A great deal of ink has been spilled documenting the struggles the U.S. Navy deals with in attempting to fulfill its worldwide commitments with a dwindling number of ships.

Indeed, China now boasts a navy that is large than America’s, something that we unthinkable as recently as a decade ago.

I was recently drawn to a thoughtful article written by a former U.S. Navy officer who is now a U.S. Congressman. Here is how she began her article, “Look to the 1980s to Inform the Fleet of Today.”

When I was a naval officer, my ships always had a plan when we left port for where we were going, how we would get there, and what we would do when we arrived. While that remains true of individual ships in the Navy, it’s not true of the Navy as a whole today. The Navy lacks a comprehensive maritime strategy that defines what the Navy needs to do, how it needs to do it, the resources required, and how to manage risk if those resources aren’t available. The Navy had a strategy that did these things in the past. The maritime strategy of the 1980s articulated a clear vision for the Navy’s purpose and how Navy leaders planned to achieve it. The nation would be well-served by the Navy’s developing such a strategy again.

I entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 1993 and was part of a new generation of officers who assumed the watch after the fall of the Soviet Union. We were the beneficiaries of a nation that had a clear and defensible maritime strategy, an administration that provided the vision, a Congress that funded it, and a Navy that executed it. Throughout my career, I deployed on both the Navy’s oldest and newest ships, but they were all designed for the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

Want more? Here is a link to the War on the Rocks article

Few writers are as successful as Francine Prose (and what a great name for a writer!) and few likely work harder at their craft (Prose typically does dozens of drafts of each novel).

Most of us who write would like to be as successful as Francine Prose. That is why I was drawn to a piece about her with the intriguing title of: “‘I’m Easily Bored by Books,’ Says Writer of 22 Novels.” Here is how it begins:

Francine Prose writes a lot.

During her nearly 50-year career, Prose has published 30 books along with reams of essays, reviews, columns and travelogues on subjects as diverse as Anne Frank, Peggy Guggenheim, Caravaggio and bacon. And while her work deals in weighty themes like truth, identity and power, even when she’s writing about breakfast foods, she is not precious about it.

“I hate the word process, I just can’t bear it,” Prose said in an interview. “People say, ‘What’s your process?’ My process is allowing my soul to leave my body and enter into the body of another human being. So try that!”

Her latest novel, “The Vixen,” which will be published on Tuesday by Harper, is a good example. It is about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the C.I.A. and book publishing. And it is often hilarious.

“We have to entertain ourselves somehow,” she said.

Want more? You can read the rest of the piece here

Local author’s works imagine and prepare for the wars of tomorrow
By Samantha Bey

As red, white and blue buntings are hoisted on homes around town and Fourth of July festivities abound, July is an opportune time to reflect on all that this country has bestowed upon us and all that we hope to protect. One Coronado resident who counts the blessings of America – and then writes about how to shield them from potential threats, both real and imagined – is local author, Captain George Galdorisi. The Navy moved George, his wife Becky, and their two children, Brian and Laura, to Coronado in 1983 for what they expected would be another two-year assignment before they’d pack up and leave for their next duty station. Thirty-eight years later, now with grandchildren growing up here, it turns out their sojourn to Coronado was a (happily) permanent one.

Galdorisi ended up completing several tours at NAS North Island, Becky taught in the Coronado School District for over two decades, and Brian and Laura both graduated from Coronado High School. During his tenure in the Navy and despite having had a busy, seagoing career, Galdorisi managed to write more than a dozen books published by mainstream publishers. He has also written over 400 articles for professional publications and hundreds of conference papers for military, industry, academic and technical conferences. And now, as the Director of Strategic Assessments and Technical Futures at Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, he has also managed to write two new books, one fiction and one non-fiction, that look to the future of warfare.

