Sea Control - Sea Control 389 - Reagan's War Stories with Benjamin Griffin

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Links:1. Reagan's War Stories - A Cold War Presidency, by Benjamin Griffin, USNI Press, September 15, 2022. 2. “Red Storm Rising’: Tom Clancy Novels and the Cult of National Security.”, by Walter L. Hixson, Diplomatic History 17, no. 4 (1993): 599–613. 3. "Tom Clancy And Ronald Reagan - Two Of America's Greatest Defenders". 2022. The Heritage Foundation. 4. “Reagan, Reykjavik, and Strategic Imagination,” by Thomas Ricks, Foreign Policy, November 2017)5. Sea Control 169 - Larry Bond & Dr. Sebastian Bruns on Harpoon, Red Storm Rising and Tom Clancy, CIMSEC, April 15, 2020. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. Your host for today's episode is Dr. Ed Salo, and he's joined by Major Ben Griffin to discuss Ben's book, Reagan's War Stories, A Cold War Presidency. This episode was edited and produced by William McQuiston. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec chapter near you. You can find a full listing of the local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org, so if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps, you can find Alex,

Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Welcome to Sea Control. Today, we have the pleasure of talking to Major Benjamin Griffin, author of Reagan's War Stories, a Cold War Presidency, which recently was published by the Naval Institute Press. Major Griffin is currently the Chief of Military History Division at West Point and is a military intelligence officer who graduated from West Point in 2006. Ben was twice deployed to Iraq, first in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2007 and 2008, and once in support of Operation New Dawn in 2011. This is his second tour with the History

Department at West Point, with his previous coming in the American History Division, 2015 to 2018. Ben holds a PhD in history from the University of Texas, along with a master's degree in history from the same institution, and a master's in international security studies from the Arizona, excuse me, University of Arizona. Welcome, Major Griffin. Thanks, it's great to be here. Appreciate having me here. So even though I gave a little discussion of you, can you tell the readers a little about yourself and your current position? Yeah, absolutely. And I should start, I am an active Army officer, but all the thoughts and opinions that I express are my own. They don't reflect the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, or West Point. But I am in a great spot. So I got

to teach history to the Corps of Cadets here at the United States Military Academy. So in my role, I'm in charge of the Military History Division. We have one core course, which is the History of the Military Arts from 1900 to the present day, and a whole slew of electives that we offer to our majors and other cadets. But I get to come to work on the banks of the Hudson every day, spend a couple hours with some of America's finest young men and women, and really get to help them grow and develop as future leaders for our Army and for our country. And so if you're ever in the area or you ever have a thought about it, I really encourage people to come up here and see the great things that we're doing at West Point and just this beautiful campus we have just a little bit

north of New York City. Yes, it is truly pretty. In my previous life, I worked at an archaeological firm and we did a lot of work up there and always got to do it in the fall. So first of all, let's just jump in with the book. So what brought you to this topic? Why Reagan? Why Tom Clancy? why the cold war so i i joke in the opening of my book that you know i was a very book hungry 12 year old and you know my dad seeing me go through everything in the house eventually handed me a copy of tom planche's hunt for october which really just sent me off on a rampage of just binge reading all of his books and then anything kind of tied to it so you know so larry bond books you know also team yankee all anything technical thriller i've had like cool pieces of hardware

were on the cover, I was going to read it as a tween and as a teen. And that really expanded my horizons into other genres of science fiction and similar things there too. And I'd always kind of been interested in this connection between fiction and policy or the inspirations for fiction. So when I was an undergraduate here at West Point, my thesis was on Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, looking at how he was drawing on sort of the emerging consumer society in the U.S. as an inspiration for that when i went to grad school at ut before my first tour here i was thinking about doing what i thought would be a topical topic for research looking at the role of the army and nation building and statecraft and i just kind of realized that i wasn't super

excited about it or enthusiastic with it because it's a dry topic to be frank important but but dry and i went back to this and i was starting to get through you know things presidents read and And just in my mind, I was certain that Reagan had to have liked Clancy, that what Clancy was writing fit too perfectly what Reagan was trying to do. And so I started digging into it. And it was just going to be a chapter in the dissertation at first, but I kept finding more and more connections of how Reagan is actively using it, how the administration is publicizing this author and giving them really interesting access to things.

