We are witnessing a pivot in strategic competition where biology has moved from the clinic to the command post. What used to be science fiction is now a set of pragmatic programs and policy moves aimed at making people faster, tougher, and more connected to machines. The question is not whether human performance will be militarized, but how fast and how ethically the two great powers will push those limits.
On the American side the signals are unmistakable. Decades of investment in neurotechnology, nutrition science, and molecular biology have been corralled into programs that imagine warfighters who can endure longer, act faster, and interface directly with autonomous systems. DARPA’s Next Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology program is the clearest example of an ambition to read and write high fidelity neural signals without brain surgery, enabling hands free interaction with systems and new modalities of human machine teaming. That work moved from theory to funded projects years ago and remains a cornerstone of U.S. research into military neurointerfaces.
Metabolic and pharmacological approaches are less cinematic than brain implants but potentially more immediate. The idea of pushing mitochondria, ketone fuels, and nutraceutical regimes to sustain cognitive and physical output for prolonged periods has been a recurring DARPA objective under programs historically described as Metabolic Dominance or Peak Soldier Performance. Those efforts have spawned civilian spinouts, clinical studies, and a broader research ecosystem focused on resilience under stress. For planners, metabolic tools promise an operational advantage that is low cost, distributable, and hard to attribute.
Across the Pacific Beijing is not subtle about its intent to fuse civilian biotech breakthroughs with military needs. Military civil fusion creates an institutional logic that accelerates dual use research, and open source reporting and specialist reviews show explicit Chinese funding and interest in military brain science, biomimetics, and human performance enhancement. China’s large genomic databases and ambition in precision medicine add a data advantage that could be repurposed for defense applications, from tailored medical countermeasures to, in the worst interpretation, population specific targeting. That prospect has driven U.S. anxiety and policy responses in recent years.
Policy has begun to catch up. In January 2025 the U.S. Commerce Department calibrated export controls on advanced biological instruments citing concerns that such tools could accelerate foreign advances in human performance enhancement, brain machine interfaces, and other dual use capabilities. Those controls show that Washington now treats certain biotech tools as strategic goods rather than purely commercial ones. Expect more friction at the technical choke points where reagents, sequencers, high parameter cytometers, and data analytics meet national security.
This is not an even race of equals. The United States still commands deeper private sector capabilities in advanced gene editing, AI driven bio design, and a more pluralistic research culture that spurs innovation. China has two structural advantages. One is speed of adoption. Its centralized planning and industrial policy make it likely to field integrated human machine applications and to put selected enhancements into service faster than more deliberative democracies. The second advantage is scale of data, from population genomics to clinical cohorts, which can feed AI models for bioengineering and personalization. That combination makes Chinese adoption patterns consequential even if the scientific limits remain comparable.
The strategic implications are messy. Short term they are operational. Imagine a contested island fight where one side’s forward teams are sustained by metabolic regimes and remote neuroassistants that compress decision timelines and improve sensor fusion. Long term the implications are doctrinal. Enhanced human nodes change the calculus of attrition, escalation, and deterrence by altering who can fight, for how long, and with what cognitive reach. And because many of these technologies are dual use, they complicate verification and arms control.
Ethics and law will not bottleneck progress, but they will shape form and friction. Democracies tolerate debates about consent, follow rigorous clinical testing pathways, and maintain more visible institutional checks. Those features slow deployment but guard against abuses that can create long tail political costs. Authoritarian systems can shortcut consent and accelerate operationalization but at the risk of medical harms, reputational blowback, and unpredictable second order effects. The result is not a simple moral victory for restraint but a tempo advantage for the reckless actor until political costs accrue.
A surveillance state plus biotech is a toxic cocktail. Large-scale genomic repositories, persistent biometric surveillance, and AI driven phenotype discovery create possibilities that fall into the category of precision risks. Policy documents warn that genetic and population level data could hypothetically be exploited to develop targeted countermeasures. Even if such programs remain beyond practical reach for years, the awareness of the risk has already reshaped export policy and research norms.
So where do we go from here? First, normalization of dual use vigilance. The West can and must secure chokepoints in instrument flows, protect critical datasets, and harden supply chains without throttling legitimate science. Second, invest in defensive biology. If adversaries pursue enhancement, deterrence will be partly technical. Better antidotes, robust medical countermeasures, and resilient force generation matter. Third, lead in norms. Democracies must set standards for informed consent, clinical transparency, and limits on heritable edits and coercive enhancements. If we cede norm setting we lose the language of legitimacy and the practical leverage that comes with it.
Finally this race is not just about weapons. It is a test of values. Militarizing human performance forces societies to ask what we are willing to change about the human condition for a strategic edge and what we will not sacrifice. The more urgent and realistic question for strategists is not whether humans will be enhanced in future wars but which societies will manage the trade offs better. A democratically anchored approach that pairs vigilance with investment, and ethics with capability, offers the only durable path out of what could otherwise become a ruinous sprint to a biologically altered battlefield.