Sea Control - Sea Control 280 - To Boldly Go with Doctrine Man and Jon Klug

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

Links1. To Boldly Go: Leadership, Strategy and Conflict in the 21st Century and Beyond, by Jonathan Klug and Steve Leonard (editors), Casemate, Sep 30, 2021.

Hey folks, Jared here. We've got Doctrine Man on the podcast today, Steve Leonard, and his co-editor, co-author, John Klug. Join host John Frerichs to discuss their new fic and compilation, To Bull They Go. This episode was edited and produced by Keegan Ingersoll. We just launched the call for submissions for the SimSec Forum for Authors and Readers over at the main website. If there was a particular piece that you enjoyed this year, nominate it, and if it gets enough votes, you can hear the author present his or her work. We've also officially put out our call for articles for the end-of-year fiction contest, so go over to simsec.org for full details. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Plums.

You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Guten Tag, shipmates, and welcome back. Today, we will dive into an exciting new book that explores leadership, strategy, and conflict in the 21st century and beyond through a series of short fictional intelligence pieces written by several different authors. Joining us today are two of the editors and authors of a few of the stories, John Klug and Stephen Leonard, aka Dr. Mann. John and Steve, can you both please give a brief personal introduction and how you two came

together to edit a book together? Well, I guess I'll jump in here first. So, for anybody who asks, I'm a faculty member at the University of Kansas, have been since I retired from the Army in 2015 after a 28-year career. John and I have been friends for years, and we have tossed around project ideas for just about as long as I can remember, and this was one that kind of floated around. It was initially suggested by Mick Ryan, who wrote the foreword and contributed a chapter to the book. And Mick, being an Australian two-star, probably had more on his plate than most people I know. So it was easier for us to pick up the ball and run with this project and bounce it around and come up with some ideas. And then, as I like to say, build the dream team

to make everything come to fruition. So that's my side of it. Yeah, I'm John Klug. I'm at the Army War College, assistant professor, going to school as a PhD candidate when Steve brought up the idea of this particular project and given our long history together and talks about science fiction, it just made perfect sense. And I guess what I brought in, apart from my own interest in science fiction is a lot of interest in military and naval history. So I enjoyed that in my time as an army strategist. We both have served in that role, I think, brought a unique perspective. And we built a large coalition really to to write this book, which was a lot of fun and very interesting. but that's me in a nutshell, I guess. Gentlemen, thank you. The book today that we will discuss is titled To Boldly Go, Leadership, Strategy, and Conflict in the

21st Century and Beyond, and it'll be released to the public on 3 September 2021. The book is a riveting collection of short stories that I would best characterize as fictional intelligence pieces that challenge your perception of both the present and the future. Before we begin, I'll remind the listeners that all opinions expressed are our own and not reflective of any institutions with which we might otherwise be associated. Gentlemen, as you mentioned during the introduction, you did collect an impressive group of authors to contribute to the book. August Cole, Mick Cook, Max Brooks, and M.L. Kavanaugh, to name just a few. Why did you choose fictional intelligence to address leadership strategy in future conflict?

Let me jump on this one. We had explored this a couple of times previously. I was part of the project with Max and Matt Kavanaugh with Strategy Strikes Back, which used Star Wars as the backdrop to discuss many of these same issues. And then we followed that up with Winning Westeros, which used Game of Thrones to do the same kind of thing. But we felt like that there was a lot more left to discuss. And science fiction provides this just rich tapestry of ideas. And this is one that I know John can expound on, but there's so much there to use in terms of metaphorical content to explore things that we deal with on a daily basis. Obviously, whether it was leadership, whether it's conflict, whether ideas of diversity to explore toxic leadership, all those things,

