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The French army wants to know what its armed forces could do in the future. To help, it brings together a group of people who know how to imagine the future: the writers of science fiction. United Kingdom Telegraph reports that the French Defense Innovation Agency is recruiting between four and five editors to form a "red team", which will propose "rupture scenarios", which is a military discourse for an original thought.
France created the Defense Innovation Agency in September 2018 as a kind of incubation pole to research existing technologies and equipment that the army could possibly use. The idea is that the armed forces might be able to find and adopt technologies faster than conventional acquisition channels, a process that can take years.
But knowing which technologies or gadgets to use is only useful if you have an idea of the problems you might encounter on the battlefield. It is apparently here that the science fiction writers intervene. But they will not tell stories about how we could fight extraterrestrial civilizations of other planets. the Telegraph said that they will "try to anticipate how terrorist groups or hostile states could use advanced technology against France".
The idea here is not that the group of authors can predict the future. By using science fiction as a tool, they will come up with ideas that ordinary military strategists would not otherwise imagine.
The use of science fiction and writers in this way is a practice already used in many other countries in a field called Strategic Foresight. The Canadian military hired sci-fi writer Karl Schroeder to write a short novel titled Crisis in Zefra in 2005. This short book outlined a scenario that Canadian peacekeepers might face in a near conflict, including the role that drones, cell phones and Internet access could play in an urban war zone. .
The United States has also resorted to science fiction writers: authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle created the Citizen Advisory Council on National Space Policy under the Reagan Administration, while the Pentagon brought a Handful of sci-fi writers and filmmakers think about potential threats in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. More recently, authors August Cole and Peter W. Singer have written an influential book titled Ghost Fleet: A novel of the next world war, which was inspired by their work in the think tanks to imagine what a third world war could look like between China, Russia and the United States.
The French army has recently been employed to modernize its forces. French President Emmanuel Macron announced the creation of a new space command, while the country's Cyber Command marched during the 14 July celebrations. This year, Franky Zapata, the original French inventor of the Flyboard Air, flew over the crowd during the military parade held this year on the occasion of July 14, Bastille Day, which could easily get out of the pages of a science fiction novel.
