Soldier Enhancement, Consent, and Long-Term Care: The Super Soldier Perspective

Bio-convergent enhancements for soldiers are becoming increasingly inevitable. Medical professionals, bioethicists, lawyers, and neuroscientists are increasingly aware of the potential for these enhancements to raise significant ethical issues, especially around issues of consent and responsibility for long-term care. This has, in the last few years, led to an increase in research on the ethics of soldier enhancements. The literature on this issue has rightly leveraged decades of bioethics, medical ethics, and research ethics literature. What is missing however from the literature is the perspective of the potential subjects of such enhancements, namely members of special operations forces. This paper seeks to fill this gap, by first arguing that subjective views of special operations members matter for ethical questions and then by reporting results of our interview-based qualitative study on United States Special Operations Forces' perspectives on consent and long-term care.