“Most publishers and editors give the same advice,” he says, “which is to ‘write what you know.’ When I write fiction, I draw from my operational experience as a naval aviator, as well as from my technical experience working with unmanned systems, big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning. This experience informs my novels.” Galdorisi began his writing career in 1978 with an article in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. He went on to write the New York Times bestseller Act of Valor, a novelization of the Bandito Brothers, as well as The Kissing Sailor, which proved the identity of the two people in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square. His reboot of the Tom Clancy Op-Center series includes three consecutive New York Times bestsellers: Out of the Ashes, Into the Fire and Scorched Earth. His latest fiction project, published by Braveship Books and is a series of thrillers about fictional character Rick Holden: The Coronado Conspiracy, For Duty and Honor, and the recently released Fire and Ice. “Fire and Ice is a thriller focused on the political-military tensions created by a modern-day Russia at its vindictive worst,” Galdorisi explains. “Vladimir Putin emerges as a central character who uses the fulcrum of Belarus to hold Western Europe hostage by strangling their oil and gas supplies.” Galdorisi says that the novel poses the plausible and highly realistic question: Can Putin and his rogue nation be thwarted through the combined efforts of EU and US political and military might? Perhaps most striking about Fire and Ice is that fictional events portrayed in the book appear to have come true in 2021. The events described in the novel include a ship completely blocking the Suez Canal, a cyber-attack on America’s oil and gas infrastructure, and Russia bullying and eventually invading a neighboring nation. Does Galdorisi have a crystal ball? Or is he just a very lucky guesser? “One of my childhood heroes, Yogi Berra, said ‘It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.’

When I write fiction, I write about things that worry me about future warfare, and then I try to intuit what wars will be like in years hence,” explains Galdorisi. It seems that so far both his worries and his intuition are pretty spot on. He notes that all three of his most recent novels, The Coronado Conspiracy (which, aptly named, has a firm anchor in this city) For Duty and Honor and Fire and Ice, are contributions to an increasingly popular genre commonly known as FICINT, which is short for fictional intelligence. “This means imagining future warfare scenarios based on the reality of high-end combat and real-world intelligence, not fantasy,” says Galdorisi. “My goal,” he says, “is to leave the reader wondering not if, but when, these kinds of scenarios will play out in our lifetimes.” Galdorisi’s primary writing passion is novels, but he also feels a sense of duty to share his knowledge in the nonfiction arena. Earlier this year he released a nonfiction project, AI at War: How Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are Changing Naval Warfare. “Along with my co-author, Dr. Sam Tangredi, another former naval officer and Coronado resident, I wrote this book because we believe that it is important for Americans to understand how inserting big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning into military weapon systems will change warfare as we know it,” he explains.

Galdorisi says writing nonfiction in addition to fiction “definitely helps” when it comes to the believability of his novels. “Starting with Act of Valor, continuing through the Tom Clancy Op-Center books, and now the more recent Rick Holden thriller series, these novels wouldn’t be believable if the technical details—especially technologies that will impact future warfare—were not dead-on right.”

When it comes to the new FICINT genre, Galdorisi explains some readers may feel troubled that people outside of the Pentagon were writing about the future of warfare. He, however, feels differently. “Many commentators accuse the U.S. military of preparing for the last war. There may be some truth to this criticism. However, there is a movement afoot to better prepare for the wars of tomorrow. Throughout the 20th century, planning for tomorrow’s conflicts occurred exclusively within the walls of the Pentagon. With a well-known adversary during the Cold War this was an acceptable strategy. However today, with a plethora of new threats, this is no longer the case.”

Galdorisi explains that for years, writers imagined future warfare, but U.S. officials responsible for the security and prosperity of America either disregarded these stories or criticized them as unhelpful to crafting a coherent national and military strategy. He says this has changed in the 21st century. “The U.S. national security community has now embraced this new FICINT genre as a useful instrument to intuit how tomorrow’s wars will be fought.”

Even with all the potentially looming warfare to write about in real life, Galdorisi’s future writing projects will focus on his fi ction. “I need to get Rick Holden and his friends in trouble again, so I am working on my next novel, as well as on another book on the impact of artificial intelligence on future warfare. That should keep me off the streets and out of the saloons for a while,” he says with a laugh. Other than writing books that envision what future warfare will be like, George likes nothing more than connecting with readers. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter, and learn more about his books, blogs, and other writing on his website, georgegaldorisi.com especially his “Writing Tips,” — which offers useful advice for all scribes, from established authors to future best-selling writers.

