Announcer:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSC an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years.
Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism, right here, right now at the NYSC and at ICES exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
I had a rare privilege last week, a night aboard CVN 72, the USS Abraham Lincoln, now under the command of Captain Peter Riebe, a Navy Academy rower, like my son Toby, though Pete graduated from Annapolis 28 years ago in 1996, and Toby, he's just a plebe beginning his Navy journey.
We flew out to Pete's ship from North Island Naval Station in Coronado aboard a massive CH-53 Sea Stallion, given that the Navy's fleet of V22 Ospreys have been grounded indefinitely pending the completion of an investigation into what's caused four fatal crashes in less than two years.
Now, once we got on the flight deck as these distinguished visitor delegations are want to do, we were escorted up and down ladders visiting the bridge of Rear Admiral Kevin Lennox, who commands the Carrier Strike Group 3, then positioned ourselves about 50 feet from Catapult 1, where 10 or so F/A-18F Super Hornets, E/A-18G Growlers and F-35C Lightnings were sent into the skies off San Diego to train for what's going to be the Lincoln's next deployment, probably into the Indo-Pacific region somewhere sometime in July.
Then after that recovery of another squadron of aircraft who had been aloft for two hours or so commenced, the planes stacked up over the Lincoln's fan tail, like the approach to LaGuardia over Queens. One by one, the Hornets and Growlers and Lightnings caught the Lincoln's arresting wire with their tail hook and then they quickly dropped the wire, taxied out of the way to make room for the next aircraft. It was a complex ballet, practice for what might be the next World War.
The F-18s play prominently in the plot of the first novel by our guests today, retired Admiral James Stavridis, former Marine Elliot Ackerman, authors of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, which we featured here on Inside the ICE House back in 2021. When Admiral Stavridis joined us 150 episodes ago, the book looked 13 years into the future at that point, declared China the enemy in 2034 with major roles played by Russia, Iran, and India, which got the best of all of them and the United States in the ensuing action playing out on a global scale.
Now we are 20 years into the future yet again making our way to 2054, and the enemy is not so much overseas, but within our own borders. Building on what we see in the headlines just today, America's adversary is herself, replaying with the catalyst of artificial intelligence what we saw from 1861 to 1865 when north fought against south and brother fought against brother.
Our conversation with Jim Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman on AI and a future political power struggle here at home manifested in 2054, their new novel out from Penguin Press. It's coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back Inside the ICE House. Remember to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen, and please rate and review our work on Apple Podcasts so other folks know where to find us.
We're honored to be rejoined today by Admiral Jim Stavridis, this time alongside his co-author of 2034 and now 2054, Elliot Ackerman. Jim retired from the US Navy in 2013 as a four-star admiral, graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1975 and embarked on a 37-year military career that saw him start out as a surface warfare officer, rising to command Destroyer Squadron 21, then the Enterprise Carrier Strike Group SOCOM, and eventually becoming NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, the role bestowed on Dwight Eisenhower in World War II. Admiral Stavridis is now vice chair of Carlisle Group and chair of the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, this after five years as the 12th Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.
In addition to 2034 and 2054, Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels Halcyon, Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at The Crossing and Green on Blue, as well as the memoir, The Fifth Act: America's End in Afghanistan and Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others. He's a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a Marine veteran who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for valor and the Purple Heart.
Welcome Jim, and welcome for the first time, Elliot Ackerman, Inside the ICE House.
Admiral James Stavridis:
Good to be with you.
Elliot Ackerman:
Thanks for having us.
Josh King:
So Jim, from 2002 to 2004, you commanded the Enterprise Carrier Strike Group. If you're sitting in Kevin Lennox's chair on the Admirals Bridge of the Lincoln watching Pete Reibe put his crew and his air wing through their paces on their workup ahead of their July deployment, what are you looking for in terms of their Blue Water Certification? How are you doing your job?
Admiral James Stavridis:
First and foremost, I'm working through the commander of the air group, who is the same rank as the commanding officer of the ship, and I'm making sure the two of them are paired up, teamed up, contributing with each other.
Secondly, I am very focused on getting down on that flight deck, getting down into the hangar deck and just putting eyes on those young sailors. The average age of the sailors on that flight deck is somewhere around 22, 23 years old and they're orchestrating, as you correctly point out, one of the most complex operations that can be done. It's seven acres of sovereign US soil. We sail it where we want. We conduct flight operations when we want. We use it in our national interest. I want to see those sailors and make sure they are where they need to be.
And then third and finally, Josh, I'm very focused on the back office, meaning the maintenance, the spare parts, the fuel, where's my next load of JP5 going to come from? The carrier, as you know, is nuclear-powered. It never needs new fuel, but those airplanes are pretty fuel-hungry. Every three, four days in the midst of real combat operations, I get another big bag of fuel from another big Navy ship, so I'm very focused on supply.
I'll close with this. In war, it's tempting to be very focused on strategy, but if you're a professional, you're looking at the logistics of your military operation.
Josh King:
And so a couple of months out, the pace of launch and recovery isn't quite where it needs to be. The maintenance isn't quite where it needs to be. How do you then sort of sit your two captains down and give them after action feedback?