you find all that in science fiction. And a lot of times science fiction deals with it in a way that we can relate better and and that's really what uh the power of the medium that you have something that's really uh really gives a good example of a of a of a subject that you want to discuss but in a fictional sense and people more people relate to it so like if if you talk about well here's how something works in the marine corps and unless somebody's really attuned and familiar with the core and how things work they might not get it but if you take that same topic and say let's talk about the Kobayashi Maru and how it affects planning and preparation then everybody will say hey wait I've seen that I know exactly what you're talking about

but you can pull in more people that can relate to the subject and then expand the discussion group per se so that was one of the ideas behind this book was just open the aperture to science fiction broadly so we could have more people with a broader view of science fiction to introduce topics of discussion? Yeah, I think fundamentally it's about tapping into imagination. It's being able to explore strategy and leadership and conflict from different perspectives. And I think Steve covered that very well. Imagining what the profession of arms will be like in the future is a way to think about it today and think about how do we get from today towards where we want to be for tomorrow. And there's so many examples in the past of people using the future

to think about these things. I mean, everything from War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells, imagining what conflict would be like and how that would inform things. Again, I'm a World War II historian in a lot of ways, and there's a great example of this. In 1925, a gentleman named Hector Bywater, he's a journalist and commentator on things naval, I guess I would say, and he wrote The Great War in the Pacific, and it was, quote-unquote, a history, right? A history of a war between the United States and Japan in 1931 to 1933. And he got a lot of things right, so to speak. So it's just another example of how we can think about the future to inform what we're trying to do today. John brings up a really good point, too, that you mentioned the use of fictional intelligence

and getting it right. Everybody here has probably read Tom Clancy, and that was when Tom Clancy first published uh that was one of the things that struck me was he got so much right and yeah he had some research and later on he had a lot of help but that's what always made fictional intelligence so much fun was you can just be stabbing out there in the dark and you get some things right and that makes your writing so much more interesting and so when you get into the science fiction world there's so much that we like people like to talk about star trek in the 60s predicting so much of the technology that we have today it makes those kinds of things more fun more interesting more compelling to audiences so so that's a it's an obvious medium to lean on those

elements of a reality definitely help pull and i think you know spawn that imagination that john mentioned you know i i think back of books growing up as i came through the military like starship troopers and ender's game and the forever war and they all have some element of truth that they're based in, they also allow that imagination to take place. What were the challenges and the rewards with working with 30 different authors, including yourselves, who contributed to the final book? John's laughing. So you ever see that commercial that everybody's seen the commercial about the cat herders? That's the challenge of dealing with 30 people, because all of a sudden, you're dealing with 30 people with 30 different lives, 30 different sets of priorities, 30

different competing agendas and trying to get everybody heard and pointed in the right direction, same direction on the same timeline, that'll keep you up late at night. But it's important to be able to do so because, you know, John and I and Mick, the three of us probably could have written this whole thing ourselves, but then you just don't open the aperture enough. So the opportunity that comes with this is being able to get more voices involved in a broader perspective bring in more examples of of fiction that we haven't considered and you get a much richer uh i think you get a much better product in the end yeah just just to pile on i mean 30 different authors this is this is an eclectic bunch now given the circumstances that we've all been dealing with

for the past two years we never got everyone in one room but i'm sure it would have been high adventure uh with with the 30 authors that we had just just sit down and chat but more to the point steve mentioned different perspectives all these folks have different experiences so they of course like anyone are leveraging the things that they have done in their personal interests to tell a story to to tell a story about the future using uh science fiction and trying to draw lessons so the richness involved in that and again it was a coalition operation i mentioned that earlier i'm sure uh we we inadvertently applied a lot of coalition doctrine uh in our approach to get this done um herding kittens or uh as some would say running the zoo with the cages open well it's

a shame that the group of the authors never got the opportunity to all come together, but I'm sure that's a convention maybe you guys can host in a COVID-free world sometime soon that many people would sign up for. I think the book offers lessons for anyone inside or outside the military, and I would say from a private to a general or flag officer, but who was your intended audience and how did you shape, how did this shape your final product? So that's a great question, probably more so because I think John and I probably talked to audience even before we really got too deep into content and before we even talked to authors. And we were in the early stages of writing our very first book proposal, which we honestly never finished. And that subject came up, what's our

