A shout out to my friend Shayz at Codelusive for putting together this really cool website. He made the process easy and has been a tremendously helpful collaborator. I do consider myself tech-savvy, but not in all areas, and website design is not an area where I have a lot of depth.
I have not always been tech-savvy, and there is a lot more tech out there than one could reasonably expect to master. I do know quite a bit about space technology, which is sort of where my collaboration with Paul Szymanski began in about 2018. He was looking for someone who understood not only the technical component of space operations but could convey the importance of space operations to military activity. My Army time gave me a bit of that background, and I think Paul liked that I thought about things differently than the way that was common among many military space practitioners of my generation.
Now, what do I mean by that? We are all products of the systems in which we grow up. When I was growing up throughout the Global War on Terror years, space capabilities were all but taken for granted. For a long time, no enemy was likely to challenge the ability of U.S. forces to use satellite communications or the Global Positioning System (GPS). The Soviet threat had faded away after the end of the Cold War, and space itself was a fairly benign environment, militarily speaking. As a consequence, our problem was more or less a customer service one: provide “space-based products and services,” as we used to say, and by that we meant analysis supporting ongoing operations.
As time went by, space became less and less benign. I was by no means the person to recognize this, but I was certainly an observer of the trend. China’s anti-satellite missile test of 2007 became a much-referenced event, and the steady increase of Russia’s capabilities drew attention. The narrative came to focus on space as “a warfighting domain,” a view to which many practitioners at the time, especially within the Air Force space community (the Space Force did not exist yet), did not know how to interpret.
From my perspective as a soldier, the customer service culture was obvious. It was not a bad thing; it was an incredibly valuable thing. The military (and many other organizations that lean on the military when bad things happen) depended mightily on these pre-Guardians, but “warfighting” was lacking in the experience of many.
Now, I should say that I am certainly no great warrior. I have gotten my participation awards and done my duty as required without any activities that would be worthy of by-name mention. Nonetheless, Army people tend to think differently in more ways than one, and one of those ways has to do with understanding that somewhere there is a 19-year-old with a rifle, and he is part of a division of about 15,000 other soldiers who need every trick in the book to help them accomplish their mission and, if possible, not die. Space operations people provide a good number of those tricks, and Army space operations people have all been trained to fight (remind me to tell the story about the time the Space Force came to our grenade range sometime).
My sense of anxiousness about not knowing what bit of knowledge was going to be needed to keep us all alive drove me to study the profession widely and deeply for many years, and it shaped a perspective informed heavily by military theorists, historians, and doctrine writers. It was this perspective, I think, and my experiences that Paul found unique during the phone call that I took from my bedroom in our house on Peterson Air Force Base in 2018. And that’s how I got the job working on The Battle Beyond—well before we even knew what we were going to call it.