We often see stories of invincible warriors
with superhuman abilities combating monstrous threats, but are the days of supersoldiers
nearly upon us, and could they be the biggest threat of all? Welcome back to Science and Futurism with
Isaac Arthur for another Scifi Sunday here on SFIA, where we look at common concepts
in science fiction and ask how scientifically realistic they are, or how they might arrive
in the real world. Today our topic will be Super Soldiers, and
like a lot of examples in scifi, this is also one common both in history and mythology. Our civilizations have risen and fallen on
the shields of our soldiers, or sometimes under their boots, and whoever had the best
tended to win. The reality is that numbers are rarely very
decisive, more troops is better than fewer troops, all things being equal, but all things
are never equal. A handful of well-trained and well-equipped
veterans is worth ten times their number of newly trained troops, and not because they
could each beat 10 at once, but rather because over the course of a dozen successive engagements
of more even size, they will have undoubtedly decisively won each of those and as a result,
eroded those larger numbers down. This gives us the first rule of warfare that
every strategist needs to know, “It is Quality Rather Than Quantity That Matters”. There are some exceptions where equipment
or doctrine is just so superior that a single warrior might face down several opponents
simultaneously – and that’s a lot of what people contemplate in the notion of a super
soldier – such as knights in full plate armor against poorly armed conscript foot
troops or some mythic warrior like Achilles or Hercules. You can also get impressive groups of troops
like the Greek Hoplites and the Phalanx formations that would prove so effective in the Classic
Era or the high mobility tactics and rapid communication frequently aiding light cavalry
as skirmishers, or the Mongols for instance. But outside of the awesome and envy-worthy
abs on the cast of the movie 300, elite troops of the past and present generally benefited
only from superior training and equipment. A medieval knight generally ate well and might
be bigger and brawnier than many a commoner, but this difference really varied from place
to place and time to time on whether it would be a minimal or moderate advantage in strength
or toughness. We certainly will contemplate the pathways
of super-training and superior equipment, all the way up to Matrix-style kung fu brain
downloads and anime-style Giant Robots or Mecha that people pilot, but our principal
discussion today is more on that direct enhancement of the soldier in question. And we need to begin that with a caveat, because
while having vastly greater strength, physical endurance and reach would have been utterly
devastating in a lower-tech era, where some 7 foot tall muscle-bound titan could just
smash people with blows they couldn’t block before they could reach him, that’s not
as important anymore. Muscle and endurance does still help but the
major reason modern militaries incorporate a lot of exercise is that being in good shape
does wonders for people’s mental endurance too, everything from handling stress to confidence. It certainly helps to have muscle still, especially
in some jobs, I remember having to move around for hours at a time in heavy body armor for
months in a row during field exercises and warzone deployments when I was in the Army,
and you get some very nice shoulder muscles that way, but they would hardly be a decisive
advantage to a jet fighter pilot or a missile technician. And a bomber pilot might achieve vastly more
significant results in battle than someone bulked out like Captain America and fighting
hand to hand, and both might be deployed to disproportionate effect by being unleashed
in a bunker-buster capacity on the enemy command and control fortress. But people piloting bombers or battle mechs
isn’t really what we mean by super-soldier. And of course, discussing Captain America
always raises the point of why soldiers like him aren’t being mass-produced. We know why for classic Steve Rogers, it defeats
the point of an awesome comic book hero if everybody gets the super soldier serum that
makes him so tough. But that’s plot contrivance for a story,
the serum’s formula gets lost and somehow can’t be replicated, not something that
makes sense in a modern context of huge research projects and data backups, or simply having
someone motivated see the end result and seeking to replicate the work from scratch, likely
with far more clues to go from than the original researchers had. This makes a bit more sense in cases like
Captain America’s regular avenging teammates, Thor, the Hulk, and Iron Man, as one is invested
with a specific and unique cosmic power, another is the accidental byproduct of nuclear bomb
blast and is very unreliable for missions, and the other is in an insanely expensive
battlesuit that’s arguably an inefficient use of money but much like with Batman, Tony
Stark and Bruce Wayne are both spending their own cash. So it might be more like a yacht than a cargo
container ship that has accountants examining its budget. The reason that Steve Austin, the six-million