intended audience? And it's like, well, we don't want to focus just on the military because that's easily done but it also limits the limits the the appeal of the book and if you're going to talk about book proposals and you're going to talk to a publisher out of the blue which we did you want to be able to pitch a product that has as much broad appeal as possible and so how do we how do we expand that appeal and so okay let's not just write about conflict let's write about leadership let's write about different areas because then you can expand from just the military to business as well and so then all of a sudden you can address business leaders and business professionals and then let's get as we dig into the subject matter and you start talking

science fiction then you open up a third audience uh science fiction fans who who might actually be really interested to see how these how their favorite uh genre uh can be applied in different areas and so when we sat down and finally pitched it uh i was very happy and i know john was too is we didn't even finish the proposal we had a draft proposal and we had acceptance by a publisher before we even got to a final uh a final written product uh as far as the proposal was concerned and then we were scrambling because oh you know we really don't have our collective uh uh oh boy how do you say this you don't have our collective shit together uh at this point and we're scrambling to say okay well we got a publisher but we're not there yet oh it's okay get there kind of thing so

so our intended audience was fairly broad we wanted to hit military wanted to hit business and other professionals we wanted to be able to hit the general uh science fiction fan base which gives you enough appeal that we would hope would make this sell well uh when it hits bookshelves yeah i think steve you know is spot on on this one we just wanted this to be very broad and and make sure that at least a couple chapters would resonate with uh all those different audiences that steve mentioned that there'd be something uh for everybody and and you wouldn't have to necessarily be a die-hard science fiction fan but you know a casual science fiction fan meaning someone who's just seen you know a couple of star wars movies and and enjoyed them just as as

entertainment but uh it's not going to argue about you know how long a womp rat is that they were shooting with 1319s or whatever um or the the other thing the big bang theory as those examples like sheldon who will argue with you over the finest points of whatever you're talking about in whatever genre you want we wanted this to be accessible and interesting and fun i believe you guys certainly certainly accomplished that i want to pivot and i want to explore one of the stories of the two of you co-wrote it was entitled yours is the superior experience intellect in the battle of the mutara nebula as a as a kid i grew up watching star wars and star trek with my father and i appreciated the extension of the storyline without spoiling the ending what was the story

about and how was it writing and editing the story together well i guess i i gotta lead off on this one um but i gotta digress before i even get into it i love movie quotes so it it doesn't matter uh it's science fiction comedy uh you name it blues brothers star wars jaws ferris bueller's day off steve's probably thinking about all the times he's had to listen to my bad quotes and including quince hey woo and uh so but con i think is one of the most quotable villains of all time and and one of the things that we get into a bit in this chapter and and uh i get into later in another one is uh why he's such a great character why he's such a great villain the greatest movies or stories have a great antagonist um if you look at star wars the original trilogy it's about the

redemption of darth vader if you're talking about star trek uh if you look at con he's he's a great colorful uh character and again starting off the the chapter with there she is you know the whole movies full of great quotes but the Battle of the Tara Nebula has a lot of great ones from not only Ricardo Montalban playing Khan but Kirk and Spock and Savick so I think that and the allusions to some of the other great works I think drew me to this particular character and then this chapter. So if you talk about Moby Dick, if you talk about Milton, if you talk about Shakespeare, all those things drew me to this chapter. So Steve, any thoughts? So, you know, obviously the content of this chapter, it's right up front. It's, it was even alluded to fairly clearly by

