Bombs Aimed to Keep Enemy Awake, Jittery : Morale: Ceaseless bombing aims to deprive the Iraq’s elite Republican Guard of sleep and will to fight

If you can’t kill them, you can keep them awake with bombs, hour after hour, night after night, making sleep deprivation a weapon. An Army may travel on its stomach, but it’s got to have its “Zs,” too.

Allied forces in the Persian Gulf War are showering the Republican Guard, Iraq’s best troops, with bombs almost continually, day and night. Officials said Wednesday the aim is not only to kill but to discomfort and demoralize. The loss of sleep is an important part of this.

“The attacks on the Republican Guard . . . are designed basically to lower his morale and to ensure that, when he eventually is forced out of his well dug-in positions . . . that he’s in the least possible condition, rather than the best, to take on the fight,” said British Group Capt. Niall Irving. “That’s what we’re doing by this continual bombardment.”

The purpose of the bombing, said Irving, is not just death for the Iraqi troops. Rather, it’s “like keeping them awake all night, night after night. . . . It’s morale. It’s keeping him awake.”

Although sleep deprivation is seldom noted in tales of wartime heroics, experts say it can be an important element in winning or losing.

“There is no doubt that it can be a very effective weapon, psychologically and physiologically, if you can pull it off,” said Dave Dinges, an expert on sleep deprivation at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital. “The hard part is pulling it off--really sleep depriving an opposing force.”

Dinges said that it is very difficult to determine just how well an enemy army can adapt to events, even to bombing. Many troops, he said, can “snack” on sleep--take small naps--and remain effective. But even for these “nap snackers,” the sleep debt eventually lowers the will and the ability to fight.

“Sleep is a fundamental drive, like eating and staying warm,” Dinges said. “It’s one of the basic needs. The more it is deprived and disrupted, the more demoralized your troops get.”

The decline in morale, Dinges said, is more intense “if the sleep loss is not of your own will. If you are forced to be awake, such as by bombardment, then over time you can get very demoralized.”

Loss of sleep erodes an army’s ability to fight in many ways. Troops begin to lose interest in the basics of soldiering. Having to watch a radar screen, stand guard duty or perform other activities that require a quiet alertness becomes “hellishly hard to do” for the sleep-deprived soldier, said Dinges.

“Studies have shown that soldiers can still shoot straight if they are really tired, but they stop cleaning their weapons,” he said. “They give up a lot of little stuff that seem inconsequential because they are tired. Then they become militarily ineffective, with a lot of weapons jams.”

Laverne Johnson, the retired chief scientist at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, said his studies show sleep deprivation severely reduces troops’ ability to understand and execute orders.

Johnson said troops may still be able to function at nearly full effectiveness at some jobs, such as shooting simple weapons, but that they will become exhausted more quickly and require rest more often. More complicated tasks, such as plotting map coordinates or radar fire control, “is when you get into trouble.”

“Sleep deprivation can reduce the effectiveness by 10% to 50%, depending on the function of the troops,” he said.

Both Johnson and Dinges said, however, that sleep deprivation alone should not be counted on to put the Republican Guard out of action.

“Sleep deprivation takes its toll, no doubt about it, but you would be amazed what a person can do when his life depends on it,” Johnson said.

Dinges said there have not been any large-scale studies about how troops can adapt to sleep loss in combat and recover some abilities through short naps. Some, he said, may learn to sleep through bombings and then be ready to fight.

But the experts do agree that sleep loss can, and has, turned the tide in many battles.

“Sleep loss has shown up as an operational problem in most of the modern wars,” Dinges said.