NatSec@Work - National Security Workforce - July Issue

Leadership Lessons and Highlights

► Will people look back in 20 years and revisit Ghost Fleet as a print documentary? Since it is the story of a war where we get our butts kicked in part 1, I hope not! One of the most rewarding outcomes of that book’s approach of what we call “useful fiction” was that in addition to all the briefings we did on its real-world lessons was there were three government investigations launched from leaders reading the book and wanting to keep certain bad things that happen in Ghost Fleet from coming true. That’s why this work is sometimes called FICINT, a play on the various INTs in intelligence. In the intelligence field, you often would prefer to warn and prevent something bad from happening, then predict something bad and it actually occurs. ► You published Like War seven years ago. Is it too late to turn the clock back on social media? That’s one where I can’t be so positive. Every aspect of social media and its effect on our world has just gotten worse since then.

► What can we do as a society to de-weaponize social media? The problem isn’t that we don’t know what to do about the weaponization of social media. There is all this research, as well as proven approaches in other democracies, on how to limit the harm, while still respecting individual rights and democracy, and even preserving massive profits for the companies. They range from providing digital literacy skills for our kids to enable them to protect themselves, to platform companies taking some pretty simple steps to keep their customers from being abused to governments not turning a blind eye to foreign government campaigns targeting their citizens. And, yet, we just aren’t willing to do them, not so ironically because of how social media has already successfully been weaponized against us. We are under attack, and we have unilaterally disarmed ourselves. ► The real question for the audience... when are you and August Cole going to complete the trilogy? As the great thinker Dr. Dre, PhD, put it, we’ve been “in the lab with a pen and a pad, trying to get this label off.” In all seriousness, we’ve actually been writing a great deal through our Useful Fiction writing business, helping various organizations ranging from NATO to SOCOM to the Army figure out how to share real world trends and lessons via scenarios. A final note on this short interview. The power of what Peter Singer brings to the table is usually in his remarkable ability to fuse the lessons of the past with a vision of the future. In that way, he is truly unique. Fundamentals don’t really change, but how they apply in a brave, new world just might.

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