Preparing for What We’re Missing
American Legion, 9.1.22
“We have a perfect record in predicting future wars,” Gen. H.R. McMaster observes. “And that record is zero percent.”[i] This warrior-scholar knows well what many Americans overlook: Our enemies often surprise us because too many policymakers—both civilian and uniformed—fail to think creatively about our enemies.
What if we are, yet again, failing to predict and thus prepare for the next war? One of the best ways to address that question is to think in unconventional ways. And perhaps the best way for military and civilian leaders to do that is to dive into the deep reservoir of fiction writing, which has an impressive track record of identifying national-security threats before they emerge.
Terror Tactics
Policymakers and pundits use words like “unthinkable” and “unimaginable” to describe military attacks, fast-emerging threats and other national-security surprises. Yet in most cases, novelists and other strategic thinkers have already thought about the “unthinkable” and imagined the “unimaginable.”
Consider the 9/11 attacks. They were many things—horrific, terrible, devastating—but they were decidedly not unthinkable or unimaginable. Tom Clancy’s 1994 novel Debt of Honor, for example, culminates with a commercial airliner plowing into the Capitol. Dale Brown’s Storming Heaven (also published in 1994) posits terrorists using a 747 to attack civilian targets. The cover of the book literally depicts a jumbo jet careening toward the Capitol Dome.
PRC Predictions
In the past decade, Beijing has stood up a 21st-century military; absorbed Hong Kong; threatened to use military force to seize Taiwan; constructed a constellation of militarized manmade islands in the South China Sea; gained strategic footholds in Latin America, Southeast Europe, Africa and Southwest Asia; mushroomed its stockpile of nuclear weapons; brandished an arsenal of space-based weapons; exploited cyberspace to wage a hack-and-harvest assault against American industry; unleashed a high-tech Orwellian surveillance state at home; thuggishly leveraged a pandemic for geopolitical advantage abroad; and triggered a new cold war.
For those policymakers and pundits who soothingly spoke of “China’s peaceful rise,” all of this is unexpected and unbelievable. Yet Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro foresaw Beijing’s bellicose shift in their 1997 book The Coming Conflict with China, which warned that PRC aggression and Western naivete would open the way for “the major global rivalry in the first decades of the 21st century.” That same year, Humphrey Hawksley and Simon Holberton’s Dragon Strike contemplated the consequences of an expansionist-militarist PRC and an accommodationist U.S. In 2000, a piece in this very magazine warned that Washington and Beijing were entering “a second cold war” and described how Beijing was in “the midst of the greatest military buildup on earth—a buildup aimed at reclaiming Taiwan” and “challenging America.”
As for China’s tech-enabled surveillance state, that was foreseen in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949)—a nightmare vision of a society where the state can monitor, control and punish everything its subjects do. “Big Brother is watching you,” Orwell wrote. Always watching, always listening. China’s majority population, deprived of individual freedom by the state’s omnipresent and increasingly-omniscient technologies, knows such an existence. And China’s minority populations—Christians, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists—know something else Orwell predicted. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” So prescient was 1984 that “Orwellian” has become synonymous with dystopian dictatorships like the PRC.
Viral Visionaries
America is weathering a relentless cybersiege—ranging from China’s theft of military technologies and control over personal data on millions of Americans, to Russia’s attacks on critical infrastructure and interference in political-electoral processes. A common reaction is, “How could this happen?”
Fiction and futurism offer an answer. Winn Schwartau’s Terminal Compromise (1993) envisioned our enemies using “viral” software to wage “computer warfare” that cripples America’s banking system, transportation infrastructure, communications infrastructure and government computer networks.[ii] That same year, a RAND study warned that “Cyberwar may be to the 21st century what blitzkrieg was to the 20th.” Clancy’s Debt of Honor predicted the use of computer “bombs” to target America’s financial industry and economy.