dollar man is singular is, six million dollars was a lot of money when the show first aired
in 1973, about 42 million dollars in modern cash, lots of inflation since then, and nearly
a thousand times the GDP per capita of the US at the time, so as prototypes go, you’re
not really anxious to mass produce those when you could buy a squadron of new tanks for
less than that, or employ a thousand police officers or soldiers in his place. This also raises the point that any given
super-weapon or super-soldier is super at something specific and it rarely pays to over-specialize
your entire military. Even if a tank or bionic man was giving you
better results per dollar – however one chooses to measure those results in a military
context – you still want a mix of units. It’s not a question of whether the soldier
with super-reflexes, super-intelligence, super-strength, super-senses, or super-durability is best,
it’s that one of each is nice and in most contexts, if someone could have a score of
1-10 in such traits, it’s better to have 5 soldiers each with a 10 in one of those
rather than one soldier with, say, an 8 in each. Gamer sorts often know such a character as
“Captain Average”, even though they’re well above average in everything, they always
have a teammate who's better than them at everything, in a modest size-team. Though the flip-side of over-specialization,
someone who is amazingly good at something but ultra-fragile or weak in every other regard,
sometimes is called the Glass Cannon, and is often not terribly useful either, especially
in the real world where your opponent isn’t the video game computer and will start by
taking that glass cannon out. The right tool for the right job is best,
but since you often don’t know what the job is going to be, and in a military context
you might be facing intelligent opposition, some general all-around toughness and ability
is good too. And unless your super-soldiering method is
dirt cheap, whether we’re talking money or some fixed number of slots that might be
filled or augmented on someone, you probably have a constraint in how much of any given
thing you can add to a person or that you can distribute among everyone. And improvements, such as training, can cost
your troops both in time, cost to support them, and training injuries and deaths. So in reality it isn’t quality vs quantity,
but rather balancing them to achieve excellence, since you likely have a number of different
qualities you want to have rather than just one. The counter to that though is that a civilization
in which everyone is a super-soldier, while boring for story-telling, is also probably
a hyper-productive one. This is our normal context for discussing
Transhumanism, a future in which a large percentage of humans have been genetically or cybernetically
augmented, and in our various episodes on Transhumanism and Cyborgs and Superpowers
we have laid out a lot of those individual augmentations people might be able to get
down the road and the problems some others have. Those are potentially very real and stunning
options too, and the source of a point we often make when discussing alien civilizations. That, if their ambassador shows up, we want
to treat them nice, not just because they might have endless armadas produced by an
empire of a million worlds to come and object to any mistreatment, but because that ambassador
themselves might be quite capable of trashing your entire military single-handedly, and
be but a normal specimen of an empire of untold quintillions of titans, even if they’re
all little green men in stature. We can imagine almost any given ability eventually
being available to humans of course but let’s consider what’s on the radar for us in the
next century and what we often see in scifi too. One obvious path is genetic engineering, but
in the short term this has the problem of needing to be done at the embryo stage. Future technologies might allow us to completely
alter the DNA of every single cell in an adult human, several trillion in number, but at
the moment we’re more limited, and those adult alternatives are further off. Whether as a product of engineering or selective
breeding, this path has the obvious moral conundrum of basically going into a caste
approach to children and limiting free will options. If you have some traits you want in your military
but not in your common populace, then you don’t want them crossbreeding much. Though, if you’re essentially a ruthless
autocrat looking for ideal citizens to govern, there’s not many traits the stereotypical
ideal soldier has that you wouldn’t want those citizens to have too, like endurance
and a tendency to obedience. I’m not really sure why you would particularly
want soldiers who were vastly more obedient than modern ones anyway, a cheerful willingness
to obey any order without hesitation is not really all that beneficial compared to your
typical professional soldier’s normal discipline, and armies don’t generally rebel either,
their commanders do, so it is typically your generals and higher-ranking officers you need
to work to keep obedient. Taking all that into account, it’s not a
bad path, if you want very elite troops starting a specialized training at birth from a genetically
