05/27/2021

Every once in a while you read something that really makes you think. As a writer, I often wonder why those of us who write in the political-military sphere do what we do.

I resurrected an article I read almost ten years ago: “Novelists Predict Future With Eerie Accuracy.” Here is how the author begins:

Last year, he had described, in his dystopian comic novel “Super Sad True Love Story,” a near future world in which economic chaos followed the United States’ default on its debt, and Chinese creditors scolded America for its profligate ways.

Now the story seemed to have an echo in real life. Washington’s extended impasse over raising the debt ceiling was resolved with a last-minute vote, but the nearness of the miss and the subsequent credit downgrade by Standard & Poor’s sent markets on a wild ride. The admonition from China’s official Xinhua news agency — “The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone” — might as well have come from Mr. Shteyngart’s laptop.

That was then, this is now, and this general idea of looking to the future through fiction has evolved into a new genre called FICINT—imagining future warfare scenarios based on the realities of high-end combat and real-world intelligence, not fantasy. My most recent novel, Fire and Ice, is a engrossing thriller focused on the political-military tensions created by a modern-day Russia at its vindictive worst. It leaves the reader wondering not if, but when, such a cataclysmic scenario might play out in our lifetimes.

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

A link to Fire and Ice on Amazon is here

The world was changing dramatically before Covid-19 hit early last year, and the pandemic has accelerated those changes.

What does all this mean for how America deals with this changed world? I wonder about that subject, and that is why I enjoyed Andrew Bacevich’s review of two new books “Losing the Long Game” and “Isolationism.” Here is how his review, “Where Does American Foreign Policy Go From Here?” Here is how he begins:

LOSING THE LONG GAME

The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East

By Philip H. Gordon

ISOLATIONISM
A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself From the World

By Charles A. Kupchan

Having made a hash of things over the last several decades, our self-described Indispensable Nation is looking pretty dispensable, not to mention confused and adrift. So there is a pressing need to understand how things went wrong and how to make them right. Each in different ways, this is the task that Philip H. Gordon and Charles A. Kupchan set for themselves.

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

Originally Published: April 18, 2021 by Hugh Taylor on Journal of Cyber Policy

AI at War: How Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning are Changing Naval Warfare

Edited by Sam J. Tangredi and George Galdorisi

AI at War: How Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning are Changing Naval Warfare, the new book from Naval Institute Press, offers an ambitious discussion about the US military’s adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related technology. Edited by Sam J. Tangredi and George Galdorisi, former US Navy officers who now work in naval officer training and strategic planning, AI at War is not a traditional book. Rather, it is a collection of 18 papers on the many aspects of the subject matter.

As one of the contributors put it, soldiers have been wondering what’s on the other side of the hill for thousands of years.

Reading this book is a bit like attending a symposium with 18 panel discussions. Tangredi and Galdorisi have done a great job in curating the material and presenting it in an order that takes the reader through the byzantine collection of interlocking policy issues that surround the technologies. Starting with a quite helpful comparative definition of AI and Machine Learning (ML), the book orients the reader to the underlying technologies, as well as the pre-technology philosophical issues that drove the development of AI and ML in the first place.

This is not a scholarly digression. Rather, as the editors understand, it is impossible to grasp the potential of AI and ML in the military if one doesn’t have a sense of how their foundational ideas have permeated military thinking for centuries. As one of the contributors put it, soldiers have been wondering what’s on the other side of the hill for thousands of years.

The material can be slow-going in places, but this is not a beach read. It’s a serious discussion of what are arguably some of the most significant challenges to have faced the US military in a generation. The book discusses AI and ML as a matter of global great power competition—providing some fascinating insights into the different ways that Russia and China, the USA’s two main adversaries, might use the technologies. In this, the contributors challenge the reader’s assumptions about military use of technology in general. Russia and China have different relationships between their governments and their militaries, so their use of AI and ML will be different. In China’s case, for example, AI is most likely being used as a mechanism to monitor the political loyalty of junior officers.

The book also takes the reader into important dialogues about the realities of developing new AI and ML for the military and implementing them at the level of naval operations. The contributors point out how AI and ML policy will have to navigate the complex institutional and political aspects of the Navy and other service branches. Congressional pork barreling, influential defense contractors and inter-service tensions will very much be a part of AI and ML coming into the mainstream of the Navy. Realism is a must in any discussion of the technologies.

AI and ML policy will have to navigate the complex institutional and political aspects of the Navy and other service branches.

Along the way, the book covers potential AI and ML use cases in the Navy. In this, the contributors highlight areas where AI and ML can make an impact on and off the zone of combat. For example, AI and ML might help with supply logistics, a less sexy but vital area of naval operations that can help win battles. The book also delves into the thorny moral and command issues raised by autonomous weapons.

As the contributors point out, AI and ML are already in use in the Navy. And, new AI and ML tools will be added to the naval technology landscape whether policy planners want them there or not. It’s simply coming in all sorts of new technologies being acquired by the service every year. The challenge will be to identify and pursue a strategically coherent and advantageous overall strategy.

This is a necessary book, because, as the editors explain, there has not been enough discussion of AI and ML in naval circles separate from requests for funding. As the editors and contributors seem to understand, if the matter is not well understood by the leadership of the Navy, the funding of AI and ML research will not be well spent.

Overall, AI at War is a worthwhile and useful contribution to a serious dialogue about the best way to employ emerging AI and ML technologies in the defense of the United States.

National security and defense officials have begun to recognize that, while it is impossible to accurately “predict” what conflict will look like in the future, one way to avoid assuming that the next war will look precisely like the last one is to mine works of fiction. In novels, authors can spread their wings unencumbered by existing doctrine.

