A Whole New Kind Of K Ration (US Army To Use Ketamine)

Why dont they just stick to amphetamines? Or invent a new, improved go pill?

Give a soldier enough meth, and he could drive a truck without legs or arms, just using his teeth and some tree branches and shit.
 
Because amphetamines can be very useful for short term bursts, but are generally not a good idea in real warfare, which usually tends to involve more long term operations. They are useful in small amounts to keep soldiers awake for long hours, of course, but if you give soldiers enough meth to blast through an enemy line, it'll do the job, but then the soldiers drop from exhaustion and can't hold their positions, which is actually even worse. War is a lot different than a movie where Rambo mows down enemies with his machine gun.

Now, for pilots, go/no-go pills make sense, you want these guys as alert and awake as possible on a moment's notice, to last for a few hours, after which they return to their airbase/carrier. Fuel and ammunition create enough of a limitation on the time spent in combat so as to make medication useful.
 
this is great news! the army will have a demand for ketamine, pharmecutical companies will manufacture it with revenue in mind, and as a result, a greater percentage of ketamine will trickle its way down to those of us who use it for other purposes :) .
 
Now, for pilots, go/no-go pills make sense, you want these guys as alert and awake as possible on a moment's notice, to last for a few hours, after which they return to their airbase/carrier. Fuel and ammunition create enough of a limitation on the time spent in combat so as to make medication useful.
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I'm not going to disagree with you except that it should be noted that the pilot who bombed the Canadians a year or two back, blamed his paranoia and fogged judgement on amphetamines. And there were about two or three cases of pilots going home and murdering their wives in fits of uncontrollable rage, also linked to amphetamines. What about that pilot who just a few weeks ago strafed a school inside the US on a training mission? Seems that they need strattera or something else like I don't know--more training?
 
well a big part of the problem is the people that are in the armed forces. Now don't get me wrong, because I support our troops... Probably more than you do. But the people that sign on are generally poor and uneducated, and downtrodden they have been made to feel bad from being poor, and drill instructors genuinely hate them a lot of the time... not to improve them, they just hate.

Such an environment breeds sociopaths.
 
The school strafing wasn't intentional. The school itself was so far out of range that the bullets literally landed on the roof, rather than penetrating it. The military is investigating whether the gun may have fired inadvertently as he made a turn.....as for the pilot who bombed the canadians, or any other friendly fire bombings, that usually tends to be more caused by difficulty making out targets at 10,000 feet or more. "Smart" bombs combined with a desire to limit casualties has resulted in pilots flying missions at higher altititude, making it more difficult to discriminate targets.

As for the pilots murdering their wives, I'd be more inclined to blame it on the same kind of shell-shock that affects soldiers who've been in combat. I take amphetamines for ADHD, but you don't see me killing people in fits of rage.
 
I really don't want to go looking for the stories but I remember hearing that these guys (the pilots and wife killers) were using amphetamine psychosis as a defense. I'm not sure but I don't believe that the wife killers were even in combat. True it is difficult to identify targets several thousand feet in the air but the guy thought that the Canadians were shooting at him and I don't think they were shooting at all. Maybe one of those moving shadows in the corner of his eye that heavy amphetamine users could identify with. I was just speculating about the new school incident, I didn't really know much about it besides reading a few stories about it when it first happened. Come to think of it all of my posts in this thread have been speculative. I'm going to keep my fingers off the keyboard until someone does the work and finds these stories.
 
I just joined the army and my official mos ( job) is 91-w healthcare specialist better know as a combat medic. Bottom line is if this turns out to be true i'll let you know.
 
anything to get an edge over the enemy.. Bush reminds me alot of hitler.. is that a bad thing?
 
Or more to the point, it's not a bad thing if you like being told what to think, what to say, and what to do. If you actually enjoy such subversive activities such as having original thoughts or expressing your opinion, you're fucked. :)

But just so everyone understands, while there may be some similarities between Bush and early 1930s Germany, Bush has done nothing remotely similar to any of Hitler's atrocities. So far, nobody has been gassed or thrown into ovens.
 
as for the pilot who bombed the canadians, or any other friendly fire bombings, that usually tends to be more caused by difficulty making out targets at 10,000 feet or more.

Tell that to the relatives of the poor bastards from the Coldstream Guards who had their APC ripped apart with 20mm cannonfire from an A-10 ground support aircraft in the 1st gulf war (two of them came from the same town in the N of England as me). The pilot blamed it on using halcyon (triazolam) as a sleeping tablet. That one incident accounted for a fair percentage of British fatalities in the first gulf war.

Getting back on topic, haven't the US military been using ketamine for emergency battlefield proceedures for quite a while now? I'm sure the US army used it for that purpose in Vietnam, and the British army used it in the Falklands; or do they mean the self injectable dose that soldiers carry until a medic can get to them?

Apparently during the Falklands, the army had a problem with people using the single self-administered dose (of morphine) in non-approved situations (like being hopelessly pinned in a firefight). Then again, if it was by anybody who survived HMS Sheffield or the Sir Galahad, who the fuck would blame them (a lot of the survivors of those two incidents alone have had to be treated for PTSD and a whole raft of other psychiatric diseases since)
 
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