A well-known quote from the world of wargaming (war simulation games) sums up the value of using fiction in preparing for a conflict. It comes from a general officer in the United States, a country that has included war games in its officer training since the beginning of the 20th century.e century. Admiral Chester Nimitz, Joint Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific during the Second World War and victorious in that theatre in 1945, said 15 years later:
"The conflict with Japan was replayed so many times in the amusement arcades of the Naval War College by so many people and with so many variations that nothing that happened during the war came as a surprise... absolutely nothing except the kamikaze tactics towards the end, that we didn't see coming. "
In France, eight decades after the end of the global conflict, armies are using wargames to explore possible developments in a conflict... without predicting everything, like the "pager attack" against Hezbollah in September 2024. "This clearly shows that war games are not predictive," points out Patrick Ruestchmann, deputy director of Wargaming at the Centre interarmées de concepts, de doctrines et d'expérimentations (CICDE), set up in 2005 and attached to the French Armed Forces General Staff (EMA). "But it allows us to ask questions and avoid confirmation bias.
Archaeological discoveries show that a form of wargame appeared as early as Antiquity in India, with the Chaturanga (or "game of the four divisions") which, according to the CICDE War Game Manual, offered a fairly rudimentary presentation of the battlefield with troops representing the four classic arms of Indian armies at the time: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots. This game is thought to be the ancestor of modern chess.
The contemporary version of wargaming emerged at the beginning of the 19th century in Prussia, when this kingdom (located in what is now Germany) was recovering from the Napoleonic Wars. "Thanks to this KriegsspielPrussia gave itself an advantage over its rivals," recalls Patrick Ruestchmann. "It allowed its officers to train in a way that was easier to implement and much less costly. So they practised on a simple table instead of a full-scale manoeuvring ground, while France still sent its soldiers to simulate battles on its champs de Mars.
WARGAMING HAS BEEN WIDELY ADOPTED SINCE THE EARLY 2020S
The defeat of Prussia in 1871 by a coalition of German states led by Prussia led to the first use of wargaming in France, within the young École de guerre, founded in 1873. But the practice was soon abandoned, even though the Germans were pursuing it intensively: "Great military leaders of the IIIe Reich, such as Erwin Rommel or Heinz Guderian, had practised the Kriegsspiel "says Patrick Ruestchmann. "And in 1939, the biggest armies in the world were all training with wargaming, except for the Soviets, the Japanese and the French.
The war game made a timid comeback in France in the early 1990s, after the Gulf War, during which French officers saw their American counterparts in action. It has been widely adopted since the early 2020s. Today, in addition to the CICDE sub-directorate, several entities in the French armed forces play the war game.
Created in 2023, the CICDE's dedicated department delivers a new game every quarter, commissioned by the EMA. "Half of our games are classified, because of the current geopolitical period", explains Patrick Ruestchmann, and also because these games name the real players in the conflicts, whether state or non-state, instead of the more diplomatically correct "red team" and "blue team".
Updated according to current events, the scenarios explore a whole catalogue of different parts of the world and strategic, diplomatic, economic, climatic or health situations in a multi-environment, multi-field approach. "Two years ago, one of our first scenarios envisaged a request from the United States to lease Greenland for 99 years", laughs the specialist.
"AN ENORMOUS GAIN IN UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGES AND CAPABILITIES OF EACH INDIVIDUAL".
The CICDE players are decision-makers: French senior officers or generals, allied counterparts (NATO or bilateral), diplomats, auditors from the IHEDN or the Centre des Hautes Etudes Militaires (CHEM), intelligence service executives, etc. "The idea is to get these different profiles to work together to explore new issues or aspects that need to be reworked", explains Patrick Ruestchmann. The idea is to get these different profiles to work together to explore new questions or an aspect that needs to be reworked", explains Patrick Ruestchmann:
"As well as being easy to set up, the advantage is that you can share and compare points of view in a very short space of time. In two or three hours, players come away with a huge gain in understanding the issues and capabilities of each other, whether friends or opponents."
Much better known to the general public, Red Team Defence is another example of the use of fiction by the armed forces. The Defence Innovation Agency (AID) has launched this classified programme in 2019, in conjunction with the Directorate General of Armaments (DGA, to which it reports), the EMA and the Directorate General of International Relations and Strategy (DGRIS) - all entities of the Ministry of the Armed Forces.
The University of Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) won the tender to recruit around ten science fiction (SF) scriptwriters and illustrators over a four-year period. Virginie Tournay was one of them. A research director at the CNRS, assigned to the Centre de recherches politiques (CEVIPOF) at Sciences Po, this political scientist specialises in policies relating to biotechnologies and digital transformations. - She also sits on the scientific committee of the Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices.
IN THE RED TEAM, "WE HAD TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX".
In her spare time, she also writes SF, which is why she joined the Red Team. "Our roadmap was to develop threat scenarios with the aim of keeping the military awake at night," recalls Virginie Tournay, who was involved from season 0 to season 3, in 2023:
"There were no military specialists among us. MinArm's concern was above all not to influence us, because we had to think outside the box, to form a creative core that was not dependent on the reasoning standards of the military world. At the start of each season, we would identify themes that might be of strategic interest, such as energy, the environment, cognitive warfare, space...".