And the way it sort of just took off once Reagan publicly endorsed Clancy's book. And so that then became the whole project, which is great because it let me say that, you know, I began my research for it when I was 12 years old and at first handed that book. Yeah, I'll confess. I picked up Hunt for Red October and I remember what day it was. It was my 13th birthday and it was in January. It was snowing. I still had to go to school. My school was on a university campus. So even though we were started an hour late. So I went to the bookstore, had a few dollars in my pocket, found it, read it. And yeah, so while Tom Clancy's books are kind of the focus of the later parts of the book, you know, you deal with Reagan's influence and with other books and movies. What are some of the earlier books that influenced him?

So one of the things that's really interesting about Reagan is just how consistent he is across his life with some of his major political statements and views. And you can then trace these back to some of his very early readings. And so in the first chapter of the book, I take a look at two authors, Harold Bell Wright, who wrote religious works. He is a kind of traveling minister and is settling around Pittsburgh, Kansas, before becoming one of the first real American bestselling authors. And his book, That Prelude to Udels, which Rayden credits for making him a practical Christian. I don't recommend hunting down a copy of the book. It is not very good, but it has a massive impact on Reagan's life. And the other author from that time that does as well is Edgar Rice Burroughs, but not the Tarzan novels, which I think are better known, but the John Carter ones. So Reagan reads this introduction to science fiction, and it just captures his imagination.

So even 60 years later, he's writing library presidents saying that he just wishes this character was much more known because it's a shame that people don't care for John Carter anymore. You know, there was the Disney movie that got terrible reviews. I enjoyed it. They got on a science fiction masochist. That's probably why. But so these books are doing various things to Reagan at a young age. Both of them feature protagonists who are transported to kind of strange environments. You know, I think Reagan very much sees himself in the main character of that printer of Udell's because it's a boy who sees his father mercilessly beat his wife to death or let her die of disease and just mistreats her the entire time. And so he runs away, becomes a hobo before coming back and is gradually brought into this community that is very churchgoing, but not very Christian because they don't give the kind of wandering soul much work, except for the one non-churchgoer gives him a job in a print shop and helps introduce him to religion through acts rather than words. And that kind of captured the way that Reagan viewed his own faith is about what you do, not necessarily about sitting in church and doing all that.

With the Edgar Rice novels and John Carter, I think part of it is, you know, if you are a shy boy from a broken house or at least a difficult house in the Midwest, you can't get much further away from home than Mars in the 1910s, 1920s. And so that's part of what appeals to Reagan about it. But then you have this place where you have a character who has a strong moral code, despite being a former Confederate cavalryman, and is able to do these great things on Mars because of its low gravity. He's super strong. He's able to pair his moral code, his sense of individual freedom and liberty with this high technology in order to do great things. And that becomes sort of a touch point for Reagan, this idea that a free people paired with massive technology or advanced technology, anything is possible. And he says as much in his address to the Air Force Academy. I also look at Whittaker Chambers' Witness, Arthur Kessler's Darkness at Noon.

I mean, Witness is not a work of fiction, but it reads like a spy thriller. And both of these are very much the formation kind of against anti-communism, where he's taking the vignettes from these stories, seeing how communists acting in Hollywood at the time do similar things, and takes this true, that this is how communists work, and he becomes very much opposed to it. And then finally, Western novels like those by Louis L'Amour. Again, we have a character with a strong moral code who does the right thing, not seeking praise or acclaim for it. and then kind of leaves town. And that often became a shorthand for the sort of policy that Reagan was looking to do. Yeah. Yeah. You can't do wrong with some Carter on Mars novels. And as a comic book fan, I know a lot of that's out there in comic book form now too. And yeah, Louis L'Amour's are great too. So what did you, what did you see the importance of the hunt for

