It's 2099, and a NATO spacecraft is under attack in Earth’s orbit. As drones take off from the moon, the fog of war descends.
“Our AI sets are inundating us with data we are no longer able to process,” says Sandy Masala, the NATO secretary general.
This isn’t a scene from the next Star Wars movie, but rather from NATO 2099, a science-fiction graphic novel published by NATO to celebrate its 75th anniversary. Drawing on contributions from 34 writers, an editorial team has woven these stories into a single narrative that envisions what the world — and NATO — might look like 75 years from now.
The approach is less far-fetched than it might seem.
“We operate in a field, war and conflict, where we have huge gaps in knowledge all the time. We don't know what certain people think about us. We don't know exactly what their capabilities are,” Florence Gaub, director of the research division at the NATO Defense College in Rome, where she co-ordinated the project, told The Parliament. “We use our imagination to narrow this gap down. And science fiction is imagination."
In a world of rapidly changing technology and asymmetric conflict, thinking creatively about potential threats is crucial. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001, a commission found that the "most important failure was one of imagination."
It’s a finding that has accelerated an appetite for innovation and an openness for new methods in the world of defence.
“We took it to the leadership level and were expecting pushback, and we got no pushback whatsoever,” Gaub says, adding that speculative fiction isn’t alien to NATO’s senior ranks. Admiral James Stavridis, the alliance’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe from 2009-2013, has written several science fiction novels since retiring.
NATO has several teams tasked with exploring future scenarios over different timeframes including "situational awareness and early warning and intelligence, which means the next six months,” Gaub says.
“Then there’s SHAPE, the military command structure. They normally don’t think further than two years. Then you have Allied Command Transformation. They are the ones thinking about the next 20 years.”
Beyond that, it’s science fiction. “This is what we call fringe future: not necessarily the likely future, but the future that people are not looking at,” Gaub says.
The stories submitted to NATO 2099 are packed with thought-provoking ideas, from libraries becoming priority targets — because they are used to train AI — to concepts of telepathic weaponry. NATO has published an anthology of the submissions alongside the graphic novel.
The strength of this approach is what is called the “crowd effect” — when many writers come up with similar ideas, patterns emerge. Many of the featured writers, for example, envisioned maritime conflicts, involving submarine terrorism and underwater drones. It’s a reoccurrence Gaub considers significant.
Futures past
It wouldn’t be the first time science fiction has predicted future threats to humanity. As early as 1985, Isaac Asimov’s Robots and Empire explored how artificial intelligence might be tricked into attacking civilians, despite strict laws prohibiting a robot from ever harming a human. Decades earlier, Asimov was already coming up with these laws.
Science fiction has also imagined specific technologies and weapons that could be deployed on real battlefields. In a 2017 episode of the British TV series Black Mirror, for example, AI-powered robot dogs are programmed to hunt humans. Four years later, robotic quadrupeds with advanced sensor technology were deployed to guard Tyndall Air Force Base in the US state of Florida — albeit with stricter rules of engagement than what was seen in the series.
Robot dogs also feature in a short story written by August Cole, a former Wall Street Journal defence journalist. In Cole’s tale, which was commissioned by NATO’s Innovation Hub, the robots malfunction in extreme heat and have difficulty distinguishing friend from foe.
Cole has built a career writing defence-oriented science fiction. He co-authored the acclaimed Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, which examines supply-chain and cybersecurity threats resulting from conflicts. The book earned its authors an invitation to the White House Situation Room
“If you look back at the history of people trying to understand warfare, science fiction has always played a role,” Cole says.
Cole and his frequent co-author, P.W. Singer, coined the terms “useful fiction” and “fictional intelligence” to describe science-fiction works grounded in plausible near futures.
“One of the cardinal rules that I always adhere to is that the science, the technology, the way people behave, has to be realistic and rooted in things that are knowable,” Cole says. “One of the reasons why that's really important is when you're making something up, you want people to believe you.”
In the real world, identifying potential threats through speculative fiction can also help organisations collaborate better between departments, he says.
“What often happens is that there's siloing in technical communities. You have incredible expertise, and the way that that is communicated is often done in a manner that is really specific to those expert communities.”
Cole says that one threat area NATO should keep an eye on is cognitive warfare. “It’s a mix of information warfare and propaganda and disinformation — basically using AI and algorithms to shape people's behaviour in the real world,” he says, pointing to the example of Russia’s current misinformation campaigns against western countries.
His line of work was made possible by trailblazers such as Arlan Andrew, the science fiction author who founded SIGMA, a science fiction think tank, in the early 1990s. As a young man working in the White House science office, Andrew attended forecast meetings run by bureaucrats.
“They were very conservative, very mundane. They didn't think about the future the way science fiction writers did,” Andrews says.
Back then, he had to fight to overcome “the giggle factor” — the challenge of not being taken seriously. “That’s why I wanted science fiction writers with PhDs: scientists and engineers who also wrote,” he says.
It paid off: SIGMA would go on to consult for the US government.
Since then, governments around the world have explored science fiction as a military asset. In 2019, France established the Red Team, a group of science fiction writers hired to assist military strategists in anticipating future national security threats by identifying technological, economic, societal and environmental trends that could lead to conflicts between 2030 and 2060.
Literary intelligence
In Germany, the government-funded Project Cassandra took a different approach, homing in on hidden messages in literature. It was led by Jürgen Wertheimer, a philosophy professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Though sceptical about the specific usefulness of science fiction, he advocates for the broader importance of fiction writing.
“Literature is the substantial DNA of society. But that someone accepts that and takes it seriously, that is rare,” he says, lamenting the significant gap between culture and politics. When the German military recognized the project’s value, he said he was surprised. Since its inception, Project Cassandra has been a regular participant at the annual Munich Security Conference.
Together with his team, Wertheimer developed a method for analysing books to predict future trends, using literature as an early warning system. For example, they identified indicators pointing to unrest in Algeria before civil protests erupted in 2021.
“I compare myself to a volcanologist, who can illuminate the internal tremors of a seismic zone quite well,” he says.
When literature references mythologised historical conflicts, he says it can often serve as a warning sign. Before the Kosovo War in the late 1990s, Serbian writers made frequent reference to the late medieval conflict between the Serbian and Ottoman empires.
“The Battle of Kosovo from 1389 became really charged up. It’s ideological preparation. This is reflected incredibly precisely in texts, and you can deduce what can happen in the future,” says Wertheimer.
As a futurist, Elina Hiltunen has made looking into the future her job. She currently researches the use of science fiction for defence at Finland's National Defence University. In her view, the value of science fiction lies in compelling defence organisations to think about situations they might otherwise overlook.
“There are risks, and then there are wild cards. And if we have at least a mental model of them, it will be easier to react to them,” she says. “Creativity is so important. These mental exercises push the boundaries of people's thinking."
Thinking outside the box is something she says defence organisations often struggle with, potentially with devastating effects.
“9/11 was a horrible, horrible event,” Hiltunen says. “But you have to admit that it was quite creative.”