Super soldier

Soldiers that obtain greater-than-normal physical abilities by wearing powered armor or a technological exoskeleton (such as the Mobile Infantry in Robert A. Heinlein´s Starship Troopers novella) are a distinct, but related concept and the two often overlap, as is the case for Halo and Warhammer 40,000 universes, for example.

Critic Mike Ryder has argued that the super soldiers depicted in these worlds serve as a mirror to present-day issues around sovereignty, military ethics and the law.

The fictional masterminds of such programs are depicted often as mad scientists or stern military personnel depending on the needs of the plot, in stories that typically explore the ethical boundaries of the pursuit of science and victory.

In 2022, the People's Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences reported that a team of military scientists inserted a gene from the tardigrade into human embryonic stem cells in an experiment with the stated possibility of creating soldiers resistant to acute radiation syndrome who could survive nuclear fallout.

[5] 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,[6] experimenting with New Age methods and psychic phenomena such as remote viewing, astral projection, "death touch" and mind reading against various Soviet targets.