Sea Control - Sea Control 151: CIMSEC Fiction Week with Ian Brown

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

CIMSEC Fiction WeekThe Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and CreativityDestination: Unknown, the first graphic novel of short stories about future war released by the Krulak Center via Marine Corps University Press.A New Conception of War by Ian T. Brown

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome aboard Sea Control. Today we're going to be discussing the recently concluded short story fiction week on the SIMSEC website. Joining me today is Major Ian Brown. Ian is a CH-53 Echo Super Stallion pilot, the author of A New Conception of War, published by the Marine Corps University Press, as well as a submission to SimSec's Short Story Fiction Week at the moral level. He's also the operations officer at the Brute Kulak Center for Innovation and Creativity

at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. As a disclaimer, our views do not represent those of the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. Ian, thanks for coming on. before we get into discussing the stories and first I want to apologize to the individual authors we're not going to deep dive into each story and pick them apart really we're going to look for overall themes but before we consider those themes Ian I want to ask you is like why fiction I know the Krulak Center sponsors a number of fiction contests the Modern War Institute down

in Australia has a number of fiction contests why do you think it's important to consider fiction as we do our trend analysis? Well, I think there's a couple of things that fiction does for us. I think kind of from my own personal perspective, for starters, is fiction is just fun to read and think of something you want to do when you want to kind of relax and unplug your mind.

It's not necessarily picking up a tome like On War by Klaus Witts or something that's kind of hard to wrap your head around. You want to have something that kind of lets you escape and relax. And I think by using fiction as a vector for professional military education and for thinking about future war, it lets you get certain messages and thoughts inside people's brains when they think they're relaxing. But we're really using that to kind of, you know, to jumpstart their own imaginations and help them think about future things in a different way. And so and kind of along with that. So, again, I come from my perspective, but also, you know, the way the Krulak Center has handled it is we don't look at it as something to supplement or to, you know, to replace professional development and some of the real hard, serious thinking to do about future conflict.

But it's another way of looking at it. And, you know, the point is not to try and get it right or accurate, because we know that nobody's going to do that. But it's just another way to kind of explore some of the threads that are facing us today and sort of tease out the implications of what they might look like tomorrow. Yeah, if you wear a Navy or Marine Corps uniform, I don't think you have to think back very far. You can just go back to Ghost Fleet to see the way that fiction can affect strategy or the way our services are behaving. So I remember when that came out, and I think it was back in 2015, that Admiral Richardson and General Neller seemed like they were on a book tour, this advertising, speaking about Ghost Fleet in every conceivable venue. you oh absolutely i remember the uh i was in quantico um when general kneller first took over and when he came to do like one of his first town hall of his town hall series couldn't have been more than like five ten minutes into his talk he said hey who here is red ghost fleet and uh not a lot of hands went up and he said all right if you haven't you all need to go and read it because this is a pretty important book absolutely so that said we have a body of fiction in front of us here I know accompanying the post on our social media feeds there, we have a word cloud that was built by Mark from our social media team.

Kind of wishing I knew Mark's last name right now so I could credit him properly. But we'll get to that. I'll fix that on social. That being said, so all the stories were aggregated. We built a word cloud from it so you could see the main themes. Would you like to start there or someplace else? you know i think that that word cloud kind of captures some of the themes that we had emailed back and forth about before doing this and you know the uh the big words that jump out are i you

know i think the biggest word was china if i remember we're trying yeah china chinese or various derivatives that seems to be sort of the common theme that when we're thinking about future conflict we're thinking about china and there there's probably a number of reasons why we've sort of gone in that direction. But I will say that that trend kind of matches some of the writing contests that our own center has sponsored previously. You know, I think we're taking pretty seriously this idea that we're living in a realm of potential near peer conflict in the future. And, you know, the most competitive competitor out there is China and what it brings to the table. So that definitely jumped out at me. Yeah. Once we had created the word