Admiral James Stavridis:
Well, I don't have to imagine this because that actually happened to me when I was the commander of Enterprise Carrier Strike Group, and what I needed was a better coordination between the ship and the air wing, all the airplanes, the 80 airplanes or the air wing, and so you called it. I put them together, and here was my secret weapon. My chief of staff who was a naval aviator, himself a real wonderful, capable peacemaker type of personality, Captain [inaudible 00:08:47], and I put him in charge of concluding and getting us to yes on that Blue Water Certification. We made it just in time and then headed directly into combat operations.
Josh King:
Elliot, as a Marine Corps special operations team leader, you were the primary combat advisor to a 700 man Afghan Commando Battalion, among other assignments responsible for capture operations against senior Taliban leadership. Today, the Marines don't have use of their Ospreys for now, their commandant is recovering from a heart attack, the Corps is working to implement Force Design 2030, which is put in place by its former commandant, David Berger, that really is fundamentally changing Marine doctrine. From where you sit now so removed from the Corps, what is the state of America's expeditionary force and readiness? How ready for the fight are they?
Elliot Ackerman:
One of the charges that the Marine Corps has always had is to be the most ready with the nation is the least. And although we call ourselves jar heads and sometimes the prototypical Marine is not what you would think of as an intellectual, the Marine Corps is actually a pretty intellectual service.
And what it's doing right now with Force Design 2030, for any listeners who aren't familiar with it, is they are really trying to reconceive what warfare would look like, particularly in the South Pacific, kind of a new type of island-hopping campaign if the United States ever had to face off against China. And that work is going on in the organization of the Marine Corps and the training of young Marines and the Marine Corps is making as an institution a very, very big bet that the next war won't look like the wars we just fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And there's precedence for this. This was done in the 1920s and 1930s when it was the Marine Corps that really was at the forefront of advancing concepts of amphibious operations that really built up to the D-Day landings in June of 1944, which the Marine Corps didn't even participate in, but where we really saw this antecedent was in 1942 in the island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific.
The Marine Corps right now I think is doing exactly what it should be doing. It's right on the cutting edge of imagining what the next war is going to look like so that the whole country can be the beneficiary of the lessons that they learn.
Admiral James Stavridis:
Let me just add a comment to that, which is the Army is spending a lot of time thinking about its future, and I said the other day to the former Chief of Staff of the US Army that the army of tomorrow is going to look a lot like the Marine Corps of today. Marines are way ahead on this.
Josh King:
Talking about the island-hopping campaign, when I was out in San Diego, our Secretary of the Navy, Carlos del Toro, who was on this show back in episode 334, he was busy commissioning the USS John L. Canley, which is the fourth Lewis B. Puller class expeditionary mobile base for the Navy. How does the Canley in terms of this island-hopping approach change the paradigm as we plan to counter the pacing threat that is the PLA Army Navy?
Admiral James Stavridis:
These are big, capable platforms that we invented after 9/11. That's when we used initially an older aircraft carrier to do this expeditionary afloat base. And it's not just Marines on these things, by the way. It can be Army. It is always SEAL detachments on here, special forces of all flavors, Air Force, high-end helicopters, they can handle it all.
And what they bring to the fight is the ability to support exactly as their name implies, afloat expeditionary forward bases. They provide the back office I was talking about earlier that allows that offensive effort to go forward. Very capable platforms, and they had their genesis in coming out of 9/11 when we suddenly needed to get into Afghanistan and didn't have the kind of capability inherent in theater at the time. We used an aircraft carrier, which is not as good for this purpose as these ships.
Last thought, they're not expensive in the big context of ships. I mean, they are a tiny fraction of what an aircraft carrier costs.
Josh King:
I mean, talking about a platform that's been around for a while, Jim, you made your bones as a destroyer skipper commanding the USS Barry from 1993 to 1995, even wrote a book about it, Destroyer Captain: Lessons of a First Command. Every day now, Jim, we seem to see news of the USS Kearny, Burke class sister ship of the Barry taking out missiles and drones launched by the Houthis in the Red Sea. From where you sit, what's your after action report on how the ship and her crew are performing?
Admiral James Stavridis:
Oh, Kearny is off the charts. And by the way, it's not just Kearny. I think at my rough count, about a half a dozen of those Arleigh Burke class destroyers named after the preeminent destroyer officer in the history of the US Navy, the legendary Admiral Arleigh Burke, and I think about half a dozen of them have now shot down significant numbers of drones, ballistic missiles. They've launched tomahawks against these installations ashore. I'm very proud of the destroyer community.
Josh King:
Vice Admiral Brad Cooper was awarding the Combat Action Ribbon to the Kearny's crew a couple of weeks ago for their actions. What are we learning from their work? Does it make continued sense to use super expensive SM2s to shoot down super cheap Houthi drones?
Admiral James Stavridis:
It does not, but we don't have a better option at the moment. What we need to do is transition into lasers, and we're not that far away. Light, we have an unlimited supply of, if you will, and it's just a matter of harnessing the heavy electronic and electric base on those ships.
I think very soon you're going to see lasers in place. Until then, the best thing that we can do is go ashore and take them out before they launch, where they're clustered together, go after their back office, their logistics, their fueling depots, their command and control, interdict the supply of them. They're coming from Iran. Unfortunately, some are going to get through. The more we can back up in that kill chain and shoot and kill the archer before it shoots at us, the better.
Josh King:
You recently wrote about four levels of escalation against the Houthis and its sponsor, Iran, invoking the little remembered ... I had no memory of it ... Operation Praying Mantis from the late 1980s. What did that entail and what would likely be the fallout if such tactics were employed again?