PSL and MinArm then gave them all the resources they needed to explore the range of possibilities: access to specialists in the various fields covered, immersion in different army units "to get the bodies talking, to observe the living and working conditions of military personnel, their motivation, their emotional level", recounts Virginie Tournay. After that, the authors and designers held a series of brainstorming sessions over a period of six months, using "a speculative fiction approach":
"We didn't want to duplicate the foresight work that the armed forces already do so well. We also had to avoid being too unrealistic and totally disconnected from the reality of our societies. So we stayed within a cone of scientific plausibility, often at the very edge of it, starting from fairly strong hypotheses of rupture, in order to build worlds in which the norms are totally different, and to examine what types of enemies could arise from such worlds.
A pirate nation, climate chaos, the uncontrollable effects of biological manipulations, an ecological catastrophe that drastically reduces energy production, a rush into space... The four seasons of Red Team have covered a wide range of possible scenarios up to the 2060s. In part available for consultation on the official programme website and published as books by PSL and Editions des Équateurs, these fictions have been 'purged' of their most strategic elements, as part of the classification process.
"I think that in the first few months, the military world was surprised, but the experiment was convincing. Today, its usefulness, both strategically and socially, is widely acknowledged. "says Virginie Tournay. So much so that the programme for the future new-generation aircraft carrier (PANG), one of the concerns of the Ministry of the Armed Forces, is said to have been modified (marginally) thanks to their work. And in November 2024, DGA has launched RADARIt's an initiative that follows in the footsteps of the Red Team, only bigger!
FICTIONAL INTELLIGENCE", A FICTIONAL NARRATIVE BASED ON REAL DATA
Fictional intelligence" is another innovative field that has recently made its appearance in the French armed forces. Director of programmes at the Paris Defence and Strategy Forum (PDSF), Lieutenant-Colonel Anne de Luca of the French Air Force and Space Agency is also head of the "foresight" working group at the Defence Academy of the École Militaire (ACADEM), which brings together the following groups around twenty organisations teaching, research and teaching staff at this historic site in Paris.
Fictional intelligence" is a fictional narrative based on real, substantiated data", explains this lawyer by training, who also has a doctorate in law. "In other words, it's about combining the power of the imagination with highly robust data. We use today's data to tackle complex issues, devising creative solutions and multiplying approaches as much as possible.
In this area, the advantage of fiction is that it enables us to devise more and broader solutions," explains Anne de Luca:
"If we were to remain captive to data, we would quickly get stuck, whereas imagination gives us a great deal of room for manoeuvre. It's an exploratory approach that complements foresight.
What's more, by "consolidating" the data using a narrative, "we create commitment", adds the officer:
"Preparing for the future requires narratives that enable us to envisage desirable futures and generate support for them. Today, for example, we can see that data alone convinces the Cartesians, but has no impact on the conspiracists. In this context, fictional intelligence helps to create vision and leadership".
This practice is already used within ACADEM by the École de guerre. At the same time, as part of the RADAR project, ACADEM's 'foresight' group - which includes representatives from the Institut des hautes études du ministère de l'Intérieur (IHEMI), the Centre d'études stratégiques aérospatiales (CESA), the Commandement du combat futur (CCF) and the Centre d'études stratégiques de la Marine (CESM) - is currently working on a 'ressourcerie', as Anne de Luca explains:
"The aim is to create a toolbox accessible to all interested organisations, with a common lexicon, standardised tools... Our goal is to facilitate the practice of foresight, to prove that it is useful, and to anchor this culture in the long term. It's far from being just a fad!
WHAT IF THE JIHADIST ATTACKS HAD PROVOKED ATTACKS BY ULTRA-RIGHT-WING GROUPS?
Fiction can also enter the field of defence in more personal ways. Deputy Director of the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI) and a specialist in jihadism, political scientist Marc Hecker has just published his first novel, "Daech au pays des merveilles" (Éditions Spinelle).
His book is based on the actual attacks carried out by the Islamic State on French soil in the 2010s, with several characters offering very serious analyses of this terrorist phenomenon. But the plot gradually shifts into uchrony: what if these attacks had provoked attacks by ultra-right-wing groups against all Muslims?
Here again, imagination allowed the author to explore the full range of possibilities," explains Marc Hecker:
"By mixing fiction and non-fiction in this way, my aim was above all to test a scenario in much greater depth than I would have been able to do in prospective research.
Even if he is not certain that his fictional attempt will reach a large number of readers, the political scientist sees it as an opportunity to widen the audience for knowledge derived from scientific production: "It is true that the name 'novel' potentially allows us to reach an audience that would not read academic publications", he says.
Basically, this growing use of fiction in defence circles seems to illustrate a wise quote from the preface of the 3e edition of the "Red Teaming Handbookpublished in 2021 by the British Ministry of Defence. It is by Albert Einstein :
"We can't solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