cloud or the social outreach team at SimSec had created the word cloud, we started sharing that internally and discussing a little bit, and one of our guys, Chris O'Connor, made the comment that ship Chinese missile does a pretty good job of capturing the Navy zeitgeist right now. One of the other larger words that jumped out at me was Marine, actually, and it appeared larger than Navy on pretty much every word cloud that we created. Is there any meaning that you can assign to that? I don't specifically remember the backgrounds of all the different authors. I know there were at least one or two of the Marines besides myself who submitted stuff. But it could be that at least on the Marine Corps side, in terms of our, you know, both our internal and external messaging,

we're looking at that theater of potential conflict pretty seriously. You know, for the Marines, it's a thread that winds its way through the Commandant's planning guidance that came out this summer, that, you know, that's basically what we're looking to get ready for. And, you know, the Commandant's planning guidance also tied pretty closely to the Navy. But I know from our own side, that's the type of conflict we're trying to get ourselves ready for. So that message has been hammered home pretty well, I think, at least on the Marine Corps side. Yeah, and I kind of wonder as I think about all the submissions, is it to our detriment that we're so focused on China? Because again, we talked about the value of fiction here. It's like, well, fiction is all

kind of focused on one opponent here, at least in the context of this writing prompt. I think there's probably a pretty good argument to be made, and you can see it playing out all over social media, and Twitter in particular, that we're not paying enough attention to China in the real world. But just for the sake of this writing prompt here, the NDS identified two primary near-peer competitors here, Russia and China, and everyone has pretty much opted to write about China, or smaller actors in a couple cases there. So that being said, why did they

do that is it trying to just a sexier opponent is like do we just consider pacific to be an inherently more maritime theaters and we write for simsex so that's what we chose yeah i mean it's possible it could be that or it could just be the kind of overall volume of messaging that's come out of a you know our various national defense and national security organs over the last several years i mean i think in in throughout our our you know our history at least in the last 100 years or so, we're always trying to get ready for somebody. So, you know, maybe it just so happens that right now that somebody is China back in the Cold War, it used to be Russia. And we just, we find that we're more focused and organized when we're setting ourselves up against

a specific adversary rather than something more ambiguous. I think it's interesting that China featured above all. And, but I hope that doesn't mean that other people out there or whether it's other submissions you got or other people thinking about future conflicts are not looking at other stuff. And I'd even say, you know, take today's headlines, for example, right? Like I woke up this morning and we had mobs storming the embassy in Baghdad. So while we're getting ready for China, it's important to remember that there's other things out there we might need to get ready to respond to. Absolutely. Any other overarching themes that you want to talk about before we start going through some of the items that I noticed? I think, I mean, I think that one of the other

big themes. And if I recall, it showed up in the word cloud here, you know, was drone or various unmade autonomous systems. You know, that subject matter in and of itself has kind of, I mean, not to say it captured the imagination, it's a legitimate new development in warfare over the last 20 years or so about how prolific they are. You know, I think it almost kind of complements the China focus as well, because again, from, you know, my own Marine Corps perspective, So that as we've been looking at how to restructure the force to disperse and sort of harden and survive ourselves in the South China Sea area, we've been looking at small expendable drones that we can use to kind of extend our reach. But it's not the end of the world if we lose one or two.

So I think I'm not surprised to see them kind of go hand in hand. Yeah. And another theme that really jumped out to me was body modification. So I know you wrote about it. I also think back to Ghost Fleet. And it just seems to be a theme that, as I look across all the stories and the frequency with which it appears, it's like, I don't want to use the word consensus, but people seem convinced that this is something that's going to happen in the next five to ten years. Yeah, I don't know. And I think you could potentially do a whole writing contest just on body modification if you wanted to. But it makes me think back to an article. I think it was actually an essay a neighbor of mine who went to school advanced war fighting a few years ago wrote. He was talking about how sort of the last uncharted territory in getting a military advantage is in the human body or the human brain. And we're jumping over each other for drones, for ships, for connectivity, for orbital superiority. We haven't really done much with the human body, us and our competitors.

