{"id":6242,"date":"2017-01-22T14:53:28","date_gmt":"2017-01-22T22:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/01\/22\/news-95\/"},"modified":"2017-01-22T14:53:28","modified_gmt":"2017-01-22T22:53:28","slug":"news-95","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/01\/22\/news-95\/","title":{"rendered":"What Better Way for the Marines to Prepare for Future Wars Than With Sci-Fi?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Lance Cpl. Steven West steps into a remote enemy hideout clad in a 350-pound exoskeleton, sensors piercing the darkness and displaying digital info on his helmet visor, until a shock of static feedback knocks him to the dirty floor. A band of locals surround him with pipes and rebar. \u201cThe feedback stopped, leaving his ears ringing, and grainy video feed warped back into view as he was struck again. And again.\u201d<\/p>\n

This scene isn\u2019t pulled from the latest Clancy-esque techno-thriller, but a short story written as part of a new Marine Corps exercise using science fiction to think about possible threats 15 to 30 years in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cWater\u2019s a Fightin\u2019 Word\u201d recounts what happens when a squad of Marines on a humanitarian mission in Africa gets surrounded during a global freshwater shortage. The author slips in glimpses of military technology in its infancy today, such as the exoskeleton, electromagnetic pulse weapons, and combat-ready robots, and combines it with likely geopolitical scenarios, such as conflict over water and other environmental resources. <\/p>\n

Officers at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory\/Futures Directorate in Quantico, Va., came up with the idea last year to host a sci-fi contest to spur creativity, as well as get uniformed Marines to conceive of threats in a different way. A total of 84 entries were narrowed down to 18 finalists, who were paired with professional sci-fi writers—including \u201cWorld War Z\u2019s\u201d Max Brooks—during a workshop co-hosted by the Atlantic Council. After months of editing, the top three stories were collected in \u201cScience Fiction Futures: Marine Corps Security Environment Forecast 2030-2045″ and published online<\/a> [PDF].<\/p>\n

The stories share common themes of political chaos, a rising China, a less-powerful and more inward-looking United States, conflicts over environmental resources, and the growth of megacities in the developing world. For Marines, who are the first US boots on the ground in the toughest situations, the toughest challenges may stem from the latter. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt will not be like Fallujah or Hue City,\u201d said Marine Lt. Col. Patrick Kirchner, citing intense block-by-block conflicts in Iraq 2004 and Vietnam 1968. \u201cBut more like Manhattan, and not on a weekend.\u201d Kirchner’s comments came at a panel on the sci-fi Marine warfighting project at the Atlantic Council in Washington. \u201cYou can\u2019t pick out the enemy and you can\u2019t just shoot him. You\u2019ve got to figure out how to clear a skyscraper. You can\u2019t just hang green t-shirts or chem-lites in the window and say it\u2019s clear. We have to find out how to figure out this kind of situations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fighting the Future<\/h3>\n

The \u201cScience Fiction Futures\u201d project includes \u201cDouble Ten Day,\u201d set in Taiwan after a major earthquake leads to a civil war between pro-Chinese and pro-Taiwanese forces in Taipei, and \u201cThe Montgomery Crisis,\u201d about a genetically modified bioweapon let loose in the US homeland. <\/p>\n

Kirchner says Marines<\/em> magazine is now featuring a monthly sci-fi column, and that the writing exercise has two audiences. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you target senior (Marine) leadership, you want them to think about what the future looks like and investments,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you are targeting second lieutenants and lance corporals, you want them to consider possibilities for the future that they are going to experience when they are senior enlisted or mid-grade officers of a different world that hopefully won\u2019t surprise them because they have considered it before.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Marines aren\u2019t the first big organization to use science fiction as a tool for creative planning. Corporations like Lowe\u2019s, Hershey, and Del Monte have embraced<\/a> sci-fi consultants, as have the US Navy and NATO.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe study history, but we’re starting to talk about studying science fiction more,\u201d said Brig. Gen. Julian Dale Alford, commander of the USMC Warfighting Lab\/Futures Directorate.<\/p>\n

Alford says science-fiction scenarios are meshed with closer-in decadal predictions by US intelligence agencies, and then turned into real-life wargaming episodes in places like the California desert.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt kind of dribbles down,\u201d Alford said. \u201cWe inject all kinds of future technologies using surrogates, we reorganize our forces and draw lessons learned. We do multiple experiments throughout the year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Science fiction helps break military strategists and thinkers out of their quarterly or yearly planning cycles, according to Erin Simpson, a consultant to the military and former CEO of Caerus Associates. \u201cMost folks in the intelligence community don\u2019t think about the future. Most of the intelligence production is driven by known threats,\u201d Simpson said. \u201cKnown threat versus problems of discovery. Fiction is a really good place for thinking about problems of discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, for the Marines, a great way to prepare for the threats of 2030 and beyond.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.wired.com\/category\/security\/feed\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"What<\/div>\n

Tomorrow’s conflicts won’t look much like today’s. That’s where science fiction comes in. The post What Better Way for the Marines to Prepare for Future Wars Than With Sci-Fi?<\/a> appeared first on WIRED<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[10378,10607],"tags":[5695,3104,10633,10634,714],"class_list":["post-6242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security","category-wired","tag-marines","tag-military","tag-sci-fi","tag-science-fiction","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}