If the US doesn’t other governments will. That’s obvious. Does anyone have the abillity to take it to the extremes that the US will? Should anyone. Are there prices that people should not be willing to pay for an effective fighting force? I feel so. This is one of them.
no. The only monsters are the people approving this program.
Moderator’s Note: Edited thread title.
Look, piffle about if you wish, but without the super-soldier program of World War II we would never have defeated the Red Skull.
::d & r::
I think the author of the article is a few bytes short of a file.
Geez, everyone knows you defeat the super-soldiers with magnetite. Didn’t that columnist watch the last season of The X-Files?
Still, I’d like better cites for those kind of claims than The Daily Telegraph, which has been known in England to go after some pretty wild goose chases. And I have a hard time believing that the same organization that’s been experimenting with such low-tech drugs like “go pills” (ie, speed) is on the brink of the pharmaceutical/genetic breakthroughs claimed in the article, even if they did sow “billions of dollars” into the project. To go from amphetamines to gene splicing looks like a pretty steep learning curve.
Here is the telegraph story referenced in the OP’s link.
It’s unclear if Jan Walker, the DARPA spokesperson, is the source for all the sci-fi stuff mentioned, or if she was simply confirming was that the Pentagon was “working out ways to resist the effects of sleep deprivation”, which isn’t particularly alarming.
I have a hard time imagining any administration that would countenance splicing dolphin genes into human DNA to create an “Attack of the Clones”-style army, much less the Bush administration, which is, if anything, too conservative about genetic research involving new human beings.
The idea is not likely to appeal to government, anyway, since the costs of raising an entire army from infancy significantly outweigh the benefits of allowing individual soldiers to perform for longer periods of time without sleep, regardless of any moral concerns.
It’s not like they are immune to bullets.
We do have super soldiers. They’re called Marines. 
Look, any talk of using genetic engineering to create super soldiers is bunk. And here’s why. You’d have to raise the BABIES you created that way. What military is going to spend 18 years changing diapers, giving bottles and scheduling naptimes just so that they might possibly have a physically better soldier? And how exactly is this going to pass the 13th Amendment? Sure, you can keep a few experimental babies secret, but how are you going to use them as soldiers without everyone finding out? And what if your super soldier prefers flower arranging, and decides to go to art college instead of Parris Island?
The article is a paranoid, hysterical, brain-dead rant.
How about a hypothetical scenario where the Republic of Kreblakistan has created an army of super-soldiers in the not-so-distant future. They are stronger, faster, smarter, and tougher to kill than the average soldier.
Would the US feel an obligation to either:
- Make it a primary mission to try and kill all of these soldiers and destroy the infrastructure of Kreblakistan so they cannot create these soldiers anymore.
- Enter the Eugenics age and build more super-soldiers than everyone else, and use our political clout to pass treaties and force other countries to limit their production of super-soldiers.
- Petition the UN to start commision a study on the impact of super-soldiers on the planet, and meanwhile seeking more domestic applications of this new-found technology.
My personal feeling would be choice number 2.
Feh, you forgot:
- Bomb the hell out them from 15,000 feet.
It works rather well, actually.
To clarify, in the event of war with Kreblakistan, the U.S. simply wouldn’t try to match the super-soldiers man-for-man. They’d just use superior technology to blow them away from a safe distance.
So choice 1 in other words.
Again, what good is it if you spend so much money making “super-soldiers,” when they can be killed by good old projectile weapons? The only use for it I can see is for Special Forces, hiding out in the wilderness for days on end and stuff like that.
Not really. I just dashed off my original post so quickly, I forgot the necessary “In the event of war…” qualifier. Your Choice 1 suggested a pre-emptive strike and destroying the supporting infrastructure. My Choice 4 suggests that if the U.S. wants to, they can destroy the soldiers and the infrastructure when they get around to it, simply by using long-range missiles, which will kill any soldier, no matter how “super”.
Rather than try to develop super-soldiers of its own (though I can imagine some dabbling research), the American are more likely to improve their existing stockpiles of targeted weapons. It wouldn’t matter if your super-soldier can jog at 30 miles/hour. One 30mm computer-targeted round from an Apache will still cut him in half, with minimal risk to American lives.
The whole “super-soldier” permise is pernicious bushwah.
Special Forces may be the only thing they would be good for. Sophisticated sleeper cells, super assasins, and ultimate spies. That sort of thing. It wouldn’t hurt if they were immune to common biological warfare either, making them the perfect secondary attack after an outbreak.
All of what you say is true if it came down to a conventional war. These super-soldiers would have to then be used non-conventionally. As I mentioned in my previous post, they would be great as a secondary attack after a biological strike. They would be great when scattered among a populace that cannot be easily wiped away with a missle. They could be used for sophisticated intelligence gathering. That type of thing.
There’s also option 4 (or 5, whatever): Wipe them out, but take their research data for (possible) future use.
The Americans already have those, sort-of. They can pick the top one-percent of one-percent of their armed forces and get the extreme high-end of human abilities and endurance, with no genetic manipulation required.
There are currently guys in the special forces who could crawl through the woods for a week, snipe a target, then crawl back. If you need to accomplish a mission that is beyond their already impressive abilities, better to rely on technology.
As for ultimate spies, forget the James Bond crap. It will always be easier to gather intel by “turning” one of the enemy through bribery or blackmail, preferably the former. Also, deploy sophisticated listening devices to pick up electronic communications. The problem now is that the Americans are getting too much information and need efficient ways to filter it.
The best defense against biological attack isn’t really to build soldiers with natural immunities (though improving vaccines would certainly help) but to make it clear that the use of biological weapons will invite a massive city-levelling (possibly nuclear) response.
Spending a few billion on genetic enhancements sounds interesting up until the point where a 13 year-old Somali conscript gets lucky and puts a .22 rifle round through your super-soldier’s heart.