Ohio To Be Center of Military's Human-Performance Research

[OhioChick]

Source: AP

POSTED: 8:53 am EDT June 15, 2008

DAYTON, Ohio -- The largest construction project at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base since World War II - an undertaking that will make the base the military's dominant center for human-performance research - is about to begin.

A ceremonial groundbreaking is scheduled Monday for the 660,000-square-foot complex expected to be completed by 2011. Excavation will begin in earnest come August.

The complex will be home to military research on such things as how humans interact with aircraft, respond to warfighting conditions, handle the stream of data and stimuli in the cockpit and are affected by high altitudes and gravitational pull.

Among other things, the four-building complex will become home to the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, which will train flight surgeons for the Air Force and U.S. allies around the world. Other research will include protecting soldiers from chemical and biological threats.

Read more: http://www.newsnet5.com/news/16612109/detail.html

[balantz]

1. Sounds kinda scary

Wonder what else they'll be doing there?

[Ghost Dog]

2. Well, "protecting ... from chemical and biological threats"

would presumably involve employing, in order to test, such threats; and possibly therefore designing and manufacturing them.

And presumably plenty of 'psychological' stuff would be involved in this general area, not to mention the 'performance-enhancing' and all sorts of 'man-machine', 'human-artificial systems' interface stuff...

Some of my guesses.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. This kind of stuff actually works out well

When I was growing up in the 1960s, my Dad was involved in the Army's CBR (chemical-biological-radiological) training and testing program, and they did some extremely wild stuff. He would let me "read" some of the material he was working on when I was about five or six -- as a result, I could actually spell "hydrogen" in first grade and was later able to tell all my friends just how badly they would suffer before death if a hydrogen bomb hit the Naval Air base we all lived near. (I grew up in a Navy engineers' town.)

As a result of these kinds of programs, a number of the top brass developed some serious anti-war conscience, even some of the right wingers. He told me that they showed one General in the Joint Chiefs' staff a high-speed movie of a lamb "melting" during an H-bomb test, and the guy lost it. (I will forgo the details of the film as related by my father. And fortunately, most of the cameras designed for these gruesome tasks were destroyed in the blast.)

Movies of test animals' exposure to nerve agents were similarly moving.

My father had been well conditioned for the job. He had been a casualty control officer in Korea and matched body parts. I always wondered why he was simultaneously very patriotic and politically liberal, before I was old enough to realize that the "patriot=rightist" equation was propaganda I had absorbed.

One of my friends' fathers worked on a project to design super-heated nuclear aircraft forged from tungsten that would fly at hypersonic speeds over "personnel", for the combination sonic-boom, massive gamma-ray exposure, and incendiary effect. (The damned thing nearly made it to manufacture.) He required psychiatric treatment and then left the program, and related that he hadn't been the only one. He later became active in the Catholic peace movement.

I say, let the military hire a bunch of wonks to study how to end life and crush liberty -- and let them explain to their sons and daughters why they spent the evening locked in the bathroom of the master bedroom, drinking and weeping. The widespread reaction will inevitably be against using these methods.

Hell of a reflection for Father's Day, isn't it? But I'm proud that the Old Man toughed it out. It falls to our generation now.

--p!

[woodsprite]

6. Probably working on those 'robot' soldiers that the Pentagon wants. n/t

[Tutonic]

4. This sounds like the Island of Dr. Mouraeu

I pictured a big old bloated Marlon Brando surrounded by Pygmalion creatures. What in the name of science is the "human performance' research? I think somebody in D.C. has been reading one too many Hollywood scripts.

[daleo]

5. Churchill, talking of Hitler, but perhaps sensing the future in general

"the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."

[SquireJons]

7. The Devil's in the Details

As Strelnikov say's in Doctor Zhivago, "a knife accompanied by a fork and a spoon appears harmless."

Few would argue against flight surgeons or testing pilots for sensory overload and high altitude problems, but even fewer will question the association with biological warfare. In truth, the part that concerns me the most is the part about how soldiers "respond to warfighting conditions."

That is an incredibly cynical euphemism.

Back in the early days of WWII, the military commissioned a study to look at how American troops were performing. This study found that only 10% of the troops involved in combat were actually fighting. The other 90% were simply trying to stay alive. So the military embarked on a wide ranging program to bump that number up. The methods embraced included the use of drugs and brain washing to overcome a soldiers natural instinct for survival. In short, they were, and still are, trying to reprogram human beings.

This is the kind of work being done when they talk about soldiers responding to warfare conditions. And it bugs the shit out of me, even more than the idiots playing with cyanide.

[DebbieCDC]

8. Good line Squire

And how true. I had forgotten that quote.

[SquireJons]

10. Always nice to be appreciated

Thanks Debbie... would that CDC be the Center for Disease Control?

Good people.

[ohio2007]

9. "how humans interact with aircraft" ... wtf ?

As long as the pilots can "think american" I suppose no harm will come of it





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