Red October to Reagan? And, you know, kind of, it appeared that it came at a time for a perfect storm to communicate the administration's message. Yeah, Clancy just gets incredibly lucky with his timing with this in a number of ways. So when Clancy goes to publish it, he takes it to the Naval Institute Press, who also published my book, very, very nice to them. And they had just decided to publish fiction for the first time in their career. And so as long as it's wet, they pick it up. And then it also captures a particular cultural moment in the U.S. when And Reagan, who has long been very sensitive to the betrayal of the United States and popular media, particularly the United States media or military and popular media, is looking to highlight things that are praising the military and turning it better. You know, as he entered office in 1981, he comes to West Point here to give us to the commencement.

And one of the first drafts of the speech has a paragraph that just excoriates Hollywood for pandering to anti-American sentiment. And in the margin, there's these handwritten notes. You have Apocalypse Now, you have Deer Hunter, you have The Killing Fields, which are all very good movies, but they also all portray the U.S. military as evil, corrupt, and everyone in the military as broken in some way. And Reagan just despised that. That passage didn't make the final version of the speech, I think in large part because they didn't want to antagonize Hollywood over much, but it kind of shows the sensitivity he had to those issues. And much of his first term is spent trying to reinvigorate support for the military, both materially in new weapon systems, expanding the size of the services, bringing in a higher quality of recruit, but also kind of spiritually and morally by changing the way the American people talk about their men and women in service. And so he viewed them as noble and gallant and wanted Americans to see them the same way. And so you have the hunt for October coming out in 1985 and Raiden got it as a gift from Nancy Reynolds. And much like you, Ed, once he got it, he didn't put it down very quickly. And that was the same way.

So he starts showing up to these staff meetings a couple of days after Christmas, just dead tired. And he apologizes to people in the room. Hey, look, I'm sorry. I was just up all night reading this book, the hunt for October, the staff took a hint and they went out and they found the book. And so all of a sudden now you have the white house press to see in this book popping up and articles being like, yeah, a lot of people in the White House reading this and the Russian embassy has just bought a couple of copies. And then Reagan publicly praises it as

unputdownable and the perfect yarn. Clancy comes to the White House March 12th of 85, and the book is on the bestseller list the next week for the first time. For Reagan, the importance of it was, A, it's the type of story that he loved. It had that same clear protagonist, you know, the kind of character who goes in and does the right thing in Jack Ryan and then leaves before he gets praised At the end of the book, Jack Ryan skips a meeting in the Oval Office of the president to get credit and praise and award and instead is flying back on the Concord to London with his daughter's Christmas present, the skiing Barbie in the seat next to him. In the movie, it's a giant teddy bear. But in the book, it was the Barbie originally. And so he sees a character that he likes. But more importantly, he sees the way that Clancy uses technology, the way that he uses or talks about American service members, but also people in the FBI and the CIA. day. Everyone serving their country is upright and good and decent and incredibly capable,

right? Even the enlisted sailor that's depicted, Sonerman Jones, he was kicked out of the Californian technology because of a prank that went wrong, but is clearly overqualified for his job. And so for Reagan, this is a vindication of the hard work of his first term and a sign of success of it, that you have this narrative that perfectly captures what he's trying to do. And Clancy was very intentional by including all that in the book in that way because he was a big Reagan fan. And so it's just ideal timing for Clancy. It's ideal timing for Reagan. It sets off a very interesting relationship. So the next book going chronologically that Clancy put out was Red Storm Rising, not a Jack Ryan book, But probably looking at it seemed like almost twice as big as time for October. But Red Storm Rising is more there's an actual war. NATO goes for Warsaw Pact, Russian Soviet Union, excuse me, invades and NATO's using the air land battle doctrine to stop the Soviet attacks.