Most of us have been trained to be more productive – I know that I have. So it’s easy to see how you can get on the productive treadmill and literally forget how to relax.

That’s why I was drawn to this article with the intriguing title: “Trying to be more productive? Schedule time to rest and take a break.” Schedule time to take a break? What?

Here is how it begins and what drew me in:

It’s probably never been easier to acknowledge that a lot of us work too much and too hard, and should take more time off. Indeed, the very idea of burnout seems to be having a cultural moment.

“If you think you’re burned out, you’re burned out,” Jill Lepore wrote recently in The New Yorker, summarizing the workplace zeitgeist, “and if you don’t think you’re burned out, you’re burned out.”

What’s the problem? In part, it may be a sociocultural residue of the industrial age, which emphasized a certain “visible busyness,” intertwined with Max Weber’s “Protestant Work Ethic” theory of divine toil, suggests John Fitch, the author with Max Frenzel of the 2020 book “Time Off.” They argue that the time has come for workaholics and productivity junkies (and the rest of us) to be as deliberate, thoughtful and creative about taking breaks as they are about their jobs. And that is about more than just using up vacation days, Mr. Fitch said in an interview: “We want to expand the connotation of time off.” Specifically, he and Mr. Frenzel recommend cultivating a “rest ethic.”

Want more? You can read the rest of the piece here

[Editor’s Note:  Mad Scientist Laboratory is pleased to announce our latest episode of The Convergence podcast, featuring CAPT George Galdorisi (USN-Ret.) discussing leading edge technologies, man-machine teaming, and algorithms of armageddon — Enjoy!  (Please note that this podcast and several of the embedded links below are best accessed via a non-DoD network due to network priorities for teleworking)]

[If the podcast dashboard is not rendering correctly for you, please click here to listen to the podcast]

CAPT George Galdorisi (USN-Ret.) is a career naval aviator whose thirty years of active duty service included four command tours and five years as a carrier strike group chief of staff. He is currently the Director of Strategic Assessments and Technical Futures at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in San Diego, California. He is also a contributing blogger for the Mad Scientist Laboratory, having written Creating a Convergence of Technologies to Defeat the Deadly Fast Inshore Attack Craft Threat Before 2050 and Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Meet Warfighter Needs. CAPT Galdorisi also presented Designing Unmanned Systems For the Multi-Domain Battle (please access this video via a non-DoD network) as a Mad Scientist Speaker Series presentation on 10 January 2018.

CAPT Galdorisi began his writing career in 1978 with an article in the U.S. Navy’s professional magazine, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.
Since then, he has written fifteen books published by mainstream publishers, including the New York Times bestseller, Tom Clancy Presents: Act of Valor, the novelization of the Bandito Brothers/Relativity Media film, and The Kissing Sailor, which proved the identity of the two principals in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic V-J Day in Times Square photograph. His latest projects include a new series of thrillers published by Braveship books, as well as a recent collaboration with St. Martin’s Press rebooting the Tom Clancy Op-Center series. His three Braveship thrillers are: The Coronado Conspiracy, For Duty and Honor, and Fire and Ice, just released in 2021. The first three books of the rebooted Tom Clancy Op-Center series, Out of the Ashes, Into the Fire, and Scorched Earth are New York Times, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly best-sellers.

In today’s podcast, CAPT Galdorisi discusses leading edge technologies, man-machine teaming, and algorithms of armageddon. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview:

• All military services must identify the “low hanging fruit” where Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be injected quickly and easily into the  operational force. For example, the U.S. Army lost Soldiers on fuel and water resupply convoys during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. AI can be incorporated into logistics platforms, replacing vulnerable human drivers in order to save lives.

• We are still assessing who — human or machine — has the innate edge over the other; however, man-machine teaming is really what holds the advantage. We are slowly developing how to best pair manned and unmanned platforms to create a sum that is greater than its parts.