So that's potentially the area where if we think that we can't gain superiority longer than a few seconds, we might look at that as the place to gain superiority. That's an interesting thought. I mean, the physical enhancement of our soldiers is something that we as Americans in fiction have been thinking about for 80 some years, going back to ever since Captain America was a comic book. Yeah. And, you know, there's certainly lots of moral, ethical implications, et cetera. And, you know, it does kind of seem run counter to, you know, all the rules we have in the military today, right? Like physical enhancement to gain advantage is, you know, it gets you kicked out, right? You know, if you're doing certain performance enhancers, but what if a day comes when we decide that that's the only place we can gain a real advantage? You know, will that conversation change? And I don't know, but I think it's interesting to explore. So interesting to explore. And then the other piece that I found really compelling at the end of the story you'd written, you went into kind of the human costs for the Marines who had employed this gear and what it's like, what the permanent costs for them. And that's something that you don't really see a lot of, like, high-level policy pieces talking about. So we talk about deployment of new systems and what that means at the tactical level for that person for the rest of their life. That's something that you considered? You actually spent time thinking about, like, what is going to be the human cost for my characters here?

I think I approached it both from a storytelling technique and from a kind of from a larger perspective that we simply don't know what the implications could be. I didn't want to make that all these modifications turn the soldiers into sort of undefeatable super soldiers, which I think would have sort of taken away from the realism. But I also think that, you know, we've developed certain military technologies where the race is to get it to the battlefield. And we don't quite think about the long term implications of it until after we've used it and we start seeing the results. I thought it was just something to throw in there and think about. And it even, I'll say I took a little inspiration from Ghost Fleet as well, because if I remember when the pirate gang is getting ready to go up into space to recapture the space station, I think they know that the guys that go up, they're all volunteers and they've signed medical waivers, basically accepting, you know, what's been done to their body. They accept the responsibility and they understand that it's irreversible. So I think if we start exploring, you know, body or brain modification seriously in the future, these are questions we're going to have to think about.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So one of the other through lines here is that the U.S. Navy appears to be in for a very rough day. I lost track of the number of carriers that we lost over the various stories here. And clearly nobody is buying aircraft carrier stock. Yeah. You know, as a Marine, I don't I almost don't want that to be true. Right. Because carriers are carriers are going to be carrying some of our jets and, you know, the small decks are going to be carrying the rest of us. So I'd like to believe that we're going to be survivable in that. But I think it feeds in kind of a larger realization that's come into the Defense Department as a whole recently is we're putting more and more capabilities into fewer and fewer platforms, which means the loss of one of those platforms has an exponentially larger impact today than it would have 30, 40 years ago when we had five or six of the same thing. And now we have one. So it may be it's not something easy to think about.

But I mean, our writers are certainly not the only ones thinking about it today. And, you know, I think we need to it's worth pulling that thread. OK, you know, we've lost a bunch of carriers, but there's still a war going on. What do we do now? Yeah, part of what that makes me wonder is, are we depressing ourselves before we ever get into the fight here? I'm reminded of the sort of cult of defeatism that grew up around Henry Pétain in France in 1940. It was like, well, you're defeated before you've really begun to fight. So I understand the need to have a realistic conversation is like prepare to face these losses. Are we doing ourselves a disservice here by just constantly assuming these massive losses?

Yeah, I don't claim to know the answer to that. You know, there's probably a fine line between Stark facing the facts and then letting negative imagination run away with you. But, you know, losing carriers, this is not the first time I've read stories about losing carriers. And as as as a national defense concept, it's not the first time we've talked about few and exquisite platforms. So I don't think that's a conversation that's going away. One of the other major takeaways here was just nobody thinks that Taiwan is surviving as well. Even in the story on the invention intervention in Syria is a mention of the Chinese successful invasion of Taiwan. Thoughts on that? I don't know.

