"When Ghost Fleet, a novel of the next world war by P.W. Singer and August Cole, appeared in June, a fever swept both the Beltway and the Internet, as reviewers clamored to extend an increasingly laudatory laurel and hearty handshake to these wunderkind of the twenty-first century techno-thriller. Their work has been variously described in the Navy Times as a "realistic look at an imagined war;" by the Wall Street Journal as "a fictional warning that real-life technologies could expose the U.S. to a devastating attack;" in USAToday as "a message to decision-makers, and the public;" by The Strategy Bridge as "an insightful and prescient book;" in War is Boring as "one of the more plausible depictions of a major 21st century war — and one of the more realistic portrayals of cyberwar … seen in fiction;" by War on the Rocks as "the best techno-thriller since Red Storm Rising;" and in Small Wars Journal as "an eminently readable novel, which is both highly entertaining and sobering." Admiral James Stavridis calls it "a plausible, frightening, and pitch-perfect vision" of global war between China and the United States, "a startling blueprint for the wars of the future and therefore needs to be read now." Even Doctrine Man!! proclaimed, "If you're not reading Ghost Fleet you're missing out on the best fiction read of the summer."
A wise man once asked, "If your friends all jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you?" I only wish now I'd listened to that wise man. But with such praise before me, a profound mistake was made: I purchased and read this book.
The Three Flaws
The most fundamentally frightening thing about this novel is less the dangerous future it purports to show and more the wild misrepresentation of risk implicit in it. The initial and evolving technological conditions presented in the novel involve a collection of substantial asymmetries — asymmetries in cyber capabilities and vulnerabilities, asymmetries of information, asymmetries of will and intent, etc. It is the accumulation of these that sets the initial conditions necessary to the novel's plot — tactical, operational, and strategic disaster for the United States. (The subsequent recovery is a matter of deus ex machina and MacGuffinry, a separate flaw … but a bit more on that in a moment.)…"
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Amicalement
Armand
is painting some ground targets as he needs them.
