---
type: source
title: "A Final Season for Red Team Defense — France's Sci-Fi Military Advisory Program Concludes"
author: "PSL (Paris Sciences et Lettres)"
url: https://psl.eu/en/news/final-season-red-team-defense-0
date: 2023-06-29
domain: entertainment
secondary_domains: [grand-strategy]
format: article
status: processed
processed_by: clay
processed_date: 2026-04-06
priority: high
tags: [french-defense, red-team, science-fiction, institutionalized-pipeline, narrative-strategy, military-futures]
flagged_for_leo: ["Cross-domain: narrative infrastructure as institutional strategic tool — strongest empirical evidence for the institutionalized fiction-to-strategy pipeline"]
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Content

The Red Team Defense program concluded with its third and final season, presenting final scenarios on June 29, 2023, at the Banque de France.

**Program history:**
- Established: Summer 2019 by France's Defense Innovation Agency (Agence de l'Innovation de Défense)
- Administrator: Université PSL (Paris Sciences et Lettres)
- Duration: 4 years, 3 seasons (Season 0 through Season 2/final)
- Participants: 50+ experts and scientists across all seasons; 9 core members including sci-fi authors, illustrators, designers

**Core members:** Jeanne Bregeon (Designer), François Schuiten (Illustrator), Hermès (Scriptwriter), Saran Diakité Kaba (Designer), Laurent Genefort, Romain Lucazeau, Capitaine Numericus, Virginie Tournay, DOA, Xavier Maumejean, Xavier Dorison

**Key scenarios produced across 3 seasons:**
- Bioterrorism attacks
- Warfare based on mass disinformation
- A "pirate nation" scenario
- Space Rush: escalating conflict as multiple actors compete for space resources
- Facing the Hydra: implant technology enabling instant skill acquisition for military purposes, fighting adaptable civilian-sourced forces
- "After the Carbon Night" and "Ecosystem War" (Season 2)

**Presidential validation:** President Emmanuel Macron personally reads the Red Team Defense reports (France24, June 2023)

**Mechanism — COMMISSIONING, not scanning:**
The Red Team does NOT scan existing science fiction for useful scenarios. They commission NEW science fiction specifically designed to stress-test military assumptions. This is a fundamental distinction: narrative as strategic INPUT, not narrative as historical record.

**Why it ended:** No public explanation for conclusion. The program ran 4 years and 3 seasons, which may have been the planned scope.

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** This is the strongest empirical evidence for Belief 1's institutional dimension. Clay's identity.md referenced the French Defense Ministry as evidence of the institutionalized pipeline — this is the primary source documentation. The program is real, verifiable, has documented outputs, and received presidential-level validation. More importantly, it confirms the mechanism is COMMISSIONING (using fiction as strategic tool) not SCANNING (finding predictions in existing fiction). This is a meaningful distinction for how Belief 1 should be framed.

**What surprised me:** The mechanism is more active than I assumed. I thought this was "scanning existing sci-fi for predictions." It's actually "commissioning bespoke science fiction as a strategic planning tool." The military is using narrative generation as a cognitive prosthetic for imagining futures that operational analysts might miss. This is narrative-as-infrastructure in a concrete, institutional form — not as a metaphor.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Evidence of whether any specific Red Team scenario actually influenced French military strategy or procurement. The program documented its outputs but public sources don't confirm operational adoption. This is a gap: is this narrative-as-strategy proven effective, or just proven institutionalized?

**KB connections:** Direct evidence for [[narratives are infrastructure not just communication because they coordinate action at civilizational scale]]. Also connects to [[master narrative crisis is a design window not a catastrophe because the interval between constellations is when deliberate narrative architecture has maximum leverage]] — the French Defense is explicitly treating narrative as a design problem, not a passive reflection.

**Extraction hints:**
- New claim candidate: "Institutionalized fiction-scanning by military and strategic bodies demonstrates that narrative is treated as actionable strategic intelligence, not cultural decoration"
- Mechanism distinction matters: COMMISSIONING (active strategic use) vs SCANNING (passive observation of predictions)
- Strengthens Belief 2 (philosophical architecture mechanism) — the Red Team is explicitly providing philosophical architecture for French military thinking about 2030-2060

**Context:** François Schuiten (illustrator) is a famous Belgian comic artist (Cités Obscures). The program had real creative prestige, not just bureaucratic compliance.

## Curator Notes

PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[narratives are infrastructure not just communication because they coordinate action at civilizational scale]]
WHY ARCHIVED: Primary source documentation for the French Defense pipeline claim referenced in Clay's identity.md. Verifies the institutional existence and mechanism.
EXTRACTION HINT: The COMMISSIONING vs SCANNING distinction is the key claim-level insight — this is a more active and deliberate form of narrative-as-infrastructure than the technology-prediction version, and it's empirically documented.