Admiral James Stavridis:
Praying Mantis was a predecessor to what we're seeing right now. In this case, the Iranians themselves were seeking to close the Strait of Hormuz and harass shipping moving through it. They actually put mines in the Strait of Hormuz through which passes 15% of the world's fuel. It was a higher percentage then.
We told the Iranians to stop it. They did not. We escalated, and Praying Mantis was an operation which the US Navy destroyed about a fourth of the Iranian Navy taking out a couple of their major surface ships, a number of their oil, gas and intelligence platforms.
The only thing we didn't do in that operation was go ashore and take out their docks, facilities, fuel. That would've been the next step. When we struck the Naval targets, the Iranians backed down. I think they would do it again if we need to go that far. Hopefully we don't have to strike Iran directly. We're going after the Houthis quite aggressively at the moment.
Josh King:
Elliot, you and Jim wrote about a potential World War III in 2034, which based on what we are seeing right now in the Red Sea and in the Mediterranean, we hope to avoid. But that moved us briskly past the 20 years of what we have just concluded, the Global War on Terrorism. Land has been set aside in the reserve on the National Mall for Memorial to our, I think what now equals 7,000 war dead from those conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of the veterans of those conflicts who suffer homelessness and consider suicide. What's the role of a memorial to help heal those wounds and where are we in the process?
Elliot Ackerman:
I think many Americans are just coming to realize that actually, the memorial has been passed by Congress, so there is land designated inside of the reserve. It's actually right in between the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for the Global War on Terrorism Memorial. So this memorial is happening, which is I think very exciting news. I'm sitting on the design committee right now, although that design has not yet been presented, but we have begun a process by which if anyone goes to the Global War on Terrorism World Foundation's website, they can have input into what that design will be.
But I think the role of a memorial is really a place where the story of the war can be told and people who participate in the war can gather and reflect. Memorials have often been a place of real healing even when they're controversial. I think a lot of people forget that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which is one of the most popular sites in the National Mall, was extremely controversial when it was first unveiled. So I think just that process of putting something physical into hallowed ground to say, "This is where you can come to remember what's happened," and in this case over the past 20 years, is important.
But I think one of the challenges in creating the Global War on Terrorism Memorial is you are creating a memorial to a war that is still ongoing because the authorizations around the War on Terrorism haven't come to an end. So it poses this question of how do you create a memorial to a war that isn't over? And that I think is a very profound one. I'm excited for the memorial and I think it's a fantastic thing that's happening.
Admiral James Stavridis:
I just want to pick up that as recently as three weeks ago, three US service men and women, one male, two female, were killed combating ISIS in Jordan as part of the mission in Iraq, Syria and Jordan. Their names need to go on that memorial and sadly, there will be more to come to Elliot's point.
And secondly, on the Vietnam Memorial, my father fought in Vietnam. He was a lieutenant colonel in command of a reinforced Marine infantry battalion in and around Da Nang. And I will tell you bluntly, he hated the Vietnam memorial until he actually saw it and went there and he was then profoundly moved by it, and for the remainder of his life, whenever he would go to Washington, he and I would go to that memorial and I would stand there with my father.
Josh King:
Is there an urgency to this? I mean, when I was working in Washington in the White House in the '90s, we were just in the final stages of laying out the World War II Memorial, and here in New York, we've within the last 10 years opened the 9/11 Memorial. Is there, Elliot, do you think a need to as a nation wrap our arms around the veterans of the Global War on Terror as quickly as possible, or do a more expeditious job than we did with Vietnam, Korea, World War II by getting this underway as quickly as possible?
Elliot Ackerman:
As I've been involved in this process, something I learned, which I think a lot of people don't realize, is that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was dedicated in the late '80s, was actually the very actual war memorial on the mall, meaning all of our other memorials in the National Mall up to that point weren't to wars, they were to individuals, right?
So where is the Civil War Memorial on the mall? There isn't one, or the American Revolution Memorial. There isn't. You have the Lincoln Memorial, which commemorates the Civil War and the Washington Memorial, which is really the Revolution. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was the first one to an actual war, and then memorials followed like the Korean War Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and now you'll have the Global War on Terrorism Memorial.
But I think the urgency comes with the fact of that this war has gone on for so long. I'm 43 years old, so if you were my age and my contemporaries you see in the service are all battalion commanders, when 9/11 happened, you're now in your mid 60s, and I would think you would want to in your lifetime see the memorial built. And if that's the case, these are the years to build it. And I'm very happy to see that that's happening.
There was a lot of leadership from people like Congressman Gallagher, Seth Moulton, Jason Crow, sort of my era guys, to push this thing across the finish line in Congress to authorize the Global War on Terrorism Memorial because they needed to get exceptions to certain bits of legislation, such as a bit of legislation that was put in place after the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial was stipulated, that the war had to be over before you could make the war memorial.
So just the process of how we memorialize and I think metabolize our wars is one I find extremely interesting, but it's extremely important. I think it's important that veterans of the War on Terrorism in their lifetime have the chance to see that memorial, take their children to that memorial and make meaning of those experiences.
Josh King:
So Jim, when I last had you on the show in 2021, we were still months away from Russia's invasion of Ukraine that came on February 22nd, 2022. A couple days ago in a column for Bloomberg, you wrote that Ukraine's President Zelensky needs a fundamental reset of the war and that's going to start with his replacement of his current military chief, General Oleksandr Syrskyi. Is that going to be enough? What else needs to be done? Is this like Lincoln subbing Grant for a hesitant McClellan?