And, you know, so how did that embolden the president to seek, you say, embolden him to seek the abolishment of nuclear weapons? But also, we don't usually think of NATO's strength as conventional warfare, but in Bed, Storm, Rising, that's exactly kind of what won the war. Yeah. And this is another one where it's just, it's a very well-timed book. So when Clancy went to the White House to meet with Reagan the first time, they get a topic that he is working on this new book with Larry Bond, who's his co-author on it. And Reagan asked him whose wins and Clancy says the good guys. So the next year is when the book comes out, and it comes out in August of 86, and Reagan has to read it almost as soon as it comes out, because in October of 86, he is flying on a plane out to Reykjavik in order to have a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev, and so he walks to the back of the Air Force One, so you got Secretary of State George Shultz in there, you got Ken Edelman, one of his lead nuclear negotiators, you've got the rest of the team there, and so he sits down to chat with them, and you would expect that, okay, we're going to this big, very short, very

high-paced summit it's time to talk detail uh you know throw weights numbers that kind of stuff which i mean reagan never really liked in the first place and was definitely not going to do and so instead he wants to talk about the book he just read which is red storm rising he calls it research because part of the book takes place in iceland iceland is central to the narrative because it's sitting on those sea lanes that we need to keep open in order to bring the mass of men and material from the u.s into uh into western europe to help with the fight uh and everyone laughs. It's a good joke, except he wasn't joking. And so you get to the summit and Reagan and Gorbachev famously and shockingly almost agree to eliminate all nuclear weapons within a 10-year

window. And no one is expecting this out of them. I think it surprised both of them that they got that close and their relationship progressed to where they were comfortable kind of offering that to each other. And then Reagan goes home amid this firestorm of criticism where people are attacking the very idea of it. And Thatcher calls him up, and she is upset. She is very upset. And it begins politely, but basically accuses Reagan of threatening to destabilize the entire balance of power in Europe by giving away nukes, which, as you know, was seen as sort of the balancing factor based off the large numbers of Warsaw Pact forces there. And Reagan very gently says, well, you know, I disagree, and you should read Red Storm Rising. It gives a good depiction

of where we are at right now. And so again, here he is recommending this book to a key partner and ally as indicative of what he is thinking about. And the reason for that is partially encapsulated by the headline or by the New York Times review of it, which says that this book is good news for Mr. Weinberg. Because as you know, everything in there works incredibly well.

It takes air and metal brilliantly. And as incredibly, U.S. forces arrive just in time to deliver the munitions they need. you know the air support is on call and always accurate the m1 tank just tears up the 72s the integration of you know nato with had in germany fight aside alongside the us goes very well uh you couldn't ask for a cleaner more sanitized version of world war iii than what clancy and bond put forward to reagan most importantly for reagan and his liking of the book is that it ends without a nuclear exchange right there's other versions of this book that

that he's read, the Third World War being the most famous one by Journalist Sir John Hackett, that do have those nuclear exchanges in them. Reagan, in this case, didn't like that because he's a lifelong nuclear abolitionist and likes this narrative Clancy provides of how the U.S. can win with NATO without going to that. And I don't think, and it's hard to say for this issue, that Reagan believed in 86 that the U.S. and NATO could win conventionally. But based off Floyd was also seeing from classified reports, from the advice he got from the Joint Chiefs and the NSC, it was clear that the U.S. was heading in a certain direction. And I think that he believed by the end of that 10-year window, the U.S. could certainly beat the Soviets conventionally alongside NATO with our partners.

And if that was the case, then nukes weren't a guarantor of security anymore. They were this dangerous and apocalyptic weapon, and you may as well get rid of them when your opponent thinks they have an advantage that they don't. yeah i was just about to bring up yeah it's a it's a lot better ending than in hackett's third world war but yeah which is a little ends with that exchange and everyone realizing oh this is not good but uh chapter six again going almost chronologically you deal with sdi or star wars and how science fiction writers have influenced both the pro and the anti-SDI camps. How did Clancy's book, Cardinal of the Kremlin, help influence or support Reagan's view on SDI? So for Cardinal of the Kremlin, it was certainly about supporting Reagan's view of SDI.

