On April 8, a bipartisan commission chartered by Congress warned that China is rapidly advancing a terrifying new military threat: genetically engineered “super soldiers.”
The
report by the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (
NSCEB) urges the U.S. to respond with a sweeping effort to militarize biotechnology. It offers little concrete evidence that such Chinese programs even exist.
In the name of national security, Washington is now pushing for deregulation, massive government investment, and human experimentation. Experts say this effort echoes Cold War-era paranoia and threatens to erode ethical boundaries in science and warfare.
A Congressional Research Service
fact sheet on the report claims its contents “describe how biotechnology could potentially revolutionize agricultural production in the U.S., transform U.S. health care, and change the future of computing power.” While that may sound promising, the report’s focus is overwhelmingly on using biotechnology for military purposes, including the creation of “genetically enhanced soldiers.” The report also states that “biotechnology’s impact on surveillance could be … transformative.”
The report argues that biology could revolutionize warfare just as airpower did in the 20th century, promising new advantages in stealth, logistics, and real-time physiological monitoring of soldiers. It calls for “a fundamental rethinking” of how the U.S. uses biotech in combat.
Biotechnology also promises new advantages in stealth and mobility. Dynamic biological camouflage, for instance, could shield warfighters from thermal detection, while wearable biosensors could adjust mission parameters based on real-time physiological data. Taken together, these advances demand a fundamental rethinking of how biology supports sustained, agile military operations, revolutionizing what it means to defend the U.S., including building for, nourishing, and healing forces in the field.”
The report argues that “winning” the global biotech race will “require de-risking the domestic production of defense-related biotechnology products” and changing “military specifications” to enable biotechnology companies to sell their products to the Pentagon more easily. Repeated references are also made to the need to “reduce or remove regulatory hurdles for familiar products.” Although the report never defines “familiar products,” the term may refer to controversial and experimental technologies such as
CRISPR gene editing and mRNA therapeutics.
NSCEB also calls for large-scale “biological databases” to be treated as a “strategic resource.” It urges Congress to direct the Pentagon to build commercial facilities across the country to biomanufacture products deemed “critical for DOD needs.” The U.S. government “will need to shoulder some of the risk of early-stage financing for biotechnology and encourage private investment,” such as “[streamlining] regulatory processes to alleviate unnecessary burdens and accelerate the commercialization.”
The report’s tone is urgent, and lawmakers appear eager to act. One day after the report’s publication, NSCEB Chair Todd Young and Commissioners Alex Padilla, Stephanie Bice and Ro Khanna jointly introduced the
National Biotechnology Initiative Act in both the House and Senate to “set in motion a whole-of-government approach to advancing biotechnology for U.S. national security, economic productivity, and competitiveness.”
Commissioners are urging “swift action” on militarizing biotech, “to protect U.S. national security.” In an accompanying
press release, Vice Chair Michelle Rozo implored lawmakers to take action on the NSCEB report, stating, “Technology is not inherently good or bad, but who uses it matters.”
Independent researcher Jeff Kaye agrees with her statement. The U.S., which recently conducted extensive airstrikes in Yemen and continues to support Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, is, according to Kaye, a dangerous actor.
Independent journalist
Peter Byrne tells MintPress News that the report reflects “the rationally untethered paranoid politics driving the ongoing weaponization and monetization of AI” in the U.S.
Byrne says that NSCEB’s speculative and scientifically questionable report “focuses on using so-called artificial intelligence to enhance the biologically violent capacities of government-backed and corporate-supported military forces—so-called “warfighters” who are increasingly being cyberized and treated, alongside targeted civilian masses, as expendable biologically augmented actors within what the report describes as an ‘Internet of Military Things.’
A Biotech Arms Race Built on Fear
The NSCEB’s composition raises additional concerns. The presence of both Democrats and Republicans on the Commission allows it to present itself as a bipartisan body. However, this obscures the fact that
most commissioners aren’t neutral experts, but have deep ties to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community.
According to her official
NSCEB biography, Commissioner Dawn Meyerriecks “led the iconic CIA Directorate of Science and Technology…defining and delivering global capabilities beyond state-of-the-art.”
She also served on the NSA’s corporate board for over a decade. In that role, she helped the agency transition to the cloud and “[revamped] their approach to encryption.”
It is unclear if she crossed paths in that role with fellow board member Eric Schmidt, founder of Google, whose early development was supported by
funding from intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA.
Google was a primary beneficiary of the post-9/11 U.S. national security state. A
September 2021 report found that 77% of all government contracts awarded to the firm were related to the War on Terror.
