---
type: source
title: "The French Army is Enlisting Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Future Threats"
author: "World Economic Forum"
url: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/07/france-army-science-fiction-writers-global-risks/
date: 2019-07-01
domain: entertainment
secondary_domains: [grand-strategy]
format: article
status: processed
processed_by: clay
processed_date: 2026-04-06
priority: medium
tags: [french-defense, red-team, science-fiction, institutionalized-pipeline, military-strategy, futures-thinking]
flagged_for_leo: ["Cross-domain: institutionalized narrative as strategic planning — canonical example of narrative-as-infrastructure in practice"]
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Content

WEForum coverage of the Red Team Defense program's launch in 2019. Key details from search result summaries:

- The "red team" is composed of science fiction writers tasked with coming up with challenging scenarios military strategists might not have thought of
- Their job: create stories and graphics imagining future threats between 2030 and 2060
- Writers submit work to the "Blue Team" of military analysts
- A "Purple Team" of academics in AI and technology validates feasibility
- Goal: think of all potential ways France and its people might come under attack
- Rationale: sci-fi writers, with their "creative imaginations and love of dystopian visions," could be a great fit for imagining threats outside the operational envelope

**The tri-team structure:**
- Red Team: sci-fi writers and illustrators (imagination/narrative generation)
- Blue Team: military analysts (strategic evaluation)
- Purple Team: AI/tech academics (feasibility validation)

**Early outputs described:** Stories and graphics dealing with warfare based on mass disinformation, bioterrorism, and a pirate nation.

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** This is the founding document for the Red Team Defense program. Provides context for WHY France made this decision — the reasoning articulates the mechanism explicitly: operational military analysts have bounded imaginations (constrained by precedent, doctrine, and current threat models); science fiction writers are structurally better at imagining outside those bounds.

**What surprised me:** The three-team structure is architecturally interesting — it's not just "read sci-fi for inspiration." It's a structured adversarial imagination process: writers generate outside the operational envelope → military evaluates strategic implications → scientists validate feasibility. This is narrative as systematic cognitive extension of institutional intelligence, not casual inspiration.

**What I expected but didn't find:** The WEF article is early-stage (2019 launch coverage) and doesn't have outcome data. The actual scenario quality and military utility are documented only in later sources.

**KB connections:** Same as the PSL final season source — primary evidence for [[narratives are infrastructure not just communication because they coordinate action at civilizational scale]].

**Extraction hints:** The three-team structure (imagination → strategy → feasibility) is worth capturing as a process claim — it's a description of HOW narrative becomes strategic infrastructure, not just evidence that it does.

**Context:** WEForum coverage gives this mainstream legitimacy — this is not fringe or niche, it's recognized by global strategic institutions as a serious methodology.

## Curator Notes

PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[narratives are infrastructure not just communication because they coordinate action at civilizational scale]]
WHY ARCHIVED: Founding document / rationale for the French Red Team Defense program — documents the explicit reasoning for why military uses narrative generation
EXTRACTION HINT: The three-team structure is the mechanistic detail that matters — imagination (narrative) → strategy → feasibility validation is the institutionalized pipeline in process form
