Category: International Relations
Review: Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

Review: Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

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It’s back to world war again. Last month I reviewed 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. Now I’ll review Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. What’s that, you ask? Both books have the same subtitle? Yup. Apparently world wars sell books. Since Ghost Fleet came first, it would be the 2034 authors and publisher poaching the subtitle. Originality, anyone?

Anyway, the same Foreign Service buddy who suggested I read 2034 suggested that I read Ghost Fleet, too. It’s one more of those books that is reputedly all the buzz inside the Beltway. This is because, as mentioned in my other review, every war-game simulation run shows the ChiComs winning and handing us our ass. This is basically the premise of Ghost Fleet, that we’re at a disadvantage in a confrontation with China, and the book takes us through the ensuing conflict.

Foreign Policy had this to say about the place the book held in the Pentagon in 2016:

“It’s on the desks of four-star generals and junior naval officers, and it has found its way on to the recommended reading lists for every branch of the American military . . . At a time when commanders and intelligence officials are worried about retaining America’s technological edge against resurgent great power rivals — crystallized in Friday’s of the Defense Department’s annual report on China — the book has captured imaginations and sparked debate inside the Pentagon. Ghost Fleet has landed at an auspicious time: After 15 years of grinding ground wars against elusive insurgents armed with homemade bombs, the U.S. military is both yearning to get back to its roots in high-end conflict and wondering how to counter old adversaries with new hi-tech tools.”

I guess that was a time when our military — for lack of a better word — leadership was more concerned with defending the U.S. against real threats than superfluous things like promoting Critical Race Theory, gender equity, climate change, and combating alleged white supremacy. It’s pretty startling the changes that have taken place just in the past nine months in that regard, though I think the seeds of those changes were planted long ago. And now, with the debacle of our shameful Afghanistan surrender and withdrawal, the threat to this country has never been greater in many decades, and yet it is more clear, to friend and foe alike, that we are less psychologically prepared to counter any threats than perhaps at any time in our history. So whether one accepts the premise of the book or not, it is clear that through our exhibited fecklessness and weakness the temptation to our enemies has been magnified exponentially and entirely through our own unforced errors.

The Future as Seen from 2014

Ghost Fleet was written in 2014 and came out in 2015, so there are some clear anachronisms in it. One thing that jumped out was the widespread use in the book of smart glasses that are based on Google Glass, and we all know what happened to that idea. Technology plays a big part in the book and in the war, as one might expect. But one has to question some of that technology. For instance, a Chinese teenage girl is depicted just flicking her fingers to manipulate smart rings on her digital joints and create dire situations half way around the world. Call me a skeptic, but I don’t see where finger flicks could be deployed with sufficient precision to accomplish their goals. I mean, I have a hard enough time getting my tablet to do anything with my fingers on the screen. These things might make for colorful visuals, but I don’t see them working in real life.

Some things, like our dependence on computer chips used in sophisticated military aircraft and machines that are made in China, enabling the planting of spyware and tracking capability in them, is plausible, though others more knowledgeable of such things than I am have pointed out how shielding and other safeguards would largely make such things ineffectual. Peoples’ movements are tracked in great detail by a network of surveillance cameras, to the point where one can hardly take a dump without being observed, and then deadly drones, called quadcopters, come in to take out perceived enemies. Not totally inconceivable, but stretched to a point that challenges credulity. These scenes frequently reminded me of the 2016 – 2018 TV series Colony, which featured an alien invasion of Los Angeles.

As in 2034, technological advantages held by our adversaries help tip the balance toward them. But the question has to be raised whether the answer is simply more technology, more dependence on technology, or whether being smarter about how that technology is developed, built, deployed, and hardened against infiltration is the better approach. Ghost Fleet is almost like a clarion call for those at the top to pour more trillions into high-end technology while it’s also a dire warning against such an approach. The money game is at the heart of Washington politics, but how much does it further expose us to our enemies? And what role should more low-tech approaches play, undercutting our adversaries’ dependence on technology?

One disturbing element of the book is how virtually everyone, on both sides, has become essentially drug addicts. They rely on “stims” and implanted “pumps” to enhance their performance, do their jobs, even stay awake. This seemed superfluous to the overall story line, but it’s far from the only superfluous element.

The Ghost Fleet

The book’s title, and much of its action, centers on the mothballed fleet of ships — the Ghost Fleet — that have been taken out of service and are moldering at various places around the country. Once the war has started, China (actually, an updated version of China, something called “the Directorate,” made up of a mix of business moguls and military brass who overthrew the former Chinese Communist Party following the collapse of Indonesia) and Russia have disabled U.S. communications and surveillance capabilities. The Directorate also invaded, in a sneak blitz attack, and holds the state of Hawaii, where much of the action goes on.

With most of the U.S. Navy destroyed, the Pentagon resorts to putting the Ghost Fleet into action. Especially a high-tech, but mothballed, destroyer known as the U.S.S. Zumwalt — an actual vessel, seen in the image above in its sea trials. Mounted with a new and powerful weapon called a rail gun, this is going to be our answer to the mighty Chinese fleet. And like the lead characters in a TV crime drama running between the bullets but never getting hit, somehow the Chinese don’t see what is going on with its refurbishment and refitting, and then the Zumwalt manages to survive every attack launched against it once sent out on the prowl.

While serving up much of the dramatic and personal action in the book, these two elements — that we’d ever tolerate occupation of a U.S. state without massive retaliation, and how so much reliance was put on a single obsolete naval vessel — further stretched credulity. Throw in an eccentric billionaire who manages to take over a previously impermeable Chinese space station, after the Russians had taken over the International Space Station by locking out the sole U.S. astronaut aboard, and a sexy serial killer whose cleverly murderous ways are directed at the Chinese occupiers in Hawaii while feeding her own homicidal desires, and you have a mix more colorful than plausible.