tailored group, that is likely to yield you some very impressive forces when all is said
and done. However, realistically I doubt it would be
that much better than simply beginning at a young age from a wider pool of the general
population sifted for suitable candidates or even at an older age and just introducing
a lot of the preferred traits, genetic or personality-wise, into the general population. This also circumvents a lot of the friction
that might arise between your warrior caste and the rest of your population, as well as
providing diversity of background. Diversity as a problem-solving trait is very
important strategically because if all your troops are borderline clones – or literally
are clones – they can be a lot more predictable and maybe more to the point, you’re losing
a lot of innovation options. As an example, if none of your soldiers are
scientists or engineers, you probably aren’t likely to see much innovation in weapons and
gear. And vice-versa - If your scientists and engineers
have no experience on the battlefield they could focus on inventing and optimizing things
that don’t really matter. They just don’t have the relevant background
to be daydreaming up good improvements. People can get in quite a rut without new
perspectives being added, and just saying that’s how stuff has always been done. In that case, no soldier stops to think about
adding rubber soles to boots because all they know is that any decent soldier knows how
to take care of his old leather-soled boots and so theirs stay in good shape or they never
think to add ibuprofen to kit because they think soldiers aren’t so weak they need
a pain killer. Meanwhile, the engineers are over-engineering
rubber tires, and since they’ve never marched a day in their life, they might never think
to make that addition to footwear. That hardly means standardization doesn’t
have value, or that raising your troops from a young age in isolation doesn’t either,
particularly if you’re using them for rebellion suppression a lot. Though the flip side of troops raised in isolation
away from the civilian population is that while they may have no empathy for the locals,
the locals don’t have empathy for them either, and so your rebel elements aren’t likely
to have any reason to hesitate in killing or torturing your troops if they get the chance,
whereas even a fareless ruthless rebel faction at least has to worry about the main populace
turning against them for what they did to someone’s son or daughter, whose only crimes
were duty and loyalty. What’s more, your super-troops bred for
war and kept in an isolated camp their whole life might be easily fascinated by the outside
world and incredibly gullible too, especially if you’re aiming for the cliché mindless
grunt. And that’s another aspect of ‘super’
to be considering, because while raw IQ is handy, and ‘street smarts’ is a bit of
a nebulous concept, you don’t want to be overlooking that or wisdom, experience, creativity,
and so on, because your enemy won’t. Your enemy is not going to try to find a way
to beat you at your own game, if you’ve got the finest heavy cavalry who ever charged
across the battlefield then they’re going to run away into a dense forest full of ditches,
spikes, and deep mud. Though at the same time, the notion that you
can’t use the same trick twice is exaggerated. If it’s a good trick you can use it over
and over, and even turn it into standard doctrine. A newly innovated super-heavy tank for instance
is not something you can’t use in the very next battle for fear the enemy has your number,
but you do need to be mindful that they’re picking it apart trying to find counters and
that calculus applies to your super-soldiers as well. That includes never forgetting the goal is
not simply ‘to kill or capture the enemy troops’, it is ‘to achieve the desired
effect’, whatever that is. It might be making the enemy troops turn on
their commanders instead, or just desert to take up their true love of making sand castles,
or not being stabbed and bleeding to death in some filthy trench. If you’re spending all your time trying
to figure out how to poke holes in your enemy’s super-armor or keep yours from being punctured,
you’re going to be surprised to find out the enemy’s weak and ineffective bullets
that merely damaged your armor, contained tracking chips so they could locate and bomb
your repair facility. And while innovation, unpredictability, and
adaptability are awesome traits, it will usually lose horribly to someone who has memorized
a big long playbook of good tactics. Again doctrine and training are awesome, so
is institutional knowledge, you just don’t want to let yourself get strangled by them,
and it would seem like the tendency to warrior caste setups tilts in that direction. The alternative though, of introducing genetic
enhancements to the general population instead, is even more likely to have unexpected side
effects. Every child is now 5% more aggressive, or
5% more obedient, or whatever, and that has to be considered as part of the wider ecosystem
of that civilization. More aggression and maybe your crime rate
spikes to dystopian high-levels, and the civilization just won’t stay together, more obedient
and you just have a society where everyone is very agreeable and your losing every war
