This story came to me because I saw a few news stories while I was researching material for this blog:
Elon Musk and Neuralink: Elon’s company implanted the first Neuralink nearly three years ago. This got me to thinking about how that could revolutionize thought. The basic concept for military application of controlling things with your mind was something I was aware of since I saw the Eastwood film Firefox.
I saw this article from Modern War about drone warfare. Drones are, according the article, not the future of warfare, but a problem to be solved. I disagree, and feel that this article is ignoring what I feel is going to be a HUGE change in how warfare is waged. We have drones that are submarines, ships, aircraft, and ground vehicles. I can build drones faster than I can train the men who operate them in combat, which is one of the basic rules in the world of our story. This is what they said:
The right question is not What can drones do? It is What can drones not do? And the answer to that question is both ancient and decisive: Drones cannot seize ground. They cannot hold it. They cannot compel a population to submit. They cannot plant a flag on a hilltop and mean it.
Submarines can’t keep sea lanes open, but they can deny them to others, yet submarine warfare changed much about Naval warfare. Maxim’s machine gun changed ground combat. Then so did the armored vehicle. Now drones.
Finally, there was this one from the Center for a New American Security: America isn’t ready for a drone war. This quote got me to thinking:
The drone threat in the Middle East, while serious and deadly, is negligible when compared to the capabilities of China, whose People’s Liberation Army will soon have the largest and most advanced drone force in the world…between October 2023 and May 2025, hundreds of Iranian-made one-way attack drones were fired at U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria and at ships in the Red Sea. Unable to detect the inbound drones more than several miles away, U.S. soldiers had less than two minutes to respond with a patchwork of defenses. Nevertheless, they shot down 80 percent of the more than 100 drones fired at them. At sea, U.S. sailors similarly intercepted most of the cheap Houthi drones but often used multimillion-dollar missiles to do so.
Then I watched as recent conflicts saw foes of the US like Iran and the Houthis launching thousands of $30,000 drones, while the US was still fighting yesterday’s war by using $10 million missiles in response.
Finally, there was this story on how the US was running out of missiles, and what an effect this would have on a future Taiwan conflict.
Those thoughts percolated, and that’s where the story was born. However, I wanted a new spin on it. As I said, this theme of neural implants isn’t new. What’s new here is the central secret of the story, which I am sure will be apparent to anyone paying attention. It’s that wrinkle that sets this story apart.
The story originally began as a short story. I was looking at just a chapter or two. The more I wrote, the more the story began filling out. The more it filled out, the more complex the war and its possibilities became. The world it’s set in grew into more than I could explain in just a few thousand words.
The characters in the story are people I have actually known. Some of them are people I’ve led into dangerous places to do hazardous things. Others are friends I have made along the way. Still others are compilations of personalities. It takes a certain type of person to do the things that most people consider to be insane. Whether it’s running into burning buildings, crawling across an enemy beach in the middle of the night, or sailing into harm’s way, the people who do those things tend to have a certain personality, and many of the characters in the story are simply carbon copies of those people.
What’s been most difficult for me is learning so much about my Marine brothers and their training pipelines so that I can try to create a new training pipeline for a technology that’s just in its infancy. As you read, you will discover that the neuros even have their own MOS, and it’s based upon real ones that exist today.
I’m using my own experience with the military, its training systems, the politics, and outright stupidity to create a world that, at least to me, seems realistic to anyone that has served.
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