Science Fiction

This essay is a fictional memo set in the year 2060 written by a future U.S. national security advisor to a future president that recounts the preceding four decades of U.S. military involvement. The memo follows the post-mortem assessment used by LTC Matt Cavanaugh, itself an homage to retired Major General Dunlap’s essay. Unlike those pieces, however, this essay presents a more optimistic view based on a defense & intelligence community that made hard decisions and difficult investments in the 2020s which allowed the U.S. armed forces to prevail in contested conflicts throughout the rest of the century.

The Mad Scientist team executed its 2019 Science Fiction Writing Contest to glean insights about the future fight with a near-peer competitor in 2030. We received 77 submissions from both within and outside of the DoD. This story was one of our semi-finalists and features a futuristic look at warfare and its featured technologies.

First things first: I am not a Mad Scientist - I am an Angry Engineer! I’ve been in the business of analyzing systems for decades, as active duty military, DoD systems engineer, intelligence analyst, and more. And yes, I’ve been a REMF (look it up if you don’t already know it, please refer to pages 9-11 for explanation of all the other acronyms and terms used in this report) the entire time because I enjoy not being shot at while I work. Enough of my background, my task here is to provide an End-To-End Analysis and lessons learned from the April Fools’ Day battle for Otso fought mainly between Donovia and the United States.

Technologically, the world in 2051 was even more interconnected, operating on 5G and leveraging the spatial web where augmented and virtual realities served as mediators between the real ‘touch and feel’ world and the digital world. All the while, artificial intelligence was approaching ‘general’ intelligence and scientists around the world cautioned that it was imminent and that the existing global infrastructure was not going to be able to respond to the potential risks that have been hypothesized to arise.

A short paper on the Kobayashi Maru training exercise employed in the fictional Star Trek universe. A discussion of 3 key takeaways.

This article describes the results of a statistical analysis of the entire corpus of Mad Scientist SciFi stories to identify common themes that emerge when all stories are considered together.