How the Miltiary Uses Science Fiction

Military science fiction is almost a genre of it's own, going back at least as far as Heinlein's Starship Troopers. But it works the other way, with the military using science fiction as a tool to help envision the shape and scope of future military conflicts.

In his excellent Transfer Orbit newsletter, Andrew Liptak looks at how the US military "is growing a cottage industry of sci-fi writer consultants to help it predict the nature of tomorrow’s conflicts." The article contains links to several documents produced by the US military as well as a link to "Crisis in Zefra" written for the Canadian military by Toronto SF author, Karl Schroeder. 

Science fiction is an ideal framing device for military strategists — not only as a way to envision potential futures, but also as a method of information delivery. In the late 1990s, the Canadian Defense Force (CDF) launched a foresight project called Future Force, designed to help leadership of the country’s army envision what the security environment in the year 2025 might look like. To accompany the report, which was published in 2005, the CDF tried something new — it commissioned science fiction author Karl Schroeder to write up a fictional take on its findings in the form of a short novella, Crisis in Zefra, which would distill the report’s findings into something that people might actually read. “The problem was that these scenarios existed in the form of massive, complex reports, and they weren’t very useful in that form,” Schroeder says. “So the task that they set themselves was to find a way to make it easily digestible for the rank and file and also for people who might become the officers of tomorrow.”

In Crisis in Zefra, a squad of Canadian peacekeepers gets caught in a violent street battle and utilizes swarms of drones, next-generation body armor, threat detection systems, and advanced weapons. Schroeder’s story anticipated some of the problems that things like cellphones pose on a battlefield, years before they entered widespread use. Since Schroeder wrote Zefra, numerous other organizations have also begun to tap into science fiction.

It's a fascinating article and I will definitely read some of the documents he's linked to. I suspect the current war in Ukraine will provide a lot of fodder for future efforts.