• History is replete with battles where Leaders were forced to make command decisions with a limited or incomplete understanding of all available information.  AI intelligence systems and entities conducting machine speed collection, collation, and analysis of battlefield information will free Commanders to do what they do best — fight and make decisions, respectively. Commanders will be able to focus on the battle with coup d’œil, or the “stroke of an eye,” maintaining situational awareness without consuming precious time crunching data.  AI’s role is not to make decisions free from human input, but rather to assist decision makers by presenting logical alternatives.

• We are techno-realists, not techno-optimists. Fiction is a great tool to help determine the future of warfare; however, it often includes idealized AI solutions. Where as in reality, this is not the case. We are not trying to change the world with AI, so much as go after the low hanging fruit to initiate change.

• The Army is leading the way in autonomous convoys and wearable devices that can help lighten the load for the Soldier. The most important thing is to recognize the importance of AI and autonomy for the Services and DoD which is happening at Senior Leader levels. Each Service can do much better in sharing their best practices and ideas for AI solutions and innovations.

• For his novels, Mr. Galdorisi begins by thinking about what worries him regarding the military and builds a scenario around that fear. His novel, Fire and Ice, depicts Soviet meddling into Eastern Europe and the possibility of Russia holding its energy supply hostage in order to exercise power over Europe. With its European presence, the Army must be aware of the potential for Europe to become the next host of a new cold war and posture itself to prevail.

• New writers should get their feet wet by writing articles for professional journals before undertaking an entire novel.

Stay tuned to the Mad Scientist Laboratory for our next episode of “The Convergence,” featuring our interview with Air Force Gaming leads Capt Zachary Baumann, Capt Oliver Parsons, and MSgt Michael Sullivan discussing how gaming breaks down barriers like rank and geography, the digital talent residing in the gaming community, and how video games can cultivate the future senior leaders of the military. Check out our video teaser from this upcoming podcast!

How did you like this podcast?  Have you had a chance to rate or review it on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you accessed it?  This feedback helps us to improve future episodes of The Convergence and allows us to reach a bigger and broader audience — Thank you!

Originally From: The Greater Los Angles Writer’s Society 

Fire and Ice is a thriller focused on the political-military tensions created by a modern-day Russia at its vindictive worst. Vladimir Putin emerges as the central character who uses the fulcrum of Belarus to threaten western Europe through a series of lethal and effective attacks on US and European energy sources. Fire and Ice poses the plausible and highly realistic question: Can Putin and his rogue nation be thwarted through the combined efforts of EU and US and political and military might?

Rick Holden and Laura Peters, reunited after several years of being assigned to commands half a world apart, find themselves thrown together by their parent agencies—the CIA and the DoD’s European Command, respectively. Their mission to rescue a captured American is successful, but then they must turn on a dime and race against time to thwart the transfer of weapons of mass destruction to vengeful terrorists.

Fire and Ice is a new entry in the increasingly popular genre commonly known as “FICINT”—imaging future warfare scenarios based on the realities of high-end combat and real-world intelligence, not fantasy. It leaves the reader wondering not if, but when, such a cataclysmic scenario might play out in our lifetimes. Drawing on the cutting-edge military technology he discusses in his recent non-fiction work: AI at War: How Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Are Changing Naval Warfare, George Galdorisi injects a new level of future warfare reality into Fire and Ice.

George Galdorisi is a career naval aviator and writer, specializing in “FICINT,” combining fiction writing with current intelligence to envision future warfare. He began this journey almost a decade ago with the New York Times best seller, Tom Clancy Presents: Act of Valor (Penguin), the novelization of the Relativity Media number-one rated movie. This was followed in rapid succession by three more New York Times best sellers in the rebooted Tom Clancy’s Op-Center series: Out of the Ashes, Into the Fire, and Scorched Earth (St. Martins). Continuing in the FICINT tradition, his three most recent thrillers are The Coronado Conspiracy, For Duty and Honor and the just-released (March 2021) Fire and Ice (Braveship Books).

