Daniel Naroditsky

12.06.18
History 103F
Professor Vardi

Erasing Imperfection: The Role of Performance-Enhancing Narcotics in Changing

the Nature of Modern Warfare

On 9 November 1939, Heinrich Boll, a young German soldier stationed in recently-

occupied Poland, wrote a letter to his family in Cologne. “Duty is strict,” Boll laments in the

hastily-scribbled missive, “and you must understand if in future I write only every 2-4 days.”

Toward the end, Boll confesses that “today I’m mostly writing to ask for Pervitin!” The final

word of his request, Pervitin, refers to a drug that had been made available to the public two

years earlier by Temmler Works, an offshoot of the German pharmaceutical conglomerate IG

Farben. As if to reinforce the urgency of his exhortation, Pervitin is written in giant letters,

underlined, preceded with a curlicue and accompanied with an exclamation mark. In the

months to follow, Boll would write countless other letters to his family, invariably

accompanying his perfunctory updates with a request — and sometimes a panicked demand —

for more Pervitin.

By June 1940, Boll could rest easy. In an operation headed by Dr. Otto Friedrich Ranke,

the Wehrmacht High Command armed soldiers on the front lines with tens of thousands of

pills. In turn, the soldiers put forth what an army medical inspector termed “extraordinary

marching achievements” (Ohler 115) churning out 60-80 kilometers per day across rugged and

unfriendly terrain. When news of the Maginot Line’s infiltration reached Hitler, he declared that

the dispatch must contain an error, for even the Fuhrer could not wrap his head around the

distance that the soldiers had covered. On 5 May 1941, six weeks before Germany launched its

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dastardly surprise invasion of the USSR, the Wehrmacht High Command, in association with

Temmler Works, issued a statement that declared Pervitin to be “crucial to the war (Ohler 117).

The miracle pill that enabled the heart of the Nazi war machine to put forth an inconceivable

performance cut out the need for sleep and sustenance. It helped German troops maintain

ironclad discipline during long journeys. It provided one division with the energy and motivation

to cover 240 kilometers in a single day. It prompted a French civilian to observe that the troops

“dash across the country like a whirlwind” (Ohler 118). Its principal ingredient was N-

methylamphetamine, more commonly known as methamphetamine.

The Germans were not unique in their reliance on performance-enhancing narcotics

during World War II. Great Britain supplied over 72 million amphetamine pills known as

Benzedrine to its troops, and “approximately the same quantity was supplied to the U.S. armed

forces.” According to Walter Reginald Bett, an eminent professor of medicine writing soon after

the conclusion of the war, “on many a dangerous mission Benzedrine helped tired men to win

the battle against sleep, when they could not be replaced by rested reserves” (Bett 215). Japan,

the country in which methamphetamine was first synthesized in 1888, fed its troops mass

quantities of Hiropon, a drug virtually identical in chemical makeup to Pervitin (Bett 216).

Performance-enhancing drugs may not have defined the arc of the Second World War in and of

themselves, but they almost occupied a central position in the constellation of factors that led

to Germany’s furious rise and its crushing defeat.

World War II inaugurated an era of widespread drug use among militaries that has only

intensified with the passage of time. At the heart of the Vietnam War, dubbed “the first

pharmacological war” by Lukasz Kamienski, more than 70% of American soldiers took drugs of

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some form. Even more shockingly, American troops consumed 225 million tablets of Dexedrine,

(“an amphetamine derivative that is nearly twice as strong as the Benzedrine used in the

Second World War”) from 1966 to 1969. According to Kamienski, this amounts to “thirty or

forty five-milligram Dexedrine tablets per fighting man per year” (Kamienski 189). As recently as

last year, media outlets reported that members of the terrorist group ISIS were using an

amphetamine-based drug known as Captagon, which “keeps users awake for long periods of

time, dulls pain, and creates a sense of Euphoria” (Kamienski 262). Almost every major conflict

since World War II has seen drug use occur in unthinkably large quantities.

