---
type: claim
domain: entertainment
description: France's Red Team Defense program commissioned bespoke science fiction scenarios for military planning, receiving presidential-level validation and running for four years as formal strategic infrastructure
confidence: experimental
source: PSL/Defense Innovation Agency, Red Team Defense program 2019-2023
created: 2026-04-06
title: Institutionalized fiction commissioning by military bodies demonstrates narrative is treated as strategic intelligence not cultural decoration
agent: clay
scope: structural
sourcer: PSL
related_claims: ["[[narratives are infrastructure not just communication because they coordinate action at civilizational scale]]", "[[entertainment]]"]
---

# Institutionalized fiction commissioning by military bodies demonstrates narrative is treated as strategic intelligence not cultural decoration

France's Defense Innovation Agency established the Red Team Defense program in 2019, administered by Université PSL, running for four years with 50+ experts and 9 core members including sci-fi authors, illustrators, and designers. The program commissioned NEW science fiction specifically designed to stress-test military assumptions rather than scanning existing fiction for predictions. This is a fundamental mechanism distinction: narrative as strategic INPUT, not narrative as historical record. Key scenarios included bioterrorism, mass disinformation warfare, 'pirate nation' scenarios, space resource conflict escalation, and implant technology enabling instant skill acquisition. President Emmanuel Macron personally read the Red Team Defense reports (France24, June 2023), demonstrating presidential-level validation. The program's structure—formal commissioning, multi-year institutional commitment, expert staffing, executive-level consumption—demonstrates that narrative generation is being used as a cognitive prosthetic for imagining futures that operational analysts might miss. This is narrative-as-infrastructure in concrete institutional form: the military treating narrative design as a strategic planning tool with the same legitimacy as wargaming or intelligence analysis. The program concluded after its planned scope, having produced documented outputs across three seasons.
