Breaking News: World leaders read fiction. Prevent World War Three.
The greatest leadership failure is a failure of imagination
We didn’t mean to predict the future. We were just connecting the dots.
We sometimes get reader comments calling our novels prescient and asking us how we “predicted” the future.
Thank you. It’s a wonderful compliment. Yes, we do our homework. It helps that one half of the Two Navy Guys writing team is a retired intelligence officer whose day job is teaching at a local college on national security topics.
But we’re not writing policy papers. We’re writing fiction—and we chose fiction for a reason…actually, two reasons.
The first job of fiction is to entertain. The desire to tell a good story is what drives us to put pen to paper. But there’s another purpose that’s just as important: to see a problem from a new perspective. You get to come along for the ride.
Books are a gateway drug
We’ve all been there, right? We get to an exciting part of the story and cannot put the book down. We’re right there with the hero, living the action in our minds. Solving the problem, and saving the day.
That’s the power of fiction. That’s what we’re after. The power to hijack your imagination for little while.
In every one of our books, we spin a realistic geopolitical crisis scenario that’s extrapolated from current events. And then we torture put our characters to work solving that problem.
Fiction goes beyond the facts. It allows us to dig into the how and why of the scenario. What are the roots of the conflict, the motivations behind the players, or the technology that’s being deployed?
And then we bring the problem to life. Fiction lets us to stand in the control room of a submarine at general quarters or strap into the cockpit of an F-35 strike fighter. We get to visit the Situation Room at the White House or step inside Vladimir Putin’s Nikolay Sokolov’s private residence.
Does that mean that a future conflict will go down exactly the way we describe it? Probably not, but the power is in the imagining. The power is in walking a few steps in the shoes of the people on the front line, seeing what they see, and feeling what they feel.
How we build an imagination machine
All this imagining starts with a few keys themes that we develop in each novel. In Order of Battle, drones figured prominently in the story line, as did private military contractors, such as the Russia-backed Wagner Group. Both of these are factors in that real-life conflict.
If you read that novel, you got a great story, but you also got a glimpse into what it looks like when unmanned assets and mercenaries become a major part of the battle space.
As we prepare to launch Proxy War, the next installment of the Command and Control series on January 21st, let’s take a look a few of the themes we tackled in that story.
Location, location, location
Land is a non-renewable commodity. That’s true in the real estate biz and just as true with countries—except they call it territory.
With more territory comes prestige, security buffers, and natural resources. The real estate under discussion in Proxy War is Central Asia, an area with a long history of rule by outsiders.
In the post-WW2 era, the Soviet Union ruled the roost in Central Asia. They imposed a common language, set up puppet regimes, and used natural resources according to Moscow rules. Those days are long gone, as much as Mr. Putin would have us believe otherwise. All five of the Central Asian republics declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Today, China is positioning themselves as an economic partner in the region via their Belt and Road Initiative, but you can be sure they have bigger ambitions.
There’s a new wrinkle in this governance scenario. As we laid out in Covert Action and continue in Proxy War, the Central Asian republics have grown up and they’re not interested in being vassals states anymore. They’d like to have a say in their own future.
Trading partners? Yes. Just leave your military at home, please.
AI on the battlefield
Just as Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War in Ukraine put the development of unmanned assets (drones) on the fast track, the same thing can happen with AI in a conflict between Great Powers.
We’re already familiar with the nefarious uses of AI: disinformation, deep fakes, and social media bots, to name a few. We’ve even seen the beginnings of autonomous weapons in Ukraine. Let’s extrapolate out from where we are today. Without resorting to Skynet doomsday scenarios, what is possible with AI on the battlefield?
In Proxy War, we posit that the next step is predictive analysis. The ability to process millions of sensor inputs, analyze for patterns, and recommend a battlefield move. All that happens in real time. Let’s quote ourselves:
…the Chinese are not fooling around. They’ve deployed a new battlefield weapon: Foresight, a predictive battlefield AI. Foresight analyzes the data and tells the PLA where the resistance forces will attack before it happens. Think of Foresight as the Wayne Gretzky of battlefield tactics. It puts the PLA forces where the rebels will be.
Can the autocrats get along?
All countries are driven to act in their own self-interest. We rely on our leaders to do what is best for the country.
When you have an autocrat in charge, you add another dimension to the decision-making matrix: Ego. Suddenly, it’s not just what’s best for the country, it’s what’s best for Me, Myself, and I. That decision might be based on money, or pride, or just because he got up on the wrong side of the bed and dammit somebody is going to pay.
But, rest assured, it’s not going to be in the best interest of the people.
In Proxy War, we take a fictional trip inside the minds of the autocratic leaders of Russia and China as they do their best to screw each other over. After all, you know the Autocrat’s Creed, right?
What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine, too.
Join the crew
Proxy War launches January 21st in ebook, print, and audiobook. If you preorder now, it will show up in your Kindle, Audible account, or your old-school mailbox automagically on the 21st.
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David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
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