In this paper, I argue that the use of performance-enhancing drugs in warfare

constitutes a revolution in military affairs (RMA). More specifically, I argue that drugs have

altered the nature of war in two distinct ways. On a practical level, drugs have armed the

human combatant with the capacity to transcend his own limitations, to inure himself against

the physical, psychological, and physiological effects that are inextricably woven into the fabric

of modern warfare. Consequently, combatants have taken on an increasingly robotic profile,

taking considerations that involve human error out of the equation. Relatedly, I advance that

the drug epidemic is part of a larger trend in which war has been offloaded from combatants to

commanders, from generals to guns. Put another way, the universal reduction of human

fallibility means that modern wars are far more likely to be decided by a numerical or

technological advantage than by a brilliant strategy or battlefield courage.

To properly contextualize the effects of drug use on warfare, it is important to begin by

considering the ways in which the perception of human combatants and their role on the

battlefield have shifted across time. To this end, it is worth starting with the Greeks, which

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Victor Davis Hansen famously referred to as the originators of the Western Way of War. Two

properties of Greek armies are germane to the present study. In the first place, Hoplites were

citizen-soldiers, which meant that they were ordinary men with a career to advance and (in

many cases) a family to raise. Military service was undertaken for the sake of attaining honor

and prestige, rather than out of financial or legal necessity. As Hanson clarifies, “the Greek

battlefield was the scene of abject terror and utter carnage, but it was a brief nightmare that

the hoplite might face only once a summer” (Hanson 25). Hoplites were expected to put forth

unbridled courage, but they were certainly not expected to be perfect. After all, the most basic

unit of military prowess — training — was absent.

The second relevant property of Greek armies was that they moved in a phalanx.

Hanson points out that the phalanx inherently “encouraged ties of camaraderie, if not

revolutionary fervor” (Hanson 29). The phalanx travels as one unit; any dissent or loss of

discipline among the ranks entails catastrophic ramifications. Furthermore, each member of the

phalanx carried a burdensome hoplon that offered protection to the man on his right. It comes

as no surprise, then, that close friendship and even sexual relations between hoplites was the

norm rather than the exception. The phalanx drew its potency from its inherent humanness,

from the fact that the fearsome whole was composed of readily-identifiable and clearly-

individuated parts.

A similar sense of individuation inheres in the Battle of Cannae, when the vastly-

outnumbered Carthaginian troops under the command of Hannibal dealt a stunning defeat to

the Romans. One invariably associates Cannae with Hannibal, who devised a stunning

outflanking maneuver that erased the Romans’ numerical advantage. The very fact that one can

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synecdochally associate a battle with a person suggests that war is an inherently human

endeavor. Its arc and outcome, much like that of a chess game, is ultimately decided not by

mathematical laws or statistical properties but by the human mind.

By turning combatants into machines, incapable of feeling emotion or committing errors

on the basis of fatigue, drugs have blasted flat the landscape of human imperfection and

strategic genius that once stood at the heart of war. In the case of Vietnam, drugs became the

vehicle through which American soldiers inoculated themselves from their own humanness. In

one recollection, a veteran told the story of a Long-range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP) member

who “took his pills by the fistful, downs from the left pocket of his tiger suit and ups from the

right”, a cocktail that made him “one of our best killers” (Kamienski 191). Marijuana, which was

cheaply available and widely used, played a similar role. To combat the trauma and utterly

wasting physical effects of the war, soldiers smoked joint after joint and follow up with a hit of

heroin, to which 10-15% of troops were addicted by the end of the war. The experience of war

had been turned on its head: battle was no longer defined and circumscribed by human

imperfection. Rather, soldiers molded themselves to accommodate the demands that the

battle placed on them, even if meeting these demands entailed the total erasure of their

human qualities.

