Greetings Readers!

Despite appearances to the contrary, Eroberung yet lives – Unfortunately, an August wedding in another country makes for a dreadfully compressed scheduled, leaving little time for literary excursions, especially when travelling to and fro to exchange paperwork with various registry offices and assure various foreign officials of honourable intentions. Throw in the intensity of Spring and Summer terms in primary school embarked on major expansion works, and you begin to understand why Eroberung has lain dormant for a few months. That being said, development of Memoirs has continued at a steady pace with several additional chapters completed, several more under way, a great deal of planning and streamlining of the narrative undertaken, and a wealth of new ideas formulated in the intervening time. Which brings us to the subject of this update, Ontological Warfare.

At the risk of being cagey and deliberately obtuse, one of the original intentions of Memoirs was (in part) to explore the actual practicalities of planetary-scale invasion. The typical trope in the majority of Science Fiction being the overwhelming application of superior military force, usually alloyed with advanced technology, however this has always struck me as being somewhat brutally simplistic, and whilst I appreciate that it makes for exciting spectacle, especially in the realms of Film and Television, it does seem a little impractical when given any degree of serious consideration. Any military force seeking to successfully overwhelm a planetary population would either need a significant numerical advantage, which would, in-and-of-itself, seem unsustainable when considering the raw resources needed to service the needs, however esoteric, of the combatants, especially if transported from one star system to another OR would need a significant force multiplier in terms of advanced technology, which then begs the question, would not such a technologically capable aggressor have developed a more efficient method of conquest than direct conflict?

Even the most astute counterarguments would seem to support these ideas; Stephen Hawkins himself has posited the existence of migrant species, stating that, “..such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they could reach… [and that] …If so, it makes sense for them to exploit each new planet for material to build more spaceships so they could move on. Who knows what the limits would be?”, but even this seems to suggest a level of sophistication that may indicate a more advanced or at least streamlined method of waging war. Ontological warfare is Memoirs’s attempt to grapple with this idea.

It is no secret that in parallel with the increasingly complex development of human culture, there has been a similar evolution in the nature of armed conflict. At present, this is best exemplified by the concept of combined arms; a method of waging war which seeks to utilise the various branches of the armed forces in conjunction with one another to maximise their marshal effect. In a similar vein, a nation state during war time usually utilises a range of tactics and skill sets to help it achieve victory, the most obvious examples which spring to mind being espionage and propaganda, both encompassing a broad range of dubious applications from the mundanities of inspirational posters to the oblique practices of ‘Psychological Operations’. However, more often than not, these complementary tools are seen as distinctly separate entities and distinct from the actual military campaign, rarely working in a truly cohesive manner, and often operating essentially autonomously with only the over-arching goal of victory against the enemy tying them together.

What Memoirs imagines, in seeking to envisage how planetary invasion might realistically be achieved, is a system for waging war which sees no difference between the application of military force or, for example, strategic manipulation of an enemy nation state’s economics, usurpation of its information networks, or subverting of its social media. A system where the scientist working to develop a targeted biological weapon or the hacker infiltrating essential digital infrastructure, stands on equal footing with the warrior on the ground applying direct force, and a system for waging war in which all are wielded collectively and cohesively to achieve victory of one system of living over another: Ontological Warfare.

So, whilst Memoirs is ostensibly a war story told from the perspective of an average ‘grunt’, in the Miliphage Servatesh, we have a warrior who operates secure in the knowledge that the full range of skills available to his species will always be brought to bear in supporting his efforts, and that he is part of a ubiquitous whole working towards a guaranteed victory – In this case, the total conquest of Earth…