Super soldier

A super soldier or supersoldier, is a concept soldier capable of operating beyond normal human abilities, usually through permanent artificial enhancements such as genetic modification or technological integration. The super soldier has been a common trope in science fiction and superhero fiction since the mid-20th century, but it's also used in contemporary discussion of future military human enhancement (often with dystopian connotations).

Weapons and other technologies have long been used to enhance the capabilities of soldiers. Sometimes this would include changes to the soldiers themselves, as in the case of war paint or coca leaves used by Inca warriors to stay alert. However, it was only in the American Revolutionary War that scientific modifications began in the form of vaccinations to enhance the immune system. The attempt to create soldiers with vastly superior abilities goes back at least to the 1920s when the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin sought to genetically engineer a pain-resistant human–ape hybrid that would be harder to kill.

In 1940, the first fictional super soldier appeared with the publication of the first Captain America comic. In the comics, a frail man named Steven Rogers joins the US Army during World War II and is given an experimental "super-soldier serum", turning him into Captain America.

Stimulants such as amphetamines have been widely used since at least WWII to enhance or maintain the performance of soldiers. Amphetamines are known to improve wakefulness, mood and concentration, but they come with negative side effects and have been blamed for the impaired judgement of two US Air Force pilots who bombed a Canadian unit in Afghanistan in 2002.

As detailed in the book The Men Who Stare at Goats and its accompanying documentary series, there was a movement within the US Army from at least the late 1970s to the early 1980s to harness untapped (chiefly psychic) human powers. Together with the exploitation of new technologies, the vision was a military of super soldiers called the First Earth Battalion. Officers within this movement believed some of them were capable of supernatural feats such as remote viewing or even stopping the heart of a goat by staring at it.

In recent years, a number of countries have expressed more ambitious intentions to develop enhanced soldiers, including the US, UK and France. As of 2011, the US Pentagon spent around $400 million per year researching soldier enhancements. A number of these countries have said they must explore the development of soldier enhancements in response to other militaries doing the same. In 2025, the US National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology claimed China is likely working on genetically engineered super soldiers.

The UK's Defence and Security Accelerator has offered funding for "Generation-After-Next (GAN) human augmentation" which may include "enhancing physical and/or psychological performance", for example by improving endurance or recovery using impalantable devices, synthetic biology, drugs, or wearable devices such as exoskeletons. As a concrete example of the latter, Sarcos Robotics, formerly part of Raytheon, has worked closely with the US military to develop full-body robotic exoskeletons like the Guardian XO, which allows one to lift 90 kg as if it were 4.5 kg.

In 2016, Japanese scientists identified a protein in tardigrades that helps them resist radiation and has the same effect on human cells. In 2023, the South China Morning Post claimed Chinese military scientists increased the radiation resistance of human embryonic stem cells by inserting a gene from tardigrades, and that the scientists said this "could lead to super-tough soldiers who could survive nuclear fallout."