I mean, I think it's that that may be kind of the thing that where morale kind of comes into more play than the technology. Right. Like we've done our best to sort of stiff arm China from from thinking about doing something to Taiwan. But if it looked like they would do it, what would the national appetite be? And if they did it, but they kind of got stuck and bogged down, it would be a question of national calculus. What is it worth for the nation to go in and try and reverse that? You know, that's certainly certainly not the first time that that question has been explored. And I think that that may be something that's hard to explore inside just a short story. I mean, that's really a question that the nation as a whole would have to decide.

I absolutely agree that it's a tough thing to capture the question of national will in a short story. Moving on, though, to the next theme that kind of jumped out at me is the mixed opinions on F-35. So you've got one story, Dreams, Nightmares, Talking Tigers, where it's an absolutely super platform there. It's a difference maker for the American forces and the Taiwanese forces in that story, versus on the other, multiple other stories, it sounds kind of like a disaster that we don't really think is going to be that effective. Now I know you're not in the F-35 community, you are in the aviation community. Is this kind of reflective of what you hear about the F-35 or mixed messaging? Yeah, I mean, like you said, I'm in the aviation community, but I'm a helicopter pilot.

I'm pretty far removed from jet operations, so I can't really speak intelligently to it. I think the biggest thing is the question mark. We don't really know, right? I mean, we've put it up, and it's gone up to the red flag exercises, and it seems to have done pretty well in those exercises. But the second you throw an intelligent-thinking adversary on the other side, they're looking at what we've done with the F-35 as well. And I think we have to be prepared for the possibility that some of our assumptions about it may be proven false once it's put up against a real adversary rather than a simulated one. Conversely, some of our assumptions may be proven extremely right. You know, it could be proven more right than we even expected and throw the adversary for a loop.

So I think the mixed opinion simply reflects the fact that we really just – we're not going to know until it goes out there. So the last thing I wanted to discuss here before we go into some other questions is vulnerability of communications. This seemed to come up in almost every story we encountered here, that we're going to need some other means to talk to one another besides the traditional means that you and I have grown up with in our respective services. I mentioned in my story is flag hoists and flashing light. One of the authors brought up American Sign Language. Do you think we've come to a consensus here that's like these communications are going to be a real problem, and should we start exploring other means? I think that particular vulnerability has been identified in definitely much higher levels than writing a story. I recall General Neller a few years back, he talked about reducing the signature of the command post out in the field.

We go out and we set ourselves up as if we're going into combat, but we have these huge antenna stations and, you know, SATCOM links and everybody's got a cell phone out there that's radiating. And that's a giant target in the EM spectrum. And we've become used to that simply because of the conflicts we've been fighting in have allowed it. And, you know, that's not necessarily a bad thing, right? Like that's one of our asymmetric advantages that we have over our adversaries, you know, the adversaries at least that we fought recently is they have no way of stopping us from communicating. So we have exploited that. We have built as much stuff to use that asymmetric advantage as we can. But I think as we shifted back to thinking about slightly more capable adversaries, we've come to recognize that that's a great asymmetric advantage against one person, but it's kind of a vulnerability if that's all you know and you've never practiced real degraded communications. So I think that it's kind of entered the consciousness, at least over the last several years. So we're starting to think about what we could do as alternatives because we seem to think that we're not going to be able to count on those comms, at least in the way we've had them in the past.

And I think, you know, going back to why the use of fiction is kind of helpful is these stories kind of let us explore some different possibilities that, you know, maybe you test one or two of them out the next time you go out on a field exercise and see how it works for you. Yeah, let's hope so. Did you have a favorite story? So there were a couple of stories that I did. I did really like for different reasons. I'd say in terms of just overall atmospherics, I got a huge kick out of Brian Kirk's story and his kind of his unsexy take on the Space Force, if you will. As I was reading it, first of all, I loved giving the Space Force guy the call sign Shatner because that when I read that, I'm like, that is 100 percent how we treat people in the aviation community. You know, we're going to give you a nickname that we know you don't like, and we're going to make you listen to it every day for the rest of your career. And I also felt that there was probably a more realistic take on what Space Force life would really be like. You know, you may join up thinking you were going to be on the next Star Wars set or on the Expanse, but it turns out you're still down in the gravity well with the rest of us.

