Kill-Proofing the Soldier: Environmental Threats, Anticipation, and U.S. Military Biomedical Armor Programs

• In Event: Vaccine Histories and their Politics of Anticipation

Abstract

While vigorously exploring new and improved external protection technologies, the U.S. military has long focused on ways to internally armor the soldier through biomedical interventions. The goal of these projects is to create a new kind of soldier with different expectations of performance, capabilities, and survivability. Much of the focus of U.S. military biomedical performance enhancement programs is on the impact of environmental threats and infectious disease, and how soldiers break down due to these stressors. Zeroing in on this trend, I examine two U.S. military biomedical “armor” projects intended to protect soldiers against the environment and disease. Employing a kind of anticipatory military biomedicine, both projects call for the embedding of “inbuilt” and “unseen” biomedical technologies and prophylaxes in the body of the soldier. As I discuss here, U.S. military biomedical research is intended to provide soldiers with protections to allow them to deploy in any condition or climate around the world, and protect them from any and all pathogens they might encounter on the battlefield. As the U.S. military increasingly sees the entire globe as a battlefield, it must anticipate, imagine, and design new ways to protect soldiers in order to make them deployable anywhere in the world.

Author

• Andrew Bickford, Georgetown University