Spock in the movie when he talks about, you know, this is the battle between experience and intelligence and this is something that john and i and a lot of us not just john and i but a lot of us have debated over the years the limitations of intelligence when you have when you put it up against experience and so this is the this is the prototypical fight um between those two but there's so much more to this uh one of my favorite parts of this is uh the discussion that star trek two in general is a nod to naval history and and if you watch the movie closely there are there are there's so much so many naval references within that film and the battle of the mutara nebula was intended from the beginning to uh to replicate uh a naval battle uh during the era of sail

and and that's why you use uh the matara nebula so you can cloud the vessels so it's you know you don't have sensors you can't see each other it's supposed to replicate a classic naval battle at sea and and it does so so well um other than you know the you know z minus 10 000 meters uh yeah but still the idea is there uh it's just that set piece is just a wonderful uh backdrop to talk about a subject like experience vice intelligence and and i can tell you that not only does it spur that conversation john and i just had this the same discussion on a separate topic uh god not what two days ago uh in a phone conversation where we're both doing our favorite stabler and ward off or waldorf over somebody who had written an article who got it so wrong

and and the end the end of the conversation was the reason why the author got this wrong was because they they're they're well studied but have zero experience in the subject matter that they're writing about so they you know they just lack that that broader understanding of how things work which oh by the way is one that's my favorite line from the battle of the mutara nebula or spock turns around or was it spock or kirk oh yes kirk when he turns around to savick it says on a starship you have to know how things work and and that was our topic too it's like okay that's that's a big that's a big hallmark uh a calling point within that battle is you know experience lets you know how things work and if you don't know how things work then it's really

hard to fight that battle yeah if i could just jump back in the other thing for the matara nebula that that that i think it underscores is you can you can offset teams offset experience and knowledge so what i mean by that is is the classic team of spock and kirk working together uh to defeat uh khan so again they're leveraging different experiences different abilities different capacities and together that makes them stronger than khan who at that point uh would not listen to anyone else um his his right arm yokin uh wouldn't listen to him at that point really it was uh he's blinded by the need for revenge and without going too down uh too far down that road but again the the team offsetting the genius we could talk about napoleon here

and the advent of general staffs to counter napoleon's genius where the staffs are going to leverage not only the commander's abilities but all of the staff's abilities gentlemen the tension between intellect and experience is certainly something that i think we we discuss a lot within the military, and it's certainly applicable to the maritime domain. So I appreciate that background, and I look forward to getting back and rereading the chapter based on all the additional references that I think I must have missed the first time around. Now I'll put you both on the spot. In the final version of the book, which story did you most relate to and why? I'll lead off on this one first, and I very much like August Cole's piece on the space battleship

Yamato and its captain uh Captain Avatar and there's there's a lot of uh angles to this I think part of it I should probably say up front is nostalgia so so part of I think each of these chapters why an author chooses to write on something I think there's a bit of nostalgia and uh you know uh I don't know about Steve but the first movie I ever saw was Star Trek in in in 1977. And then I think the next two were Superman and then Star Trek, the motion picture, but August chapter is based on an anime, really the first anime that made it to the United States. It called Starblazers and that came out in the late seventies here.

And fundamentally it's, it's an allegory in a lot of ways. As a Japanese cartoon, it's an allegory for World War II. where the Earth is being attacked by aliens and getting pummeled from planet bombs and having radiation destroying the planet and forces people to live underground. And the one hope that they have is to send off the space battle cruiser Yamato on a year-long mission to a distant planet to get a machine that would essentially stop the radiation. So August took a very interesting approach with it. He kind of laid out a little bit of background.

