The first world war gave us the tank, mustard gas and mass trench warfare. The second world war spawned the nuclear bomb. What would a third bring about? And how would that conflict play out?
These are the questions PW Singer and August Cole set out to answer in *Ghost Fleet,*a novel founded in a scientific estimation of the future of war. Set in the near future, the novel opens with a Chinese two-pronged attack against American space satellites, a drone invasion of Pearl Harbour and a scrambled response from Silicon Valley's tycoons, hackers and space pirates to reverse the tide.
Yes, this is fiction. But Singer and Cole's resumes give away how this is not just any old sci-fi. Both co-authors work for international relations think-tanks in Washington DC: Singer authored nonfiction best-sellers such as Corporate Warriorsand Wired for War, while Cole used to be the Wall Street Journal's defence correspondent.
Ghost Fleet also comes with hundreds of footnotes explaining how every single military technology, 'sci-fi' weapon and geopolitical trend mentioned in the book is grounded in reality. That's why, rather than simply a good read, Ghost Fleetcan come across as a 400-page warning.
WIRED:Ghost Fleetis very specific in envisioning how a third World War would unfold. In your book, it all starts with a satellite armageddon and a cyber attack. Would a WWIII really look that way?
Peter Warren Singer: If there was a war between the great powers in the 21st century, it would be very different from all the wars of today -- the Afghanistans, the Iraqs -- in that, much like WWI or WWII it would take place in multiple domains. We wouldn't just be fighting on land, we'd also be fighting in the air, and at sea, two fields in which we haven't seen battles between major powers in at least seventy years. But differently than the other World Wars, we would also see battles in two domains that technology has allowed us to reach: outer space and cyberspace.
We would see battles in the heavens, and in the virtual world, which may very well determine success or failure in the real world. One of the other things that would be very different is the technology mix would be everything from sci-fi-like technologies like cyber weapons, drones and so forth, but, also, the older weapons wouldn't go away.
For example, we met with fighter pilots and talked through what dogfights in the 21st century would be like, and you'd see stealthy fighter jets going against each other, but you'd also see drones there, and the pilots had a very conflicted sense of how they felt about that.
How likely does such a conflict seem to you?
We are very specific that this isn't a work of prediction. However it's a novel with over 400 headnotes documenting every single technology in it, every single political-economic social trend, even some of the quotes are all pulled from the real world. It does capture how there are trends going on, right now, that are a little worrisome. While many people thought that the risk of a great power war was something in our historical rearview mirror, it's come back around in the 21st century: we've seen Russian land grabs in Ukraine, and visits by bomber planes with the red star on, that sent NATO to its highest point of alert since the 1980s.
And in the Pacific we have everything from confrontation to disputed waters in the South China Sea. US and China are in an arms race now, and both of their military strategies have identified the other as their competitor. I don't think a war is inevitable, even if People's Daily --China's officials' newspaper-- actually used the phrase “war is inevitable if the US doesn't change its policy in the Pacific.” I don't think war is inevitable but it is very clear that what was once unthinkable is thinkable again for many people.
One of the premises of the book is that the West could be caught off guard because it's falling behind in military technology. We used to think that Western countries were at the cutting edge of technology, but you turn this assumption upside down. Why?
For the last 70 years we've had an assumption: that we'd be at least a generation ahead in our technology. That won't be the case in both business competition and military competition as we move forward. For the military there are two issues playing out here. One is that competitors, like in particular China, are gaining the fruits of our intellectual property through massive cyber-theft campaigns: as an illustration, let's take the F35 joint strike fighter, the fifth generation fighter jet that is going to equip not just the US military but also most of our allies such as the UK.
My co-writer August Colewrote the story that the F35 program was hacked on at least three separate occasions, including one time during the test flight. And we have already seen its 'Chinese twin' -- the J31 -- appear in Chinese military trade shows before the F35 has been deployed into our own forces.
But in the same breath, you have the surpassing of technology. China has more supercomputers than the UK does, it has carried out more hypersonic weapons tests than the US: it's pushing the frontiers in very interesting and exotic technologies. That's on the military side.
But you also have a second trend, which is that unlike during the Cold War, the civilian sector is the one that is really pushing the envelope, and in many ways it's moving ahead of the military. That's not just a challenge for the military, but in general it also means that there's a lot of things out there on the open market, off-the-shelf technology that may be better than what the military has, and it's available for all sorts of actors out there, which might range from private companies to insurgents, to other nations.
What is the West getting wrong about military technology?
There are a couple of challenges that may be woven into the Western tech-industrial complex and worldview. One is the assumption that we are always better, and yet we may be squandering that inheritance that we received from our parents and grandparents' generations. Related is that we have shifted from producing quantity like back in WWII to focus on quality in terms of military equipment. But it's become exquisitely expensive and the result is that we may have not enough, and --even worse--it may not be as good as we think.
I joke that a lot of our technology right now is the equivalent to a car called Pontiac Aztek. It had a design that tried to be a combination of a sportscar, a station wagon and a SUV truck--all combined together. Of course the result was that it wasn't good at any of these: it was over-engineered, overpriced, over-promised, and turned out to be not good either for the racing world or to go camping.