This included developing the
Maven program, which used AI to improve drone targeting, and
counter-terrorism tools that disproportionately targeted Muslims on social media. Income from this program was key to supporting Google’s rise to global dominance.
Another notable member of the Commission is Dov Zakheim. A Pentagon journeyman who, during the Reagan administration, strived to ensure Israel
was equipped with U.S.-made weapons and fighter jets at bargain rates, he was also a key member of the Project for the New American Century. In September 2000, the neoconservative think tank published “
Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” The report promoted “the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces.”
The document controversially suggested that ethnic bioweapons could “transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.” Zakheim was among its authors, along with fellow PNAC members Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. They later served as key advisers to President George W. Bush during the War on Terror.
“The marriage of biotechnology and U.S. national defense – war – policy harkens back to the U.S. crash program to create a usable germ warfare arsenal during the Korean War,” Jeff Kaye tells MintPress News. “Now the U.S. government wants to whip up a false fear about ‘genetically enhanced PLA super-soldiers’ in order to fund their own unprecedented attempt to create such soldiers themselves.” In the end, Kaye says, such programs primarily benefit military and technology contractors and raise serious ethical and strategic concerns.
The Myth of China’s Super Soldiers
In
December 2020, then-U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe directly accused the Chinese government of “[conducting] human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in the hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities.” Despite providing no evidence, and the question of whether this is even
scientifically possible being an obvious and
open one, his comments triggered widespread
media coverage, often uncritical, that persists to this day. Multiple outlets have published
speculative accounts of Chinese advancements in gene-edited or technologically enhanced “super soldiers.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the NSCEB report repeatedly justifies the urgent need for U.S. investment in biotechnology with claims that Beijing is close to outpacing Washington in every aspect of the field. “China’s recent success across core biotechnology capabilities, including AI-driven drug discovery platforms and biomanufacturing, signals that they may soon eclipse us,” the report ominously cautions, “and if that happens, the U.S. may permanently lose its competitive edge. But the biggest threat, naturally, lies in the military sphere.
Nonetheless, the Commission appears uncertain on whether China has already made concrete moves in the direction of biotech weaponization, intends to, or is merely exploring the concept. For example, one passage states “our adversaries could [emphasis added] engineer ‘super soldiers’ with genetically enhanced physical capabilities.” Another speculates, “paired with new technologies like implanted brain-computer interfaces that tap directly into a soldier’s brain chemistry…‘super soldiers’ could [emphasis added] attack our military – before our leaders can even act.”
Elsewhere, though, the Commission firmly declares it has “every reason to believe that the CCP [sic] will weaponize biotechnology,” including the creation of “biotechnology-powered troops,” citing a highly questionable October 2024
State Department report drawn up by arch anti-China hawks as proof. The report speculates that traditional technologies like drone warfare could pale in comparison to “genetically enhanced PLA super-soldiers with fused human and artificial intelligence.”
While super soldiers may sound like science fiction today, in reality the CCP [sic] has long called for ‘population improvement’, and has backed research into topics like the genetic basis of intelligence.”
The conclusion is highly debatable and lacks substantiating evidence.
In
March 2003 a then-senior member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a purely advisory body without any legislative power, called for “better protection of the health of baby girls,” and “the need of start [sic] a project to cure deformed baby girls or girls born with slight defects.” Then, the Commission points to a
2022 report from Berlin’s Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science.
The report notes that while China is a pioneer in the emerging field of Germline Genome Editing, its experiments have exclusively focused on eradicating genetic diseases and hereditary disabilities. These experiments involve changes to DNA in egg, sperm or embryo cells—a still-controversial area of research.
Moreover, the report stresses that other countries – including Britain and the U.S. – have undertaken comparable experiments, and
Beijing adheres to a rigorous regulatory framework in all its GGE testing.
The Society notes that in November 2018, a Chinese scientist and two collaborators independently created genetically edited babies without government approval or oversight. As a result, they
were jailed for “illegal medical practices” and violating national regulations on biomedical research and medical ethics. The report contains no indication that this research is intended for military use, begging the question of how the Commission concluded from its findings that “super soldiers” are an intended result of China’s GGE experiments.
Human Enhancement and Military Obedience
Although the NSCEB report includes a recommendation for ethical oversight, a
leading recommendation in the NSCEB report is for the Pentagon “to consult with stakeholders to define principles for ethical use of biotechnology for the U.S. military.” However, the accompanying text runs to just over 250 words and offers no explanation or definition of ethics in this context, let alone examples or concrete proposals for countering them. It simply states the investment must reflect the U.S. military’s “commitment to American values,” without defining what those values are or how they should be measured in practice.
