and
I may get in trouble by saying this, but these statements frighten me. You are an extremely exceptional individual if these statements hold true for you; and you may be but this will absolutely not hold true for everybody else. It is not possible to condition to the body and brain to sleep deprivation. It is not possible to beat back the body's reaction to sleep deprivation no matter how fit you are. The only way to counteract the effects of lack of sleep is to sleep.
Performance after a period without sleep can be directly related to performance with a specific blood alcohol content, 24 hours without sleep and you will act as if you have a blood alcohol content of .10. You are drunk in all the states I know of. 72 hours without sleep and you are performing at about 20% of your normal capacity. You can breathe and maybe walk.
You must sleep. There is no way around it. I know the exigencies of combat dictate that sometimes you must go anyway and accept the consequences but it is vital that it be recognized that there will be consequences. They are absolutely unavoidable.
As I have pointed out before there is huge body of research and material available on this subject. Go to the websites of the National Transportation Safety Board, Flight Safety Foundation, Coast Guard, Airline Pilots Association etc and type in "fatigue". Dozens of extremely good, readable and concise references will come up. One of the classic fatigue accidents is the DC-8 a crew flew into the ground at Gitmo because they were just too tired to move the controls. This is a HUGE deal in the transportation business.
Here is a link to a PDF about the Sleep, Activity, Fatigue, and Task Effectiveness (tm) Model and Fatigue Avoidance Scheduling Tool (tm).
Link:http://faculty.nps.edu/nlmiller/Fati...hSAFTEFAST.pdf
It provides a nice overview of the problem. FAST (tm) is a computer program that provides a graphic depiction of sleep deprivation vs. performance and might be a useful tool, maybe good to use in a briefing.
You must sleep. You can't get around it.
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