'Ghost Fleet' Depicts War Between China, U.S.
Defense analysts combine sci-fi and reality to portray future weapons, gadgets.
Peter W. Singer and August Cole's new book, prototype weapons of today, like this U.S. Navy variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35C, are fully integrated into the U.S. military
By Tom Risen
June 29, 2015 | 1:39 p.m. EDT
Tech like virtual reality, robotics and increasingly fast Internet is changing the way we live, but how will it evolve a generation from now, or even change the way we fight a global war? The new science fiction thriller “Ghost Fleet” takes on questions like that by drawing inspiration from real-life prototypes and emerging sectors of technology to depict how both war and everyday life look in the future just a few decades from now. The book goes on sale on Tuesday.
Authors Peter W. Singer and August Cole expand their research as defense analysts into the realm of imagination about a not-too-distant future that could find the U.S. at war with a great power like China. Singer is a strategist at the New America Foundation and a consultant for the U.S. military. Cole is a non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and a former defense reporter with The Wall Street Journal.
Singer, who spoke with U.S. News on how weapons and technology are evolving a century after World War I, says the rule for the book was to keep the fictional story rooted in reality.
“Every technology in the book had to at least be in the research and development stage,” Singer says. “They were drawn from trade shows, contract announcements or simply taking a technology and understanding how it would be applied in a different way.”
Singer explains the evolution of weapons that are being tested now but will be mainstream in the coming decades, including drones and stealth destroyers but also gear like wearables that is being developed by Silicon Valley firms.
Q: Let’s start off by discussing the weapons in the book. In the future world war that you describe, the prototype weapons of today like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Zumwalt Class stealth destroyers are fully integrated into the U.S. military. Without giving away too much of the plot, can you talk about how you expect them to perform against Russian or Chinese weapons like the J-31 Chinese fighter jet?
The F-35 and J-31 dogfight itself will be determined by the software, the pilot, but also how many of them there are. In World War II, we basically outproduced the enemy. Now we make weapons that try to be all things to all people and can end up being overpriced. We have clipped from quantity to being about quality. We don’t know which focus would win in the next war.
The U.S. military has for the last 70 years gone into battle with the expectation that they are at least a generation ahead of who they are facing. That inheritance is not going to be there for future generations. We are planning on spending $1 trillion on fifth-generation fighter jets, but the Chinese J-31 jet looks like a cousin of an F-35. That’s partly because my colleague Cole says the F-35 program got hacked on multiple occasions.
A similar theme is playing out at sea. The Chinese Navy is experimenting with long-range missiles. In 2030, they will have 100 more warships than the U.S. is on pace to have. They are growing in quality and quantity. Pentagon weapons testers have also looked at every single major U.S. weapons program and determined that they had significant vulnerabilities to cyberattack. The recent hacks of the Office of Personnel Management show that we are not as good on cybersecurity defenses as we should be. Whoever wins at cyber or space will have a huge advantage on land, seas and air.
Q: Space is a major part of your story, which depicts a weaponized Chinese space program. How likely do you think it is for China to build not only a space station but also space weapons?
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Space is a domain that will determine success and failures in battles back on Earth. We have more than 1,100 satellites in orbit that run communication, commerce and key activities for the military. We utterly depend on them. All the great powers are equipping themselves to fight there. China has carried out multiple anti-satellite weapons tests. The U.S. is spending billions of dollars on its space weapons programs. On Tuesday Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work announced that it will start a space operations center to coordinate efforts on this. Russia is rumored to have re-launched Cold War programs but also satellites that can take out other satellites. China has made enormous strides in its space program and they are advancing at a much faster pace than us. China launched its first manned crew into space in 2003, which resembled the U.S. Gemini spacecraft from the 1960s. They aim to launch a probe to the Moon and retrieve a lunar sample in 2017.
Q: Robotics of all kinds are depicted in the story – including drone submarines, firefighting robots and artificial intelligence battle systems, including autonomous drones. Which of these are being developed now and which do you think will be debuted first?
The world will see robotics applied in everything from delivering food to delivering bombs. The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been like World War I for sci-fi weapons, when submarines and planes didn’t truly reach their full potential but proved their worth. The next major conflict is going to see them truly reach their fruition, and the books depicts that. We talked with military officers who may be operating alongside unmanned systems and asked “how are pilots going to feel when they are sharing the skies with autonomous planes?” We are already seeing drones used by many different factions for war. We see insurgents making robotic improvised explosive devices and insurgent groups like the Islamic State group and Hezbollah have already flown their own drones.
Q: Tell us a bit how you take Silicon Valley gadgets like smart visors, wearables and virtual reality to the next level in the book with things like smart rings and what you call “viz glasses” that project images directly into an eye?
That was a fun part of the book; to go to consumer trade shows and take a look at what is looming, like wearable devices wrapped around your finger. Google Glass is not the end point of the smart visor experience, for instance. Google is upgrading its version, but people including the Israeli military are working on their own version. We considered that visors will evolve from being projected onto a screen in front of eyes to being projected into your eyes. It will make your experience of walking through the world and perceptions of reality very different. There is one scene in the book where two people are having an argument and one person is searching for retorts and comebacks. It’s like now when you are talking to kids at the dinner table and they are looking down at their phones.
Q: Two of the most interesting technologies that highlight a next generation of technology we can’t quite imagine are gummy drug cocktails and brain-to-machine interface. What existing products and technologies inspired you to depict those in your story?
People in the book chewing gummy drugs of different kinds, different drug cocktails, that’s kind of the equivalent of the cigarettes in World War I that were the drug of choice for relief and alertness. We looked at military research on what they call “human performance modification,” what sports stars are allegedly using and abusing, and what college kids are using to study and test-prep. The vast majority of college kids have reported taking some kind of drug for test-prep.
The brain-to-machine interface is perhaps the most chilling scene in the book. It was designed by [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] and it’s called BrainGate – a connection that enables moving a robotic arm. Another is designed to allow you to send out your thoughts to a machine but also to work in the other direction, to help soldiers with thoughts plagued by PTSD. It will move into video gaming and therapy, but also interrogation, based on what happened in U.S. interrogation during the last 10 years of the war on terror. The lesson we have learned in reality is that whether it is a stone or a drone, technologies have been used for both good and bad.
Tom Risen is a technology and business reporter for U.S. News & World Report. You can follow him on Twitter or reach him at trisen@usnews.com.
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