Admiral James Stavridis:
I don't think it's exactly like the Grant McClellan piece, but it is certainly philosophically, if you will, relatively normal to change out commanders if you're not getting the results you want, and that happens across the spectrum of military operations. I'm very respectful of President Zelensky's authority to do that, and I think he's handled it reasonably well. The outgoing general has received their equivalent of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The incoming general from all I can see is well-regarded, so that's one piece of the reset.
Piece number two is technology tools, capabilities reset. Zelensky can't do that from Kiev. We've got to help him with that. Top of my list, F-16s are finally coming online. We should have been moving on those from day one. They will arrive starting about two, three months from now. The longer range [inaudible 00:24:06] the surface-to-surface cruise missiles, those are what are needed to get behind Ukrainian lines, obviously more drones. And let's also be talking about surveillance, intelligence, how we can help the Ukrainians knit all that together. So second part is a technology reset.
And then thirdly, and this part is again beyond Zelensky's control, though he can contribute to it, he needs to reset the narrative, which is drifting away from Ukraine right now. There's this growing sense that they just can't win. It's going to be a stalemate no matter how this comes out. He needs to fight against that, and that's tied up with his support in Washington and Brussels.
So he's got a leadership reset, a technology reset and narrative reset he's got to undertake if he is going to turn this thing around. I think he has the ability to do that. And of course Elliot right now is in Ukraine, so maybe Elliot could opine on some of that.
Elliot Ackerman:
I certainly agree with everything that Jim said, and I think ultimately this is going to come down to whether or not the Ukrainians can conduct that reset and whether or not their allies will continue to support them at the level that we've been supporting them at. And much of that will depend on elections, and not just American elections, but elections across Europe and Ukraine very may well be a war that is either won or lost at the ballot box, which just underlines the fact that all war is ultimately political.
Josh King:
And I wonder whether it can wait until November, Elliot. You brought up your contemporary Seth Moulton and from where I sit, there just aren't enough Seth Moultons in Washington who, like Jim Stavridis or you, are ready to speak up and make this case and be persuasive to the American taxpayer who has to write this check.
Elliot Ackerman:
Well, and it's unfortunate because I think it hasn't in the United States, and we talk about narrative, this hasn't been framed clearly enough to the American people that this is an investment in our stability. We're paying right now so that we don't have to pay later. And frankly, this is also an investment in our own defense infrastructure and the building out of our industrial capacity when it comes to weapons manufacturing, which is something that we need. So I think there's not just a Ukrainian reset that needs to go on in terms of narrative, I think there's also an American reset that needs to go on.
Admiral James Stavridis:
Let me add, by the way, we're talking here in a business context about a return on investment. The cost here is de minimis. We're talking about $60 billion. The US defense budget is nearly $900 billion, and 60 billion to crack the Russian military dollar for dollar, that's the best money we have ever spent, defenestrating, and I use that word deliberately, the Russian military.
Josh King:
Elliot, I was listening to a conversation that you had with former acting CIA director Michael Morell, around the time of the publication of your book, The Fifth Act: America's End in Afghanistan. Jim has written in a recent Bloomberg piece about a rotating workforce of generals that he had under him in Afghanistan, McChrystal, Petraeus, Alan and Dunford. You've written, Elliot, about putting 20 years worth of conflict on our national credit card. On the topic of blood and treasure, what do we do about the problem of Americans being anesthetized to the cost of war, whether that's the 60 billion for Ukraine or whatever our next war is going to cost us?
Elliot Ackerman:
When I've written about Americans being anesthetized to the cost of war, it's often been specific to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and every war that the United States has fought since our founding has needed a construct to sustain it.
And what I mean by a construct, broadly speaking, is we've needed to sustain it in terms of two things, as you noted, blood, who's going to fight the war, and treasure, how are we going to pay for it? So for instance, the American Civil War, right? The blood, well the first ever draft in American history comes in during our Civil War, and treasure, as does the first ever income tax in American history to fund that war.
And we can take that forward. I mean, if you look at the second World War, the second World War, the construct was a national mobilization and war bond drives. Look at the Vietnam War. The construct of how we sustained that in terms of the blood was a very unpopular draft, which ultimately led to the end of the war.
So we get to the Global War on Terrorists and 9/11 happens, America is again going to war and we need a construct to sustain that war. And again, broadly speaking, that construct was the blood, came from our all volunteer military, and the treasure came from deficit spending. There was never a war tax. We put the cost of the Global War on Terrorism on our national credit card, and the result was that the American people were anesthetized to the cost of that war. If you weren't serving in the military, didn't have a loved one serving in the military, we didn't feel that war every day, and I would argue that the result was a 20-year war that just seemed to drag on and on.
As we sit here as a country and we contemplate the current threats against us, whether they be Ukraine or Taiwan, it's very difficult to imagine a kinetic war against a peer adversary in which we have the same type of a construct, one that wouldn't require a national mobilization. So in some ways, when Jim's talking about the return on investment that you see in spending the money right now to support the Ukrainians, it's so that we never have to fight that type of a war because that would be a war that would be truly disruptive. But again, when I think about wars, each one is different and it all starts with the construct as to how we are going to fight the war.