His FININT work—imaging future warfare scenarios based on the realities of high-end combat and real-world intelligence, not fantasy—is supported by his thirty years as a naval aviator, including four command tours and five years as a carrier strike group chief of staff, culminating in two combat tours in the Arabian Gulf.  During this final tour he also led the U.S. delegation for military-to-military talks with China’s People’s Liberation Army, Navy. Adding to his ability to harness all-source, open-source, intelligence to support these FICINT efforts, he is currently the Director of Strategic Assessments and Technical Futures at the Navy Information Warfare Center Pacific in San Diego, California.

Other than writing thrillers, George likes nothing more than connecting with readers. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter, and learn more about his books, blogs and other writing on his website: http://georgegaldorisi.com/—especially his “Writing Tips,”—which offer useful advice for all writers from established authors to future best-selling writers.

Full disclosure: I love to drive. When people started talking about self-driving cars, the first thing I asked myself was: What question is this the answer to?

But people who thought they were the greatest idea ever were undaunted. Predictions about self-driving cars being on the roads in huge numbers by this year were everywhere.

Now we have hit the brakes. I read an article recently, “The Costly Pursuit of Self-Driving Cars Continues On. And On. And On.” It’s subtitle is revealing: “Many in Silicon Valley promised that self-driving cars would be a common sight by 2021. Now the industry is resetting expectations and settling in for years of more work.” Here is how it begins:

It was seven years ago when Waymo discovered that spring blossoms made its self-driving cars get twitchy on the brakes. So did soap bubbles. And road flares.

New tests, in years of tests, revealed more and more distractions for the driverless cars. Their road skills improved, but matching the competence of human drivers was elusive. The cluttered roads of America, it turned out, were a daunting place for a robot.

The wizards of Silicon Valley said people would be commuting to work in self-driving cars by now. Instead, there have been court fights, injuries and deaths, and tens of billions of dollars spent on a frustratingly fickle technology that some researchers say is still years from becoming the industry’s next big thing.

Now the pursuit of autonomous cars is undergoing a reset. Companies like Uber and Lyft, worried about blowing through their cash in pursuit of autonomous technology, have tapped out. Only the deepest-pocketed outfits like Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet; auto giants; and a handful of start-ups are managing to stay in the game.

Want more? You can read the rest of the piece here

In this episode I have the honor of sitting down with one of my mentors, Navy Captain George Galdorisi. George is a Leader, Mentor, Strategic Thinker, National Security expert, and author of 15 books. George discusses his latest Rick Holden thriller, Fire and Ice. It is fiction that experts claim helps to strategize the challenges Russia presents in the real world today.

In the late 1990s I had the honor of leading the United States delegation for military-to-military talks with the People’s Liberation Army, Navy (the PLAN).

Our group visited Chinese naval bases and back then, China’s navy was not much of a force. That has changed dramatically in the ensuing two decades.

That’s why I found a recent article, “China’s navy has more ships than the US. Does that matter?” so interesting. Here is how it begins:

Exactly if and when the increasing antagonism between United States and China will boil over into full-on conflict remains anybody’s guess.

But for now, one thing is as clear as the aqua-blue waters that lap up on the shores of China’s man-made islands in the South China Sea: Beijing’s naval fleet is larger than that of the U.S. Navy.
Citing the Office of Naval Intelligence, a Congressional Research Service report from March notes that the People’s Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN, was slated to have 360 battle force ships by the end of 2020, dwarfing the U.S. fleet of 297 ships.

Such numbers are hard to pinpoint because the PLAN doesn’t release public reports on its future shipbuilding efforts like the U.S. Navy does. But according to the CRS, China is on pace to have 425 battle force ships by 2030. Sheer size and numbers carry a quality all their own, and a numerical advantage would be of benefit in a small battlespace like the Taiwan Strait, some China watchers say.

Still, others note that because the U.S. Navy has been doing this a lot longer than the growing Chinese force and is aided by the naval might of America’s allies in the region, the U.S. retains key advantages that extend beyond any mere hull tally.

Want more? You can read the rest of the piece here