Drugs are not the only means through which this erasure has been effected. The rapid

growth of technology, starting from the development and deployment of the Atomic Bomb, has

rendered human skill and tactical genius somewhat irrelevant. Put another way, war has

become so tightly interwoven with political considerations and so heavily defined by

technological and numerical considerations that one can hardly classify modern military combat

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as a confrontation between human beings. As a case in point, one can consider Mary Kaldor’s

astute interpretation of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which lasted from 6 April 1992 to 12

October 1995. As Kaldor notes, “at the outset of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, there was a

bewildering array of military and paramilitary forces. In theory, there were three parties to the

conflict — the Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. In practice, different forces cooperated with each

other in differing combinations throughout the war” (Kaldor 45). Due to this intrinsic

complexity, the war can hardly be thought of in terms of battles or generals; shifting

allegiances, coupled with the use of cutting-edge technology, meant that the war played out

among tanks and guns rather than human beings. The strategy practiced by Bosnian Serbs and

Croats — “territorial gain through political control rather than military offence” — meant that

even Clausewitz’s legendary definition of war as “the continuation of politics by other means”

failed to encapsulate the nature of the conflict.

A reasonable objection to the analysis produced thus far may point to the fact that a

temporal gulf of several millennia stands between the Greeks and the present day. Perhaps,

one might argue, the dehumanization and de-individuation of warfare was a gradual process

rather than a sudden revolution brought on by drugs and inconceivably powerful technology.

To combat this line of thinking, it is worth examining the First World War, the final major

conflict to take place before the presently-discussed Revolution in Military Affairs took hold. At

first blush, World War I appears to fall into the same mold as the Bosnian War: between the

inscrutable web of alliances and betrayals that played out during the course of the war and the

endless period of trench warfare, one can seemingly identify the very same trend of

dehumanization that dominated later conflicts. If that is indeed the case, then drugs cannot be

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said to have made a significant contribution to this trend, let alone ushered in a Revolution in

Military Affairs.

Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the First World War was very

much decided by the frailties and genius attendant to the human condition. To this end, the

Schlieffen Plan failed largely because German troops were exhausted after trekking hundreds of

miles through Belgium and France. In addition, General Alexander von Kluck committed a now-

legendary error by redirecting the First Army to the southeast, without consulting his superiors.

The exhausted troops met with unexpected French and British resistance and were dealt a

crushing blow at the Battle of the Marne.

In analyzing the arc of the First World War, two considerations come to mind. In the first

place, it is perhaps not a big stretch to surmise that German forces would have had a fighting

chance to meet Schlieffen’s expectations had they been armed with Pervitin. Indeed, soldiers

frequently turned to alcohol to combat their exhaustion, a choice that ultimately compounded

their problems. The second consideration, more qualitative and perhaps less banal in nature, is

that the war was very much defined by concrete strategy. Had Helmuth von Moltke succeeded

in carrying out his predecessor’s daring plan, there was no numerical or technological equalizer

to ensure that the war would have essentially followed the same path. The war was

fundamentally human in the sense that it is possible to trace its arc through the lens of

decisions made by generals and feelings felt by troops.

Modern conflicts do not subject themselves to an analysis of this nature. Even a conflict

between two well-defined entities, such as the United States’ war against the Islamic State of

Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), cannot be considered in the same category as World War I.

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Predictably, this is in due in part to widespread drug use between both combatants. ISIS

operatives have sworn by an amphetamine-based drug known as Captagon, which has

circulated in the Middle East for decades. In July 2018, a Syrian militant group allied with the

U.S. unearthed a massive repository of Captagon pills worth approximately $1.4 million. More

notably, a post-mortem analysis revealed that the perpetrator of the 2015 Sousse attacks, a

radicalized student, had ingested a copious amount of a stimulant believed to be either

Captagon or Cocaine. For its part, the United States army has hardly lessened its dependence

on drugs. Since the early 2000’s, air force personnel and troops on long overseas missions have

been armed with Modafinil, a powerful stimulant that promotes wakefulness and alertness. On

a related note, modern armies’ increasing reliance on drones and other unmanned

technologies have continued the war against human imperfection.

To be sure, it is unreasonable to claim that modern war has deindividuated the

combatants to such a degree that strategy and battlefield tactics are no longer germane. To this

end, it is worth returning to the German Army’s Pervitin usage during World War II. Despite the

massive surface benefits that the drug accorded, its over the course of several years led to

punishing physical and mental side effects. As Nicholas Rasmussen points out, by 1941 Pervitin

“began to raise doubts in high circles…Military medical authorities worried that too much extra

time was needed for troops to recuperate after taking methamphetamine” (Rasmussen 54).