Additionally, as a former intel analyst, I have to question how the Chinese and Russians could gear up for their attacks without us seeing what they were up to. We can identify specific cargoes being loaded on ships from our satellite surveillance and humint capabilities (assuming someone was watching, which they would be, before our satellites were incapacitated), and that just didn’t compute to me. Or how the Chinese wouldn’t see what we were up to refitting the Zumwalt at Mare Island.

The book has been criticized on literary terms, and I have to say I frequently found the book annoying. There are so many locations, subplots, and characters to keep track of — switching between them every one, two, or three pages throughout the book — there were times I was tempted to throw the book down. Rather than building my suspense, that got to be too much and just irritated me. I wound up spending an inordinate amount of time flipping back in the book to see who a specific character was or what was going on in a given subplot. Also, the book comes to a screeching halt in the middle of the most critical action, implying somehow we had prevailed without filling in the details how we did, and that also annoyed me.

While the book is a novel — at 404 pages, a rather long one — it also has 374 end notes meant to document every detail in the book and intended to lend credibility to it.

I won’t argue that Ghost Fleet doesn’t raise some questions worth evaluating, or that it isn’t entertaining enough in numerous places. But I wouldn’t get my ideas on how a future war might start, be fought, won, or lost, from the book. Or any work of fiction. I’d suggest that our military and political leadership get their heads out of their reading lists and get back to looking in a hard-headed way at world realities. Not that I have much faith that they will.

>>Click this link to buy the book on Amazon<<

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War is by P.W. Singer and August Cole, an Eamon Dolan Book, published by Mariner Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Copyright © 2015 by P.W. Singer and August Cole.

P.W. Singer is a strategist at New America, a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, and Principal at Useful Fiction LLC. He has been named by the Smithsonian as one of the nation’s 100 leading innovators by Defense News, as one of the 100 most influential people in defense issues by Foreign Policy to their Top 100 Global Thinkers List, and as an official “Mad Scientist” for the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. Singer is the author of multiple best-selling, award winning books in both fiction and nonfiction, ranging from Wired for War to Ghost Fleet. Described in the Wall Street Journal as “the premier futurist in the national-security environment,” Singer is considered one of the world’s leading experts on changes in 21st Century warfare, with more books on the military professional reading lists than any other author, living or dead.

August Cole is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council. He is the director of the Art of Future War project, which explores narrative fiction and visual media for insight into the future of conflict. His fiction writing tackles themes at the core of American foreign policy and national security in the twenty-first century, including the privatization of military and intelligence operations and the future of American power in the Pacific. He is also writer-in-residence at Avascent, an independent strategy and management-consulting firm focused on the defense and aerospace sectors. From 2007 to 2010, Cole reported on the defense industry for the Wall Street Journal.

Photo of U.S.S. Zumwalt by U.S. Navy and General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also is posted on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry, and on Substack in my community there, Issues That Matter. Follow me here, and there. And if you like the piece, please share it. Links below.
Disgrace

Disgrace

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In a normal country in normal times, those responsible for such an enormous debacle as what those at the top in our country caused to happen in Afghanistan in recent weeks would resign in disgrace. And if they didn’t, steps would be taken by those charged with oversight to remove them from office, even try and punish them. But this is not a normal country and these are not normal times, and there seems to no longer exist any sense of shame, disgrace, or even admission of failure. Instead, as the alleged president just did, again, they take a victory lap and spew lies and distortions touting how brilliant and insightful they are, and hope everyone is as imbecilic and full of guile as they are.

Listening to Biden’s words a short while ago made me more angry than I can ever remember any political figure, in my entire life, make me. And that is saying something. I shouted out my anger, and I struck my head wondering how a single human being — as despicable and useless as this rotten excuse for a human being is — can be so profoundly stupid. And arrogant. Surely it has to be a team effort. And the ulterior motive a powerful one.

The insult I used as the title of my last piece on this subject — Ignorance With Impudence — barely touches the level of ignorance nor that of impudence put on full display today.

You see those hands in that photo above, showing a collapsing Biden last Thursday when he was challenged by Fox News’s Peter Doocy on his attempt to blame his Afghanistan catastrophe on his predecessor? Look carefully and you’ll see that they’re drenched in blood. The blood of 13 of our service people killed at Hamid Karzai International Airport last week. The blood of hundreds of needlessly dead Afghans in the same attack. The blood of the Americans, the blood of the Afghans who risked their lives to support us, deliberately left behind while surrounded by rabid terrorists intent on rooting them out and killing them. Also there is the blood of the hundreds, thousands, who will die in Afghanistan, in the United States, and elsewhere in the world as a result of the incredibly bone-headed and callous decisions made by this incompetent and those who allowed and facilitated him to make and carry them out.

If ever there was a time to say there is plenty of blame to go around, this is it. But since Biden is at the top of this heap of excrement and claims the buck stops with him — as if he actually means it, as Harry Truman did — he bears ultimate blame and responsibility for what happened, what will happen. To paraphrase the immortal 1988 words of Senator Lloyd Bentsen, back when Democrats still had some honor and a tad of sense, to vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle, Mr. President, I served with Harry Truman. I knew Harry Truman. Harry Truman was a friend of mine. Mr. President, you’re no Harry Truman.

Stalemate

Once more I find my post taking a different direction than I initially intended. The news continues to come in so fast, and it’s so awful, it’s impossible to keep up with it. I’m not a news service and this is not intended to be either daily reporting or a book. Any one with a fair mind and open eyes can see the reality, the actual events and people creating them, the results of those events and those people, and they don’t need me to continually point them out. My job, as I’ve executed it for more than four years now, is to put the pieces together, to analyze them, and to do what I can to bring people a clear view of the reality. To the extent many of my readers already have a clear view, they read my pieces and nod their heads and occasionally let me know they agree. And I try to give clear views to those readers who don’t see, or don’t want to see, the reality, and I hope I can bring some around to at least consider views other than those they are fed by what I’ve come to call the State Media, the corrupt and biased mainstream media and Big Tech whose lies and coverups in large part brought us to the terrible place we’re now at.

