![]() Reagan’s Star Wars would have been a hugely expensive investment, and its lack of feasibility soon turned it into a political laughing stock. While the Strategic Defense Initiative is certainly one of the more famous incidents of incorporating science fiction into the world of politics and international relations, it must equally be said that it is not a particularly convincing example regarding the benefits science fiction can bring to the field. In Reagan’s 1983 Star Wars speech he included several phrases from the report, which insisted that space was America’s “most valuable national resource” and encouraged closer cooperation between NASA and the military. It takes the form of a 40-page document, still available online today, that was written mainly by two science fiction authors, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The proposal for this programme was to a significant degree based on a report titled “Space. However, the idea of preparing for wars fought in outer space is much older than that, dating back to the early 1980s and Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative – better known as Star Wars. In 2018, Donald Trump announced his administration’s plan for launching a new, sixth branch of the US Armed Forces, the United States Space Force, designed to establish American dominance in an area that, according to President Trump, will become a major battlefield in future wars. In another example from the US, science fiction was not just used by the government for advisory purposes but actually shaped policy initiatives: This came primarily as a reaction to the belief that one critical reason why the possibility of a such an attack had not been anticipated was because of the CIA’s lack of imagination. Countries like Canada or the US have also relied on sci-fi authors in the past – for instance, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Pentagon reached out to Hollywood filmmakers, among them Die Hard screenwriter Steve de Souza, for “some left-field, off-the-wall ideas” concerning further potential scenarios of disruption. While this type of cooperation between the military and science fiction writers may seem absurd at first glance, it is interesting to note that France is by far not the first state to encourage it. The main focus of this so called “ Red Team” will revolve around the question of how hostile states and terrorists could make use of new technologies in the future. Their job will be to think of future military scenarios which traditional army strategists might not necessarily be able to come up with on their own. In an attempt to think outside the box, a team of four to five science fiction writers are currently being headhunted. However, after having created an Agency of Innovation in September 2018, the latest announcements have made it clear that the army is not willing to limit itself to conventional programmes of development only. This investment is part of a recent trend in the French Army to become more future-orientated in its approach to military strategy. In July 2019, the French inventor Franky Zapata showed off his flying hoverboard at Bastille Day, a technology the French Ministry of Armaments deemed so promising that it decided to spend €1.3 million on its further development.
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