And you're looked at as kind of strange by the other services. So and I also found it interesting that his vision of the Space Force did not actually have Americans in space, at least as I remember from reading it. You know, the Shatner talks about the best assignments. It's not like being up in orbit on some some Death Star battle station, but it's just being a better basis planet side. um so so i and i i found it i found it kind of funny but also a an interesting question is even if we make space the domain of an independent service does that mean we have to put lots of people up there to own that space or is that something we can cover down with autonomous systems and ai to do the space-based stuff and keep the people down here so yeah i liked his story for a lot of reasons you know it'd probably be better from a podcasting perspective if i was

to disagree with you about favorite stories, but yeah, Brian Kirk's story I found just phenomenal. I started laughing almost immediately just at the banter between the characters, and I continued laughing throughout and found myself having to explain some things to my spouse about why it was that I was laughing so hard while sitting over in my easy chair reading this. And the first, you know, topside preservation Brian Usafraid's hammering blows and the buzzing of power tools echoed through the room as the pain chippers worked on maintaining the flight deck so like i felt that

to the depths of my soul again remember many times sitting in my stateroom on a ship working at my computer because that was where you work on a ship wearing double hearing protection because my guys are out working topside somebody's using a pain chipper or a needle gun on the outside of deck the second thing is a marine correctly using ship versus boat in conversation with a space force officer in reality that a marine would probably if he was talking to a navy officer refer to it as a boat solely for the purpose of pissing the navy guy off three dimension and throw away a coas and four is just mocking another services junior officer so as someone who spent two and a half years on the joint staff surrounded by officers senior to me is like this is very

familiar how we talk with each other when we're in an office environment when we're not you know engaged in combat yeah i definitely i recognize a lot of stuff that that struck sounded very true to me i did want to talk about your story briefly though that was actually my favorite for a few different reasons as you wrote you had to make some assumptions can you walk us through some of those assumptions uh yeah i can um and as i was thinking about this question before uh we talked here i i a bunch of stuff kind of popped into my brain so if i start going too long just let me know and cut me off. But I'd say, so I think on the surface, like the reader probably thinks that the biggest assumption was the tech I was talking about, especially the subderms, the implants in

your brain that have a entangled particle connection that lets you communicate in crazy ways. I guess one of the assumptions is if we had that thing, the sky's the limit for capability on it, right? So I want to, like I mentioned at the beginning, I wanted to avoid turning the soldiers into super soldiers. They were just completely unrealistic. And so as I was fleshing out the tech assumptions, I was partly helped by the fact that I am not an expert in quantum entanglement or quantum physics at all. So I avoided trying. My assumption was even the best scientists probably wouldn't claim they know much more than a very small fraction of how quantum physics and particle entanglement works. So they would probably be pretty conservative in how much

they're going to let the human body interact with it. And so that's kind of what drove me to the squid skin concept, which essentially offloads a lot of the tactical communication burden to the suit rather than the subderm thing in the brain, which then minimizes the number of those particles inside the user. And so I also, as I was thinking about that, from a psychological standpoint, I figured there could be a double-edged sword if you put particles inside all of your teammates to allow instant mental communication you know if you had a teammate who was injured or killed

you potentially run the risk of them dumping their raw feelings and emotions right into your brain with no way of shutting it off potentially causing um some psychological casualties so again that's why i kind of uh i tried to i didn't want to make it a an omnipotent device you know you would have a few ways of communicating but then the squid skin would offload a lot of that communication, you know, to preserve you psychologically while protecting you on the electromagnetic spectrum. But then I think the, from my perspective, at least the technical assumptions were sort of not the most radical ones in the story. I tried to explore a lot of different changes in our culture and our organization that I think would be kind of

