperfections, most of them genetic. The human body at this point is no longer sacred because it becomes an ‘object’, or an instrument of parents or the state, to be modified or redesigned at will. According to Habermas, once we view human bodies, including those of military professionals, merely as defective ‘hardware’ and their minds as enhanced ‘software’, then our self-understanding as The ethical implications of biotechnology are daunting. In his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil observes: ‘the primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are’. Insofar as the new technologies promise to remake not only our bodies but also our worlds, they raise important and urgent questions about society’s continued engagement with the soldiers who fight in its name. Moreover, if future war is to be a struggle between cultures, between the West and various non-Western peoples, states, societies or regimes, then its intersubjective meaning has never Australian Army Journal  Volume II, Number 1  page 139
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been more important. For this reason even post-human warfare is likely to be just as ontologically real as before. In the words of one of America’s leading contem- Humanity is neither an essence nor an end but a continuous and precarious process of becoming human, a process that entails the inescapable fact that our humanity is on loan from others, to precisely the extent that we acknowledge it in them … Others will tell if we’re humans and what that means.
It is the idea of humanity as a process that brings us to the core of the question of biotechnology and war. In the future we will be encouraged to see humanity as a continuing process of ‘becoming’ human—a process that, through cyborg enhancement (a form of ‘participatory evolution’), is now far more technologically determined than it was in the past. At the same time, morality has become far more intersubjective than subjective. This is why the prospect that we may begin to fight ‘post-human wars’ in the near future should prompt sobering thoughts. Wil tomor- row’s Western warriors find themselves alienated from a self-understanding of their own species? Will they think of themselves as genetically different from soldiers from other societies who are not experiencing the post-human condition? Endnotes
1 US Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, viewed 10 January 2004, <http://www.mcwl.quantico.usmc.mil>.
2 DARPA Defense Sciences Office, ‘Human Assisted neural Devices’, viewed 10 January 2004, <www.darpa.mil/dso/thrust/biosci/brainmi.htm>.
The Author
Christopher Coker is Professor of International Relations in the London School of Economics and Political Science. A specialist in defence policy and military ethics, he is the author of several books, including War and the 20th Century: A Study of War and Modern Consciousness (1994); War and the Il iberal Conscience (1998); Humane Warfare (2001) and Waging War without Warriors? The Changing Culture of Military Conflict (2002). His latest study, The Future of War: The Re-enchantment of War in the 21st Century, wil be published later this year.
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