Fiction writers who have attempted to predict future wars and their consequences, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations notes, have a checkered history:
Some have amounted to blatant propaganda. A famous example was Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. Published in England in 1903, it was republished by the Naval Institute Press in 1991 and made into a movie. Childers creates the story of two Englishmen on holiday who sail their yacht among the islands and tidewaters along the North Sea coast of Germany. They discover a fleet of barges moored in Imperial Germany’s coastal estuaries in preparation for a surprise invasion of England. Childers was obsessed with the prospect of an unexpected landing on the English coast, which he feared could overcome the feeble British army. His vivid novel drew the attention of the press, the public, and the admiralty, which was his purpose. The Riddle of the Sands lives on in Oxford and Cambridge student culture as mythology more attuned to modern ears than Beowulf or The Iliad. It is the best of its time. But, as Eric Grove writes in his introduction to the recent republication, “His book was far from being the only exercise in literary scaremongering at the time.” Grove lists half a dozen others, including The Great War in England in 1897, by William Le Queux.
Similar in impact to Childers’ work but intended as entertainment, is Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising. Published in 1986, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it describes the “real” war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact and includes some campaign moves and countermoves by the opposing sides that broke through the then-rigid boundaries of conventional Pentagon gaming and analysis. By the time the book went on sale, U.S. naval planning had become relatively stereotyped. Clancy’s imaginative ideas were treated with respect and examined closely. Such works of fiction involve the thoughts and actions of the imagined participant in vivid detail. Unlike the body of science-fiction tracing from H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, some of them are relevant enough to be taken seriously by war-planners.
A recent book, Ghost Fleet, by Peter Singer and August Cole, rivals Red Storm Rising for thought-provoking insights that draw attention to creative steps that a first-class enemy could take to defeat the U.S. Navy today. The story is about a twenty-first-century attack on Oahu by China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy. Instead of bombing and neutralizing the U.S. Pacific Fleet as the Japanese did on 7 December, China conducts a surprise invasion. Aided by worms planted in the combat systems of American warships to incapacitate their sensors and missile systems, Chinese warships, aircraft, and missiles are able to neutralize the U.S. warships that would have defended Hawaii. Unmanned Chinese aerial vehicles, flying from innocent-looking commercial ships, then destroy American ground defenses. Their manned and unmanned ground vehicles complete the invasion and occupation.
One might question Ghost Fleet’s logic of China’s commencing a war this way, but the surprise attack is no more a strategic folly than was Tom Clancy’s initiation of a fictional World War III with a surprise Soviet attack on NATO. The thrust of the Singer and Cole book is to create a strategic setting in which they can describe modern information warfare. They identify a host of potential vulnerabilities in the American armed forces that in real life should not be ignored. They back up their descriptions of the Chinese technologies used in the book with extraordinary technological detail, validated by more than 400 endnotes supporting each of the crippling cyber, robotic, and malware attacks. On the American side the Navy initially descends into a thick fog of operational helplessness, the defenders of Hawaii are baffled and blinded, and chaos reigns throughout the United States as the Chinese shut down utilities and power systems fail from coast to coast—until Singer and Cole imaginatively describe how the United States achieves a comeback to defeat the Chinese attackers.
I have mentioned Red Storm Rising before, if only briefly,
Ghost Fleet, on the other hand, has come up multiple times:
- The Fourth Industrial Revolution will transform the character of war
- The best hard science fiction he’d read in decades is a techno-thriller
- Your strength grows but your options become ever more limited
- Once it was deployed, it offered inspiration for anyone, including one’s enemies
- The Americans should have looked up
- The Japanese should have looked East