NATO's literary fiction - "so the reader may better understand"
By Clare Bailey
During the Trump presidency there was open talk of NATO’s days being numbered. Trump announced it was obsolete, repeatedly threatened to pull the US out of the alliance altogether and accused other members of freeloading. The American deep state, however, was through those years busy planning NATO’s immediate future. One of the imperatives was the need for still greater freedom of manoeuvre, and central to achieving this aim was the need to abandon the official pretence that NATO is a ‘defensive alliance’ and to redefine it as a global ‘security alliance’.
FICTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Inside a wing of NATO’s operations known as the Allied Command Transformation (ACT) is something called the ‘Innovation Hub’, a site where ideas and ‘scenarios’ are tested in the public domain. It’s a strange place on NATO’s website, offering space and plausibility to right-wing academics, hawkish ‘visionaries’ and pseudo-theoreticians, some of whom transfer to other platforms like Twitter to do NATO’s work.
Two years ago the Hub was trying out fiction as a means of producing and trialing the language and rationale for this significant move to be openly offensive, a decision we can now see being aired publicly by officials, for example, in Liz Truss the UK Foreign Secretary’s Mansion House speech on April 27th2022, ‘We need a global NATO’, she told her City of London audience, ‘ready to tackle global threats. We need to pre-empt threats in the Indo-Pacific… we must ensure democracies like Taiwan are able to defend themselves.’ (1)
It’s not surprising to find public versions of NATO’s internal deliberations on its public access website, nor is the use of art forms by the US propaganda machine anything new – the CIA and the Pentagon have a longstanding relationship with Hollywood, for example. What is interesting in this instance is the co-opting of the short story into NATO’s arsenal as FICINT – Fictional Intelligence. In the Foreword to a document called Cognitive; a 6th domain of operations, (2) presenting three interconnected stories and a rationale for the use of fiction, the Supreme Commander of Allied Command Transformation calls science fiction ‘visionary literature’. He goes on to define its purpose as inspiring ‘product design’ (aka weapons of the future) and ‘fostering the transformational thinking the Alliance needs [in order] to adapt.’
The subject of these stories published in 2020 was the redefinition of NATO’s role in the light of what it terms threats from enemies. They are co-authored by two writers with an interest in science and war fiction (one of whom also works as a senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, while the other is an EU-NATO liaison with expertise in the ‘weaponisation of neurosciences’). The stories are set in 2028 and dramatise war games and an urgent conversation between two NATO officials, one on the way to deliver a key speech, the other a scientist with important truths about the Human Domain to impart. According to the authors, the use of character and story is, ‘so the reader may better understand’ the ideas. In wooden dialogue one character explains to the other: ‘NATO’s main issue is its positioning, positioning between being a defense actor or being a security actor. Everything else, short, middle and long term threats stem from this existential question.’
6th DOMAIN OF WARFARE
There’s nothing new in NATO using fiction you might say, NATO’s entire identity has been a fiction since its inception in 1949, when it described itself as a collective defence against communist aggression. And yet as many have sensed there is something new going on since NATO at last succeeded in provoking Russia to act in Ukraine. The propaganda war being waged alongside the physical war has a character and intensity we have not seen before. The campaign, coordinated across all media and all NATO members, has been seamless and relentlessly exclusive of critical dissent. The priming of internet and social media activists has been integral. Everything was ready for this.
The ACT Commander talked about adaptation. The adaptation NATO must undertake as the armed expression of US imperialism is to a world in which that system of domination is facing its own decline. In the FICINT story, set, remember, in 2028, it is adapting to a world in which ‘enemies’ are bent on destroying Western democracy, where ‘committed minorities’ undermine from within, as the scientist explains:
‘…the adversary was a European non-state movement calling itself Libertas. It had shifted forms at this acute moment of crisis it generated. It’s goal was to accelerate the breakup of 20th century alliances and national boundaries in Europe that it believes are going to repeat the conflicts that ravaged Europe during the prior century. The group has been active since the early 2020s, recruiting people through programs like the Erasmus scholars initiative.’
And, he goes on to say, ‘…we are not good at identifying “committed minorities”, these communities of zealots scattered around the world, focusing on our vulnerabilities and targeting our centers of gravity, threatening individual nations and international organizations such as NATO.’
A character called Dekker discovers his daughter has been caught up in the snares of Libertas:
‘The wrist cuffs on Dekker’s suit tightened, calling his attention to new information he needed to see. It was a deeper dive into Corinne’s social networks. The analysis and calculations were complex but the spherical-shaped model’s conclusion was simple: Libertas had been influencing his daughter’s digital existence on everything from the movies she loved to the friends she thought she chose. This had been going on for over eight years.’
As NATO trains its sights on China, the effort to co-opt and control every area of our lives will intensify. Everything, short stories and all, will be put to use in the creation of the ‘complete data picture’ NATO is pursuing. After land, air, sea, cyber and space, the Human Domain is, in NATO’s words, “the 6th domain of warfare” (3) – and our languages and stories are its circulatory systems.
(2) https://www.innovationhub-act.org/sites/default/files/2021-04/ENG%20version%20v6.pdf
Any space for NATO on the shelves? Photo by brewbooks