radical to make that tech concept work. So talking about, I think I mentioned in an early part of the story, we're going to stop being us, right? Which has a lot of implications because being us has certain policy consequences, acquisitions consequences, and national statecraft consequences. So I, you know, if we're going to stop being us and turn ourselves into sort of these smaller, very different types of units, we're going to have to let them do certain things. And we're going to have to organize ourselves for defense in certain ways. One elements of that, which I tried to touch in on was kind of the introduction or reintroduction of whole of whole of government deception as a strategic tool and uh that was when you know kind of the the big

part of the plan was convincing the Chinese that we were not actually going to be coming to the aid of Taiwan when in fact we were planning on doing so and having a sufficient deception campaign to make to make it seem like we were telling the truth and uh that's something that I've I've explored it or i've read a lot about and i think it's it's not something that's baked into our democratic system the way it is that you know the way an authoritarian state can more harmonize the messages coming out of it and uh i i think that would be a big sea change for us if we engaged in national level deception but it could be something that would be necessary in near-peer conflicts and uh and oh by the way you look back in times like world war ii we were actually pretty

good at it and i think that's something we may have to re-examine going forward and then i guess finally one thing i wanted to get into not being us was looking at the adversary not as a bunch of weapon systems but as human beings that have their own vulnerabilities and i wanted to kind of challenge the assumption that the chinese capabilities means they have this this wall of stuff that they can throw out at us and that it's like a it's like a force field as soon as we start crossing the range rings of their weapon systems, we're just going to start getting attrited and dying. And I don't think we spend enough time looking at the people behind those machines, at the

context of how they're trained, at their relationships with their chain of command, as well as some of the broader social fractures inside an authoritarian country like China. So I wanted to kind of slay the boogeyman, if you will, of China's going to be surrounded to buy range rings of deaths of all kinds of missiles, and it's just going to be impossible. There's vulnerabilities there that I think if we looked at a little more from the human side, we might find ways that we could gain some advantages. So Ian's story on the moral level is about a Marine Corps unit that gets deployed in the vicinity of a Chinese garrison, and they use the technology they brought with them to sow discord amongst the Chinese via the Chinese social media platforms.

So you're talking cheating spouses, betrayal of family members. The Chinese garrison turns on itself and becomes combat ineffective. What we've seen recently is the Chinese and the Russians have kind of moved to, we'll say, set some borders around their Internet where they only allow certain information in. It's like they're cutting themselves off a little bit from the World Wide Web. Do you think that is a move to harden their societies against the tactics you're proposing? I think it's a reaction to the fact that they've they internally sort of understand that the big danger of social media is you can't really control it. You know, you may be able to you can maybe talk to the headquarters of the company, but it's very, very hard to sort of tamp down and control individual users. And I think as we saw in Hong Kong, for example, you'd have some of the protesters were using things like VPNs and other digital workarounds to get outside the great firewall of China that tries to block information going in and out.

Yeah, so – and I – if I – it was last week or so, I saw something about Russia trying – basically taking the internet offline and then bringing it on again. And I think those are certainly responses to the fact that they – those kind of regimes, free exchange of information is dangerous to them. And so they're trying, they recognize that. And so they're trying to find ways to sort of fill those cracks. Conversely, because they see it as a danger, that's a potential avenue we can use to exploit. So back to the subject of body modifications, you outlined a pretty specific one in your story. You've talked at length about it now. Would you sign the waiver? I really don't know. Do you mean to tell me that your extensive experience with our services combined information technology systems where Microsoft Outlook is oftentimes a 50-50 proposition has not built your confidence and our ability to install this on a human being? Yeah, so I'll tell you this. I think I'll pass on the subderm for right now, or I won't commit one way or the other, but I did deliberately try and sort of push the envelope on sort of how much autonomy we would let those lower-level units have with some of that other equipment. I was trying to sort of push a very extreme version of mission command, kind of going back to the loss of connectivity, loss of our 24-hour information stream, is we may have to grapple with the fact that we're not going to be able to have the same level of control and communication with these small distributed units.

