The Adjacent Possible interviews Brent Scowcroft Center Nonresident Senior Fellow August Cole on the Art of Future War initiative and the War Stories from the Future project:
Just over a year ago, the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security’s Art of Future Warfare project started out trying to answer the question: “Can artists play a meaningful role in the national security community for not only their visions of the future but in how they work?”
The inspiration came to Steve Grundman, a fellow at the Council, from the way Call of Duty: Black Ops II explored the future of conflict. As we want to reach writers, producers, illustrators and designers, and more from well beyond the Beltway, crowd sourcing plays a major part in the project.
The scope of challenges for today’s defense and security community is so broad, and the tempo of changes so fast, that status quo approaches aren’t working. We’ve held five short-story contests exploring the arc of future conflicts, from how wars start to what happens to people, particularly veterans, when they end. To explore craft, we interview writers and artists, too, and also get to feature fiction from first-time fiction writers, including those currently serving.