“The Component-Man is the One that Fails Most Often”: Idiophylaxis, Breakdown, and the Repair of the U.S. Soldier
Andrew Bickford
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
Georgetown University
Soldiers are fragile, and if there is one thing that the history of warfare shows us, it is that military commanders, planners, researchers – and soldiers themselves – know this. From a military planning and implementation standpoint, the stress point of all military operations is the soldiers themselves, who often break down during and after combat. The question is: can you repair them once they’ve broken down, or prevent them from breaking down and needing constant repair in the first place? My talk traces the development, rationale, and legacy of one such attempt to deal with breakdown, repair, and the “component man” in the military, a kind of military futurism devised at the peak of the Cold War: Dr. Marion Sulzberger’s vision of creating soldiers for the U.S. military who would have their own kind of special “biological armor” – what he termed Idiophylaxis. In 1962, Sulzberger presented a paper at the Army Science Conference at West Point titled Progress and Prospects in Idiophylaxis (Built-In Individual Self-Protection of the Combat Soldier). Sulzberger’s call was for a radical re-thinking of the combat soldier, and the ways in which soldiers were imagined, designed, and developed – all with the goal of internally and psychologically “armoring” the individual soldier through new forms of biomedicine and biotechnology. The ultimate goal of Idiophylaxis was to develop a soldier who would not break down on the battlefield, and who was capable of immediate self-repair.