At least in the Marine Corps, we're talking about potentially sprinkling across the South China Sea, sort of hold the line alone and unafraid until we can bring the surge forces, I think we call them, you know, back to get into the fight. So understanding some of these vulnerabilities like exploiting distrust of a local political system in an adversary or tinkering with the adversary's national financial system, we see those as vulnerabilities. How much trust are we willing to push down to the lower level to exploit those things without them asking permission? And I don't really have a good answer for that, but I wanted to explore it because if we're reserving a lot of those previous national-level decisions at the very highest level, but then we lose touch with those units we're expecting to carry out the national strategy, how are they going to do that if they don't have the authority and the trust given to them to go do some of these things on their own? You know, pushing national level decisions down to a squad leader is certainly an uncomfortable conversation, but I think it's, you know, maybe not in that extreme fashion, but those kind of things I think we need to start thinking about if we're expecting to lose our communication, expecting to be able to have direct control over these units. If we want them to be effective on the battlefield, we may need to give them a lot more authority and autonomy than we have in the past. Reflecting again on the body of work as a whole now, was there anything that wasn't there that really surprised you? Yeah, you mentioned hypersonics, and I was struck by the absence of them, which I think is interesting since Russia just said they've got the first one ready to go on their side.

I was also struck, not a whole lot of talk about artificial intelligence, except in a very tangential sense. I touched on it a little bit in my story, but it was very much as like kind of one small, it was a small tool enabler in a larger package. And going back and looking at your word cloud from this week, AI might be in there somewhere, but I'm having a real hard time, you know, seeing it. It's probably size four font or something. And so that struck me, especially in contrast to, you know, looking at China, especially like China's big investment into that capability. that it was not talked about a whole lot about here yeah given that you can't really go on natsec twitter mill twitter whatever we were calling it this week without seeing a very steady drumbeat of articles about ai or hypersonic so i was very surprised to see

see them get very little mention here but i wonder is that because of the services that are being discussed here and it's primarily the navy and marine corps is there a view whether it's from the outside or the inside that maybe these technologies are not necessarily navy marine corps technologies maybe we do these technologies like this is going to come from somewhere else yeah it could be looked at more as a you know kind of a smaller less less vital tactical tool compared to other things we're talking about yeah that's interesting any of these stories send a shiver up your spine so uh mike beretta's tree of life story so uh i found that one i i i really i i liked it and i i'm not saying it was a you know a very happy story because obviously it

wasn't but i i liked it because it was very different from the rest of the stories uh it had a very human focus and aspect and what i what's really struck me about it was that it was it was a reminder once you get past all of this like the stuff we've been talking about the last 30 minutes, the drones, AI, missiles, ships, all that stuff. At the end of that technology chain, it's human beings who are the ones who ultimately suffer the consequences of war. I was also, it gets to an issue that is getting, I think, more attention every year we go on in this, you know, what we've called the forever war now is that military service as a generational thing. You know, now you're having fathers handing over the war to their children because it's been

going on for so long, as well as sort of an increasing self-selection of who it is in the military you know we're not drawing from a wider population it's that generational thing it's multiple generations of the same family constantly serving so i thought his story struck right to the heart of the burden that places on the families that do that generation after generation and how you know how even you cannot put a uniform on but just seeing that going on in your family and seeing the consequences can have a very strong emotional impact you know i got kids of my own too and uh the one moment that really kind of hit home for me in his story was when uh he had this thing about the you know the i think it was the father pinning the gold wings of gold onto his

daughter going on and you know my my daughter has got a you know a carol danvers captain marvel streak in her as much as anything else and and and just you know thinking about that sequence of you know is that something i i could ever bring myself to do with my own daughter it was very it was very powerful and very moving and very troubling so mike's story is an excellent read and it's an extremely difficult read just based on the subject matter that he chose to address and i'll just say now i'm the parent of a marine infantryman he and i don't really talk for a lot reasons. But Mike's story and his, you know, the daughter's fate in this story just triggered a lot of emotions there as I thought about recurring stress nightmares around notification that