Josh King:
Gentlemen, we're not yet at 2054. The three of us are stuck here in good old 2024. Before we head to the break, I just want to dwell for one more minute on the here and now as it somewhat informs, I think, what you guys have both in your book imagined could happen 30 years hence. We have a splintered Republican party and a divisive likely nominee of that party. We have an 81-year-old democratic incumbent to a lot of folks not watching MSNBC think ought to step aside to make way for the next generation of the party's political talent. Where do both of you see the end game in November?
Elliot Ackerman:
I think you laid out very clearly the challenges here. I think, listen, the one thing that I think most Americans, and it seems that there is true consensus across the United States, across region and party, is that nobody wants these two choices, yet here are these two choices presented to us. And I feel like sometimes watching American politics is like watching the competition between two Soviet era refrigerator companies. It's this sort of race to the bottom. None of it seems very appealing and I think most Americans are going to sort of hold their noses and vote.
And I think, listen, prognosticating in the political business has very bad odds, but the only prognostication I would offer is that it will probably be a very close election and it will I think probably be a contested election, and that I don't think either side is going to walk away the day after the election and say, "Well, I guess you got the better of me and I'm just going to walk away." So those are my broad predictions.
Admiral James Stavridis:
I will simply add to that, and by the way, I want to preface this by saying I'm a registered independent, always have been. I've never made a political contribution to either party. I never will. That comes out of my ethos of 37 years in the armed forces, so I play the ball down the middle. I'm a centrist on the vast majority of political issues.
Having said all that, the only point I want to pick up on from what Elliot just said is the political parties. It's been now a couple election cycles since we felt we had a good set of choices in front of us, and there is nothing in the constitution that says we are always going to have two political parties, one shall be Republican, one shall be Democrat. Poll after poll shows the majority of Americans are in the center, kind of a 40 to 50% in the center, and then you've got two very passionate fringes of 20% on either side. Could be as much as 60% in that center, frankly. I think the time is right for a new political party to emerge, and that's one of the ideas we explore in 2054.
Josh King:
Talking about new political parties, we are going to get to that right after the break. James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman, authors of 2054, are going to move 30 years into the future to examine a potential war that starts and ends right here at home. That's all coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman, co-authors of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, and now its followup, 2054, were spending a lot of time discussing issues of the here and now in 2024, but now we're going to speed up 30 years into the future and drop into the waning days of the administration of US president, Angel Castro.
Elliot, when Jim was here last, he described the process of pleading with his editor Scott Moyers at Penguin to write a novel. As Jim relayed the story to me, he said, I'm going to quote him, "Admiral, you're a great guy. You're a really good writer, but you're not a novelist. Why don't you go write another book of nonfiction?" And I was like an 8-year-old kid. I said, "Scott, I can write a novel. I know I have it in me."
So from your side of this Rashomon story, Elliot, Admiral walks into a room, says he wants to write a novel, what do you make of this guy?
Elliot Ackerman:
He didn't walk into the room. Our shared editor, Scott, took me out to lunch and said, "I don't know if you've seen, but I've written a few of these nonfiction books with this retired admiral. Maybe you know him, James Stavridis." And what Scott didn't know is that Jim and I are part of this thing called the Fletcher Mafia, and that we both went to the Fletcher School of Law Diplomacy, although I predated him. He was the dean, but I was an alum, and we already had a preexisting friendship and he had invited me to be the writer in residence at Fletcher for a semester.
And when I asked him what my duties were going to be, he sent me a very organized, bulletized list of the things that he wanted me to do, and one of them was talk with the dean about books when he feels like it. And so I dutifully did that during the semester and realized that Jim is one of the most deeply and best read people I know, and I was very much struggling to keep up.
So the idea of collaborating with Jim seemed pretty obvious to me, but you never know. I was a lowly captain when I left the Marine Corps and he was the Supreme Allied Commander and I didn't want to be in a situation where we were arguing about adjectives with the Supreme Allied Commander, but we thought we'd try to write a first chapter together. So we did that. It was a total pleasure, a real great meeting of minds, and that's how we've proceeded ever since in our collaboration, and it's been a joy.
Josh King:
What was the division of labor on the first book, and then as you reflected on that process, how did you revise and tweak the process to get the second book done?
Admiral James Stavridis:
I'll give a quick snapshot of that. I'm more the conceptual big picture. I was the one that kind of had this idea of a trilogy of novels, one about US China, one about AI cyber. Civil conflict kind of came along later. And then the third one, 2084, will come out and talk about climate and geopolitics and climate, so I had kind of this big picture idea.
I had sketched out an outline, and then Elliot, who is by far the better craftsman of the word, would take on doing an initial draft, would go through that in some detail, reshape the plot lines and rinse and repeat. And our novels are relatively short, about six chapters, and the technique worked beautifully for us, so we've maintained that in the second novel. Elliot, did I miss anything?
Elliot Ackerman:
No, I think that's it. We just outlined everything with a lot of detail and then at the end of the day, someone's got to sit in the chair and imagine, whether it's Wedge with his cigarettes in 2034 or Meechy with her butterfly tattoo in 2054, that stuff comes to you, and then we kind of go back and forth and decide on what we like, what we want to get rid of. And we've been doing it, we figured out a method that works for the two of us and we've sort of been writing the books that way.
