"No Such Thing as a Night's Sleep": The Embattled Sleep of American Fighting Men from World War II to the Present

Sleeping soldiers: On sleep and war

“…Ensuring the vigilance and alertness of its troops has long been a crucial component of the USA’s military strategy. As historian Alan Derickson (2013: 2) documents, ‘U.S. military leaders and their civilian advisors have attacked drowsiness on the battlefield with an armamentarium comprised of punitive measures, administrative practices, chemical stimulants, and other sleep countermeasures.’ The US military wants its soldiers awake and cognizant for extended periods of time, independent of any diurnal schedule or circadian rhythms, always ready and able for protracted engagement.…”

“…. An adversary would need an approximately 40 percent increase in the troop level to compensate for this advantage’ (quoted in Derickson, 2013: 17). An axiomatic assumption, as the director of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office Michael Goldblatt noted in 2002, is that ‘soldiers having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limitations will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future’ (quoted in Malet, 2016: 65).…”

“…Interestingly, Hetherington referred to the photos as a kind of Trojan horse, namely, a way of portraying ‘masculinity when you should be taking pictures about war’ (see Haggart, 2011). The opposition he sets up between war and masculinity is actually collapsed in the photos, in part because of how he reimagines a certain interpretation of masculinity in war, namely, one that ‘elevates a wakeful self-denial as a component of masculine identity’ (Derickson, 2013: 3).…”