This article is so clueless, it reads like a humor piece.
about 40 percent of U.S. soldiers get fewer than five. And that’s when they’re stationed at home, sleeping their “normal” amount. It’s even more extreme when they’re in combat.
Instead of studying what drugs to take, why not ask the obvious question — why are so many soldiers getting so very little sleep even when they are at home?
Answer: the military forces them to do that. Yes, the US military deliberately deprives its soldiers of sleep throughout their careers, apparently believing that it “toughens them up”.
They could fix most of the problem in an instant — by treating their soldiers like human beings. This works for almost all the other armed forces in the developed world.
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Second question: why exactly are there so many American soldiers “in battle”, “on the battlefield”, “in combat” — when the US has never been successfully invaded, and hasn’t had even an attempted invasion in over 200 hundred years?
Answer: the United States persists in invading countries that never offered them any harm, committing genocide but not winning the war, and then being unable to withdraw from the country they trashed.
You are basically describing an endless series of war crimes, and yet it never even enters into your head to ask, “Why are we doing this to other people? Why are we doing this to ourselves?”
You could have had free healthcare. You could have sent all your kids to university for free. You could have fixed your decaying 70-year-old infrastructure and had clean water, bridges that didn’t collapse, even (jumping to the present) the fast internet that the telecoms were given hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to provide, and strangely, never did.
You could have had all these things, and more, and still had money lying around. Instead you have had seventy years of continuous warfare, you’ve spent over $20 trillion dollars in today’s money — that’s $20 million million dollars.
Why? Why are you doing this to yourselves?
None of these questions ever occur to you. You write about how to keep desperately sleep-deprived men and women awake, people who are fighting illegal, genocidal wars in countries that never offered the US any harm and you never think to ask any of the interesting questions at all.
You simply regurgitate press releases from the US military. That’s not journalism, that’s stenography.
Bill Murphy Jr., please try to develop a little integrity before the next article. Perhaps if American journalists stopped being the lickspittles for the military-industrial complex and started asking hard questions, America could reverse its ongoing and rather meteoric collapse.