at the bargaining table because you’re just not very good diplomats and negotiators anymore,
even if you’ve got an amazing military. I could imagine some gray areas, like you
have cities you recruit from that you intentionally breed for aggression and where gangs run rampant
and you recruit from them. If memory serves, that’s how some space
marine chapters in Warhammer 40k recruit, and many others from horrible death worlds,
much like we see discussed in Frank Herbert’s Dune, where the Imperial Shock Troops, the
Sardaukar, are all raised and recruited on some desolate and harsh prison planet, Salusa
Secondus, then given elite training and gear forthe survivors, and spoilers of course but
the Fremen of Dune turn out to be even better as they come from an even harsher planet and
eventually end up getting even better training. In that series we also have an extensive breeding
project to make superhumans that went on for 90 generations – which is nearly as long
as we have meaningfully recorded human history. Shorter would be nice and we see something
like that with the Clans from the Battletech and Mechwarrior Franchise, who are mix of
genetic engineering and selective breeding and raised from birth to serve in various
caste systems, and their warriors are huge Elementals who tower over everyone and have
awesome body armor or pilots who run the giant battlemechs the setting is best known for. Starting up camps to raise infant soldiers
from genetically engineered embryos is definitely a long prep time, and you really have no way
of knowing what traits or training you need to focus on that far out beyond generalities
or how many troops you need. An empire can topple itself pretty quickly
by having too few troops, but just as easily by having too many to support, so 20-30 year
prep time for your classes to graduate isn’t too optimal, nor is 90 generations of selective
breeding. Even the child soldier slaves, the Unsullied,
we see in George R.R. Martin’s A song of Ice and Fire, are problematic
for requiring many years of training, compared to rapid conscripting and boot camp. And a high-tech society might be able to virtually
train people very quickly or even upload skills directly to people’s brains like in the
Matrix. I mentioned Warhammer 40k a moment ago, and
in that setting we see the Astartes, the Space Marines, who are created by having 19 engineered
organs implanted into them when they’re adolescents or young men, over the course
of several years which also includes lots of training and conditioning and even brainwashing. They get a range of abilities, from being
about half again as tall as the typical human and stronger than an Olympic bodybuilder,
to some weirder ones like being able to spit acid, though with the secondary benefit of
being able to digest just about anything for food. And while they have definitely had a power
creep over 4 decades of the game and stories, the original notion wasn’t that they were
the toughest thing out there, but rather a very tough thing that could be mass-produced
cheaper, faster and more reliably than some of the other methods. It’s still very expensive to make and equip
them, so they tend to use recruitment, weeding out standards that are very extreme, often
stupidly so depending on the writer, but in the case where they’re recruiting from gang
members or prisoners that they’re planning to also brainwash so they can’t remember
their past, having 99% of ‘applicants’ die during the trials to join isn’t really
a big deal to them, as they only want the absolute best to fill a number of slots that’s
less than a billionth of their empire’s total population but the deadliest spear tip
of its vastly larger military. That setting is always an impressive mix of
the utterly fantastic and ridiculous with occasional bits of surprising realism, so
I don’t want spend much time on its specifics, but the notion of specialized and implantable
organs does make a lot of sense, and if you’re super-sizing an adolescent in their growth
phase to be huge, then maybe you’ve got more room for extra bits like a second heart,
or to cover their bones in adamantium or lace them with graphene or whichever. The second heart definitely does make sense,
that’s definitely a vulnerability and not just in the obvious way. As I mentioned earlier, the biggest reason
besides tradition that militaries still focus a lot on physical exercise is that all that
improved cardio and associated chemistry like endorphins just make people better at handling
stress and keeping morale high, so replacing or adding hearts or adrenaline or dopamine-producing
glands might have some huge effects, as might simply using drugs on the soldiers. It’s worth noting that a second heart doesn’t
help for blood loss though, and that more ideally you’d rather have several smaller
secondary hearts throughout the system as pumps, though that would be harder to accomplish
I assume. There’s a comic book where Magneto, master
of magnetism, gets his heart ripped out by Thanos’s grandfather and instead of dying
he’s able to prove he deserves his sobriquet by keeping his blood pumping and inside his
body by magnetically controlling the iron in his blood cells. Which is both a reminder how impressive mastery
of a single talent can be once you know all the tricks, and a good reminder to writers
to be careful to contemplate some of the additional options some new power or technology might
include that might wreck the setting, once your fans think of it, and start wondering
why ships in Star Wars don’t trying ramming each other at hyperspeed more often. Like that, this is often some other form of
attack or defense a power or tech might be put to, but also includes non-military roles. If you’re out cloning or duplicating your
best soldiers – which isn’t a bad idea - you also might be wanting to do the same
for your scientists, best craftsmen, best teachers, and just about anything else. Speaking of clones, and Star Wars, when Star
Wars did their Clone prequels and cartoons, we saw one single person reproduced over and
over, Jango Fett, and rapidly grown in just a handful of years to maturity of body and
skills by a technology that presumably would have worked on any other specialist occupation
too. Before that, back when the Clone Wars were
a throwaway line from the original film, Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn series explored cloning more,
and Grand Admiral Thrawn had the common sense to select some of the best at various different
disciplines of soldiering, pilots, infantry, etc. One single super-soldier versus duplicating
your ten best pilots, your ten best tank gunners, your ten best light infantrymen, and so on. This better approach and common sense is why
so many of us loved Thrawn as a villain and Zahn as a writer. It's worth noting though that life is not
a point-buy system for mental and physical attributes in some Role Playing Game, so there’s
no reason strength has to come at the expense of Intelligence or Charisma, or Dexterity
or Constitution. If you’ve gone and isolated the various
genes to make someone seven feet tall, prone to living over a century, having an IQ over
160, being physically beautiful, and so on, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t include
that on everyone. And someone who has all that going for them
plus bionics or super-education might actually be the best pilot, tank gunner, infantrymen,
and everything else you’re looking for too. In which case, yeah you should duplicate that
single person not the distant runners up, but you could have duplicated that person
when they were, say, 20 rather than 30, and had a dozen 20-year old copies each specialize
in something else, and then duplicate them instead. Now I say duplicate instead of clone because
cloning is usually meant as creating someone’s genetic twin who then needs to be grown and
educated, not a copy of their mind and memories, which we usually call duplication instead,
and typically presumes some digital uploading and scanning of brains. Though you could also replicate a classic
meat-brain with copied neurons and memories with nanotech too. I think you could probably argue it’s still
cloning if you took someone you found impressive and also grafted on replacement genes for
some things, like removing their risk of cancer for instance, but either way it's just copying
the hardware from the same basic schematic, if they don’t get those memories. Duplication is trickier because that can still
be divergent too, the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor gives one of the best, and
certainly the most humorous, deep contemplations of scanning and copying someone’s mind over
and over again. This is definitely a good way to make a super-soldier
as all you’re really doing is taking an existing one. I suppose you could also rob copies of your
best troops from other places in a multiverse too, something akin to Council of Reeds or
Ricks or Kang the Conquerors for that matter, something we’ll explore more next week,
in our Multiverse Warfare episode. This is probably your best path to getting
super-soldiers though, because a digitally copied mind of a loyal and skilled troop can
still benefit from all your other cool technology, like power armor or giant robot mecha, even
those very tailored to fit their style and specifications. They gain the quasi-immortality of duplication
and from someone who is already presumed willing to lay their life down for the cause, which
is a lot easier if you know someone is able to take care of your family, friends, and
other obligations, which a copy of you presumably can be trusted to do. This circumvents all the problems with Artificial
Intelligence running amok while still allowing digital alterations. Imagine a soldier had 100 copies made of them
onto an android with super-strength and toughness and just some minor digital tweaks like lessened
sense of panic or the new digital upgrade for knowing how to use the newest version
of the plasma rifle, and you outright tell the volunteer that the memories of each bot
are saved for review but patched over and replaced every week with a fresh copy. A week’s not long for a volunteer who doesn’t
really want a billion divergent copies of themselves to change their minds and go off
track, and from the individual copy’s perspective, you know you’re a copy and have a mission
and that your memory is getting saved and your original is still around reviewing the
