Telling Tales: Startup Helps Officers Explain Future Warfare Through Storytelling.

• Author: Roaten, Meredith

Despite a decades-long military career producing policy papers, crafting monographs and even publishing a book, retired Army Col. Ike Wilson wasn't entirely sure how his writing would turn out before he walked into a three-day storytelling conference.

"I'm a pretty prolific author and writer. But I convinced myself a long time ago that I was a very particular type of scholarly writer and even a technical writer," said Wilson, who serves as president and professor at the Joint Special Operations University.

But after three days of conversations with creatives involved in world-renowned television, book and movie projects such as The Mandalorian and Band of Brothers, Wilson said he felt ready to tell the story of modernized special operations forces using creative, narrative fiction.

"We don't consider ourselves necessarily artists in terms of what we do," he said.

Empowering personnel in the defense community to grab attention with their writing is the goal of Useful Fiction, the company that organized the three-day workshop for JSOU.

Co-founded by authors Peter W. Singer and August Cole, Useful Fiction wants to change how warfighters envision new technologies and concepts that will be essential to the future of warfare.

"We're at this point where... quantum computing, artificial intelligence or robotics are no longer sci-fi," said Cole, who is also a nonresident fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at Marine Corps University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center on Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.

"There is, I think, an awareness throughout the Defense Department--certainly within the Pentagon--that the conventional ways of... thinking about the future and, of course, making steps to act on it, aren't sufficient."

Singer and Cole started the company in 2021 after working together on the 2015 best-selling thriller novel Ghost Fleet. The story--which follows the U.S. military, its adversaries and allies as World War III breaks out--is fiction, but the concepts and technologies described in it are not.

That's the formula for what Useful Fiction dubs "fictional intelligence," and it's what made the novel so compelling to its readers, said Singer, who is also a senior fellow at the New America think tank. Ghost Fleet's 27 pages of endnotes explained how plot points like specific cyber attacks have been tested in the real world.

Even some of the character's quotes were taken from real...