Dumbing down the enemy

The U.S. Air Force has officially expressed its interest in finding a way to dumb down the opposition.

Issuing a $49 million call for research, the military is asking scientists to explore methods to “degrade enemy performance” by artificially overwhelming their “cognitive abilities.”

This isn’t the first time the military has targeted enemy minds.

Most infamously, the U.S. Army asked volunteers to use psychoactive drugs, such as marijuana, LSD and PCP, to study the disorienting effects of those substances.

That research resulted in the development of a hallucinogenic artillery round, which could leave subjects in a sleep-like state for days. It also led to the short-lived abundance of tie-dye shirts and black light posters in Army surplus stores across the country.

But that was then. This is now.

Harnessing the power of hallucinogenic drugs might have been cutting-edge stuff in the 1960s, but the counterculture has since exhausted all experimental options related to hallucinogenic substances.

With $49 million  up for grabs, we have to become creative. It’s time to explore ideas that might have previously seemed too sinister or too evil to be exercised by a moral republic.

It might be dark and difficult, but I’m willing to go there.

In the search for a new mind-altering weapon, the U.S. needn’t look farther than the hypnotizing locks of Justin Bieber, whose disorienting and destabilizing effects have been well documented.

Last November, Bieber incited a panicked frenzy at the Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island, N.Y., where more than 10,000 fans gathered in hopes of meeting the then 15-year-old megastar.

When it was announced that the singing, dancing sensation would have to cancel his appearance for security reasons, things got ugly.

The Bieber-induced riot that followed led to one arrest and about 9,999 broken hearts.

While the military generally frowns upon disorder, inciting hysterical panic in the enemy’s camp could be tactically desirable.

However, if we were ever to deploy the Bieber, we’d have to get around the tricky legal fact that he’s technically Canadian property.

Hopefully, our NATO ally to the north would be willing to make a deal.

But if Bieber ultimately proved inaccessible, we have other options. In fact, the most devastating mind-altering interface ever devised by man was crafted by American college students in Massachusetts. Enter Facebook.

Each day, the social networking juggernaut sucks a total of 8 billion minutes out of the lives of its 300 million users.

If we truly desire to invade and occupy enemy minds, leaving them shallow and useless, we’ve found the most effective means.

And the basic coding should be easy enough to steal. Mark Zuckerberg already did it once.

But wait. If we could harness and combine the destructive powers of Bieber and Facebook, condensing and focusing their devastating effects into a single, powerful weapon, would we really dumb our enemies down? Or simply make them more like us?


E-mail: tycherne@indiana.edu