Initially I was going to call this piece Stalemate — the point in a chess match where a player has no legal moves left that won’t land his king in checkmate. It’s a draw, and the game is over. As a nation, we’re now in stalemate, and there are no legal moves left that will get us out of it. As a nation, we’re forced to live in this stasis, which was engineered by the Dem strategists and whoever is calling the shots behind the scenes of the party, and one has to hand them kudos for that achievement, as despicable and dangerous as it is. We have a clearly mentally incompetent president who, by almost any measure, the 25th Amendment was written for. But then, even if he could be removed from office either through that amendment or impeachment, we have a poison pill, the repulsive and dangerous Kamala Harris, as vice president. We get rid of the top guy, and we’re left with what might be an even worse substitute. And below her is the power hungry and vicious Nancy Pelosi. So, three layers deep, we’re left with no good legal moves, and that was the plan all along.

Those same Dem power brokers counted on what they see as the stupidity of the American people, for whom they have no respect other than to use them for their own purposes, and then along came the gift that keeps on giving — the COVID pandemic — which allowed them to flaunt and just plain throw out constitutional protections of our vote. That fraud allowed them to engineer a victory for a doddering old fool you wouldn’t trust to drive your kid’s school bus, let alone head the most powerful country on earth. And they knew that, even in his dementia, given the chance to grab the top accolade of his long and feckless political career — the presidency — Jello-O Joe would put the interest of the country aside and go for it. For this he won my top Profile in Cowardice award.

As I point out in that piece, it wasn’t always this way in American politics, even among the Democratic Party. Read the piece and see, if you forgot or weren’t around at that time, how Thomas Eagleton — a far more capable figure then Joe Biden — stepped down from being George McGovern’s running mate in 1972 when details of some issues with depression Eagleton had dealt with came out. At that time, the good of the country took precedence. That now seems like a prosaic concept.

An Unmitigated Disaster of a Presidency

For anyone who voted for Joe Biden — and, to be perfectly frank, you have to bear some responsibility for this debacle — I defy you to name one single thing Biden has done, one decision he’s made, that has made life better for ordinary Americans. I’ll go one further, and defy you to name one single thing, one single decision, he’s made, that hasn’t made things much worse for this country and its residents. We are so far beyond fucked at this point, it’s hard to even find a suitable word to describe it.

Whether it is throwing open our southwestern border to every ilk of criminal, drug runner, COVID-carrier, and terrorist who cares to cross it, in thorough disregard for our laws and well being — now being augmented by thousands of unvetted Afghans arriving and being sent willy-nilly around the country — taking our focus from competence and merit to attempting to inculcate divisions and distrust in our military, in our corporations and other institutions, and in society at large, to flaunting the Supreme Court and the rule of law to undermine the ability of property owners to pay their bills and stay afloat, to creating what can only be described as confusion on the coronavirus front, this president and his puppet masters have done what they can to sew discord and disorder in the nation. Crime is allowed to spiral out of control, unbridled federal spending is driving inflation, and he took us from energy independence to once more being dependent on the Middle East for our energy.

On the international stage, he has now shown this country to be weak and untrustworthy, and as we’ve learned, weakness breeds instability and tempts bad actors to take chances they would not otherwise. Despite the lies Biden told today — and there is no other word to describe his ridiculous and readily disprovable assertions — we have now created a terrorist nation in Afghanistan, and given a safe haven to not just the Taliban, but their close allies, al Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, and ISIS, among others. Even more mind-boggling, by leaving behind $83 billion in military hardware, we’ve made this terrorist state the fifth best equipped military in the world. The Taliban now have more Black Hawk helicopters, as just one example, than Australia.

Make no mistake. The same bunch of misguided idiots — Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, child-moron Jake Sullivan who purports to be National Security Adviser, throw in Joint Chiefs Chairman and blowhard Mark Milley, and other members of the Obama foreign policy (sic) team — that brought us the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq and the Iranian nuclear deal have now undone 20 years of progress, as difficult as it was, in Afghanistan, and created a mess and a threat that will be our nemesis for decades to come.

Perhaps most poignantly telling are the comments of the parents and spouses and siblings of the 13 slain service people, who spoke of Biden’s insensitivity, his self-absorption, his incessant talking about the death of his son Beau — who did not die in combat — his checking his watch each time, 13 times, a coffin came off the aircraft at Dover Air Force Base. I’ll end this piece with the words of Kathy McCollum, the mother of 20-year-old Marine Rylee James McCollum, killed in the attack on HKIA, who says it better than I ever could.

Calling in to a talk show Friday, McCollum said this:

“My son was one of the Marines who died yesterday. Twenty years and six months old — getting ready to come home from freaking Jordan to be with his wife and witness the birth of his son. And that feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap just sent my son to die. I woke up at four o’clock this morning, two Marines at my door telling me my son was dead. So, to [have White House Press Babbler Jen Psaki on] right before me and listen to that piece of crap talk about diplomatic crap with frickin’ Taliban terrorists who just freakin’ blew up my son and no, nothing, to not say anything about, oh my god, I’m so sorry for families. So, my son is gone.”

McCollum’s son is gone. And as tragically, so is our national honor, and very possibly our security and our future with it.

Featured image, Biden’s Collapse, Al Drago, Bloomberg News via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Stalemate, from rutrackerpulse.weebly.com. Used under Fair Use.

The Three Heads of the Poisonous Serpent, Jim Watson, Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears in my Substack community, Issues That Matter. Please subscribe here, and there.