The concern was exacerbated by multiple cases of soldiers exhibiting psychotic behavior or

dying of heart attacks after weeks or months of heavy Pervitin usage. Hence, the drug did not

ultimately change the fact that Germany committed several fatal strategic errors. In fact, Adolf

Hitler himself spent the entire war on a cocktail of drugs administered to him by his personal

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physician, Dr. Theo Morell. This cocktail, which included Pervitin and Cocaine, took an

immeasurable toll on Hitler’s health and decision-making ability.

In the same vein, it would be fallacious to claim that wars contested in the past few

decades have been decided entirely by complex constellations of geopolitical and technological

factors. However, due to the rising prevalence of asymmetric war, conflicts can no longer be

thought of merely as a prolonged confrontation between two entities. To see this, one can turn

to the Algerian War of Independence, in which the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN)

sought to wrest Alegria from its place as France’s most prized colony. From a purely numerical

standpoint, the conflict was decided from the beginning: France possessed the ability to

provide unlimited reinforcements, and “the French government assiduously refused to

recognize operations in Algeria as anything more than the ‘maintenance of order’” (Horne 170).

Nonetheless, as a consequence of the utter brutality that suffused the war, France’s victory was

a pyrrhic one. Both French civilians and French troops no longer found it appealing to inflict

such violence in order to maintain a colony that clearly wanted nothing to do with it. In a sense,

the FLN’s fearless thirst for battle and violence constituted a brilliant strategy that enabled

them to transcend their disadvantages.

Hence, performance enhancement spawned an RMA not because drugs and technology

obviated the need for brilliant generals and state-of-the-art military tactics. Rather, they

engendered a kind of deus ex machina effect wherein the qualities that once defined a

fearsome army no longer guaranteed victory in a military confrontation. A phenomenal strategy

could still impact the course of a war, but with the maximization of human performance came a

flattening of the military landscape. To this end, one can consider the case of American jet

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pilots during the Gulf War, over 60% of whom relied on amphetamine pills. Of those who did,

61% “found that ‘go pills’ played a crucial role in completing their tasks” (269). By enabling a

human combatant to operate at full capacity for inconceivable periods of time, drugs heavily

diluted the effects of courage and master planning.

Ultimately, the advent of performance-enhancing drugs in warfare is merely a

microcosm of several more general trends that have defined modern warfare. One of them —

the fact that most modern wars are either too asymmetric or too geopolitically complex to be

characterized as a violent confrontation between two entities — has already been touched

upon. Perhaps an even more pertinent trend is captured by Azar Gat in a recent paper entitled

Is War Declining — and Why?. In broad strokes, Gat argues that the decline of war in the past

two centuries has largely stemmed from “the advent of the industrial-commercial revolution

after 1815” (Gat 153). Economic and military cooperation, Gat avers, has become more

profitable and more prudent than warfare. I argue that part of the backbone that spurred on

this realization consists in the (rather successful) drive toward human perfection. Partly

because of the effectiveness of performance-enhancing drugs, societies across the world have

perhaps realized that war is no longer an art, but a costly investment that seeks to essentially

dislodge an immoveable object. It is neither possible nor prudent to attempt to predict the role

that military combat will play in making the global order, but perhaps it is not too much of a

stretch to state that any conflict on the magnitude of the Second World War will involve

copious use of narcotics, as each side attempts to take human imperfection out of the

equation.

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 Works Cited

Bett, W.R. “Benzedrine Sulphate in Clinical Medicine: A Survey of the Literature.” Postgrad

Medical Journal, no. 22, 205-218.

Davis Hanson, Victor. The Western Way of War. University of California Press, 2nd edition, 2009.

Gat, Azar. War in Human Civilization, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Kamienski, Lukasz. Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War. Oxford University Press,

2016.

Ohler, Norman. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Translated by Shaun Whiteside, Houghton

Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

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