In this article for the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, Prof. Evans and colleagues explore how research into the enhancement of military warfighters may be justified within the scope of contemporary U.S. research ethics guidelines.
State militaries have strong interests in developing enhanced warfighters: taking otherwise healthy service personnel (soldiers, marines, pilots, etc.) and pushing their biological, physiological, and cognitive capacities beyond their individual statistical or baseline norm. However, the ethical and regulatory challenges of justifying research into these kinds of interventions to demonstrate the efficacy and safety of enhancements in the military has not been well explored.
The US Department of Defense (DOD), among other state militaries, has a strong interest in pursuing biomedical enhancement: taking otherwise healthy service personnel (soldiers, marines, pilots, etc.) and pushing their biological, physiological, and cognitive capacities beyond their individual statistical or baseline norm.1 The Army’s now defunct Future Combat Systems program (2003–2009) aimed to modernize the force through pharmaceutical performance enhancement technologies as well as exogenous enhancements like exoskeletons, with the latter continuing into the present. Since 2008, the Air Force’s 711th Human Performance Wing has sought to enhance the combat effectiveness of personnel through medical, educational, and technological means. And since the 1960s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has sought human enhancement through cybernetic, pharmacological, and neuroscientific means.
Most writing on military enhancement focuses on the far future of enhancement, such as brain–computer interfaces; so-called ‘metabolic dominance’ utilizing pharmaceuticals to render soldiers able to survive simply by processing fat rather than the need to eat; and artificial general intelligence. But much enhancement research in practice is considerably more prosaic: the use of steroidal and nonsteroidal muscle growth stimulants, ‘fatigue countermeasures’ such as amphetamines and modafinil, and encouraging better human-machine teaming with existing artificial intelligence (AI). All of these enhancements, particularly biomedical enhancements, may carry side effects and tradeoffs. In the presence of uncertainty about the relative balance of the risks and benefits of ordinary medical technologies to the individual and the fighting force, a standard part of the development pipeline would be clinical trials.
In what follows, we outline a series of possible justifications specifically for military enhancement research. Our justifications are limited to military studies for three reasons:
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Journal of Law and the Biosciences https://academic.oup.com/jlb/article/11/2/lsae023/7862678
Nicholas G Evans, Blake Hereth, Michael L Gross, Jonathan D Moreno, How do we justify research into enhanced warfighters?, Journal of Law and the Biosciences, Volume 11, Issue 2, July-December 2024, lsae023, https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsae023
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