Nonetheless, the Pentagon is encouraged to consider “Biotechnologies for warfighter performance optimization.” These include performance-enhancing technologies, policies for informed consent, and discussion of potentially heritable genetic treatments.
As Peter Byrne tells MintPress, “the professional China-demonizing ‘authorities’ are calling for diverting the USA’s increasingly diminishing funds for projects aimed at benefiting society at large, for weaponizing disease and genetics with the sole goal of killing millions of people for profit by the very few. There is no ‘ethical’ stance to take in undertaking a fundamentally murderous and technologically stupid project, which is bound to backfire, except to recoil from it as a hot iron.”
The report does urge the Pentagon to ensure soldiers give informed consent to any genetic enhancements. The “reversibility” of ‘enhancements’ to which they are subjected suggests that the NSCEB’s program will – at least publicly – adhere to basic
medical standards. Yet, a
deeply disturbing May 2021 Britain’s Ministry of Defence report on “human augmentation” raises grave concerns about “consent” in military contexts:
Consent in the military is necessarily different to consent in wider society due to the unique relationship between subordinates and their superiors. It could be difficult for military personnel to give sufficiently voluntary and informed consent due to a tendency to follow orders over individual interest. Would a Service person who refused to be augmented be guilty of disobeying a lawful command?”
The report stressed that “establishing advantage” in human augmentation was urgent. It claimed the role of people in war was “being challenged in three key areas: data, complexity and speed.” Human augmentation, it added, was “the missing part of this puzzle.”
It went on to advocate wearable technologies, psychedelic drugs, gene editing, exoskeletons, sensory augmentation devices, and invasive implants such as “brain interfaces” be considered for administration to soldiers by the British military post-haste. “Adversaries” supposedly outpacing London in the field was a core justification.
That the British M.O.D. published almost identical findings to NSCEB four years ago amply demonstrates how Western governments and military thinkers have been obsessed with weaponizing the human body and mind for some time. Their public pronouncements and formally published, open-source plans offer far more concrete, chilling indications of developments in this field than have ever emerged from China. For example, NATO’s ‘Innovation Hub’
during 2020/21 published a number of
bizarre papers and convened several conferences on the subject of “cognitive warfare.”
The Hub’s purpose was to explore “militarisation of brain science” and answers to the burning question of how to overcome perceived biological limits to human performance.
Most of the
associated paper trail has suspiciously been removed from the web. However, documents it published outlined numerous ways in which the “human domain” could be added to established spheres of conflict, such as “air, land, sea, space and cyber.”
It resolved for NATO to aim for “cognitive warfare” dominance globally by 2040.
In a surreal twist, the Hub consulted several “futurists” to sketch fictional scenarios, whereby this objective could be achieved.
One paper outlined a fictional scenario in which, by 2039, autopsies conducted on Chinese soldiers killed in skirmishes with U.S. and Australian troops over a Silk Road initiative in Zambia would find the corpses were “supra-human,” or genetically augmented beyond typical human capacity, the product of gene-editing in a lab that would give them enhanced muscle capacity, night vision, and “resistance to sleep deprivation, thirst, extreme heat and humidity.”
The incident, the author forecast, would trigger a “cognitive war” under NATO’s Article 5. It was not long after this highly speculative and implausible fiction was published that Ratcliffe made his claims about China developing “super soldiers,” suggesting that Ratcliffe’s remarks may have drawn inspiration from speculative NATO material.
If NSCEB’s report is fully adopted, many of the Innovation Hub’s most alarming proposals could edge closer to reality.
Aaron Good, founder of
American Exception, argues the implications of the report are dire and reflect deeper dysfunction in U.S. governance.
This enterprise is so sinister and horrifying, it is not something that should be considered in an advanced civilization. But since we live under a lawless and exploitative oligarchic regime whose only real imperatives are to perpetuate itself and to aggrandize the wealth and power of its oligarch owners, this is what we get.”
“We must hope some constellation of internationalist powers can transcend the regime of the West,” Good says, concluding that the U.S.-led global order is unlikely to yield power without resistance.
As during the Cold War—when
exaggerated claims of Soviet nuclear superiority and Chinese
brainwashing triggered decades of arms races and human experimentation—U.S. policymakers are again invoking the specter of enemy-state superpowers to justify ethically murky and potentially illegal programs.
Echoes of
past atrocities like MKULTRA are unmistakable, raising the question of whether some biotech enhancement experiments may already be underway in secret.
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