Josh King:
Not withstanding that you're both part of the Fletcher mafia, we should sort of pause for a second and go a little bit deeper on how you work together as writing partners, business partners, and also friends, because there are a couple of things that are obvious differences, your military rank that you had being one. There's a generational difference. Elliot, you're 43. Jim, you're 69.
Having followed both of you a bit, you're also temperamentally different. Jim, I've always seen you as a statesman, a politician, a diplomat. I think you always try and find the light in a topic. Elliot, from what I've been able to follow you, having read both books and over the last couple of years, heard a couple of your podcasts, you're somewhat darker and you seem to be quick to call out bullshit when you see it, even if it's an American leadership in five acts. How much white space is there between both of you in your outlook and when you're ready to sit down and tell a story, how do you bridge that divide?
Admiral James Stavridis:
Well, you missed the most important thing though, and that's what do we drink? And we both love Negronis, and that's fundamental to our relationship. I can't recall a time I have sat down with Elliot Ackerman and not had a Negroni. I think what you have done is lay out the slight differences between us, but what we share in addition to Negronis is a deep and abiding love of this country, a desire that it find its way in a very complicated century. We both believe there are dangers ahead and the public needs to be cautioned about them.
We both are very personally invested in our friendships with each other, with many others, and frankly, Elliot mentioned the Fletcher mafia. The real fraternity of which we are part is that of combat veterans. That's pretty important to both of us, so I think there is much more that we share than that divides us. The divisions are what gives spice and interest to the plot lines as we go along.
Elliot Ackerman:
And I would just add, I think that's also probably the classic manifestation of the Navy Marine Corps team, which we represent, and I think we are probably not the first pairing where it's at least generally speaking, the temperaments are fire and ice, and I think it's worked well for us.
Josh King:
Okay, so you guys, you write this book in 2021 called 2034. I talked to Jim about it. As you're trying to entertain but also send a larger message to readers, it seems fiction certainly serves as a useful vehicle to tell this near future story about a perilous track that we're on in a confrontation with a PLA and the opportunism of other actors like the Indians, the Russians, and the Iranians. Can you quickly summarize how that book turns out for the major characters who are going to show up or their kids are going to show up 20 years later in 2054?
Elliot Ackerman:
Sure. I think what we see in 2054 is that years prior, the United States, and really the world has experienced this cataclysmic event, which is a war between the US and China, and which neither side really wins. The beneficiary becomes India.
And as we already spoke about, as we're seeing now, domestically in the United States, trends by which more and more Americans are ceasing to identify with either the Republican or the Democratic parties continue and those parties increasingly become rump parties. And in the intervening 20 years, what we see is that a very charismatic independent candidate, President Angel Castro, emerges and wins the presidency and founds the American Dream Party. And now the Republican and Democratic parties, who are very much on the outs, realize that for their own survival, and it's sort of this horseshoe theory of extremism and politics, they're going to have to find the areas where they agree with one another.
And there's precedent for this in American politics. We had the dixiecrats in the 20th century where you had progressive Democrats in the northeast and the same party as segregationists from the south, and so you wind up where the Republican and Democratic parties merge and they become the Democratic Republicans, which was actually an American political party, but they're actually called Truthers for short.
So the conflict that exists in the opening of the book are the Truthers against Angel Castro's party, the Dreamers, so Truthers versus Dreamers. And in the opening chapters of the book, Angel Castro is assassinated, and there are questions about who or what assassinated him. And what we see is that leads into a discussion of artificial intelligence and new technologies that are on the scene, not only to conduct an assassination, but also to continue to curate and control our reality to include our political reality.
Admiral James Stavridis:
Yeah, and let me just pick up the characters piece of it. Those who have read and enjoyed 2034 will be reintroduced to Sandy Chowdhury, who is a national security deputy in Washington. He's now the head of a big private equity firm, the largest private equity firm in the world. You also see Lily Bao, who is the daughter of my favorite character who it killed me to kill off in 2034. Admiral Lin Bao, his daughter, Lily Bao, emerges as a very interesting nuanced character in the new novel. And then finally, many will remember Admiral Sarah Hunt, who carries the burden of launching the nuclear strikes that ultimately end the war. Her daughter, Julia Hunt, has become an officer in the Marine Corps and is on the staff in Washington DC.
So you see surviving characters or their progeny in this new book, I think. And finally, to close, two very interesting international characters emerge, and we'll let people read 2054 because that carries part of the geopolitics with Japan and Nigeria involving as very important nations.
Josh King:
Turning the pages of 2054 was such a lot of fun in some ways because for those of us who've watched Woody Allen's Sleeper and other sort of dystopian futuristic takes of what survives from the world that we know now and what gets completely replaced, I'm curious your process in terms of creating this new world 20 years hence, the similarities and differences to today.
Certainly, self-driving taxis have arrived, but what's also there are the mundane things like the old-fashioned telephone on the desk of retired admiral, now White House chief of staff, John Bunt Hendrickson. How much fun did you guys have sort of picking and choosing what would stay and what would go?
Elliot Ackerman:
I think what we've always sort of striven for in the book is this idea of, I think of it as the uncanny, and what I mean by that is the uncanny is this idea that if something is just a little bit off from reality, it seems the most frightening or the most scary. An example would be if you had a robot at home that did chores for you and looked like R2-D2, that robot wouldn't seem probably very creepy to you, right? But if that robot was 98% like a human but sort of had these shark eyes, you probably wouldn't want it kind of stalking around your house.
