COLLEGIUMCOLLEGIUM
Hall of Shoulders

Space Strategy

Steven Leonard & Jonathan Klug

Steven Leonard & Jonathan Klug is known for science fiction as strategic simulation; leadership and civil-military lessons drawn from popular narrative. **Thinker ID:** leonard_klug **Provenance grade:** B (book/practitioner corpus, applied here to space) Steven Leonard (founder of the Modern War Institute's "Project on Strategy" lineage, creator of Doctrine Man, professor of practice) and Jonathan Klug (US Army strategist, professor, war-college educator) are the editorial and intellectual force behind a distinctive school of strategic pedagogy. Across their co-edited volumes (notably *Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict*, *To Boldly Go: Leadership, Strategy, and Conflict in the 21st Century and Beyond*, and *Winning Westeros: How Game of Thrones Explains Modern Military Conflict*), they treat fiction not as decoration but as a working laboratory for strategy. Their wager is that imagined worlds let practitioners rehearse decisions, surface assumptions, and teach civil-military and leadership lessons that doctrine alone delivers poorly. This dossier reconstructs their frameworks and applies them, with citation discipline, to contemporary space challenges.

Built

Sources

39

Primary + secondary

Citations

0

ARGOS-tracked

FTS5 Chunks

39

Retrieval index

Councils

0

Memberships

Review Lens

Adversarial questions for candidates

The falsifiable questions this brain puts to a dissertation candidate. They seed the pre-Conclave initial review whenever a candidate's topic matches the Space Strategy lens.

  1. 1

    Falsifiable scenario test: "You claim your space-conflict framework is robust. Name the specific fictional or counterfactual scenario that would *break* it, and show me the decision point at which your framework would have given the wrong answer. If no such scenario exists, your framework is unfalsifiable.

  2. 2

    Technology-determinism check: "Hold your enabling space technology fixed and vary only the doctrine, organization, and commander's beliefs. Does your predicted outcome change? If it does not, you have written a story about the hardware, not about strategy, and you have not engaged the human decision.

  3. 3

    Whose-future audit: "Every scenario you ran renders some futures plausible and excludes others. List the futures your analysis silently excluded and justify each exclusion. Whose interests does your set of 'plausible' futures serve?

  4. 4

    Pedagogical transfer: "If you used a narrative case to teach this lesson, demonstrate that the lesson survives translation back into a real, named space decision, and that a reader who never saw the fiction would reach the same conclusion. Otherwise you have entertained, not taught.

  5. 5

    Counterfactual-to-action bridge: "Your speculative analysis identifies a risk. Specify the present-day decision, budget line, or doctrinal change it should provoke this fiscal year. If your imagined future provokes no present action, what was it for?

Core Concepts & Space Translation

Fiction as strategic simulation

The central Leonard-Klug move: a science-fiction or fantasy scenario is a controlled environment in which strategic logic can be isolated and examined without the noise and stakes of a real campaign. The imagined case (a Star Wars siege, a Star Trek first-contact dilemma) functions like a wargame turn, a structured "what if" that exposes how a decision-maker reasons. Key works: *Strategy Strikes Back* (2018); *To Boldly Go* (2021).

Space translation

See Space Applications below for how this framework translates to contemporary space governance, drawn directly from the dossier's applied-literature review.

Narrative as a teaching instrument for leadership and civil-military relations

Leonard and Klug repeatedly use character arcs and command relationships in fiction to teach mission command, the moral burden of command, and the friction between political ends and military means. The story is a case study with built-in human texture, which is precisely what abstracted doctrine strips out. Key work: *To Boldly Go: Leadership, Strategy, and Conflict in the 21st Century and Beyond* (2021).

Space translation

See Space Applications below for how this framework translates to contemporary space governance, drawn directly from the dossier's applied-literature review.

Popular culture as a shared cognitive commons

Because the source texts (Star Wars, Star Trek, Game of Thrones) are widely known, they give a heterogeneous audience, officers, policymakers, civilians, a common vocabulary and a low barrier to entry into hard strategic argument. The accessibility is a feature: it broadens who can participate in strategic reasoning. Key work: *Winning Westeros* (2019).

Space translation

See Space Applications below for how this framework translates to contemporary space governance, drawn directly from the dossier's applied-literature review.

The thought-experiment / counterfactual as analytic method

Their volumes operationalize the classic strategic-studies thought experiment. By moving the problem into a fictional frame, they license counterfactual reasoning ("what would this commander have had to believe to act this way?") that is harder to run inside an unfalsifiable real-world debate.

Space translation

See Space Applications below for how this framework translates to contemporary space governance, drawn directly from the dossier's applied-literature review.

Anti-determinism about technology and outcomes

A recurring lesson in the Leonard-Klug corpus is that technology, even fantastical technology, does not dictate outcomes; doctrine, organization, leadership, and the strategic imagination of decision-makers do. The fiction makes this visible by holding the technology fixed and varying the human choices.

Space translation

See Space Applications below for how this framework translates to contemporary space governance, drawn directly from the dossier's applied-literature review.

Wargaming kinship

Leonard and Klug's method sits adjacent to professional wargaming and educational simulation: structured, adversarial, narrative-driven play used to teach and to test, not to predict. The genealogy connects their fiction work to the wider wargaming-for-decision literature.

Space translation

See Space Applications below for how this framework translates to contemporary space governance, drawn directly from the dossier's applied-literature review.