Modern Warfare

It was the third time she had died today. She wasn't sure if she could go through it again. So far, she had been suffocated, electrocuted, and now drowned. And that was just today. This week, she had been subjected to blunt force trauma, critical gunshot wounds, hangings, burnings, and multi-story falls. And yet, every time, they brought her back from the brink and kept her from going all the way into the next world.

She was Lima, one of the twenty-six elite recruits for the program's inaugural Special Ops training. Warfare had changed a great deal in the last hundred years, and the world superpowers now needed soldiers that were faster, stronger and tougher than ever before. If the twenty-first century had been about replacing human soldiers with more expendable machines, the twenty-second century was about exploiting the strengths of humanity against those machines. Now, everybody had machines. China had an army of tough, cheap androids that had replaced its standard military. Korea had an Air Force constituted entirely of unmanned drones capable of hitting targets on the other side of the world. And Saudi Arabia had spent much of the wealth of its oil reserves developing the technology that allowed them to build a satellite defense system that patrolled their borders from the upper limits of the ionosphere.

The United States, always looking for that edge, that avenue of research and development that no one else had yet thought to take, decided that the only way to combat the limitless resources of a densely populated or oil-rich country would be to fight smarter, not harder. And so where most countries looked to the benefits of machines, the U.S. looked to the benefits of human beings, basing their research on the belief that the human spirit and its ingenuity could overcome any obstacle. The result was a program to create human soldiers that could outthink another nation's machines; soldiers that could work outside a set of programmed parameters and find creative combat solutions.

Of course, the real problem was how you conditioned a human soldier to fight a machine. When the enemy is faster, stronger, and tougher, it can be psychologically traumatizing for a human soldier ... and so the U.S. military developed a controversial program to train soldiers not only in Special Ops combat and support services, but to conquer their fears, chief among which is the fear of death. By frequent and repeated exposure to the most terrifying near-death experiences imaginable, the idea was to create soldiers that would go into a combat situation against artificial combatants unafraid. And by being unafraid, it would clear their minds to find more creative solutions to win.

With it being the first class of cadets subjected to these rigorous training exercises, long term effects on the soldiers remained to be seen. The general consensus seemed to be that, like with combat or general skills training, practice is nothing to be sneezed at. So why not practice dying? If soldiers practiced the experience of falling, being shot, drowned, and so on, they could overcome that natural human fear of death ... and by conquering death and their fears of death, they could combat the machines of other countries with renewed courage and confidence.

Now the only thing the U.S. military needed to truly test their new training program was an actual war to fight. But knowing the world superpowers and their history, it was only a matter of time.


(578 words)