Visions of World War III

 

Back in the ‘80s I read a couple of World War III novels.  The Third World War: August 1985 (published 1978) was written by a group of retired British general and flag officers.  Red Storm Rising (1986) was written by Tom Clancy, who developed close ties with the military after the surprise success of The Hunt for Red October (1984).  In both books, a numerically superior Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe is stymied by a technically superior NATO.

Both books were implicitly pleas to continue the development and procurement of high-tech weapons.  That message was received in high places:  Margaret Thatcher gave a copy of August 1985 to Ronald Reagan.

And in both books, the war ends with the political collapse of the Soviet Union.  My reaction at the time was, “Nah!  That’ll never happen.”

And then it did.

Which led me to think that I should pay more attention to military thinkers.  Thus it was that Elliot Ackerman’s and Admiral James Stavridis’s 2034: A Novel of the Next World War drew my attention.  Their vision is considerably darker than their Cold War predecessors.

Early in the book, China sinks a US carrier task force by completely disabling its electronic systems.  Using similar cyber warfare techniques, its ally, Iran, hijacks an F-35.  The US, unable to protect its own assets or to effectively cyberattack the Chinese, go nuclear.  After a limited nuclear exchange, India steps in, using its own impressive cyber and kinetic capabilities to stop the war and become the new, responsible world power.

On the technical front, 2034 seems to be relitigating the 1970’s and 80’s argument between the “go big” neoconservative Committee on the Present Danger and the “go smart” Military Reform Caucus associated with Senator Gary Hart.  (Remember him?)  Both August 1985 and Red Storm Rising were in the “go smart” camp.  In his public statements, Admiral Stavridis argues we should “go smart” by emphasizing cyber operations, but 2034 can also be read as an argument to “go dumb” by not relying so much on advanced electronics.  In it, the admiral who suddenly finds herself in charge of the surviving Western Pacific carrier group is one of the few to fully realize the implications of what the Chinese have done, and responds by stripping the avionics out of the only squadron of obsolescing F/A-18 Hornets left in her fleet (the others having been replaced by now useless F-35’s), and seeing to it that her pilots are retrained in how to fly with paper maps and dead reckoning. 

On the political front, 2034 argues that America has lost its way.  As one of its Indian characters says, “America didn’t used to start wars.  It used to finish them.  But now it is the reverse; now you start wars and don’t finish them.”  The resulting loss of legitimacy is endangering the US’s position as the dominant world power and keeper of the peace.

Like the other WW III novels, 2034 is structured as interwoven short episodes, told from the point of view of key characters representing all the nations in the war.  It is a well-written, thought-provoking page turner that propelled me along, even though I knew (more or less) how it was going to end.  Recommended.

 

Penguin Press, New York, 2021

320 pp

 

I confess I did not go back and reread August 1985 and Red Storm Rising.  I did refresh my memory by consulting https://www.hoover.org/research/world-war-iii-novels .  Here’s what they had to say:

General Sir John Hackett (ret.), The Third World War: August 1985 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1978).  In this scenario, written by a coterie of British retired generals and admirals, the Warsaw Pact attacks across the inner-German border. For a month, NATO defends valiantly. The convoy sea lane across the Atlantic remains intact and the Soviet blitzkrieg stalls. To prevent a NATO counter-offensive, the Moscow Politburo drops a nuclear bomb upon Manchester, prompting nuclear retaliation against Minsk. The Russian military then launch a coup, resulting in a ceasefire. Why did the Pact fail in the blitzkrieg? Because the West held the edge in electronics over brute Soviet production.

Tom Clancy, Red Storm Rising (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1986).  Tom Clancy and his writing team adopted the same basic scenario of a Warsaw Pact blitzkrieg. In this novel, however, the Battle for the Atlantic is more centric, as are the American advantages in space and in the air. The Soviet blitzkrieg sputters out for lack of supplies, fuel, and manpower sustainability. Nuclear weapons are not employed. In the end, the Russian military overthrows the Politburo and agrees to a ceasefire that restores the status quo ante.