 
Ignorance With Impudence

Ignorance With Impudence

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Remember Baghdad Bob? You know, the Iraqi Information Minister who, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, told reporters to believe him, not their lying eyes. As American troops advanced on the capital, Baghdad Bob made one pronouncement after another about how they were being repelled, poisoned, American troops were committing suicide, and the glorious Iraqi Army would crush the infidels. Even as American tanks rolled within view of the podium, Baghdad Bob continued to insist that the Americans would never be permitted to enter Baghdad and Iraqi forces would prevail.

Well, guess what? Baghdad Bob is back. Actually, lots of Baghdad Bobs. An entire phalanx of them, filling the podiums not in Baghdad, but in Washington. Now Baghdad Bob masquerades as a range of surrogate characters, all babbling nonsense as ridiculous and unbelievable as old Bob:

Jen Psaki, White House spokesbabbler. Rear Admiral (!) John Kirby, Pentagon spokesbabbler. Ned Price, State Department spokesbabbler. Jake Sullivan, allegedly National Security Adviser since someone left a door open and allowed him to escape from daycare. And their babbling bosses, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and the Babbler-in-Chief, Joe “Jell-O Joe” Biden.

It was at least entertaining to hear the babbles of the original Baghdad Bob. It’s a lot less entertaining hearing the strings of lies and political spin uttered daily, even hourly, seemingly without a shred of shame, by this crewe of Washington Baghdad Bobs. It is the kind of high audacity for which I reserve one of my strongest insults and expressions of disgust: Ignorance with impudence. You cannot find better examples of what that means than simply listening to this pack of incompetent and unscrupulous liars and scoundrels.

My view, from personal experience

By way of disclosure, part of my response to what is going on in Afghanistan right now derives from my personal experience. I didn’t get into this in my last post on the subject, but I think it would be helpful to readers’ understanding of the current situation for me to do so. It will help explain why I can see that virtually everything we have done, and are doing, in Afghanistan in recent weeks is absolutely ass-backwards and thoroughly incompetent. And how, ultimately almost certainly, it will lead to significant loss of life to American citizens and citizens of our allies, as well as to a wide range of Afghan civilians, including those who helped us and those who simply believed the lie that they might have a different way of life. Despite the insensitive and ill-informed lies of the Babbler-in-Chief, people already are dying, often in the most awful and gruesome ways.

I am not a military strategist, and make no claim to be one. Most of my knowledge of military principles comes from Sun Tzu, and a childhood fascination with the strategies that helped the Allies defeat the Axis. But I am a good observer of what is going on around me, watching as social and other trends grow from mere seedlings into towering and inexorable movements, cultivating good sources, and keeping my ear to the ground to listen for vibrations of approaching storms. And I have enough knowledge and sense of history to apply, compare, and contrast current events to past events. I believe these are reasons why my ambassador looked to me to help explain what was going on in Algeria as terrorism began to swell up and rack the country in the early 1990s — even though my job had absolutely nothing to do with any of that — and why the political section chief ran all his cables by me before dispatching them to Washington.

It is the same sensibility that allowed me to be the sole member of the U.S. intelligence community (I say that in all honestly and humility) to correctly, and definitively, call the outcome of the 1994 Jordanian parliamentary elections. It was one of the rare times during my 11-year diplomatic career to be concretely recognized with a promotion, as incompetents all around me were routinely promoted.

Perhaps most salient to my understanding of the Afghanistan debacle was my time in Albania, during the 1995-1997 period. As Economic and Commercial Officer I predicted, soon after my arrival in the country, that the massive pyramid schemes spreading throughout Albania would, in time, collapse, and bring the government and the country down with them. At first I was scoffed at and few people paid my reports any attention. Pyramid schemes? Who cares? When most of a country’s population has invested their life savings in them, someone should. And then, as the end approached, almost to the week I had predicted more than a year before, suddenly my reports became must-read material back in Washington and elsewhere.

When the country did finally collapse and anarchy sprang up in the hinterlands, our military intelligence people saw things in terms they were used to, as if this was a conventional war with a front approaching the capital, a little closer each day. I and only one other person in our country team, the Public Affairs Officer, spoke out, saying this was a crazy view, and the anarchy was going to burst out all around us without warning. We were scoffed at, but that is exactly what happened, within days.

It happened with the suddenness we had predicted, and it was too late to do anything about it, to get non-essential personnel and family members, as well an many endangered civilians and personnel at other embassies, out of harm’s way. We were under a 24/7 hail of gunfire from all sides — something that went on for many weeks — and as Aviation Liaison I was the one who conveyed the news that the airport was under attack and all flights canceled. The person whose responsibility it was to handle an evacuation was curled up in a corner on the floor, in tears. When she finally pulled herself together and called the country team into a meeting, her solution was to mount a motorcade and drive for hours across uncontrolled territory to reach the border and leave the country.

I had spent many hours over as many beers with a Welsh friend of mine over the past year-plus discussing what we’d do — not if, but when — the end came. We knew such an approach as had been proposed would probably wind up getting everyone killed. The only solution, we decided, was to bring military helicopters directly into the compound and fly people out of the country. So I spoke up and proposed that as the most effective solution, acknowledging how the plan was devised, and in the end, after hours of consultation between the front office and Washington, that is precisely what we wound up doing. Over the subsequent weeks, as I stayed on as one of the essential personnel to not be evacuated, the U.S. Navy flew out hundreds of people of 30-some nationalities, including personnel from the Russian and Chinese embassies, without the loss of a single person or aircraft, though all the choppers, it later was found, had taken fire. Marines were brought in to protect us on the ground, and I have to say, I was never so happy and relieved to see Marines as I was seeing them come down onto our compound in the growing darkness.

As it turned out, the Brits tried something similar to what our GSO had proposed, but just to drive to the port city about an hour away and get on a ferry to Italy, and they were lucky to escape with their lives. All their vehicles were taken at gunpoint, and they wound up aboard a ferry with many of the very people they were running from. This, of course, is a danger we’re already seeing, as Taliban and other terrorists infiltrate escaping Afghans in their plans to bring attacks to the U.S. and other Western countries.

