Ender's Game, Armour, The Last Starfighter

Ender's Game and 1984, dust them off, no longer the province of nerds and sci-fi geeks, they became the required reading of the martial academies. We first had to understand the psychology of slavery if we were to become free. The classics of literature were studied just as the samurai had studied art, calligraphy, poetry and watercolors. These were studied alongside the disciplines of the sword. Just as the Japanese had taught: the complete warrior had to be a complete human being first. The mechanisms of modern technology were employed for combat training. In the Neo-of-the -Matrix like scenario children studied the arts of artillery, deployment of forces, marshaling of guerrilla tactics using asymmetrical warfare against a stronger opponent.

Asimov was a scientist. And then he decided there was too much beauty in science to leave it to the scientists, it had to be literary and imaginative. Winston Smith used his speakwrite to make history disappear and now I use my Siri equipped iPhone to make literature appear.

The alien invasion was an advanced race who had progressed beyond the human form; something like the brains floating in liquid that moms use to talk about. Because of their advanced telekinetic nature, projectile weapons are nearly useless against them. Projectiles can be diverted with minimal psychokinetic force. The only way to combat them is to slash past the Sentinel droids which protect their tanks in primal, edged-weapon, hand-to-hand combat. And once passed the droids to smash their liquid filled tanks and sliced them open as they quiver on the deck.

This new fact of history had created a renaissance in hand-to-hand combat. An ancient art form that had decayed into an obscure past time once again became a matter of life and death. Mock Renaissance wargames became the training for a mortal struggle as we began train our children at the age of three to be locked in a death strugggle to save the human race by age 13.

Attend your training. It's what was expected. The research had been done to show that 10 years was the period required to become an expert in anything. We were turning our children into killing machines to save the human race much as the cold warriors and medieval knights had done.

The suicide bombers, the jihadists and the imperial powers all came together with their former foes to fight and push back the alien invasion. The suicide bombers of the Afghan struggle in the New York war became the instructors with some training thrown in from a few old Vietcong left over from the Vietnam war.

The zeal for combat was inherent to human nature. It had to be massaged, encouraged and brought to fruition. The martial cultures of the Cold War, the Butlerian Jihad and the Renaissance had to be revived. It was a matter of life and death.

FPV/FPS masters were no longer quirks, they were a matter of life and death. There's a reason that Dungeons & Dragons was so successful. There's a reason that people play first-person shooter video games and go online with headsets and joysticks to have war with their friends on their team. It's a part of human nature that will never go away. DARPA had started their six drones per pilot program just in time. Finally in 2015 there was a foe worthy of worldwide combat.