Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T16:37:58.520Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

From Idiophylaxis to Inner Armor: Imagining the Self-Armoring Soldier in the United States Military from the 1960s to Today

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2018

Andrew Bickford
Andrew Bickford*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, Georgetown University
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

All militaries try to develop a “winning edge” in warfare. More often than not these attempts focus on new weapons systems and weapons platforms, on new ways of maximizing the offensive capabilities of a military through firepower. These attempts can also involve the training and development of soldiers, including performance enhancements to make them fight better, longer, and smarter than the enemy and to counter human frailty on the battlefield. These concerns and problems have long held the interest of the U.S. military. This article traces the development, rationale, and legacy of one such attempt to deal with human frailty and the “body problem,” a kind of military futurism devised at the peak of the Cold War. Dr. Marion Sulzberger envisioned creating soldiers who had their own kind of special “biological armor,” or what he termed “idiophylaxis.” In 1962, he presented a paper at the Army Science Conference at West Point titled “Progress and Prospects in Idiophylaxis (Built-In Individual Self-Protection of the Combat Soldier).” Sulzberger's call was for a radical rethinking of the combat soldier and the ways in which soldiers were imagined, designed, and developed. His goal was to “armor” the individual soldier both internally and psychologically through new forms of biomedicine and biotechnology. The interventions he detailed in 1962 live on today in the U.S. military's soldier performance enhancement research programs, including DARPA's recent “Inner Armor” program and desire to make “kill-proof” soldiers.

