Interesting. Sleep deprivation is common in oilfield jobs, 12 hour shifts (which can go over for some jobs), in a 24/7/365 industry. I have gone a week on eight hours of sleep. The effects were interesting, both on cognitive function and attitude. Two of the more notable were seeing things which were not there (shadowy movements in the edge of vision were most common) and hearing sounds which were not present. I can readily see how those could affect performance of soldiers in the field. Cognitive function suffers as well, with multiple verifications of data before it is trusted, slower processing, and potential for error increasing substantially. The ability to explain to others decreases as well as other communication efficiency, Finding ways to prevent these effects would be great, insofar as they are physiological.
I think, too, that our brains do a significant amount of problem solving while we sleep, and that that ability becomes impaired as well, at least in the sense that we can explain the solutions to others, even if we know what needs to be done. At some point, sleep will come, if only for a couple of seconds at a time, whether standing, sitting, or prone. I think these 'micronods' are a way of processing information that the brain would normally process in a full sleep state. In the days before full data transfer fro instruments to the data files, I recall numerous occasions where I was awakened by bumping my head on the instrument rack while standing there writing down data to feed into the database.