Russia’s Reemergence
Russia devolved from a fledgling democracy and partner in stabilizing Europe in the 1990s into an authoritarian regime bent on reconstituting the Russian Empire in the 2000s. Post-Soviet Russia’s path—annexations of a slice of Georgia in 2008 and a chunk of Ukraine in 2014, destabilizing military deployments and combat ops in the Middle East, nuclear threats against NATO members, weaponizing natural gas, the beastly attempt to seize the whole of Ukraine via military force in 2022—has been called “unexpected” and “shocking.”[iii]
Yet in Russia 2010 (1993), Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson described the possibility of post-Soviet Russia's shift from democracy to authoritarianism, with kleptocrats, the military and internal-security forces running a “regime [that] rules by decree.” Such a regime, they predicted, would be characterized by “Russian nationalism and resentment of the West,” wield natural gas as a weapon, seek to reincorporate territories and countries populated by ethnic Russians, and stoke “confrontations” in “eastern Ukraine and the Crimea.” Such a confrontation, they bluntly concluded, “is one of those surprises that should not be a surprise at all.”[iv]
Border Bedlam
Policymakers seem repeatedly surprised by the tidal waves of illegal immigrants crashing into America’s southern border—and by the cascade of consequences inside the U.S. Every president this century has deployed troops on the U.S.-Mexico border to assist border agents, deter illegal immigration, stem inflows of violent gangs and/or support counter-narcotics efforts.[v]
But again, none of this is a surprise to fiction readers. Harold Coyle’s Trial by Fire (1992) describes a Mexico unraveling in the wake of corruption and narco-warlordism—and how the ensuing chaos spills across the border and inexorably draws in the U.S. military. Caspar Weinberger and Peter Schweizer’s The Next War (1998) sketches a scenario involving a “mass exodus of weary and hungry” “illegal immigrants…driven north by the chaotic situation inside Mexico”—and how this would strain social-welfare programs and spawn national-security challenges.[vi]
Tokyo’s Treachery
Washington’s lack of imagination is not a new ailment; it’s a chronic condition. Consider the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which shocked most Americans. In describing the attack, President Roosevelt used words like “suddenly” and “surprise.” Yet Hector Bywater’s 1925 novel The Great Pacific War foresaw a conflict initiated by a string of surprise Japanese attacks—including kamikaze attacks—against U.S. forces and bases across the Pacific.[vii] As far back as 1910, airpower visionary Billy Mitchell predicted Japanese airstrikes against U.S. warships.[viii]
Past Is Prologue
Like latter-day Cassandras, novelists continue to offer a glimpse of what lies ahead if our leaders continue to think unimaginatively about our enemies.
Cold War II with China—like Cold War I with the USSR—promises to be costly, draining and tense. Yet as America grasped early in the global contest with Moscow, a cold war is preferable to another world war. August Cole and P.W. Singer’s Ghost Fleet and James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman’s 2034 are sounding the alarm over what a full-blown military conflict with China would look like—and why we must develop new alliances, weapons systems, and strategies to deter Beijing and prevent Cold War II from turning hot.
Russia has lopped off parts of Georgia, annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and laid siege to the rest to Ukraine. The warning offered a quarter-century ago by Weinberger and Schweizer is that, without a firm and unified response from NATO, a revisionist Russia will try to salami-slice its way through Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland. NATO, at long last, finally seems awake to the danger.
Given North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and Iran’s nuclear aspirations, the possibility of high-altitude detonation of nukes to carry out EMP attacks is increasing.[ix] And given al-Qaeda’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons vulnerabilities, the possibility of terrorists gaining access to nukes is increasing as well.[x] In 1984, Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka’s War Day described the devastating effects of EMPs and nuclear fallout. In 1991, Clancy’s Sum of All Fears sketched the chaos terrorists could unleash by detonating a nuke in an American city.
In the past 30 years, mankind has begun to peer again inside the Pandora’s Box of chemical and biological agents. Mustard gas in Iraq, sarin and anthrax in Tokyo, anthrax in D.C. and Manhattan[xi], chlorine and sulfur in Syria, VX in Kuala Lumpur, MERS-Coronavirus in the Middle East[xii], Novichok in England, Ebola in western Africa, Coronavirus-19 in Wuhan—some of these were let loose by acts of nature, others by incompetence, still others by intention. Regardless of how they were unleashed, we were unprepared and still seem unable to fully grasp the destruction purpose-built bioweapons could inflict on our free society. Yet Clancy’s Executive Orders (1996) and Richard Preston’s The Cobra Event (1997) detail what our enemies could do with weaponized viruses. Equally compelling and dispiriting is what was written not by novelists but by scientists like Donald Henderson, who worried about how government might respond to a 21st-century pandemic—and warned against it in 2006.[xiii]
Thinking of Threats
The list goes on. The imagination can drift into some dark places when trying to think through unforeseen dangers—a space Pearl Harbor crippling America’s satellites and satellite-dependent economy; a drone-swarm pummeling the Super Bowl; a jihadist group laying siege to churches, hospitals, schools and other soft targets; container ships being used to mount Trojan Horse attacks. The list of what’s “unthinkable” but all too possible is endless.
Some dismiss this as fearmongering or warmongering. But this sort of thinking can help us contemplate a broader range of threats, sharpen how we understand the behavior of our enemies and prevent conflict by preparing for worst-case scenarios.
Others worry that writing about the “unthinkable” will give our enemies ideas. But our enemies have already contemplated much worse. The challenge is to try to think like them—and to think ahead. A good place to start is in the fiction section.