Keywords

militarymilitarizationbiomedicineperformance enhancementsoldier's bodymilitary medicinemilitary bioethicshistory of medicineMarion Sulzberger
Type
Armored Bodies
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 810 - 838
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Annas, C. and Annas, G.. 2009. Enhancing the Fighting Force: Medical Research on American Soldiers. Journal of Contemporary Health and Law Policy 25, 2: 283–308.Google Scholar
Army Medical Science and Technology Initiatives in Advanced Biotechnology Briefing. 2004. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Defense.Google Scholar
Army Invites 500 Leaders to Biennial Science Conference. 1962. Army Research and Development News Magazine (Apr.): 1.Google Scholar
Aronova, E. 2014. Big Science and “Big Science Studies” in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In Oreskes, N. and Krige, J., eds., Science and Technology in the Global Cold War. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bickford, A. 2008. “Skin-In Solutions”: Militarizing Medicine and Militarizing Culture in the United States Military. North American Dialogue 11, 1: 5–8.Google Scholar
Bickford, A. 2010a. Pat Tilmann and Why Soldier Hero Worship Serves the Powerful, and Not the Soldiers. Shadow Elite Column, Huffington Post, 30 Sept. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-bickford/emshadow-eliteem-pat-till_b_744890.html.Google Scholar
Bickford, A. 2010b. “Triumph of the Pill: Armored Life, Biotechnology, and Health in the United States Military.” Invited Keynote Talk, “Are Soldiers Human?” Workshop, The Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, The Post Structural Research and Thought Cluster, and The British International Studies Association Post-Structural Politics Group, University of Manchester, 24 Sept.Google Scholar
Bickford, A. 2011. Fallen Elites: The Military Other in Post-Unification Germany. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Biro, M. 1994. The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture. New German Critique 62 (Spring/Summer): 71–110.Google Scholar
Boscaglia, M. 1996. Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century. Boulder: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Buchanon, A. 2011. Beyond Humanity? The Ethics of Biomedical Enhancement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Callahan, M. 2007. Inner Armor. DARPATech, DARPA's 25th Annual Systems and Technology Symposium, 7 Aug., Anaheim, Calif.Google Scholar
Clarke, A. E., Mamo, L., Fosket, J. R., and Fishman, J. R.. 2010. Biomedicalization: A Theoretical and Substantive Introduction. In Clarke, A. et al. , eds., Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Clausewitz, C. von. 1976. On War. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Clynes, M. E. and Kline, N. S.. 1960. Cyborgs and Space. Astronautics (Sept.): 26–27, 74–76.Google Scholar
Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Creager, A.N.H. 2014. Atomic Tracings: Radioisotopes in Biology and Medicine. In Oreskes, Naomi and Krige, John, eds., Science and Technology in the Global Cold War. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Deakin, S. 2014. Naked Soldiers and the Principle of Discrimination. Journal of Military Ethics 13, 4: 320–30.Google Scholar
DeLanda, M. 1991. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. New York: Swerve Editions.Google Scholar
Dyvik, S. L. and Greenwood, L.. 2016. Embodying Militarism: Exploring the Spaces and Bodies In-Between. Critical Military Studies 2, 1–2: 1–6.Google Scholar
Edwards, P. 1996. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Erickson, P. et al. 2013. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Esposito, R. 2008. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Esposito, R. 2011. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Finley, E. P. 2011. Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Ford, K. and Glymour, C.. 2014. The Enhanced Warfighter. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 70, 1: 43–53.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. 1980. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Friedl, Col. K. E. (U.S. Army) and Allan, J. H.. 2004. USARIEM: Physiological Research for the Warfighter. Natick, Mass.: United States Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, L. A. 2003. Remembering Marion Sulzberger, 1895–1983. Society for Investigative Dermatology, Inc. 1: n.p. (society journal, Cleveland).Google Scholar
Gray, C. H. 1989. The Cyborg Soldier: The US Military and the Post-Modern Warrior. In Levidow, L. and Robins, K., eds., Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society. London: Free Association Books.Google Scholar
Gray, C. H. 1997. Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict. New York: Guileford Press.Google Scholar
Gross, M. L. 2006. Bioethics and Armed Conflict: Moral Dilemmas of Medicine and War. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gumiliev, N. 1972 [1916]. Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumiliev. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Gusterson, H. 1996. Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hautzinger, S. and Scandlyn, J.. 2014. Beyond Post-Traumatic Stress: Homefront Struggles with the Wars on Terror. New York: Left Coast Press.Google Scholar
Hoffman, N. Y. 1983. Marion Sulzberger, M.D.: “Mr. Dermatology.” Journal of the American Medical Association 249, 10: 1243–49.Google Scholar
Hogle, L. F. 2005. Enhancement Technologies and the Body. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 695–716.Google Scholar
Howell, A. 2014. Resilience, War, and Austerity: The Ethics of Military Human Enhancement and the Politics of Data. Security Dialogue (7 Nov.): 15–31.Google Scholar
Jablonski, N. 2004. The Evolution of Human Skin and Skin Color. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 585–623.Google Scholar
Jablonski, N. 2011. Evolving Skin. Interview by Beth Herbert. Helix Magazine, Science and Society Research Center, Northwestern University, 16 Sept. At: https://helix.northwestern.edu/article/evolving-skin.Google Scholar
Jacobsen, A. 2015. The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military Research Agency. New York: Little, Brown & Co.Google Scholar