And now there is Afghanistan

If you look at the details of what we’ve done in Afghanistan, it makes our escapade in Albania look like a picnic in the park. Not only are the numbers enormously larger, the territory vastly bigger and more isolated, but the threat massively more dangerous and coordinated. And yet our so-called leadership approached our exit from the country apparently with less care, planning, or sense than we handled our evacuation from Albania.

Tell me, if you are one of those I’ve heard from who think this exit couldn’t have been handled any better, what kind of military strategy calls for surrendering your most secure base and means of ingress and egress — the Bagram Airfield, otherwise known as the Bagram Air Base, just 30 miles outside Kabul — before you have gotten all your interests out of the country? What kind of political or military calculation leads you to surrender hundreds of billions of dollars worth of valuable, useful, and lethal military hardware to the enemy? What kind of genius does it take not to see the advance of the Taliban, not in days, but over months, as they closed in on the capital? Who pulls out your on-the-ground intel capability while your citizens and assets are still in harm’s way? And what kind of calculation would one have to make to completely withdraw all of one’s troops, leaving behind more than 10,000 American citizens, thousands more citizens of our allies, and tens of thousands more of those Afghans and their families who assisted our 20-year effort in the country?

If none of that makes sense to you, you have more sense than our Babbler-in-Chief, his benighted advisers, and those in the top leadership who allowed and facilitated him to go through with such a catastrophic plan. But, wait! It gets better. Or, more correctly, worse. While we haven’t had a U.S. service member killed in almost a year and a half in Afghanistan, now you pull out all 2,500 troops, only to have to send 6,000 back in within days. And we give up our embassy, another key safe haven, because we have no capability to defend it, so we move everything to a civilian airport inadequate to the task it now has to carry out, and surrounded by hostile and malevolent forces.

None of this, none of what currently is being done, considers that thousands of Americans aren’t in the capital. They’re out in provincial cities, and in surrounding Medieval boondocks. Even those in Kabul have been prevented from getting to the airport. What is someone hundreds of hostile kilometers away supposed to do? “Stranded” is indeed the correct word for their situation, despite what Baghdad Bob Psaki says about the situation. And to listen to the child-idiot Sullivan, maybe they should just call an Uber. Such moronacy. Such callousness.

As one military person with on-the-ground experience in Afghanistan said, we need to send at least another 6,000 troops, above the 6,000 already sent — my estimate is closer to 12,000 additional — back in, and to secure every airport around the country, and escort AmCits and others to those airports to extract them from the country. They should be authorized to use whatever lethal force is needed to secure our citizens. But that isn’t being done, and already troops are being withdrawn so Jell-O Joe can meet the artificial deadline of August 31 he set, American citizens be damned. By another knowledgeable estimate, most troops are going to have to be withdrawn as early as the end of this week to meet the deadline. It’s hard to imagine a greater show of disregard for one’s own citizens, let alone the citizens of countries that supported us and helped us. Our credibility isn’t hurt in the world — it’s gone.

As CIA Director William Burns goes on bended knee to Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar in Kabul to beg to extend the artificial deadline, and Baradar tells him to stuff it, we have officially turned 20 years of expenditure of blood and treasure and reasonable success to utter and acknowledged defeat. What can be more shameful?

Now at this point, maybe lying is the only defense you have left. And since the official pronouncements are so transparently and verifiably false, we’re left with our cadre of Baghdad Bobs in Washington. Even the toadies in the left-wing media can’t cover up such an obvious disaster. As one CNN reporter said from Kabul, she had been covering many crises in many places over many years, but she had never seen anything like what she was seeing in Kabul.

“It’s mayhem! It’s nuts!” she shouted on camera.

And meanwhile the top Dems, Pelosi and Schumer and the rest, party and dance and raise funds, and their NPR lackeys already are saying they hope the American public has a short memory when the 2022 mid-term elections come up.

I know one American who won’t forget this. Not in 2022. Not in 2024. Not ever. And I hope you don’t, either.

Baghdad Bob gif from gifimage.net, used under Fair Use.

“No One Being Killed in Kabul,” by Marcus Yam, Los AngelesTimes/Rex, from DailyMail.Com, used under Fair Use

This piece also appears in my Substack community, Issues That Matter. Please subscribe here, and there.
It All Falls Apart

It All Falls Apart

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Do you remember the last time we saw helicopters evacuating embassy personnel and civilians following a U.S. overseas collapse? If you said April 29-30, 1975, upon the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army, you’d show you have a sense of history. Something that seems to not be in the portfolio of this country’s current shadow government or its top figurehead leadership in the form of Joe Biden.

Watching the events of the past few days, on top of the seven months that preceded them, we — even the skeptics and rationalizers — can have no doubt but that things are totally out of control and falling apart at an accelerating and alarming rate. On every key front we are seeing the abdication of responsible and competent leadership, and in every area where the country expects its government to keep it safe and secure — its primary duty — it has been failed.

I outlined specifics of these failures in an earlier piece where I explained why we are so fucked. I posted that piece less than three weeks ago, and its dire account now seems almost optimistic in comparison to what we’ve witnessed in recent days. One hopes these events might serve as a wake-up call to the country — even the corrupt mass media, who were complicit in putting us into the jeopardy we’re now in, have been critical of the so-called Administration’s catastrophic handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal — but it seems those holding the power are loathe to surrender even a millimeter of that power and are intent on blustering and lying their way through the mess — messes — they created. Worse, who is supposed to answer the wake-up call when one party, holding a deaf ear to the phone, controls the White House and both houses of Congress? The fox is guarding the hen house, and the rest of us are the hens.

On Monday we finally heard from Jell-O Joe, after days of silence while he went on “vacation,” and despite his empty claim that “the buck stops with me,” he preceded to blame everyone except himself for the Afghan disaster. If you haven’t already heard it, and you have a strong stomach, you can read the text of his blame game here.