So I think in the book, we're creating a reality that doesn't look like R2-D2, it looks like that human that's 98% like a real human with the shark eyes. So our reality feels a lot like the world we live in today, but is just sort of off and place into the future in ways that hopefully to the reader feel a little bit uncanny and make you pause and say, "Wow, this could actually be the reality that we're in if our behaviors don't change."
Admiral James Stavridis:
Yeah, two British writers who do that very well I think are Ian McEwen and Ishiguro. Ishiguro just won the Nobel Prize. He writes in exactly the way Elliot just describes. Things are just a little bit off. And Ian McEwen does that in a couple of his forward-looking novels as well.
The one thing I would add to Elliot's excellent comments there are the other thing looming over this is artificial intelligence and the idea of the singularity, which is the merge of biology, engineering, technology, writ large, cyber, all of it kind of coming together and creating a very new, distinctive force. I think we're just beginning to understand what that might look like. So think 30 years on, it'll be a very pervasive part of our lives, and so that is really the biggest part of the future, and that's where you want to focus people on, the singularity.
Josh King:
Yeah, singularity is a tough concept to get your arms around. In the early chapters of 2054, a name from my own past came roaring out of your pages. Right out of college in the late 1980s, spending time back in the Boston suburbs where my folks lived, I got a temping job at a place called Kurzweil Music Systems, where the founder, a guy named Ray Kurzweil, would come in and out of this nondescript office building just doing his business, making these musical keyboards. His name seemed to vanish in my own consciousness over the decades, but now he's back in a big way. I want to hear just a clip of Ray in conversation last year with Lex Friedman. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 7:
I mean, if this did not have any connection, it would be pretty stupid. It could not answer any of your questions.
Speaker 8:
If you're just listening to this. By the way, Ray's holding up the all powerful smartphone.
Speaker 7:
So we're going to do that directly from our brains. I mean, these are pretty good. These already have amplified our intelligence. I'm already much smarter than I would otherwise be if I didn't have this because I remember my first book, the Age of Intelligent Machines, there was no way to get information from computers. I actually would go to a library, find a book, find the page that had the information I wanted, and I'd go to the copier, and my most significant information tool was a roll of quarters where I could feed the copier.
Josh King:
For our listeners, Jim Elliott, who is Kurzweil? Where is he now? And who's responsible for injecting his thinking and philosophy into 2054?
Admiral James Stavridis:
I'll take the blame for that. I've been an enormous fan of all his writing, but particularly, and I would recommend this to anybody listening, the book The Singularity is Near, and it's an evocative title. And you get this sense of this shadow coming at us, but it's really opportunity coming at us. And I think Mr. Kurtzweil, I don't know him. I have great respect for him. As we said, I envy you an early encounter with him.
A very good way to think about it is the merge, as I said a moment ago, between your brain, between biology and cyber, computer science, all enhanced by artificial intelligence. That's the singularity. The singularity means everything coming together and it is a very powerful image. And in terms of what he's doing now in 2054, he may not want to hear this ... Well, I don't want to give away my plot, so I think you have to read the book to learn the future 2054 predicts for Ray Kurzweil. It's very interesting.
Josh King:
In my preparation of talking to you guys, I watched about an hour and a half of this conversation with Kurzweil and Lex Friedman and also saw that he has another book coming out later this year, The Singularity is Nearer. We may get more insight from Mr. Kurzweil.
What was the process in which you zeroed in then on the march of gene editing and AI driving the main element of the plot line? By page five, you've got Major Hunt giving a CIA assessment of advances in remote gene editing among state and non-state actors to this senator from Massachusetts, Nat Shriver, who serves on the Select Committee on Intelligence.
Admiral James Stavridis:
Yeah. I think first and foremost, what's always in both of our minds is geopolitics. And it is very clear that all of this at some point is going to be weaponized, all of this being the singularity, AI, cyber, cybersecurity. That was the real fundamental thought we had going into the novel.
As we got into writing it, every day there being new articles about exactly what you see in the front end of the book, remote gene editing. Every few days, the cells in your body are changing out. You are not the same person a few days on because many, many of your cells have been replaced. If an entity could get into that back to singularity, bringing together biology, AI, engineering, the chances for mischief are very, very high.
Elliot Ackerman:
I would just add that Kurzweil in his book, I mean, he asks some very interesting, I think pretty profound questions. I mean, he asks at one point, will robots inherit the earth? And he says yes, but they will be our children. And I think so much of this trilogy is the journey of how they become our children. And that's why Jim and I have brought these characters forward generationally through books.
So it's not just a book about technology, it's also a book about generations and the fusing of those two and the idea of what does the world look like when molecules become the new microchips? And we all today have a familiarity with what it's like to inject our bodies with technology. I mean, these COVID vaccines we've all taken are a form of technology.
If we keep taking that forward, that this world, this singularity, it doesn't necessarily look like cyborgs, it looks like the interplay between biology and technology and the barrier between the two becoming increasingly porous where you don't know the difference between a molecule and a microchip and you don't know the difference between a robot and your own child, and what does that future look like?
2054 is a stop in that journey, and by the time you get to the end of the century in 2084, in the last book, you'll see what we imagine it like there too.