This fairly new phenomena has been dubbed “FICINT,” as it combines fiction writing with current intelligence to envision future warfare. This writing is strongly grounded in reality and not fantasy and that is what makes it so valuable.

While anyone can write FICINT, periodically, one or more writers with the strongest possible “street creds” produce a work of fiction that imagines war in the future. 2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis is one such work – and one that was recently highlighted in the New York Times Book Review “Shortlist.” Here is an excerpt:

This fast-paced military thriller details the horrifying aftermath of a mistaken encounter between an American naval patrol and a potent Chinese weapon. The weapon’s power — to destroy all computers on board the American ships, rendering them utterly isolated — works as a kind of metonymy for the book’s argument about America’s waning global influence. The military’s isolation finds a twin in the novel’s political problem, in which American operators must reimagine their allies not as helpers to boost their might but as saviors.

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

Asked the question, “Who is the most powerful person in publishing,” most would not guess correctly, but they would likely assume that it was a man – and they would be wrong. That honor goes to Madeline McIntosh, the U.S. chief executive of Penguin Random House.

I was taken by a recent article describing her accession to this position – at an atypically young age – because it did a deep dive into her career path, while also addressing the important question regarding book sales. The title of the piece, “Best Sellers Sell the Best Because They’re Best Sellers,” sums up the business side of the article.

What surprised me is that her climb was not a straight climb up the corporate ladder, but rather a series of twists and turns, zigzags and lateral moves, many of them quite risky, but all of them invaluable in preparing to lead the biggest of the big-five publishing houses. Indeed, Penguin Random House is larger than the remaining top four publishers combined!

You will find her story fascinating and enriching. Want more? You can read the rest of the piece here

Most people who write yearn for more of one thing. No, it’s not inspiration, or an uber-quiet office, or a better agent, or a more fabulous publisher. It is one thing alone: time!

That is why I was drawn to a recent article by Ken Wells, “How I Wrote Five Novels While Commuting.” It inspired me to make time. Here is how he begins:

When I took a job in New York City at the age of 44, I had work I loved, a growing family and a secret disappointment. I had always wanted to write a novel.

For eight years I’d dragged a manuscript around and fitfully pecked away at it. But mornings with my wife and young daughters were busy, and my job as an editor and writer at this paper was demanding. By the time I slogged home after eight to 10 hours at the office, I was usually too beat to write another sentence.

How would I ever find the time and energy to write?

My move came with a commute. I was captive to a train that shuttled me back and forth from my home in suburban New Jersey, to Hoboken, N.J., where I hopped a ferry to my job in lower Manhattan. The train ride was about 50 minutes each way.

A week or two into my commute, two things had become clear: I would be spending a lot of time on the train. And the ride was pretty comfortable. One day it hit me: Could I write a novel on the train?

I started doing calculations. If I subtracted, say, 10 weeks a year for vacation, business travel and sick days, that meant I’d have 42 weeks, or 210 weekdays a year, to work on my novel. If I could write two single-spaced pages a day, or about 1,000 words—which didn’t seem that ambitious—surely at the end of 12 months I could end up with close to a 400-page manuscript.

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

Every so often, a book comes along that makes you think. And when one makes you think about the country you live in, it gets my attention.

That is why I was drawn to a review of a new book, “Tightrope, Americans Reaching for Hope,”
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

The review alone took me to places In America I have never been and knew nothing about. Here is how it begins:

As the United States awakens from one of its foundational myths — that we are a democracy without castes — the official record of our times is being written largely by people born to socioeconomic advantage. This irony, in which those on the fortunate end of historic wealth inequality attempt to chronicle a populist movement produced by that inequality, often results in dubious journalism.

Even well-intentioned urban, coastal, college-educated scribes commit obliviously condescending word choices (“flyover country”), illogical assumptions (everyone in red states voted for Trump) and variations on poverty porn, in which subjects are conveyed as helpless and joyless (“observe this sorry case in Appalachia”). To those who know something about, say, rural poverty firsthand, earnest nonfiction narratives understandably may read as voyeuristic studies predicated on the dangerous idea that we are a nation of two essentially different kinds of people.

In fact, we are a nation of essentially similar people shaped by vastly different circumstances of place, wealth, education and culture. Those best able to document our socioeconomic divide with humility and accuracy typically have occupied more than one class, remain connected to the one they left and attribute any upward mobility to good fortune rather than to personal exceptionalism.

One such journalist is the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who grew up tending sheep on a small family farm in rural Oregon in the 1960s and ’70s. In “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope,” he and the journalist Sheryl WuDunn, who is also his wife, offer a litany of stories from across the country, revealing the structural causes of countless so-called personal failures among the working poor. Most of these stories come from Kristof’s hometown of Yamhill, population 1,105.

Intrigued? You can read the full review here

I write about things that make me wonder. “What Ifs” come naturally from both my military experience as well as my current work in the high-tech world. Here is what inspired For Duty and Honor:

What if the Islamic Republic of Iran is killing Americans in terrorist attacks and other actions and the United States is not taking action? And what is a carrier strike group commander decides to create an incident that has Iran’s fingerprints and uses this as an excuse to extract his own vengeance on Iran? Can he be stopped?

And here is the review from Wings of Gold:

I write about things that make me wonder. “What Ifs” come naturally from both my military experience as well as my current work in the high-tech world. Here is what inspired The Coronado Conspiracy:

“What if the most senior officers in the United States military are so dissatisfied with the President that they concoct a scheme to have the President direct a major military operation, and then have that operation fail in order to drive the President out of office?”

And here is the review from Wings of Gold: