Super soldier

Not to be confused with the Amalgam Comics character Super-Soldier or the Marvel UK title Super Soldiers.

Concept design for exoskeletal amplification for body armor.

The supersoldier (or super soldier) is a fictional concept soldier, often capable of operating beyond normal human limits or abilities either through genetic modification or cybernetic augmentation.

Overview

Supersoldiers are common in military science fiction literature, films, and video games. Examples include Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein and The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. Supersoldiers are also prevalant in the science fiction universes of Warhammer 40,000 and The Horus Heresy. Critic Mike Ryder has argued that the supersoldiers depicted in these worlds serve as a mirror to present-day issues around sovereignty, military ethics and the law.

Fictional supersoldiers are usually heavily augmented, either through surgical means, eugenics, genetic engineering, cybernetic implants, drugs, brainwashing, traumatic events, an extreme training regimen or other scientific and pseudoscientific means. Occasionally, some instances also use paranormal methods or technology and science of extraterrestrial origin. In entertainment, the creators of such programs are viewed often as mad scientists or stern military personnel depending on the emphasis, as their programs would typically go past ethical boundaries in the pursuit of science or military might.

Cyborg soldier

Some fictional supersoldiers can also be categorized as cyborgs or cybernetic organisms because of augmentations that are intended to enhance human capabilities or to exceed physical human restrictions.

U.S. Army

In the book The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004), Welsh journalist Jon Ronson documented how the U.S. military repeatedly tried and failed to train soldiers in the use of parascientific and pseudoscientific combat techniques during the Cold War, experimenting with New Age tactics and psychic phenomena such as remote viewing, astral projections, "death touch" and mind reading against various Soviet targets. The book also inspired a war comedy of the same name (2009) directed by Grant Heslov, starring George Clooney.

See also

• First Earth Battalion
• Future Soldier 2030 Initiative
• Human enhancement
• List of psychoactive drugs used by militaries
• Project MKUltra
• Superhuman
• Übermensch

Archetypes in fiction

• Space marine
• Superhero

Fictional examples

• Captain America
• Bloodshot (comics)
• Clone trooper
• Deadpool
• Deathstroke
• Doomguy
• Master Chief (Halo)
• Soldier Boy
• Space Marines (Warhammer 40,000)
• Starship Troopers
• Stormtrooper (Star Wars)
• Winter Soldier (comics)
• Wolverine (character)