Josh King:
In 2034, you go there with the depiction of the actual use of tactical nuclear weapons. In 2054, you go there again with the depiction of a presidential assassination. We've lost four sitting presidents to assassins' bullets, Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, Garfield by Charles Guiteau, William McKinley by Leon Czolgoszh, and Kennedy by Oswald.
Tell us about President Angel Castro. Like Barack Obama, who acknowledged his Hussein middle name in a self-deprecating fashion, he acknowledges that Castro isn't the kind of name you'd typically expect to see in the Oval Office, but he also doesn't have much use for the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution, does he?
Elliot Ackerman:
No. And I think he is a figure who is, again, he's very charismatic. He's done right by the country. He's navigated the country through a period of crises and got it back on its feet, but like anyone, he's susceptible to wanting to hold onto power for too long.
And so when we meet him, he's pushing the limits of his constitutional power, and there's a lot of questioning as to how long he will hold on to power. And many people are saying Angel Castro will never be George Washington because he can't get out of Washington as sort of a quip that his political adversaries use against him, and that is the moment when he's killed.
And the question is, who has killed him and why has he been killed? And there's a schism that erupts in the United States versus the Truthers and the Dreamers and everyone's alternate reality as to why did Castro die and why was he killed and interjected into that reality is questions about artificial intelligence and the singularity.
Admiral James Stavridis:
Yeah, and I would only add, there's a third question, how was he killed? And that is central to the construct of the novel.
Josh King:
How he was killed. As we begin to wrap up, gentlemen, for most of the population, we're just beginning to think about toying around with our first ChatGPT prompts. Pew Research reported last year that just 14% of US adults have tried ChatGPT. What's the message, your hope that we take away from 2054 about our politics, our country, our world, and ourselves about this unknown technology that's just beginning to inhabit our world?
Admiral James Stavridis:
I'll give you two things I think are really important here. One is the cautionary note. It is understanding the immense power that is going to be unleashed, and that is something we interrogate pretty thoroughly in the course of the novel. And again, I don't want to give away the plot, but there are both pluses and minuses to the technology. So point one is the immense power of AI when it fuses with biology, the singularity.
And then the second point is, and again, a cautionary point is we have to overcome these internal divisions in the country and that the potential for conflict is real and God forbid, but when or if the shooting starts, it may not stop, and thus enormous, enormous flashing yellow light for the country, and you have to read the book to hear how we think that comes out. Those are my two big hopes that people will be grabbed by as they read 2054.
Josh King:
Just a quick jump to wrap up, because as Jim was saying, as he sketched out our characters in the two books and the intergenerational aspect between them, talk a little bit about family because fathers, mothers, sons and daughters play such important roles in 2034 and 2054.
We've talked about Ray Kurzweil, but as long as we're dwelling on pioneers of the late '80s, Elliot, I wonder if I could ask you about your dad, Peter Ackerman, who died a couple of years ago in 2022, a long career here on Wall Street at one of the storied firms, Drexel Burnham Lamber, working alongside Michael Milken. How much did your dad's influence and his journey impact you as a citizen, soldier and writer as well as a son and a father?
Elliot Ackerman:
My dad was my best friend and my hero, so I almost can't even say how it impacted me because his influence on me is braided into every fiber of who I am, and so I wake up every day and I hope I make him proud.
Josh King:
Jim, your upbringing was different. Your dad, a Marine colonel, as you said earlier, served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, your grandfather, a Greek school teacher expelled from Turkey and a pogrom. You recently wrote in Bloomberg that a lot of young people say, "I can't do equally well in a civilian job with all the danger and hassle in military life." Does one need to have a unique Stavridis or Ackerman family history to end up in uniform, or does the United States just need to change the view of its servicemen and women to look something more like Norway, as you've speculated?
Admiral James Stavridis:
I'm quite content that our nation will continue to provide terrific women and men who want to join the military. It's an all volunteer force. It is a force of people who raise their hand and say, "Take me. I will go forward. I will protect you. I will offer to be the best of all of you." I firmly believe with all my heart the nation will continue to produce those young men and women. Will we have some shortfalls in recruiting when the economy is white hot? Sure. But overall to our opponents, don't bet against us.
Josh King:
And Elliot, you wrote a piece in Time, Why Bringing Back the Draft Could Stop America's Forever Wars. How did your family experience shape your own outlook, your decision to go to ROTC at Tufts and ultimately serve eight years in the Marines?
Elliot Ackerman:
I have always felt very much a fortunate son of the United States, and so it shaped me in that it just very much made me want to serve my country, want to give back and want to be out there contributing my little piece with other Americans. And I joined the service before 9/11, so I joined a peacetime military that went to war. And as much as you've already heard a very proud alumni of the Fletcher School and Tufts University, my true alma mater and my dearest friends come from my time in the Marine Corps, and it was just the biggest privilege ever to serve with those guys and to get to be their friends today.
Josh King:
Well, as I said after our last conversation, I can't wait to see 2034 and now 2054 adapted for film and television after reading both books. Thanks so much, Jim and Elliot for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Admiral James Stavridis:
Thanks Josh.
Elliot Ackerman:
Thanks for having us.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guests were Admiral James Stavrudis and Elliot Ackerman, co-authors of the New York Times bestseller 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, and now its sequel, 2054, both available wherever you get your books from Penguin Press.
If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @icehousepodcast.
Our show is produced by Lance Glenn with production assistance, editing and engineering from Ken Abel. Pete Ash is the Director of Programming and Production at ICE. And I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
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