Jauregui, B. 2015. World Fitness: US Army Family Humanism and the Positive Science of Persistent War. Public Culture 27, 3: 449–85.Google Scholar
Jünger, E. 2003 [1920]. Storm of Steel. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Killion, T. H., Bury, S. J., de Pontbriand, R., and Belanich, J.. 2009. United States Army Science and Technology: Sustaining Soldier Performance. Military Psychology 21 (supplement 1): S9–S22.Google Scholar
Knickerbocker, B. 2002. Military Looks to Drugs for Battle Readiness. Christian Science Monitor, 9 Aug. At: https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0809/p01s04-usmi.html.Google Scholar
Lin, P., Mehlman, M. J., and Abney, K.. 2013. Enhanced Warfighters: Risk, Ethics, Policy. Report prepared for The Greenwall Foundation, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, Calif.Google Scholar
Mackee, G. M. 1955. Dr. Marion Sulzberger. Journal of Investigative Dermatology 24: 141–42.Google Scholar
MacLeish, K. 2015. Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Marinetti, F. T. 2009 [1915]. War, the Only Hygiene of the World. In Rainey, L., Poggi, C., and Wittman, L., eds., Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Martinez-Lopez, L., Major-General, MD. 2004. Biotechnology Enablers for the Soldier System of Systems. The Bridge: Linking Engineering and Society 34, 3: 17–25.Google Scholar
Masco, J. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Masco, J. 2014. The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
McNeill, J. R. 2010. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McSorley, K. 2014. Towards an Embodied Sociology of War. Sociological Review 62, S2: 107–28.Google Scholar
Messinger, S. 2010. Getting Past the Accident: Explosive Devices, Limb Loss, and Refashioning a Life in a Military Medical Center. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 24, 3: 281–303.Google Scholar
Military Operational Medicine Research Program. 2004. Information Paper 21 (21 Oct.): 1–11.Google Scholar
Moreno, J. 2012. Mind Wars: Brain Science and the Military in the 21st Century. New York: Bellevue Literary Press.Google Scholar
National Security Directorate, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 2001. Objective Force Warrior: “Another Look.” Report prepared for the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army Research and Technology.Google Scholar
Oreskes, N. 2014. Introduction. In Oreskes, Naomi and Krige, John, eds., Science and Technology in the Global Cold War. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Poggi, C. 2009. Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Rabinbach, A. 1992. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Research Area 3, United States Army Medical Research and Materials Command. 2004. Military Operational Medicine Research Program Information Paper 21, Oct.Google Scholar
Robson, S. 2014. Psychological Fitness and Resilience: A Review of Relevant Constructs, Measures, and Links to Well-Being. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation.Google Scholar
Segel, H. B. 1998. Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Shay, J. 1995. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Shils, E. A. 1972. Minerva: The Past Decade and the Next. Minerva 10, 1: 1–9.Google Scholar
Sinclair, R. R. and Britt, T. W., eds. 2013. Building Psychological Resilience in Military Personnel. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.Google Scholar
Singer, P. W. 2008. How to Be all that You Can Be: A Look at the Pentagon's Five Step Plan for Making Iron Man Real. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 2 May.Google Scholar
Slotten, H. R., ed. 2014. War and Medicine. In Slotten, H. R., ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of American Science, Medicine, and Technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Spotts, F. 2004. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. New York: Overlook Press.Google Scholar
Stoller, P. 1997. Sensuous Scholarship (Contemporary Ethnography). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Sulzberger, M. B. 1962a. Progress and Prospects in Idiophylaxis (Built-In Individual Self-Protection of the Combat Soldier). Paper presented at the 1962 Army Science Conference, United States Army Military Academy, West Point, 20–22 June. Army Research Office, Office of the Chief of Research and Development, Headquarters. Washington, D.C: Department of the Army, MSS 86-4, carton 9.Google Scholar
Sulzberger, M. B. 1962b. Body Armor. Papers of Marion B. Sulzberger, M.D. Technical Director of Research, U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command. Office of the Surgeon General, Washington, D.C., MSS 86-4, carton 6.Google Scholar
Sulzberger Papers, University of California San Francisco Library, Special Collections MSS 86-4, cartons 6 and 9, 2014. At: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c89025p3/entire_text/.Google Scholar
Terry, J. 2017. Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First Century America. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
The Project for the New American Century. 2000. Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. Washington, D.C.: Project for the New American Century.Google Scholar
Theweleit, K. 1987 and 1989. Male Fantasies, Volumes 1 and 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Tracy, I. and Flower, R.. 2014. The Warrior in the Machine: Neuroscience Goes to War. Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 15 (Dec.): 825–34.Google Scholar
United States Department of the Army. 1998. Army Science and Technology Master Plan. Washington, D.C.Google Scholar
Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. 1962. Idiophylaxis: Biological Armor for the Soldier. Army Research and Development News Magazine (Sept.): 27.Google Scholar
Weinberg, A. M. 1996. Edward Shils and the ‘Governmentalisation’ of Science. Minerva 34: 39–43.Google Scholar
Weinberger, S. 2017. The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency that Changed the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Wool, Z. 2015. After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar