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This exclusive Cogs of War interview is with P.W. Singer and August Cole, who in 2015 published Ghost Fleet, a futuristic thriller depicting the next world war. As pioneers of the fictional intelligence genre, we invited them back to reflect on their predictions.

Looking back over the last decade, which of the technologies or strategic predictions in Ghost Fleet have proven most prescient, and which haven’t developed as anticipated in the novel?

When we started working on Ghost Fleet in 2012, most of the focus in the national security ecosystem was on an assumed future of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. In turn, there was a belief that the United States would be able to induce or even cajole China into becoming a partner with a shared stake in the rules-based international order created by the United States. Based on a mix of research on history, Chinese military doctrine, Chinese Communist Party messaging, as well as our gut instincts, we just didn’t see the next 20 years that way. Rather than non-fiction, we chose to use a new model we called “useful fiction” to blend research with narrative and explore how the future could very soon become one of great power competition and even outright globe-spanning conflict.

But it wasn’t just about the strategic environment. Many of the real technologies and trends we explored in the book, such as cyber weapons, a vulnerable American defense industrial supply chain, and ever-more autonomous drones, among others, were being regularly ignored or glossed over in plans and visions of future war. This also meant any war between China and the United States in the 21st century would play out differently than Cold War visions of World War III. What was then a novel take on great powers and new technologies all seem to have hit the mainstream, so to speak, today.

There are all sorts of other disquieting points that we’ve tracked over the years as what we call “Ghost Fleet moments” coming true. Just a few examples are deepening military ties between China and Russia, the U.S. Navy’s railgun program being retired too early, and the idea of an eccentric space-obsessed billionaire inserting himself into U.S. national security.

An aspect that we didn’t have room for in the novel was the wartime impact of information warfare and political division inside America. We provided a few scenes, including one during the opening of the conflict, where a young security guard at a civilian port films on his cell phone the very start of the conflict. All his followers knew the United States was at war at the same time that cyber attacks hammered the national command and control systems, effectively putting America’s military and civilian leadership in Washington in the dark. We also referred to a domestic movement of foreign-influenced isolationist politicians, who were very willing to accept defeat and China’s global hegemony, seeing the fight against it as not worth the toll. We even worked with a graphic designer to create a fictitious propaganda poster for this movement to drive the point home.

But if we were to refresh the novel today, we’d have way more in there. China and Russia have since made massive investments and doctrinal priorities in cognitive warfare, while the U.S. public and government have become more vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation.

In your book, the U.S. military is initially overtaken, in part, due to an overreliance on tech that was cutting-edge, but didn’t work the way it was intended to. With the benefit of 10 years of instability in the world, advancements in defense tech and innovation, and your own reflection, how has your thinking on this changed, or not changed? 

We wish we could say that we’re more positive than negative on that, but that issue endures. The United States still has unresolved supply chain security issues that create openings for adversaries to exploit. It still has major cyber vulnerabilities across both military and civilian networks. The latest public revelations about the China-led Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon campaigns point to a catastrophic status quo. The U.S. military still considers its major legacy systems “apex predators,” yet America’s foes have figured out how to turn them into “prey” through novel applications of emergent AI and data capabilities, to say nothing of drones across domains. Even in fast-moving areas like AI, too many of the acolytes now are coming across like the revolution of military affairs acolytes of the 1990s, proclaiming how they’ll solve all the historic issues militaries face during combat operations. Take the notion of supposedly “lifting the fog of war” with technology like AI. It ignores both that emergent AI systems have certain baked-in flaws around data quality, conclusions, and sharing, while not giving enough weight to the fact that our adversaries are developing exploits for these weaknesses. We’re not Luddites, but we hope people take away the lesson from Ghost Fleet that finding balance is essential. The real technological grail today is figuring out how to bring in the best of new technologies informed by the hard-won and enduring human lessons of warfare.

What messages did readers take from your book that you did not intend or anticipate?

A Chinese military officer who reviewed the book for one of their military colleges wrote that we were seeking to justify a U.S. military buildup to start a war with China. Given that the imagined war in our book (spoiler alert) doesn’t start or end well for the United States, that wasn’t the message. A military professor in the United States somehow misread the entire point of the book and later wrote how we were techno-optimists obsessed with proving technology is the deciding factor in future warfare at the expense of the human dimension of conflict. If anything, we strove to show the opposite: Ignoring the human experience in warfare because of a misplaced faith in technology is a recipe for tactical disaster, if not strategic defeat.

Since around the late 1990s, Hollywood studios sought to avoid offending the Chinese Communist Party due to its lucrative market, but this is changing. Beijing’s tighter restrictions on the number of U.S. films that can be screened in China and growing local competition have reduced Hollywood’s incentives to self-censor, so it’s more plausible now to imagine a Ghost Fleet film. If a film adaptation of Ghost Fleet were made today, what’s the one narrative element you’d insist remain unchanged, and what’s one you’d gladly rewrite?

We’re afraid you may be overstating that trend. Look at everything from the new Top Gun to all the broadcast or streamer TV shows like The Terminal List. The bad guys are still the same old “Axis of Evil” and terrorists. It is a shame, as there have been some great projects created in other countries that aren’t afraid to explore contemporary trends in warfare all the way up to great power conflict, like Occupied and Furia in Norway and Zero Day Attack in Taiwan.

But, if a Ghost Fleet movie were to be made, we’d insist less that a certain technology or scenes be kept in, and put our weight behind keeping characters that resonated with the book’s audiences, such as the American insurgents behind enemy lines, the old military mentors coming out of retirement, and our fun cast of cyber heroes and villains. In turn, we’d gladly script in a role for two ruggedly handsome civilian writers…

You introduced “fictional intelligence” or FICINT, as a serious analytical tool. Ten years later, how do you see this tool being used by others? Do you like what you see?

We’ve been fortunate enough to take the approach that originated with Ghost Fleet and work with over 60 different partners on it through our Useful Fiction network. They’ve included every U.S. military service and partners within NATO and the Five Eyes, as well as Fortune 100 companies. The topics ranged from helping Special Operations Command explore the future of special operations to working with Navy officers to realistically render future conflict scenarios in the Pacific. What has been powerful is to see it not used just as an analytic tool, but also to drive organizational change. It’s been employed for everything from helping both young students and senior policymakers engage with concepts they’d otherwise avoid, to making the case for literally billion-dollar investments that wouldn’t have been approved otherwise.

If you had to write a novel today predicting what warfare might look like ten years from now, what’s the biggest risk you’d take narratively or technologically?

Funny that you ask. We just completed a book-length project for the Army doing just that, titled Task Force Talon: A Novel of the Army’s Next Fight. We don’t want to give too much away, but the story is told from the perspective of a young Army officer on the frontlines of a hard-fought conflict defending an allied nation. On the substance side, it uses the format of a character-driven story to share a combination of the real-world doctrinal lessons from the Army’s Field Manual 3-0, lessons learned from both contemporary conflicts, as well as recent Army innovation efforts, field exercises, and training. Expect a mix of the kinetic, the cyber, the cognitive, lots and lots of drone and counter-drone action, and challenges like an enemy with similar gear, culminating in multidomain operations, where a soldier’s tactical decisions can have strategic effects, even thousands of kilometers away.

In many ways, the biggest risk for any fiction or non-fiction writer, or even military organization, is holding back from putting your ideas out there.

Image: Petty Officer 2nd Class Jonathan Nye via DVIDS.