Here's a free military science fiction anthology about the future of special forces

An intriguing window into the future of warfare

Image: Useful Fiction / Photo by USGS on Unsplash

I've long been fascinated by military science fiction: some of my favorite and formative books include the likes of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, while I've also loved more recent entries such as Linda Nagata's The Red trilogy and Kameron Hurley's The Light Brigade.

Stories about the future of war can go far beyond entertainment. Militaries and specialists around the world have been looking at how they can use science fiction as a way to imagine the future, and put that thinking to use as they prepare for the conflicts just over the horizon. Authors such as P.W. Singer and August Cole (Ghost Fleet and Burn-In) and Admiral James Stravridis and Elliot Ackerman (2034 and 2054) draw on current trends, technologies and politics and use them to build their stories. As Singer once noted, governments provide plenty of white papers that seek to predict the future, but described them as "paper Ambien", while a novel is far more likely to grab a reader and connect them to their subject matter.

Since 2020, Singer and Cole have been running Useful Fiction, a consulting firm that works with various military organizations in the US and other NATO countries to use storytelling and writing to train officers and leaders in how to better envision and prepare for the futures that lie ahead of us. They've just released a new project, an anthology called The Fourth Age: The Future of Special Operations, which you can read for free.

In its foreword, General Bryan P. Fenton, commander of the United States Special Operations Command, writes that the goal of this project was to use this framework to "create near-future narratives envisioning how our Nation may use its special operations forces in the decades to come and demonstrating the unique value proposition these forces bring to the Nation." SOF hosted Singer and Cole for a pair of sessions in 2022 that brought more than 40 individuals together to take part, with nine of them selected to write a story in this anthology.

The eleven stories in the anthology take place all over the world: Russia, the Port of Haifa, Tanzania, Lebanon, Washington DC, Ukraine, Kentucky, Argentina, and the South Pacific, dealing with a range of topics about the future of warfare.

These specific scenarios might never come to pass, but the act of creating these stories is a good way to get officers and leaders to think about the challenges that they might eventually face in the future, according to General Fenton: these "stories incorporate the full array of joint, interagency, intergovernmental, multinational and commercial elements leveraged by various state and non-state actors in this era of strategic competition."

These stories aren't exactly what you might find in the pages of magazines like Analog or Asimovs or Lightspeed: they drop in a lot of technical jargon and phrases or sentences like "With a quiet demeanor that seemed to go with his technical role, Goodman was responsible for the team of small bots that supported the unit. Depending on the need, they served as tools projecting out its eyes and ears, teammates supplementing their capabilities, or even disposable swarms operating on their own. Goodman had been one of the first in the Command to earn the new 'Centaur' tab, befitting his tactical expertise with robotics and autonomous systems learned at Fort Moore’s Operational Robotics Course."

But what I find fascinating about this particular strain of science fiction is that they're stories that really lean into reality. These stories aren't designed to predict the future, but they are looking closely at the present day and extrapolating from there in a grounded way.

While I'm not exactly their target audience, I've found these types of stories to be useful to understand how the military is looking at the world and trying to figure out how to anticipate and tackle the challenges that they see coming down the pipeline. The goal isn't to find new and innovative ways to kill our fellow humans: it's to give people who'll be in leadership roles the tools to try and find better ways to lead, with the idea being that they'll be able to make better decisions on the battlefield that'll lead to fewer casualties and deaths.