P.W. Singer and August Cole explain which of the technologies or strategic predictions in Ghost Fleet have proven most prescient, and which haven’t developed as anticipated in their 2015 novel:
When we started working on Ghost Fleet in 2012, most of the focus in the national security ecosystem was on an assumed future of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. In turn, there was a belief that the United States would be able to induce or even cajole China into becoming a partner with a shared stake in the rules-based international order created by the United States. Based on a mix of research on history, Chinese military doctrine, Chinese Communist Party messaging, as well as our gut instincts, we just didn’t see the next 20 years that way. Rather than non-fiction, we chose to use a new model we called “useful fiction” to blend research with narrative and explore how the future could very soon become one of great power competition and even outright globe-spanning conflict.
But it wasn’t just about the strategic environment. Many of the real technologies and trends we explored in the book, such as cyber weapons, a vulnerable American defense industrial supply chain, and ever-more autonomous drones, among others, were being regularly ignored or glossed over in plans and visions of future war. This also meant any war between China and the United States in the 21st century would play out differently than Cold War visions of World War III. What was then a novel take on great powers and new technologies all seem to have hit the mainstream, so to speak, today.
There are all sorts of other disquieting points that we’ve tracked over the years as what we call “Ghost Fleet moments” coming true. Just a few examples are deepening military ties between China and Russia, the U.S. Navy’s railgun program being retired too early, and the idea of an eccentric space-obsessed billionaire inserting himself into U.S. national security.
An aspect that we didn’t have room for in the novel was the wartime impact of information warfare and political division inside America. We provided a few scenes, including one during the opening of the conflict, where a young security guard at a civilian port films on his cell phone the very start of the conflict. All his followers knew the United States was at war at the same time that cyber attacks hammered the national command and control systems, effectively putting America’s military and civilian leadership in Washington in the dark. We also referred to a domestic movement of foreign-influenced isolationist politicians, who were very willing to accept defeat and China’s global hegemony, seeing the fight against it as not worth the toll. We even worked with a graphic designer to create a fictitious propaganda poster for this movement to drive the point home.
But if we were to refresh the novel today, we’d have way more in there. China and Russia have since made massive investments and doctrinal priorities in cognitive warfare, while the U.S. public and government have become more vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation.
In the novel, the Americans face a classic problem:
How do you police an empire when you’ve got a shrinking economy relative to the world’s and a population no longer so excited to meet those old commitments?
The Battlestar Galactica remake seems oddly prescient in its emphasis on cyber-warfare vulnerabilities. Early in Ghost Fleet, the DIA — “it was something like the CIA, but for the U.S. military” — gets compromised:
The idea of using covert radio signals to ride malware into a network unconnected to the wider Internet had actually been pioneered by the NSA, one of the DIA’s sister agencies. But like all virtual weapons, once it was deployed in the open cyberworld, it offered inspiration for anyone, including one’s enemies.
The Chinese take out American satellites with space-based lasers, rather than ground-based missiles:
The first target was WGS-4,16 a U.S. Air Force wideband gapfiller satellite. Shaped like a box with two solar wings, the 3,400-kilogram satellite had entered space in 2012 on top of a Delta 4 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral.
Costing over three hundred million dollars, the satellite offered the U.S. military and its allies 4.875 GHz of instantaneous switchable bandwidth, allowing it to move massive amounts of data. Through it ran the communications for everything from U.S. Air Force satellites to U.S. Navy submarines. It was also a primary node for the U.S. Space Command. The Pentagon had planned to put up a whole constellation of these satellites to make the network less vulnerable to attack, but contractor cost overruns had kept the number down to just six.
The Japanese are prepared for an attack from China, but not from the east:
This was a crucial component of the plan. He took a deep breath and waited, telling himself that the missiles were threats only if someone pushed the launch button. Japan’s Air Self-Defense Forces, however, were not authorized to fire on targets without permission from that country’s civilian leadership. The gamble was that permission wouldn’t come in time. Two decades of near-daily airspace incursions by Chinese aircraft would have desensitized the Japanese, plus their communications networks were supposed to have been knocked offline by cyber-attacks. At least, that was the plan.
