For my fellow sci-fi nerds out there, especially those interest in tech, I have a book series recommendation: Star Carrier by Ian Douglas, which I think is his pen name. This recommendation comes with a small caveat. The plot and character development are a C- at best, but the descriptions of tech 400 years in the future are so compelling, it's truly worth overlooking. In this hyper-technical future, humanity has overcome faster-than-light travel through a theoretical engine called an Alcubierre drive. By the way, that's actually a hypothesized concept you can explore. Essentially it uses gravity to create a wave that allows objects to ride through spacetime and skirt the physical limitations of speed. Of course, because humanity can escape the safe confines of our solar system, we encounter hostile aliens species, and conflict ensues. Douglas goes into exquisite detail of what combat looks like in space and at incredibly high speeds. How do you shoot at something moving at 30 percent the speed of light? He even considers the impact on maneuver: when ships enter faster-than-light travel, they cannot communicate with one another, and they are traveling over such vast distances that their calculations of where to stop are imprecise at best. They come out of warp drive millions of miles apart, meaning the first order of battle is regrouping. Those plans have to be made before the mission ever launches, because Douglas doesn't create some fanciful way around the cosmic speed limit. There is no way to communicate faster than light other than sending a ship back with a message. How do you fight a war when you can't communicate with the political leaders who initiated it in a timeframe relevant to the fight? In a world where major wartime decisions are made by politicians sitting in Washington, it's a hard future for us to imagine. But it's actually the past we need to look to — an allusion Douglas makes well in the series by comparing the armada from Earth heading into the galactic abyss to naval explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries. They left their ports with objectives and intent and little else. When they encountered change or the plan fell apart, they couldn't run back to Europe to ask "what now?". In the books, Douglas tackles this fundamental challenge of commander's intent through AI. Models are trained to drill down on what victory actually looks like and then make decisions in the absence of communication in good faith with that outcome. (A small aside to say this series is from 2010, so that insight was more prescient than it sounds!). You've indulged my nerd-dom long enough for me to get to my point, which is this: it seems that as technology advances, there will never be a magic bullet that overcomes the necessity of operating well in contested and disconnected environments. It's a lesson we are learning right now through the eyes of Ukraine, and it's one new MC Post original content contributor Anton Toutov tackles in his article, "The Age Of Assured Connectivity Is Over: Command And Control In A World Where The Signal Won't Hold". In it, Toutov paints a picture that, to me, doesn't feel far off from this fictional 25th century landscape. "What commanders, and the people building the systems commanders depend on, actually need to be asking is what the system is supposed to do in the moments, or hours, or days that the signal is gone." Ubiquitous connectivity is an anomaly of hegemony. As new tech comes faster and cheaper, the design principle Toutov is pointing to will become more important, not less.