We have a lot of military equivalently for that, and it's not just the US military that's buying it, but also our counterparts in the UK and the like: their weapon systems turned out to be not all that good for the types of battles fought in the Middle East, and they might not be that good also for other battles either. So what does it mean to be buying a warplane that is neither really good at close air support nor for dogfighting? And we can have the same conversation about warships, or ground vehicles-- that's a challenge that's out there.
The book also points out Western overreliance on foreign manufacturers. Is it a realistic threat?
Everything in the book comes from the real world. We explored the ramifications of having your weapon systems powered by chips that are made by your competitor. We worked on data are taken from a DARPA report that documents this overreliance, and when I refer to it this is not just US weapon systems, but also of course British weapon systems.
When we explore the vulnerabilities that come from having ships that are made by someone else and the potential that they might have flaws or vulnerability baked into them--that's not theory--that's taken from a series of incidents we have already seen playing out. Similarly, when we explore cyber-security flaws --the risks they present to weapon systems--that's drawn from a US military report: earlier this year the US military weapons' tester did an examination of the cyber security of every single major weapon system and found “ significant vulnerabilities” in them.
And that's what they found, let alone those that are still unknown-- just to think how the U.S. Office of Personnel Management was utterly pwnedby Chinese hackers that had access to over 18 million of personnel files including classified information. The point is again, it's not pure sci-fi speculation,
While researching this, was there any future military technology that struck you as particularly visionary? What would be the most interesting innovations?
What was a lot of fun for us as writers was not just to document what was changing in military technology and moving forward with it -- what does the next generation drone look like, or how an electromagnetic railgun could be fielded in a war -- but we also had the opportunity to go and look at changes in the civilian sector. What your home would look like, but also what technologies might then move back into the military, some things like 3D printing, enhanced visors (some sort of Google Glass), or brain-machine interfaces. The latter is at the center of one of the most chilling scenes in the book.
We explored how certain technologies that were originally developed to help the paralysed would move into war through taking their thoughts and converting them into computer orders. Unfortunately, brain-machine interfaces could also be used for torture and interrogation.
This again sounds like science fiction but the book documents the real DARPA projects on it, which again is not just designed to help the paralysed to move but also being developed to help soldiers deal with PTSD by manipulating their feelings and memories. That's seemingly a good thing, but just like a stone, a drone, the Internet, people can use it for both good and bad.
Private actors seem bound to play a huge role in WWIII...
It's a great comparison back to WWII, because business then was different and you also didn't have this thing called cyberspace out there. As an illustration: we know that if there's a battle between the great powers there would be a cyber-element to it, and that wouldn't just be stealing information -- we'll truly see cyber-war for the first time.
But the players in that cyber-war wouldn't just be groups like the British intelligence , or the US army cyber command. There would also be a number of other actors who might be private contractors, the digital version of Blackwater. We have already seen the emergence of these kinds of companies --it's moving to be a $160 billion industry -- and of course it's one that brings huge capabilities to the private sectors, but also questions about who exactly they are working for.
The Italian company Hacking Team has recently been hacked, and it's been revealed that it was working for both the US air force and the Russian government simultaneously. That's what mercenaries do in the cyber age: we're back in the 1500 in some ways.
Other actors may be proxy groups- for example in China you have university-affiliated cyber militias that would play a huge role. Finally you have groups that really have no historic parallels -- think of hacktivist communities like Anonymous - we can be fairly sure that they're not gonna align themselves with one nation or the other, but it is clear that they won't sit out the most important battle on a domain they've sworn to protect.
Why does your war start in space?
At the end of WWII, 70 years ago, Arthur C. Clarke-- a young physicist who would later become a very important science fiction author -- envisioned the utilization of space for communication networks. Since then that vision has become real and it's one that any single countries, commerce, communication, and also military depend on. The result though is that all the great powers are eyeing this domain as a future battlefield.
China has conducted a number of satellite tests in recent years, and in turn the US military just invested five billion dollars in new space weaponry and operation capabilities. Just weeks ago it created a new coordination centre to essentially monitor Chinese and Russian movements in space.
The sad reality is that if there was a great powers conflict on Earth, it would very quickly move into space, as whoever is able to control heavens, or at least take away those capabilities from the other sides, would have great advantage back on Earth.
Is the situation is such a mess, why hasn't World War Three happened yet?
Well, wars start through any number of reasons. One World War started by very deliberated choices to reorder the global political system, another started basically from a crisis that spun out of control. We are fortunately in a situation right now where we've been able to manage crises, and the power balance is such that deterrence is holding. The worry is that these dynamics could shift at some point: a crisis could spin out of control, two warships scrape paint over some reef that isn't even on a nautical chart in the South China Sea and you could see it spin out of control. Or you can see how power balances might change.
Now the US military has a decided advantage over Russia and China but that is undergoing a shift. China has built more war ships and warplanes than any other nations in 2012, 2013, 2014. It's planning to do so in 2015, in 2016, 2017... you get the point. The US navy reports are projecting that by the mid 2020s it would face a Chinese military that's not just quantitatively matching it, but also qualitatively matching it.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