And then for the rest of the chapter, he put it in the form of a letter. And he had some really interesting main points within that letter. I think that someone thinking about naval conflict, military conflict, leadership, especially leadership could draw from that chapter for today so that's that's the one that that spoke to me a lot partly uh for what he's saying but also partly for nostalgic reasons i'll flip the script on you just a little bit because you know we could we could talk all day long about our favorite chapters and i don't like to single out a favorite chapter because honestly there were so many that I that as we went through editing that we would read and say oh my god now I got to go

watch the expanse all over again or you know I need to go pull up Asimov and I need to check this reference because this is absolutely fascinating but for me I want I want to talk about the most timely article so I was explaining to somebody a week or so ago that this thing was a labor of love during a time of COVID right so we're stuck in the middle of a pandemic uh working from home some of us wearing pants some of us not and what uh what struck me as the as the chapters came in was one from craig and steve whiteside that deals with the stand the stephen king novel and if you remember the stand it dealt with uh basically a man-made pandemic and and what came out of that chapter was absolutely fascinating reading because it's you know you're

reading this in the midst of a pandemic and really the article excuse me the chapter is about what we learned from that experience in the stand and it couldn't be more timely you know and and this book is going to come out probably when we're at the peak of the delta variant and and you know hospitals are overrun and it will be just as relevant today as when the the first draft crossed our desks in what, November, October of last year, you know, before we had hit the first peak of COVID-19. And so that chapter, you know, it may not be as relevant two years from now, but I'll tell you what, it's a good read, it's a smart read, and it's a creepy read. And all three of those combined for it's worthwhile to take a look, and then to go watch the stand or go read the book again.

It's kind of a wake-up call, and that made it an especially timely chapter. Steve, I'm glad I'm not the only one who is having to go back and reference and try to dig back into some of the resources. I received a review copy when I was on a temporary duty assignment, and I found myself sitting in a hotel room continuously going back to my computer and trying to pull up some of the references, trying to make sure I was kind of capturing or catching everything, but really an enjoyable read. gentlemen for both of you before we wrap where can listeners connect with you guys on social media and what are you guys working on next so i'll hit i'll hit this one social media is pretty easy you can find me up on linkedin you know there's only one of me uh the old man with the you know typical university profile picture or you can find me at doctor man on facebook uh or twitter or instagram all three i'm up and running what we're working on next is well we've

got some ideas bouncing around that we really don't want to talk too much about because you know we don't have we just we'll just say that we have another big project in the works that we hope to have published about this time two years from now assuming that the publisher will approve it yeah i'm saying more than that is kind of you know i don't want to tip the hat too much because we're too early in the process but uh like i said john and i we've been working our schemes slash projects for so long that there's always another one in the works. And so this one, we don't even have the dust blown off the bookshelves to put this book on the shelves when we're already starting to plan for the next one. And if that one doesn't come through, we'll figure something else out,

but there's always something going. It's just the nature of who we are and how we think. So I'll leave it at that, John. I'm on LinkedIn, only John Klug, J-O-N-K-L-U-G on LinkedIn. And then at strategy underscore troll on Twitter. That's about it. And again, Steve mentioned we're thinking about another project, but I've got an albatross that's a dissertation that I need to finish. So I'll leave it at that. Yeah, I got scuffed up pretty bad by a friend of ours for distracting John for over a year while he was supposed to be dissertating. And that was one of our fellow contributors, Francis Park, who sent me a note and he said, hey, you got to stop distracting John. He has to write that dissertation while he can. And, you know, these projects are

great, but you're keeping him from doing what's important. And I think I said something nasty to him, like you ought to be a crayon eating Marine while you have the opportunity. No, I'm just kidding. But, you know, point well taken. So we're, as we think about that next project, we're also thinking about ways to keep John from being distracted so he finishes that dissertation so you know then then we can have unfettered access to uh to my favorite buddy out there well John uh or aka strategy troll now I'm gonna have to look you up uh I wish you the best of luck on your dissertation and and look forward to seeing the back end of it and Steve aka Dr. Mann uh look forward to seeing what that project does come uh out and develops into the future

To both of you, my sincere appreciation for coming on the podcast today to discuss your book and your work. To the listeners, I highly recommend you check out their book, To Boldly Go, Leadership, Strategy, and Conflict in the 21st Century and Beyond. Thank you for listening, and until next time, guten tag. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 We'll be right back.