The basic entire premise of the book is that Reagan is right. And to the extent that Clancy even has Jack Ryan say exactly that to a Gorbachev stand-in one of the last scenes in the novel. And so it's just over the top in how important SDI is to the U.S. interest. And so Reagan reads this book and he loves it. It's the last one that comes out while he's in office. So it doesn't reference the public as much, but it is one that remains in his personal collection long after he is retired. And it kind of speaks to the sentimentality he has of it. The writers who really influenced Reagan on the issue were more in the science fiction realm. So what you had is shortly after Reagan's election, a group called the Citizens

Advisory Council Forum. And this was made up of a group of astronauts, scientists, military officers, contractors, and science fiction writers. Some of the notable names, you have Edward Teller, Buzz Aldrin are in this. And the writers is people like Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Jerry Cornell. And what they're trying to do is the scientists and the military minds are getting there and taking this really technical information about what SDI is and space policy in general. They give it to the science fiction writers who then make it accessible and readable. They produce a report, they give to someone in Reagan's camp, Reagan reads the entire report, and some of that language actually makes it into his speech about SDI, where he's talking about

it's better to defend the world than to avenge it, basically. He publicly thanks the group in a letter, also writes to Daniel Graham, one of the Air Force generals involved in this process, advocating for high frontier another sdi type of program and just really is effusive in his praise for the science fiction writers who are helping them out but it's very controversial in that community uh you know jerry pornell remembers that damn near tore the science fiction community in america in half because you have the big three of the community robert heinlein isaac asimov arthur clark falling in different camps and getting very nasty about the whole thing you know heinlein is very much for it. He attacks Arthur Clarke when Clarke testifies in Congress, saying,

like, how can you as a British person testify to the U.S.? How dare you, Horner? Which is very hurtful to Clarke. And Clarke kind of later backs off his opposition to the program, kind of questioning, oh, maybe it was actually good and I did something bad in opposing it in the 90s. But you just see that that relationship was destroyed. And same thing when you have Asimov coming out against it as well. That was a long relationship between Heinlein and Asimov that began when Heinlein got Asimov a job at a research lab during World War II. And they had worked together and knew each other pretty well. But this ends any chance of further friendship between them. And Asimov gets the last word because he lives longer. And so he's able to, in his autobiography,

basically call Heinlein a small mind who was turned into a conservative by his wife and just no longer had any creative thoughts in his head it just it gets very nasty with this but you have congress members of congress getting people on both sides of this debate holding them up as experts and so science fiction becomes a major part of of the discussion here the one ed kennedy labels it as star wars here because trying to create a negative connotation with that is an easy reference point and probably made a positive reference to it because of the popularity of Star Wars. You end the book talking about the legacy of Reagan and you discuss the creeping militarization of the U.S. foreign policy. What exactly did you mean by that?

So I start this when I look at Operation Desert Storm. You have a war that gets broadcast into the living rooms of Americans across the country that makes for very good television. It does incredible ratings for CNN, kind of makes that network really take off. And it is a Tom Clancy dream war, basically. It is high technology. American military does an excellent job, and it is able to achieve its operational objectives with few casualties, and an airline battle is seemingly vindicated by this. It's almost like a Nintendo game in a lot of ways when you have this war, and it makes the conflict seem easy, and so that has kind of gone along and grown as people are inclined to support the troops, which is wonderful. We need support, but kind of leave

it at that surface level and not interrogate the why or the how or the consequences of policy in many ways. And so when you want to show that you're doing something, a lot of times it's easier to make something blow up than to start a long and arduous economic policy. It's just push a button, boom, there's action. I have done something. I have been able to prove that I am serious and that I am tough. And I think that ease and that desire to show action in many ways takes away from good policy to our detriment when we're looking at strategic issues. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think that that's in one way made war and the future wars after Desert Storm a whole lot easier um why do you think stories were so important to reagan's way of communicating

