Super soldier

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 the 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 first Urban Legend 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 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. Together with the exploitation of new technologies, the vision was a military unit 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. ==Current military efforts==

In recent years, a number of countries have expressed more ambitious intentions to develop enhanced soldiers, including the US, UK and France. In 2025, the US National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology claimed China is likely working on genetically engineered super soldiers. Physical enhancement 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. 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." Cognitive enhancement US military research has considered several methods of cognitive enhancement, such as various types of transcranial stimulation and augmented reality. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has proved to significantly improve target detection in air traffic control simulations and performance in flight simulations. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) can also boost performance in short-term memory tasks. In 2018, the US Department of Defense offered funding for vision enhancement research that could enable faster target detection. ==Future projections==

In 2019, the US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Chemical Biological Center (DEVCOM CBC) released a report entitled Cyborg Soldier 2050: Human/Machine Fusion and the Implications for the Future of the DOD. The report explores visual, muscular, auditory and neural enhancements it views as "technically feasible by 2050 or earlier." In 2018, neuroscientist E. Paul Zehr published Chasing Captain America: How Advances in Science, Engineering and Biotechnology will produce a Superhuman for a lay audience. Zehr suggests some super soldier capabilities may only be a few years or decades away, but thinks giving many of them to a single person could have significant negative effects. ==Fiction==

Since Captain America's debut as the first fictional super soldier in 1940, super soldiers have become common in military science fiction and superhero fiction. Other well known examples of super soldiers are the X-Men, Iron Man, Master Chief, Captain Nazi, Luc Deveraux of the Universal Soldier film series and Soldier Boy from The Boys. ==See also==