highlights and you don’t want your family having to deal with a million divergent clones
either. I can see someone feeling depressed and expendable
at that or just comfortably liberated, and the upside to this process is that it wouldn’t
take long to determine which camp a volunteer for duplication fell into. And again, since they're digital and you have
the original’s help and insight, you could tweak that copy to be less inclined to worry
on the matter. That’s not without risks but seems better
and safer than the classic robot war machine run by an artificial intelligence, and I think
it would go over better than using the upload copy to replace the original if they died
in combat. Backing your soldiers up isn’t a bad option
either but it makes more sense to tweak and augment the copies, especially in prototyping
mode when there’s doubts about the results. You don’t have to delete your copies either,
if you’re mass producing android troops for instance, you just need to have a game
plan for afterward. And ‘hit the off button and kill off your
survivors now that you don’t need them’ probably isn’t a good one. Same for any super-soldiers. It’s popular in fiction to show the modified
and trained killing machines being shunted off to the side after the war as inconvenient,
dangerous, obsolete, or embarrassing – Star Trek The Next Generation did an episode on
this called “The Hunted” where they were kept in a prison on a moon after the war they’d
been made for. The episode was typical for TNG season 2 – awful
– and many parallel plots seem analogies for veterans of unpopular wars or with mental
health issues shuffled off to one side by their leaders. There’s a lot of historical and modern precedent
for that concern too. In practice this a bad plan for all sorts
of very obvious reasons though probably better than trying to wipe them out, which is what
happened in the case of those Space Marines I mentioned earlier, in terms of their predecessors,
the more crudely designed ‘Thunder Warriors’, who were so prone to going nuts or dying of
cancer or illnesses related to their fast, crude and heavy-handed augmentation that some
of the scattered survivors of their purge seem to regard it rather philosophically as
a necessary evil, recognizing they had a shelf-life with no pleasant post-expiration-date outcomes. Super soldiers made on addictive combat drugs
and using weapons and power armor running on poorly shielded radioactive power supplies
don’t have a lot of good retirement options, something that setting also explores. And to be fair, if a war was desperate or
important enough, you would have volunteers for things like that who knew this was irreversible
and would only end in them dying in battle or needing to be euthanized for everyone else’s
safety, and we’re not really contemplating ethics here, just options, so I could see
that. Alternatively, if you’ve got excess super-troops
who you’ve not made mentally unstable or living on borrowed time, and who actually
have relatively normal or admirable civilian skills and behaviors, then you can use them
to help colonize newly conquered territories or to fill in your losses in your old territory,
which has certainly been a common approach historically, especially as it often lets
you insert community leaders into areas who are loyal. Whether or not their skills are hereditary,
or if they keep their bionics or augmentations or other gear, or are forging a new life as
a copy of someone else whose original family is back on their home world are all very dependent
on the circumstances and technology. One thing that seems to run true throughout
our examples though, is that if you’re planning on making people into supermen, arming them
to the teeth, and training them to kill, it’s probably a good idea to be training them not
just to be super-soldiers but good citizens too. It makes it more likely that they’ll keep
to the spirit of the cause and reduces the problems of what to do after the conflict. Appropriately then perhaps, probably the most
important trait when making super soldiers is to focus on making super-citizens. So as I’ve mentioned before, a couple months
back my wife and I adopted 3 little kids, the youngest of whom is 4 and currently spends
a lot of time in daddy’s studio watching educational videos, as does my wife who has
an adjoining office but prefers to work from mine and since she’s a politician, that
means she’s on the phone a lot. I love having them here, but it means I have
also come to truly love having an earbud I can put in that has noise isolation features,
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to buyraycon.com/isaacarthur to get 15% off your Raycon purchase! So next week we will continue our discussion
from last fall about Time Wars with a look at Multiversal Warfare and the implications
of some of the crazier aspects of Quantum Mechanics. And next Thursday we’ll take a Journey to
Alpha Centauri. And two weeks from now we’ll have our end
of the month Livestream Q&A, Sunday, February 26th at 4 pm Eastern Time, where my lovely
wife and cohost Sarah will take your questions live from the chat for me to answer. I hope to see you then. If you’d like to get alerts when those and
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