Air Force to use neuroweapons to overwhelm enemy minds

Wired is reporting how last month the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 711th Human Performance Wing revamped a call for research proposals examining "Advances in Bioscience for Airmen Performance." It’s a six-year, $49 million effort to deploy extreme neuroscience and biotechnology in the service of warfare.

Among their suggestions is the use of "external stimulant technology to enable the airman to maintain focus on aerospace tasks and to receive and process greater amounts of operationally relevant information."

And in addition to this:

...perhaps the oddest, and most disturbing, of the program’s many suggested directions is the one that notes: “Conversely, the chemical pathway area could include methods to degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities.” That’s right: the Air Force wants a way to fry foes’ minds — or at least make ‘em a little dumber.

It’s the kind of official statement that’s seized on by anyone who is sure that the CIA planted a microchip in his head, or thinks that the Air Force is controlling minds with an antenna array in Alaska. The same could be said about the 711th’s call to “develo[p] technologies to anticipate, find, fix, track, identify, characterize human intent and physiological status anywhere and at anytime.”

The ideas may sound wild. They are wild. But the notions aren’t completely out of the military-industrial mainstream. For years, armed forces and intelligence community researchers have toyed with ways of manipulating minds. During the Cold War, the CIA and the military allegedly plied the unwitting with dozens of psychoactive drugs, in a series of zany (and sometimes dangerous) mind-control experiments. More recently, the Pentagon’s most revered scientific advisory board warned in 2008 that adversaries could develop enhancements to their “cognitive capabilities … and thus create a threat to national security.” The National Research Council and Defense Intelligence Agency followed suit, pushing for pharma-based tactics to weaken enemy forces. In recent months, the Pentagon has funded projects to optimize troop’s minds, prevent injuries, preemptively assess vulnerability to traumatic stress, and even conduct “remote control of brain activity using ultrasound.”

Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense [book]

Along the lines of my previous post on neurosecurity and information warfare, check out this book by Jonathan D. Moreno: Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense (2006). Synopsis:

Imagine a future conflict in which one side can scan from a distance the brains of soldiers on the other side and learn what they may be planning or whether they are confident or fearful. In a crisply written book, University of Virginia ethicist Moreno notes that military contractors have been researching this possibility, as well as the use of electrodes embedded in soldiers' and pilots' brains to enhance their fighting ability. Moreno (Is There an Ethicist in the House?) details the Pentagon's interest in such matters, including studies of paranormal phenomena like ESP, going back several decades. Readers learn that techniques like hypersonic sound and targeted energetic pulses to disable soldiers are close to being used in the field, and even have everyday applications that make "targeted advertising" an understatement. Despite the book's title, Moreno doesn't limit his discussion to brain-related research; he explains the military's investigation of how to enhance soldiers' endurance and reaction time in combat as well as various nonlethal disabling technologies. The ethical implications are addressed throughout the book, but the author leaves substantive discussion to his praiseworthy last chapter.

I really don't know what to make of these claims that the US military is delving into the paranormal. Almost sounds like deliberate disinformation. Or that the higher-ups can't distinguish between sound scientific principles and the work of quacks.

Neurosecurity: The mind has no firewall

Neurosecurity and the potential for so-called 'mind hacking' has interested me for quite some time now, so I was surprised to discover that this topic was covered back in 1997 by Timothy. L Thomas. Writing in Parameters, the US army war college journal, Thomas warned that the American military risked falling behind in the burgeoning field of information warfare.

His particular concern was that military systems operators could be exploited as 'open systems.' "We need to spend more time researching how to protect the humans in our data management structures," he writes, "Nothing in those structures can be sustained if our operators have been debilitated by potential adversaries or terrorists who--right now--may be designing the means to disrupt the human component of our carefully constructed notion of a system of systems."

Thomas continues,

This "systems" approach to the study of information warfare emphasizes the use of data, referred to as information, to penetrate an adversary's physical defenses that protect data (information) in order to obtain operational or strategic advantage. It has tended to ignore the role of the human body as an information- or data-processor in this quest for dominance except in those cases where an individual's logic or rational thought may be upset via disinformation or deception. As a consequence little attention is directed toward protecting the mind and body with a firewall as we have done with hardware systems. Nor have any techniques for doing so been prescribed. Yet the body is capable not only of being deceived, manipulated, or misinformed but also shut down or destroyed--just as any other data-processing system. The "data" the body receives from external sources--such as electromagnetic, vortex, or acoustic energy waves--or creates through its own electrical or chemical stimuli can be manipulated or changed just as the data (information) in any hardware system can be altered.

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Others, however, look beyond simple PSYOP ties to consider other aspects of the body's data-processing capability. One of the principal open source researchers on the relationship of information warfare to the body's data-processing capability is Russian Dr. Victor Solntsev of the Baumann Technical Institute in Moscow. Solntsev is a young, well-intentioned researcher striving to point out to the world the potential dangers of the computer operator interface. Supported by a network of institutes and academies, Solntsev has produced some interesting concepts. He insists that man must be viewed as an open system instead of simply as an organism or closed system. As an open system, man communicates with his environment through information flows and communications media. One's physical environment, whether through electromagnetic, gravitational, acoustic, or other effects, can cause a change in the psycho-physiological condition of an organism, in Solntsev's opinion. Change of this sort could directly affect the mental state and consciousness of a computer operator. This would not be electronic war or information warfare in the traditional sense, but rather in a nontraditional and non-US sense. It might encompass, for example, a computer modified to become a weapon by using its energy output to emit acoustics that debilitate the operator. It also might encompass, as indicated below, futuristic weapons aimed against man's "open system."

There's some great food for thought here, but as an important aside, it's worth noting that this article has a high bullshit to reality ratio. Overly enamored by the pseudoscientific areas of inquiry explored by his Russian colleagues, Thomas, quite bizarrely, placed as much credence on the development of viable alternative weapons (such as energy-based and psychotronic weapons) as he did on paranormal weapons. Consequently, the credibility of the entire article has to be thrown into question; I advise you to read this essay with a considerable grain of salt.

Link: "The Mind Has No Firewall"

H/T: JD