“So what’s happened?” Biden blathered, as he went through his litany of blame. “Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.”

Never mind that all of what went down was 100 percent predictable, and predicted, and Biden and his feckless advisers and the Pentagon and the State Department took absolutely no precautions to put in place a contingency plan that would have allowed a withdrawal that didn’t turn into a total rout and disgrace for our country. There is equally little argument that can be made that most of the last 20 years in Afghanistan wasn’t something of a circle jerk of errors, with one bogus and misleading statement of success after another coming out of the Pentagon and from four administrations of both parties, once more bringing back memories of Vietnam.

Former UN Envoy to Afghanistan Peter Galbraith over the weekend laid much of the blame for the rapid collapse of the Afghan military and government on the toleration of widespread corruption in the country over two decades by the U.S. and its allies. Much of the trillion dollars the U.S. poured into Afghanistan went into politicians’ and war lords’ pockets, with loose or absent controls on the part of our DoD and State Department.

Back to where we started on Sept. 11, 2001

A country is great only to the extent its leaders are great. We are a country in disgrace, and don’t for a moment think that hasn’t been noted by the Chinese and the Russians, not to mention the plotters of terror around the globe. Which highlights yet another lie, a most dangerous one, Biden uttered Monday.

“We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago,” he said, “with clear goals: Get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that. We severely degraded al Qaeda in Afghanistan.”

One after another, knowledgeable intel analysts and operatives, all with on-the-ground experience in Afghanistan, filled the airwaves today with their assessment that al Qaeda is already taking root in Afghanistan, that it never went away. And now with their brothers in arms and spirit once more in control of the country, they will have a clear way forward to reestablish their jumping-off point for launching attacks against the U.S. and other Western countries. Even the leading apologist for the left, the New York Times, has a piece called “Disaster in Afghanistan Will Follow Us Home.” You don’t have to be a genius or intel analyst to figure that out. You just have to not be Joe Biden.

Two quotes from former top officials in Democratic administrations really have it right. Bob Gates, former Defense Secretary in the Obama Administration, said — and has since stood by his statement — that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” And Leon Panetta, another Defense Secretary and CIA chief under Obama and Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton, said, ““He is president of the United States. He is going to have to take responsibility.” Going on to compare the loss of Afghanistan to the Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1961, Panetta said that JFK, unlike Biden, “took responsibility for what took place.”

Or, if you prefer, Jell-O Joe’s old boss, Barack Obama, perhaps put it most succinctly: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

When Biden says “And here’s what I believe to my core . . . ” you know that is just blather because Biden has no core. Over the 40-umpteen years of his undistinguished career, he has shown time and time again how he’ll blow with whatever wind is blowing, say anything he thinks will advance him, lie when that’s convenient, and just make things up as he goes along, all the while with his hand in the till. And now that he mostly dwells in La-La Land, the existence of a core to him is an even more preposterous concept. Jell-O Joe has as much of a core as the bowl of flavored gelatin “Dr.” Jill and his other handlers feed him when he’s not sucking on an ice cream cone.

And when the toadies in the Pentagon and State Department — more focused on things like “white rage” and Critical Race Theory than the nation’s security — spout nonsense, they are no better and also have to bear responsibility for this calamity. Just as one pathetic example, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Kabul wouldn’t fall from Friday to Monday, he was right — it fell from Friday to Sunday. If these incompetents, Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, not to mention Biden himself and those pulling his strings, are not immediately fired, there is no hope to look forward to, and the only light at the end of the tunnel is that of an oncoming locomotive. Of course, for your answer, just look at the poison pill that was put into the vice presidency, the useless and frightening Kamala Harris, to make any move to apply the 25th Amendment to Biden an unattractive option.

To those who didn’t like Donald Trump’s tweets so voted against him: Are you happy now?

One wishes for the grownups to come back and put an end to this clown show.

A return to the 1970s. Only worse.

It seems no matter how far a country gets from its dismal past, it is always in danger of sliding back into it. Many of us who lived through the 1970s and all its dismal aspects — Vietnam, gas lines and dependence on OPEC, loss of faith in our political leaders, the Mariel Boatlift, raging inflation, raging crime, the Iranian takeover of our embassy, the degradation of our military, and our loss of prestige on the world stage — recognize how every element of the 1970s is back, in one form or another, most on steroids.

The country has become a dumpster fire of crises. We cited in our post of July 29 the range of crises — all induced by this Administration — the country is facing:

+ The catastrophe on the Southwest Border

+ Spiraling crime in big cities across the country, most Democratic ruled for decades

+ Our feckless foreign policy, Afghanistan being the most acute and visible example of that

+ Deliberate undoing of our long-sought energy independence

+ Rapidly rising inflation

+ Confusing and troubling mixed-messaging on COVID.

Now we have our latest version of the fall of Saigon. What is going on on our no longer existent Southwest Border makes the Mariel Boatlift look like absolutely nothing. Our military is chasing political correctness and a “woke” agenda while our adversaries gloat and plot. Our students fall further and further behind in their educational prowess, some not even being able to read and write in cursive or otherwise, and with entire states removing academic requirements for graduation (they’re “racist,” the benighted morons of Oregon say). And now, after the past week, what ally or client state or individual who assists us would have any faith in our word or commitments to protect them?

In an act almost as shocking as what has happened in Kabul, on August 11 Biden asked OPEC — the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which include Iran and Venezuela — to increase its production to help control rising fuel costs. This is the same Biden who, by a stroke of the pen, canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline, while greenlighting Russia’s Nord Stream 2 Pipeline, and reinstated controls that took America from energy independence, which President Trump helped usher in for the first time in 62 years, back to being dependent on oil from sworn adversaries and some of the most volatile areas on earth.

You may recall how we railed against OPEC in the 1970s for the deleterious effect it had on the country. Now Biden bows at its feet.