TEXT BOX ONE: Think-Tank Thinkers
To help defense policymakers relearn the element of surprise and recognize that the unexpected is not necessarily unlikely, CSIS recently issued a report built around 18 vignettes that “represent plausible futures”—a targeted PRC decapitation strike against America’s elected leadership; the use of cyber timebombs to cripple U.S. satellites; a Russian blitzkrieg through the Baltics; the manipulation of social media, use of cyber-blackmail and zeroing-out of bank accounts to paralyze America’s Indo-Pacific forces.[xiv]
The Atlantic Council’s Art of Future Warfare project turned to more than a dozen futurists and novelists to develop “creative approaches to understanding armed and social conflict.” Former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said the effort helps “shed the shackles which bind us to our current constructs and instead imagine things as they might be, for better or for worse.”[xv]
TEXT BOX TWO: Future Fact
Military historian Andrew Liptak reports that “Various groups within or adjacent to the military have increasingly turned to science fiction, using anthologies, graphic novels and books to visualize the battlefields we might someday find ourselves fighting in.”[xvi] “Returned” might be more accurate, as Liptak adds that military thinkers have “used science fiction off and on for more than 100 years.” He points to an 1871 novella by a British colonel warning about “Germany’s aptitude for mechanization and movement on the battlefield.”
The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory has unveiled an anthology of scenarios set between 2030 and 2045.[xvii] The Army Cyber Institute at West Point commissioned futurists—employing a methodology known as “threatcasting”—to write stories that “model possible future threats.”[xviii] A collection of those stories—featuring titles like “Dark Hammer” and “Silent Ruin”—is available at
cyber.army.mil/Work-Areas/Threatcasting.
NATO launched a fiction-based project dubbed “Visions of Warfare 2036,” which is available at act.nato.int/images/stories/events/2012/fc_ipr/visions-of-warfare-2036.pdf. The German military’s ominously labeled “Project Cassandra” enlisted literature professors to explore future threats. [xix]
The Institute for Leadership and Strategic Studies at the University of North Georgia (which is a military college) has a “future scenarios” reading list including books such as “The Next Hundred Years,” “Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare,” “The Next Decade” and “The Future Declassified.”[xx]
Alan Dowd is a senior fellow with the Sagamore Institute Center for America’s Purpose.
[i] https://www.cfr.org/blog/planning-2013-what-are-next-threats
[ii]https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/79/pg79.html
[iii]https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/03/an-faq-roundup-on-the-crisis-in-ukraine-and-crimea.htmlhttps://www.defensenews.com/outlook/2017/12/11/moscow-based-think-tank-director-russias-unexpected-military-victory-in-syria/
[iv] Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson, Russia 2010, 1993, pp.171-174 and pp.232-233
[v]https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/03/politics/border-troops-deployed-obama-bush/index.htmlhttps://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2021-07-06/us-mexico-border-troops-immigration-crisis-2071343.html
[vi] Weinberger and Schweizer, pp.169-175.
[vii]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1929374.The_Great_Pacific_Warhttps://thediplomat.com/2017/12/this-1925-novel-inspired-japans-attack-on-pearl-harbor/
[viii]https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/special-reports/pearl-harbor/2016/12/06/milwaukees-billy-mitchell-predicted-pearl-harbor-attack/91625442/
[ix] https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/363326-how-one-north-korean-nuclear-armed-satellite-could-cripple-the-us?amp
[x]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-qaeda-pakistan-nuclear/al-qaeda-says-would-use-pakistani-nuclear-weapons-idUSTRE55L12V20090622https://ctc.usma.edu/the-terrorist-threat-to-pakistans-nuclear-weapons/
[xi] https://www.npr.org/2011/02/15/93170200/timeline-how-the-anthrax-terror-unfolded
[xii] https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-019-00422-y
[xiii]https://www.worldvision.org/health-news-stories/2014-ebola-virus-outbreak-factshttps://www.aier.org/article/how-a-free-society-deals-with-pandemics-according-to-legendary-epidemiologist-and-smallpox-eradicator-donald-henderson/https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.556.2672&rep=rep1&type=pdfhttps://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210316-33-years-after-iraq-chemical-attack-survivors-still-seeking-justicehttps://www.npr.org/2019/02/17/695545252/more-than-300-chemical-attacks-launched-during-syrian-civil-war-study-sayshttps://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/tokyo-subways-are-attacked-with-sarin-gas
[xiv] https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/180227_Cancian_CopingWithSurprise_wAppen_Web.pdf
[xv] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/War_Stories_from_the_Future.pdf
[xvi] https://onezero.medium.com/the-u-s-military-is-turning-to-science-fiction-to-shape-the-future-of-war-1b40d11eb6b4
[xvii]https://onezero.medium.com/the-u-s-military-is-turning-to-science-fiction-to-shape-the-future-of-war-1b40d11eb6b4
[xviii]https://www.inverse.com/article/44549-these-army-graphic-novels-predict-the-future-of-cyber-warfarehttps://cyber.army.mil/Work-Areas/Threatcasting/
[xix] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jun/26/project-cassandra-plan-to-use-novels-to-predict-next-war
[xx] https://ung.edu/institute-leadership-strategic-studies/reading-lists/future-scenarios-and-predictions-reading-list.php