KRYPTOS

WHAT MIGHT THE FUTURE NATURE OF WARFARE LOOK LIKE? A COMIC BY FORMER ARMY CAPT. KATIE HATHAWAY ’12 WINS OVER THE ARMY MAD SCIENTIST LABORATORY

“Our world is so complex right now,” says Katie Hathaway ’12 speaking by video chat from Georgia. The first woman to command a U.S. Army tank company, Hathaway is currently studying for her master of science degree in global technology and development in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at ASU. Before she left the Army in April, she won a contest by the U.S. Army Mad Scientist Laboratory (a real organization) to creatively comment on the operational environment and changing character of warfare. Her story, Kryptos, addresses the compounding effects of climate change, misinformation, disinformation, and other forces. “Climate change is more than just, It’s hot outside,” she says. “It’s a compounding effect. It’s cascading, and it increases the complexity of any problem you have. If you add climate change to it, you just created like a hundred more problems. I was really trying to get after that showing the refugee group, mass migrations … and misinformation and disinformation and how we deal with it and don’t deal with it.”

“Tech is just this huge race, a constant competition of who can use tech in a new way to gain a new advantage.”*

“State and non-state actors and superempowered individuals will seek to overwhelm target populations through a firehose of disinformation operations, using false (partially or wholly) and miscontextualized information, effectively burying the truth in a sea of falsehoods.” † “We can build all this tech, but physical stuff that has been around for thousands of years, like smoke, is still a problem for a lot of tech.”* “Ocular enhancements are one of the potential military-use cases of machines physically integrated with the human body to augment and enhance human performance over the next 30 years.”†

“Our adversaries are exploring ways to achieve cyber and electronic dominance on the battlefield.”†

*Katie Hathaway †Army Mad Scientist Laboratory

“The brain develops cognitive biases to manage extensive information. These biases lead humans to draw false conclusions and ignore conflicting data.”† “Virality trumps veracity—if something trends, it makes an impact, affecting viewers’ opinions—regardless of whether or not it is true.”†