If you were like me, you might have fallen out of your chair when you heard this. It’s like our enemies have taken over power in the country — which really they have, since these people are intent on what they say is “fundamentally changing the country,” which are code words for destroying our way of life — and up has become down and down has become up.

Jimmy Carter might have been arguably the worst president of our lifetime. Until this president. Now, it’s no contest, and things truly are falling part. It is not a notional question: Can we survive this Administration? I’m not confident, and less so by the day.

U.S. Embassy Kabul, Afghanistan, August 15, 2021, photo by AP/Rahmat Gul. Used under Fair Use.

Dumpster Fire, photo by Ben Watts, Free Stock Photos. Used with permission.

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Review: 2034: A Novel of the Next World War

Review: 2034: A Novel of the Next World War

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An old Foreign Service buddy of mine recently turned me on to the book 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. Co-authored by writer Elliott Ackerman and retired Admiral James Stavridis, my friend tells me the novel is all the buzz inside the Beltway these days. In no small measure, this is because in every war game simulation run in recent years, the ChiComs wind up handing the U.S. its ass on a platter. A sobering thought, it was enough to make me want to read this book.

It’s no coincidence that I’m posting this review on August 6, on the 76th anniversary of the day the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. While it takes more than a book to remind us, the specter of nuclear war has not receded into the realm of the totally implausible despite all the changes that have occurred in the world in those intervening years since the Enola Gay (which I’ve actually seen and stood next to) released its payload over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. If anything, an increasingly multi-polar world may be making the world ever more dangerous.

First, from a literary point of view, the book is well written. At times the action is gripping, and it becomes difficult to put the book down (a tendency I confess to have resisted and wound up reading the book in several tranches). There is a fair amount of personal back story of various characters, which got me a bit impatient, though such things usually do when my focus is on the action.

The general premise of the book is that China coordinates with the Iranians and the Russians to goad the U.S. into a conflict in which the U.S. is from the outset at a technological disadvantage. A series of miscalculations and missteps set the world’s two leading powers into a pattern that winds up in a tit-for-tat nuclear exchange, one that, just barely, falls short of being an all-out nuclear blow out. In the end, the world balance of power has shifted, and somehow India winds up emerging as the world’s king maker. There are elements of nuclear porn, for those who seek such things, but the book doesn’t wind up being Apocryphal. If anything, I found the ending rather unsatisfactory, but we’ll get to that.

One of the premises of the book is that the Chinese have developed a technology that renders entire fleets of their ships invisible to detection. Clearly this gives them a huge strategic advantage, but I had to wonder how plausible this is. We have satellites circling the globe with visual surveillance capability, and it just didn’t make sense to me that actual ships on the waters could be hidden from that kind of visual identification.

As it turns out, I recently came across an article where this very issue is raised. Apparently GPS technology already is being intercepted and manipulated by unknown actors to show ships and fleets in locations where they are not. Obviously, this can lead to serious consequences if, for instance, a nation thinks it is about to be attacked by a phantom fleet, which it believes to be real, and retaliates. But, much as I suspected in reading the scenario painted in 2034, visual satellite imagery is used to confirm the actual location of the ships detected and to compare that location with the phantom location to demonstrate the reality. So until someone shows me some technology that completely obscures a vessel’s visual presence (as well as the role played by human intelligence), I have to conclude that this is a stretch too far.

There were other things in the book that didn’t compute to me. Early in the book an entire U.S. naval fleet is destroyed by the Chinese, and yet our retaliation is restrained and the course of events is stretched over several months. If China (or anyone) wipes out an entire fleet of our ships, would we slow-walk our response, as happens in the book? I seriously doubt it. In fact, the whole war seems like it is in slow motion. I understand we’re on entirely new ground here and we have never engaged in a full-scale war with a nuclear power before. We may or may not make a first nuclear strike, but would a nuclear China be as restrained if faced with a massive conventional response? I can’t answer that question, with what I know, but the pace of events just didn’t seem realistic, though it did help fill pages.

Another thing I didn’t understand was a key part where the Russians take out underwater Internet cables passing under the Arctic Sea, completely disrupting domestic U.S. communication. I had to wonder why Internet cables running under the Arctic Sea would be connecting domestic U.S. Internet nodes, and why destroying them would disrupt our internal Internet connectivity. I also looked up current undersea cables and there don’t appear to be any running under the Arctic Sea. But even if there were, I can see where they might disrupt connections to Europe or maybe Asia, but not between the East and West coasts of the U.S. This seemed to be an unanswered question even though it was a critical event in the book.

The cable thing also raised the question why one side or the other wouldn’t have used an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack on the other, which would have had far more widespread effects without the need to resort to nuclear ground attacks and frying whole cities.

I understand a certain degree of literary liberty, but when logic seems not to apply to major elements of the plot, without any explanation, I find it troubling as a reader and it makes me question how much I can suspend disbelief. Perhaps we’ve gotten to the point where we believe that all things are possible with technology, but until pigs fly without benefit of technology, I’m going to retain a level of skepticism.

There are some interesting themes that run through the book. One of them seemed to be, low tech meets high tech and low tech wins (usually, anyway). This has long been a kind of life principle of mine. Are we too dependent (and would be even more so in 13 years which, by the way, doesn’t seem that far off) on technology? Probably. Especially if proper safeguards and backstops aren’t built into it. But meanwhile we are engaged in a technological competition with the Chinese. To believe 2034, they may well be winning that competition. And there is reason to believe they are, aside from the book.

One lesson, early on and which sets the whole story in motion, is how not following proper procedure and going off on deviations can be a very bad idea. A U.S. naval commodore, heading a patrol in the South China Sea, decides to deviate from SOPs to go check out a Chinese merchant vessel that appears to be in trouble. In doing so, she walks right into a trap that had been set by the Chinese. It might not be as heroic or dramatic, but sometimes it’s better to stay with the program and not follow one’s gut feelings or curiosities.