something has happened like that. So, you know, the knock on the door, the chaplain standing there in his dress uniform uh and you know my personal favorite uh the one that wakes me up most frequently is i'm down in the national military command center in the pentagon and some sort of notification flashes up on the screen and that's how i find out like no notice i'm just blindside with his mike's subject matter was really tough and then also just the nature of the way his daughter passes there and it's almost dismissed within the story the way he's written is really artful where he's done the innocuous nature of the mistake one of the two pilots may have made you just think back to all the close calls that you've had in your own career you know there's

no malice of forethought as you make those mistakes just somebody does something wrong in the heat of the moment now somebody's not coming home so very tough read and Mike did a phenomenal job with that before i become too maudlin here though any other topics you want to discuss um not really i just i'm i i love using or i love reading fiction that explores these kind of things and i'm glad to see that these kind of uh these kind of contests are growing in number uh you know i know the army the army mad scientist lab does one uh kulak center is doing a couple the Australians are in on it and I just think it's it's great that we are trying to to capitalize on the imaginations of our people to deal or to sort of start thinking through things that we may

need to thinking be thinking about really hard in 10 20 or maybe not even 10 20 years maybe two to three years we need to start thinking about it now well this has been great again I want to thank Ian Brown for joining us today you can find him on twitter at at ian underscore tb03 you can follow along with his work for the Krulak Center at the Krulak Center. Ian, any parting thoughts on what we can expect next from you or the Krulak Center? Well, I would, on kind of both those questions, I'd say our next big creative writing project, we've just wrapped up a creative writing essay contest for some Marine Corps students talking about education and training in the future, which changes we might make for the kind of future we're talking about here in the stories

in your writing contest, but also we are deep into working on volume two of our graphic novel product looking at future war called Destination Unknown. If you're not familiar, that was a pilot project that was done last year with a very small group of motivated Marines, but it was to use the graphic novel format to kind of explore some of the, one, to explore these questions about future War, but also use that medium as a PME tool. And it was a really cool project. There were, I think, about five or six stories that looked at artificial intelligence, drones. There may have been some bodily enhancement in there, too. I'm trying to remember. But a couple cool things about it was it was entirely written and illustrated by Marines, for Marines. And at

the end of every story were some PME questions to further discussion about some of these trends. And so we're very excited to be working on Volume 2 of that right now. I'm contributing a story myself, but we have members of each of the armed services in the U.S. contributing stories, so we're going to have a joint perspective on this one. And we've even got a team of Australians who are contributing theirs as well. So that's our contribution to trying to think about the future fight and some of the different threads it could take. So can I ask, is that something that's going to be available online, or is it something we could order? Oh, no, it's 100% free, accessible online.

if you go to the Marine Corps University Press website, you can find the PDF and download it for free. And if anyone is in the Quantico area and wants to come by the Krulak Center, we have a very limited supply of hard copies that we are happy to share with others. That's awesome. So for those of you who are going to go look up Ian on Twitter to see what he's been up to, I'm going to give you fair warning here. I went expecting to see him pumping his book relentlessly, maybe some thoughts on leadership tactics and strategy maybe some discussion of Klauswitz or Boyd no it is 90 percent New England Patriots football commentary so Ian as a closer could you give us a Pat's playoff prediction look there's no denying it's it's not and it hasn't been a season of

dreams but we've had people writing the obituary of the Patriots before and they've been proven wrong and I'll just say that it when it comes down the line there is nobody I would rather have in the playoffs than the Brady Belichick team to put my hopes and dreams on so we'll we'll see how things look on Sunday so as a reminder you can find me on twitter at jwsc03 simsec is at simsec and you can find the simsec website at simsec.org thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next time. We'll be right back.