For more than fifty years, the U.S. Defense Department has sponsored drug studies and brain research that aim to minimize soldiers’ all-too-human reticence to kill. The preemptive prescription of drugs intended to reduce soldiers’ self-doubts and anxieties may serve a strategic military purpose, but increasingly it comes at the expense of soldiers’ long-term well-being.

Laurie L. Calhoun is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Advisory Editor of Transition: An International Review.
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Other Independent Review articles by Laurie L. Calhoun
Summer 2023 Tyranny Reverse Engineered
Winter 2010/11 Political Philosophers on War: Arguments inside the “Just War” Box
Winter 2005/06 Michael Walzer on Just War Theory’s “Critical Edge”: More Like a Spoon Than a Knife
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