The Talented Gamers-Part 4
New School Compares Notes with Old School
Maj. Anthony M. Formica, U.S. Army
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Mike pulled a chair out, settled himself at the far end of the bar, and surveyed his surroundings. A woman in her mid-thirties sat opposite him, and judging from the scrolling motion of her eyes, she was looking at a social media feed piped into her ocular implants from her wrist display. A few seats over from her, a man roughly Mike’s age was speaking loudly enough to suggest he was on a call; his repeated emphasis on the words “units,” “arbitrage,” and “ROI,” further suggested he was struggling with all his might to convince anyone listening to him, to include his fellow bar patrons, that he was an important man. Farther afield, an old, wrinkled veteran sporting an Operation Enduring Freedom ball cap sat in an armchair, languidly perusing a hard-copy newspaper. The four of them constituted the entirety of the bar’s clientele.
Mike activated his own wrist display and scrolled through the news feed. It had been about twenty-seven hours since the president had announced an end to military operations in the Strait of Malacca, thirty or so since Mike’s contract had been terminated with the DCF, and the headlines had long since shifted their attention from the Indonesian archipelago to a new, simmering mélange of regional tensions. Barely an hour after President Franchi’s announcement, a spontaneous and wide-ranging movement had appeared on a host of social media platforms demanding that America’s armed forces, flush with victory, finish the job the Chinese had started in 2028 and free Taiwan. A few demonstrations had already taken place outside the White House, the Chinese embassy in D.C., and in a couple of the larger cities.
Habitually, instinctively, Mike checked out the DCF talent marketplace to see if maybe the current events had produced a need for applications; they had not.
“Thank you for visiting the Department of Converged Forces,” the banner on the page read. “We are not taking applications for command at this time.” Slightly deflated, he ordered a bourbon on the rocks and went back to his scrolling.
“Got room for two on your end there?” Mike looked up with an involuntary twitch of irritation to see who had asked the question. A broad chest greeted him as he swiveled around, and sitting atop that chest was the rugged, grinning face of George Switzer, major, U.S. Army. George had frequently been Mike’s counterpart for whenever the DCF and the Army needed to synchronize and deconflict operations. Laughing as he slapped Mike’s back, George proceeded to pull out a bar stool and sit down next to Mike.
“So I take it that it’s over, we have you to thank for that, and now the reason you’re here is that you’re waiting for a new job. I have that about right, buddy?” George said jovially as he settled into his seat and placed an order.
Mike was well-rehearsed at this sales pitch; it was his way of showcasing to people like George, with their badges and tabs and jaunty smirks that, despite his age and lack of physically demanding crucible experiences, he deserved a seat at the same table where they sat.
“Thought about going back to Durham, but to be honest, I figured I’d wait it out a little bit,” Mike replied as he took a swig of his drink. “You’re pretty much right; I am waiting for a new job. I assumed the fighting wouldn’t end at the Strait and thought being close to a command center would help up my chances of getting rehired if they started asking for applications.”
“I guess that makes sense,” George remarked as he received his drink. “I gotta say, I have no idea how you guys’ TPA thing works. I mean, we have something similar in the Army, our own, dumber version of a talent marketplace, and I know the aspiration is to get to where you guys are, so I probably should get smarter than I currently am … but still, at the end of the day, I’ll never understand how your being close to Fort Bragg at this moment matters in any way that counts.”
“It’s all about speed in the DCF,” Mike replied. “There’s a constant operational tempo, and we never know where the AI models will point to next. We’re focused on the Straits today, but tomorrow, who knows? The AI might see a spike in the price of the synthetics we use in our 3-D printers in Egypt, note an incoming heat wave that’ll kill off the bacteria that make the synthetic materials, and read a bunch of angry posts from Russian girlfriends in the Western Military District about their boyfriends going on a snap military exercise. It’ll churn all that data in less than a second, combining it, splicing it, drawing insights that no human would ever draw, and conclude that the U.S. has three hours to get a Converged Battalion on the ground in Estonia; any longer, and the Russians’ own AI will figure out that the DCF will be facing an ink shortage and that there’s a window of opportunity for a fait accompli.”
Mike was well-rehearsed at this sales pitch; it was his way of showcasing to people like George, with their badges and tabs and jaunty smirks that, despite his age and lack of physically demanding crucible experiences, he deserved a seat at the same table where they sat. That they should respect him for seeing as a science that which they could only ever at most, charitably, see as magic. George had clearly bought the pitch, so Mike went on.
“So, if three hours makes the difference between a sustained NATO alliance and Estonia reverting to a poor suburb of Saint Petersburg … well, then, yes, the fact that I can be sitting in a quantum uplink station within fifteen minutes makes quite a bit of difference in deciding to hire me or a guy with more combat missions but who’s two hours away. Chalk that up to a very positive attribute in my KSA score,” Mike concluded.
George chuckled again. “Fair enough, fair enough. I’ll still take regular soldiering, thank you kindly; building and leading teams, you know? Even if I’ll never see combat, I still think preparing a group of people for it is its own reward. And I don’t know if I’d want to constantly be selling myself; pretty sure I’m not cut out for that,” George said.
“We’re all always selling ourselves, George,” Mike remarked blithely, nodding toward the aspiring CEO at the other end of the bar. “It’s just a question of which currency we trade in. For that guy, it’s the MBA vocabulary he’s memorized; for you, it’s what your evaluations and chest candy say about you. For me, it’s KSAs.”
George thought about this remark before smiling and clapping Mike on the back again. “Yeah, but you know what? There’s one thing you can say about my line of work that makes it better than yours.”
“And what’s that?” Mike asked, eyeing his drinking companion suspiciously.
“I got ordered to Fayetteville’s heat and humidity; you’ve chosen it,” George said. “You have my pity, fella.” George laughed heartily and Mike gave a small chuckle.
After a pause, George’s countenance became a little more sober. “I hear #freetaiwan is the most viral thing going right now. You think there’s anything to it?”
Mike again checked the portal while answering. “I don’t have any idea, George. Would be fun, though.”
“Fun for you, probably,” George replied, circling the ice in his glass. “Lots of dying for folks like me.”
Maj. Anthony M. Formica, U.S. Army, serves as the chief of the 82nd Airborne Division’s Information Warfare Task Force. He holds a BS from the U.S. Military Academy and an MA from Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, which he obtained through the Downing Scholars Program. Formica deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom with 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, and in support of Operation Atlantic Resolve-North as a company commander with the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne). He has also served as an observer-controller at the Joint Readiness Training Center.
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