I have long believed that if we get into a nuclear war it would most likely be by accident or miscalculation. We have come pretty close a couple of few times. In the book, a series of mishaps and miscalculations allows a U.S. Navy pilot to get through to nuke Shanghai despite attempts by his commander to call off the attack. And things just continue to snowball.

Parts of the book turned out to be nothingburgers. There is a whole section devoted to a battle for the Strait of Hormuz between the Iranians and the Russians which seemed superfluous and much to-do about not much. I was expecting more involvement by Russia leading to the U.S. being forced to fight a two-front war, and that just never developed.

While, as I said, much of the book is gripping, I found the ending unsatisfactory. It is made to seem that the U.S. had been reduced to some sort of second- or third-rate power, while India, of all countries, had risen to be the major world power. Both the reality and the logic of that eluded me. In the course of the book the Chinese nuke Galveston and San Diego, but in the end the country seems demoralized and a shadow of its former self. Somehow I don’t see how loss of those two cities would have such a major impact on the country as it does in the book. There are even people living in refugee camps, which also seemed superfluous and unlikely.

We’ve faced crises before, whether it was grouping and striking back after Pearl Harbor, or following 9-11. And a major hurricane, like Katrina, certainly devastated a big part of the country, and we dealt with it, if imperfectly. Maybe if New York and Los Angeles were taken out it might be more likely. But with Galveston and San Diego being the targets, I don’t see it. Of course, at the rate and in the direction the country currently is headed, we might be so wimped out and divided and chaotic by then, that we just slip into being a third-rate power.

We also never do find out how things are in China after the war (except they don’t mind putting a bullet in the back of the head of someone who is perceived to have screwed up), and we are left wondering the final disposition of Taiwan, which China has invaded in the course of the war.

My friend who turned me on to the book disagrees with me on the ending. He thinks it would be quite realistic to believe that the country could be so demoralized if even relatively minor cities were nuked that it might actually break up, and the country would face an existential crisis the likes of which we only experienced during the Civil War. In his view, states with extreme politics, like California and Oregon, might opt out of the Union and attempt to become independent entities. There also would be lots of openings, he says, for malicious external actors to support some people’s worst inclinations. I’m not prepared to say his analysis is wrong, again, especially with the current negative trends we’re seeing in the country. I do think it would not be unrealistic to think both the country and the world would be profoundly altered by a war between the superpowers, especially one with nuclear exchanges.

As I proceeded through the book, I was reminded of an argument I had with a friend 40-some years ago. I argued at the time that logic would militate against a nuclear confrontation, and the other party argued that it would in fact be logic that would lead to such a conflict. Reading this book and seeing the progression of events, I actually could see the validity of that argument and how that very logical progression of events led to the conflagration that ensues.

The Washington scenes frequently reminded me of the things I didn’t like about being in the Foreign Service and the reasons that caused me eventually to leave it: The boneheads running the show, the clash of egos, the internal politics, the too many chefs in the kitchen, the hubris, the suits and ties running the ship of state aground. There were little giveaways to when the book was written and the authors’ perspectives, such as a reference to the one-term presidency of Mike Pence, but those didn’t much matter in the overall scheme of things.

Of course I felt bad about all the millions of incinerated people, on both sides. I even felt bad for the ex-wife of one of the main characters who got nuked in Galveston (and I felt bad for the neat little B&B there at which I once stayed). But, think what you will, I felt worst about this squirrel that the main Iranian character squeezes to death in his hand, and for its mate as she watches him do it. That just seemed gratuitously cruel and it bothered me all through the rest of the book.

Perhaps the main value of 2034 is that it draws our attention to the biggest external threat facing the country and the world. China has made no secret of its designs for domination both regionally and on the larger world stage. Its impact has been felt in the past year and a half through a devastating virus that it allowed to be released across the globe and, to date, has faced virtually no consequences for what, at best, was its negligence. Neither has it faced consequences for its repressive internal policies, the genocide it is conducting against the Uighurs, its crushing of Hong Kong’s democracy, or its open threats against Taiwan and even Japan. While our focus and national resolve drift, China’s has intensified.

There are a range of issues the book brings attention to, from the role of technology, to war strategy, to civil preparedness, to hardening our communications, to effective diplomacy. And they are all worthy of attention. But what it fails to address, what fall outside its purview, are the internal divisions that tear at our national fabric, the diversion of both our civilian and military leadership from the big issues of national security to some sort of “woke” agenda that only further weakens us, and our growing loss of educational acuity as China surges ahead. It is the internal threat that, in the end, may pose the greater danger than the external one. The import of that threat is not lost on China nor our other adversaries.

Bottom line: Read 2034, pay more attention to what China is up to, and what is — or isn’t — going on in Washington, too.

>>Click this link to buy the book on Amazon<<

2034: A Novel of the Next World War is by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis.

Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels “Red Dress in Black and White,” “Waiting for Eden,” “Dark at the Crossing,” and “Green on Blue,” as well as the memoir “Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning.” His books have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart.

Retired Adm. Jim Stavridis spent more than 30 years in the U.S. Navy, rising to the rank of four-star admiral. He was Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and previously commanded U.S. Southern Command, overseeing military operations through Latin America. At sea, he commanded a Navy destroyer, a destroyer squadron, and an aircraft carrier battle group in combat. He holds a Ph.D from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he recently served five years as dean. He has published eight previous books and hundreds of articles. Admiral Stavridis is chief international security and diplomacy analyst for NBC News, and a columnist at both Time magazine and Bloomberg Opinion. Based in Washington, D.C., he is an operating executive of the Carlyle Group, an international private equity firm, and chair of the board of counselors of McLarty Associates, an international consulting firm.

This piece also is posted on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry, and on Substack in my community there, Issues That Matter. Follow me here, and there.