i think it's because how important stories were to him kind of forming into who he was because reagan kind of self-creates himself that sounds great um he kind of makes his own persona right he was a very insular very shy boy growing up his family moved a lot he was not very often comfortable and that's a pretty far cry from the easygoing very community a very talkative figure he portrays himself as as he grows grows out right so he becomes a broadcaster in iowa calling sports games and what's interesting to me i told the story in chapter one is the most important moment or the story that reagan always retells from the broadcast booth is a baseball game of cubs and cardinals and you have the ninth inning of the game and it is agi galan facing dizzy dean uh with

the tie game in the ninth and in those days you weren't calling the game from wrigley field you were calling the game from the booth and there was telegraphy that would give you a code and you would then paint the story from that code uh it goes out on reagan right at this very high drama moment this is also the period when there weren't really radio rights established very clearly and so there were competing broadcasts for these games and all the different networks and so reagan knew that he had to keep calling the action otherwise his audience would go listen somewhere else and so he starts making it up and he calls a series of nine foul balls uh just over and people may be furiously what's this pitch count doing now but it's you know describing in

great detail these kids racing after foul balls how one just missed going around the pole and then finally the feed comes back. And it turns out that Gallon on the first pitch had popped out to left field. And so I went back and I found this game. It actually did take place. It was thanks to baseball reference as a great tool that goes through the pitch by pitch of old games. And what's interesting to me, it was the season that the Cubs ended on a tear, a 20 game win streak to run down the St. Louis Cardinals and win the NL, which meant that Reagan was one of the few people who called the Cubs World Series game prior to 2016. And so, I mean, he's telling this story

to Harry Carey in 1989. And he's telling this story in his biography in the 1960s of this relatively meaningless April ball game. But it was an important moment for him because that was when he felt the most pressure. And it also, I think, reinforced him that the important part of a story is the final message. And that's gotta be true.

But all the stuff around it, eh, whatever. Because, you know, if you listen to Ronald Reagan on the radio, you'd be able to recreate the box score, right? Say who got the hits, who got the runs, who won the game. But if you were to talk to someone who was in the stands at Wrigley Field, you'd be talking about totally different ball games because all of the action was a story that he weaved in real time, as opposed to what you would have seen when he gone there. And so for Reagan, that kind of became his hallmark and his calling card is that he saw himself as a fabulist, you know? And so he was going to tell these stories

and they were going to have the element of truth. They're going to have his message in them. But real or not, yeah, it's not that big of a deal. Great example of this, he is at a Medal of Honor Society luncheon or is receiving a Freedom Prize. And so in this room, you have recipients of our nation's highest award.

People who have done incredibly heroic things to earn this medal. And they're listening to the President speak. So he tells a story about reading a citation for Medal of Honor when he was in the service during World War II. And he describes a doomed bomber coming back from a mission over Germany. It's flying over the channel, and the pilot realizes they're going to have to ditch it.

And so he orders the crew to bail out. You have the co-pilot. It's right at the door about to jump. The pilot's behind him, and they hear the voice of the belly gunner, who's just too wounded to be able to go, too wounded to be able to jump out of the plane. So the pilot looks to him, says, OK, son, we'll ride down together. And then Reagan pauses, Medal of Honor, posthumous. Never happened. That event never happened.

I went through every Medal of Honor from World War II, and there are incredible stories there. And there are ones where people gave their parachute to someone who was wounded. There are ones where they stayed and tried to land the plane, but none of the stories meet the criteria for that plane that Reagan's describing there. A doomed plane over the English Channel

and just killing yourself So you can bring comfort to a dying boy. Reagan uses that story to juxtapose against the Soviets, given their highest medal to Trotsky's assassin. And he said that so we honor someone who's going to bring comfort to a dying boy. They honor a political assassin. And again, so that that story wasn't true meant less to Reagan than that. It was carrying this important message and that someone listening to them would have that message going forward. And he valued these stories and jokes in a very similar way because he thought that, and I think he's right here, is people are more likely to remember your message and your story and then to share it if it's in a memorable narrative, if it's in a joke, rather than if he gives a normal speech. Totally makes sense. You know, the techno thriller that Clancy, I don't know if you'd say actually invented, but totally popularized, still present.

