We are funding the next soldier now. Not with steel alone but with biology, code, and contracts. How public money is steered today will determine whether future warfighters are augmented responsibly or conscripted into a race that normalizes permanent bodily modification and shifts the political calculus of violence.
Governments and defense agencies are already investing in human performance as a domain of technical competition. Advanced research offices explicitly solicit projects that push at the boundaries of physiology, cognition, and human-machine interfaces. Those investments promise resilience in extreme environments and faster recovery from injury, but they also concentrate power to change what it means to be a combatant.
At the same time institutional-level strategies are emerging that try to hold those investments to ethical standards. NATO has published a strategy committing Allies to Principles of Responsible Use that emphasize human agency, informed consent, and attention to reversibility, invasiveness, and heritability when assessing human enhancement technologies. Those political commitments are not mere rhetoric. They already shape funding channels, partnership criteria, and collaborative projects across members.
Here is the blunt ethical problem: money shapes norms. Funding choices act as de facto regulation. When grant solicitations prioritize speed and operational edge without commensurate safeguards they incentivize risky shortcuts - shortcuts that can create long tail harms for individuals, families, and societies. That is the core moral hazard. If investors and state sponsors underwrite technologies that reduce short-term casualties or performance limitations then political leaders face lower immediate barriers to deploying force. The result could be more conflict, not less - a paradox where investments intended to protect people make war more likely or more routine. This is an inference grounded in the literature on enhancement, operational risk, and the documented ethical concerns about coercion and downstream social impact.
The ethics literature gives us a usable checklist. Recent empirical work with defense personnel and ethicists distilled a set of interlocking principles - necessity, human dignity, informed consent, transparency and accountability, equity, privacy, ongoing review, international law, and broader social impact. These are not abstract ideals. They are practical constraints you can bake into funding mechanisms. If a research program cannot demonstrate respect for these principles it should not get public money.
Translate principles into funding policy and two things happen. First you change incentives. Contracts can require reversible interventions where possible, robust consent processes, and independent monitoring. Second you reduce strategic surprise by making ethical compliance a competitive advantage for firms and universities seeking public R&D dollars. Those strings create a market for safe-by-design augmentation rather than an open market to the cheapest or fastest tinkerer. This is precisely the governance lever the Alliance documents propose when they link funding programs to ethical frameworks and trusted supply chains.
What should funders actually do? Practical rules I would push today are these:
1) Ethics-by-design conditionality. Make adherence to the nine principles a condition of award. Proposals must show how they will protect autonomy, ensure informed consent in hierarchical organizations, and build reversibility into interventions where science permits. Independent ethics audits should be mandatory for programs that move beyond sensing and analytics into biological modulation.
2) Coercion-proofing and voluntariness safeguards. Military populations are not ordinary research cohorts. Funding should require explicit mechanisms that guarantee participation is free of command influence and that refusal carries no career penalty. Oversight panels must include civilian ethicists and veterans. The policy guidance already advanced by defense commentators that stresses voluntariness is practical and achievable.
3) Life-cycle health commitments. Funders must underwrite not only research but long-term monitoring and care for recipients. If governments underwrite enhancement R and D they owe lifetime medical surveillance and support. Contracts and grant awards should include escrowed budgets for longitudinal health studies and veteran care. This removes an obvious perverse incentive to externalize long-term costs onto individuals and society.
4) Reversibility and heritability screens. Prioritize funding for interventions that are reversible and demonstrably non-heritable. Where heritable or irreversible changes are proposed, require the highest level of ethical review and international legal assessment. Put bluntly, public funds should not bankroll interventions that lock future generations into consequences decided in a procurement cycle.
5) Transparent procurement and red-team requirements. Funded programs should publish non-sensitive risk assessments and acceptance criteria. Independent red teams must probe dual use and proliferation risks well before transition to fielding. NATO and allied mechanisms that promote trusted alternatives and threat review boards are a model worth scaling.
6) International coordination and export controls. Ethics cannot be siloed. If one state uses biotech augmentation without restraint others may be pushed to match. Funders should condition awards on active participation in allied norm-building and support measures such as export controls and code-of-conduct agreements for sensitive capabilities. Public money used irresponsibly accelerates an arms race in bodies and genomes.
7) Democratic oversight and public accountability. Finally, augmenting humans for war raises social license questions that defense labs alone cannot settle. Funding bodies must build public reporting, parliamentary or congressional briefings, and opportunities for civil society scrutiny into program design. If research is secretive because it is “strategic,” that secrecy itself becomes an ethical liability. The history of military medicine shows that transparency reduces abuse and increases legitimacy.
Some will say these constraints slow innovation. True. They also protect the polity and the people whose bodies and choices sit at the center of this debate. The alternative is faster technology and slower ethics, a mismatch that typically produces scandal, harm, and regulatory whiplash. The right balance is not to stop research but to steer funding so that innovation and social responsibility move in tandem.
We stand at a funding inflection point. Public money either becomes the architect of a defensive, humane augmentation regime framed by consent and care, or it becomes the engine of a tech-driven moral hazard that erodes trust, fuels an arms race, and redefines sacrifice in ways democracies may come to regret. Funders have more than dollars to spend. They have leverage to shape the moral geometry of future conflicts. Use it deliberately.