Ghost Fleet: get ready for war with China
Sitting on the dock this summer my father asked me what percentage of the books I read that were fiction. I said zero percent. When I said that, I had Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War in my right hand. That pretty much sums up the odd nature of this book, which uses fiction to challenge the way we think about future war.
The authors explicitly set out to write a contemporary version of Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising (co-written with Larry Bond). As a work of fiction, Ghost Fleet probably doesn’t quite match that book (Ghost Fleet is short both on pages and on character development), but it is immensely thought provoking nonetheless.
The book revolves around a surprise attack by the Chinese on Hawaii. The authors have declined to provide a year in which the book takes place, but ten or fifteen years in the future is probably about right: close enough that we can recognise the world, but far enough away that some of today’s latent trends have reshaped the nature of war.
Ghost Fleet has several interesting themes:
Return to full-spectrum warfare. First and foremost, the book features a return to full-spectrum war, which would come as a big shock to a post-Obama military. Huge numbers of American ships and aircraft just disappear in combat, as they did in World War II. The impact is much more severe, though, as spending cuts and defence inflation mean there are fewer platforms to begin with. In Ghost Fleet, new Coast Guard cutters and the Zumwalt-class DDG have all been cancelled, for instance. The USN very quickly loses surface superiority.
This move to big, systemic technology bets (higher quality, lower quantity platforms) has an even bigger impact in the air. Large defence prime contractors, mindful of cost, have already outsourced key components, and struggle to really understand their own supply chains. In Ghost Fleet, many of the F-35’s chips are produced in China, and this gives that country the opportunity to hack these planes. With so much riding on it (creating huge technology risk), the neutralisation of the F-35 eliminates US superiority. Even today, it has been fifty years since the US found itself at such disadvantage. A key part of the book’s resolution comes as the US is forced to put its ghost fleet ships and boneyard birds back into service.
Another facet of full-spectrum warfare is the attrition of mid-level NCOs and officers. The US is very quickly forced to press its retired greybeards back into service, which creates a huge generational culture clash.
Americans as insurgents. A corollary of the return to full-spectrum warfare and the ensuing losing of superiority is the sudden importance of US soldiers and civilians becoming insurgents. We are used to our forces being in uniform and operating from bases, and the authors clearly play on moral relativism when they cast US soldiers beyond enemy lines essentially behaving as terrorists (they even call themselves mujahideen).
Technology. Naturally technology plays a huge role in Ghost Fleet, and arguably the book’s protagonist is a rail gun. There are “viz glasses” (e.g. Google Glass) that mean people are constantly filming and browsing and processing information while doing other things. There are satellites blasting each other. There are armed drones, large and small, operating seamlessly with soldiers. There are even all manner of drugs taken regularly to improve physical and cognitive performance.
Technology is also an area in which the book is quite conventional: it doesn’t examine the full potential of artificial intelligence (AI). AI does appear in a few places: drones operate largely autonomously, to avoid jamming, for instance, and AI does a lot of work analysing information and optimising speeches, for instance. But nowhere (as I recall) do we have large numbers of robots, operating autonomously, with humans taken completely out of the loop. Although we might find this distasteful (who can forget the Terminator T-800), it is as inevitable as nuclear weapons: if the enemy has robots that can react faster than humans, then so must we — particularly if the citizens of the West have largely lost the will to fight. The oversight is slightly odd given Singer’s seminal work, Wired for War. Perhaps he thought robots would make the book too unbelievable.
The limitations of friendship. When we think of total war, we naturally think of World War II, when Allied countries harnessed their full industrial might, and everyone fell in line to support the war effort. If we spent much time thinking about what a war with China would look like, we’d subconsciously apply the WWII mental model to that war as well. Ghost Fleet should give us pause.
Singer has separately written extensively about the yawning chasm between Silicon Valley and the military. There are many reasons for this: West Coasters live in a Matrix-like fantasy land of peace and security, they have particularly liberal values, and they are still angry about the intrusive government surveillance revealed by Snowden (but then, who isn’t?). It shouldn’t really be surprising then that when the balloon goes up in Ghost Fleet, the US gets precisely zero support from Silicon Valley. This only changes when an iconoclastic tech billionaire creates an Anonymous-style group of hackers to regain the initiative in cyberspace, but even that has to be done in secret. Even Walmart takes awhile to get on board (they have huge operations overseas, after all). The US military even has to hire international privateers to regain superiority in space.
One of the lessons (a reminder, really) from our recent forays into the sandbox is that total military might is largely irrelevant: what matters is how much power we can bring to bear relative to the enemy at a specific point in time and space (firstest with the mostest). We need to be very sober about just how much of the West’s total power can really be brought to bear, even in existential conflict.
Ghost Fleet is an enjoyable and fairly quick read, but it has a very powerful message: get ready. Really get ready — because things are changing quickly, our position in the world is not secure, and transitions between great powers usually results in war.
And in case the book’s message was too subtle, Cole and Singer recently penned a short piece in The Daily Telegraph to draw an explicit line between today and the future of Ghost Fleet (“Here’s how World War Three could start tomorrow”).
It is no longer politic to avoid talking about these trends. It may seem like a fear of the distant past or the realm of fiction, but if there is a hope of averting such great power fights, a frank and open discussion about their real risks of and likely horrors is needed. Not persuaded? At least weigh the statement of a Chinese military officer in an official regime publication last year. “The world war is a form of war that the whole world should face up to”, he said. It is a statement to be both considered and chilled by.
P.S. On cue: “Obama Navy Now Half The Size Of Reagan Navy”