I mean, after Tom Clancy's died, we still have people writing Jack Ryan novels. You know, there's all kinds of other people. Do you think the techno thriller is still influences military national security thinking and policy? And, you know, I was thinking about the book Ghost Fleet that came out a few years ago. And, you know, we also have things that I don't know if they're technically techno thrillers. the more of the special ops kind of books yeah absolutely i think that's still a very viable genre and you know i think august cole and uh and singer were very consciously uh evoking clancy's red storm rising when they did go sweet and you know it the book popped up on professional reading

list uh it was certainly discussed in my circle you know as a junior field grade officer we were reading that and talking about it and i think like it's it's similar in the way that you would use like a war game that you know these narratives these techno thrillers are something you can put yourself in you can imagine the scenario and really start thinking about what this war would be like or what would be the consequences of a choice that i make that you can't when you're just talking about doctrine and tactics on kind of a textbook or theoretical level and so be able to put you know believable characters believable environments around these things is incredibly useful still. And Ghost Fleet's a great example of that. I actually think there's a lot to glean

from Six and Lou's Earth's Remembrance Trilogy, a Chinese science fiction author. But there's a lot in those books about deterrence and nuclear policy that I think is fascinating. And the Dark Forest's titular metaphor has a lot of military significance to it as well. Sorry about any spoilers here. I just fast forward in the podcast if you don't want to hear it. But so in in the book basically what you have is this idea that actually the universe is teeming with other planets in life and everyone is trying to kill each other and so you have to be quiet you can't make a signal or noise otherwise you're going to die it's like animals moving past one another in this dark forest and i think when you look at what modern wars is both we see in ukraine what

you saw in nagorno-karabakh the sense that hey if you get seen something's going to come your way Right. A lot of Russians get in high Mars because of that right now. And so it's like a dark force. You got to figure out how to minimize your signal while still finding somebody else. And so looking to science fiction, looking to techno thrillers, doing something immersive to think about tactics and operations is incredibly useful. Yeah. And I was just thinking also the book that came a few years ago, Strategy Strikes Back, looking at military strategy through the Star Wars universe, which I think one of the editors was saying that came to him when he was in South Korea because they soldiers didn't understand Western military examples. But if you talked about Star Wars, they understood. And that brings me to

one of the quotes I really liked in the book where you said, use correctly, fiction can help create policies that will ensure the good guys do indeed win. And I think, you know, I think there is a place for fiction, be it novels, movies, TV shows, and some of my students are pointing out video games in this discussion of what influences policy and influences military strategy doctor and that kind of stuff. So the book is available from Naval Institute Press on any of the major bookstores online, and I assume other bookstores. So what are you currently working on and how can listeners follow you on social media or other places? So I am on Twitter at BenGriffin06. Right now, my next research project, I'm going to look at

fiction and veterans and why kind of veterans write fiction. I'm still trying to decide the full scope and scale of it. It'll either be just about the first world war or the more of a 20th century exploration, but I'm kind of exploring three main reasons why I think they're turning to this. The idea that they're going to memorialize something that was lost, either, you know, friends or units or something that was close to them, that they want to provide lessons for broader society to do something or avoid something and that they want to be able to describe what the real experience was in a way that a history can't do and so going back and looking at works by you know some of the world one poets uh you know your owens and your wilsons your sassoon's writers like

tolkien and lewis and a known even in the way of the poo novels um or stories it's not novels really people like Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller. It's a huge, rich vein of these veterans going back and describing it. A, because I think they're stuck in that moment in many ways, but then also because I think that they have something they really want to say about the experience. And so what I'm going to try and do is go back and provide the historic context to that writing to tease out what they are trying to get across. Well, thank you. And thank you for spending some time with us. And like I said, I totally enjoyed the book. It made me want to go back and pick up some of my you know tom clancy team yankee all that stuff and read it i need to convince my

chair to let me do a class where i look at all that is 1980s history because well i can't believe how long ago it was but thank you Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon