Science Fiction as a Military Asset
In July 2019, the French inventor Franky Zapata showed off his flying hoverboard at Bastille Day, a technology the French Ministry of Armaments deemed so promising that it decided to spend €1.3 million on its further development. This investment is part of a recent trend in the French Army to become more future-orientated in its approach to military strategy. However, after having created an Agency of Innovation in September 2018, the latest announcements have made it clear that the army is not willing to limit itself to conventional programmes of development only. In an attempt to think outside the box, a team of four to five science fiction writers are currently being headhunted. Their job will be to think of future military scenarios which traditional army strategists might not necessarily be able to come up with on their own. The main focus of this so called “Red Team” will revolve around the question of how hostile states and terrorists could make use of new technologies in the future.
While this type of cooperation between the military and science fiction writers may seem absurd at first glance, it is interesting to note that France is by far not the first state to encourage it. Countries like Canada or the US have also relied on sci-fi authors in the past – for instance, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Pentagon reached out to Hollywood filmmakers, among them Die Hard screenwriter Steve de Souza, for “some left-field, off-the-wall ideas” concerning further potential scenarios of disruption. This came primarily as a reaction to the belief that one critical reason why the possibility of a such an attack had not been anticipated was because of the CIA’s lack of imagination.
In another example from the US, science fiction was not just used by the government for advisory purposes but actually shaped policy initiatives:
In 2018, Donald Trump announced his administration’s plan for launching a new, sixth branch of the US Armed Forces, the United States Space Force, designed to establish American dominance in an area that, according to President Trump, will become a major battlefield in future wars. However, the idea of preparing for wars fought in outer space is much older than that, dating back to the early 1980s and Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative – better known as Star Wars.
The proposal for this programme was to a significant degree based on a report titled “Space. The Crucial Frontier”. It takes the form of a 40-page document, still available online today, that was written mainly by two science fiction authors, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. In Reagan’s 1983 Star Wars speech he included several phrases from the report, which insisted that space was America’s “most valuable national resource” and encouraged closer cooperation between NASA and the military.
While the Strategic Defense Initiative is certainly one of the more famous incidents of incorporating science fiction into the world of politics and international relations, it must equally be said that it is not a particularly convincing example regarding the benefits science fiction can bring to the field. Reagan’s Star Wars would have been a hugely expensive investment, and its lack of feasibility soon turned it into a political laughing stock.
Why, then, do governments and militaries around the world still value the input of sci-fi writers today? The answer to this question mainly comes down to the fact that science fiction is rarely used to directly shape defense policy, as was the case in the previous example. Instead, it is applied in the field of military Strategic Foresight. Foresight, in this case, has less to do with predicting the future than with investigating it. This involves the imagination of various possible scenarios, some more likely than others, and the creativity of science fiction authors in combination with their knowledge on technological developments is thus considered a highly valuable asset for the military in this area.
Because Strategic Foresight, even when based on science fiction, is still a part of military strategy, very little information can be found about the details of government programmes which incorporate writers to come up with scenarios for future challenges. However, we can gain an insight into what these scenarios might look like by considering a number of sci-fi books that were either written by authors who had worked in defence think tanks beforehand, or that were directly commissioned by governments for military purposes:
Karl Schroeder, for example, was hired by the Canadian Army in 2005 to write a “dramatized future military scenario.” The result was a book titled Crisis in Zefra, set in an imaginary African city-state around the year 2025 and focusing on the challenges a Canadian peacekeeping force might encounter when dealing with an insurgency in an urban war zone equipped with drones, cellphones and internet access. Schroeder’s second publication for the military, Crisis in Urlia (2014), explores not only visions of a “crowdsourced military”, but also of “online nations and religions, post-agricultural food supplies, and 3D printed buildings”.
Another, maybe less technical, sci-fi contribution is the novel Ghost Fleet by American authors P.W. Singer and August Cole. It outlines the scenario of a third World War between the US, China and Russia which to a significant proportion takes place both in outer space and in cyberspace. Before writing the book, which is also featured on the official CIA website, co-author August Cole worked for the Atlantic Council think tank as an expert on the defense industry.
All three of these books can be freely accessed online for anyone interested in scenarios of future military conflicts that expert science fiction authors have come up with (Crisis in Zefra here, Crisis in Urlia here, and Ghost Fleet here). What must be kept in mind, though, is the fact that these highly dystopian accounts were written to highlight the possibility rather than the probability of future technological and military developments. While they may provide interesting input for military strategists, they are in no way meant to predict the future.
