P.W. Singer and August Cole ’s launching novelGhost Fleetisn’t like any other Future War novel out there . One , they ’re not your distinctive novelists , and two , it ’s a novel that ’s more realistic than anything else that typically has the ‘ Military Science Fiction ’ soubriquet attached to it .
Military skill fiction has a long and distinguished story . Early ‘ Invasion ’ novels such as the The Battle of Dorking and War of the Worlds speculated on war in the late 1800s , while books such as Robert Heinlein ’s Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman ’s Forever War examined the purpose of the soldier in warfare . With their first novel , Singer and Cole have put together a book that ’s more in line with the earliest wartime novel , and it ’s a terrific narration that will almost certainly be interpret by every military officer with a growing amount of dread .
Cole and Singer are n’t your typical novelists : they each work Washington DC - based think tank dedicated to international affairs Cole at the Atlantic Council and Singer at the New America Foundation . Singer has write several books that are well worth read : cable for War : The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century , andCybersecurity and Cyberwar : What Everyone require to Know . Cole has written for the Wall Street Journal and has extensively address the defence industry : if there ’s anyone more qualified to write about the direction war is point , it ’s these two .
https://gizmodo.com/how-ghost-fleet-nails-the-perfect-vision-of-world-war-i-1713881852
https://gizmodo.com/wired-for-war-asks-what-happens-when-robots-kill-for-5164837
https://gizmodo.com/everybody-needs-to-read-pw-singers-book-on-cybersecurit-1679573295
Ghost Fleet rend in just about every trend and new technical maturation associated with military hardware and strategy and puts it to bet . At some peak in the relatively near future , China has come under a newfangled government known as the Directorate . Tired of the excesses and degeneracy of the present Chinese government , their goal is to enhance China ’s position in the Pacific , and start to put long - planned strategy to work .
Ghost Fleet open with an American astronaut being locked out of the ISS as Chinese Taikonauts , armed with an infrared laser , blow key satellites out of the sky . Russia is a nominative ally , and help China establish a major assualt against US and allied belongings across the Pacific . Pearl Harbor is a actual image as it ’s taken over by Directorate land violence , drones and armor . Taking advantage of its hold on US fabrication , the country also sour to stultify US technological resources : computer and phone systems are compromised , leaving the US at a major disadvantage when it comes to deploying some of its advanced weapons and systems .
In the aftermath of the initial , literal Pearl Harbor - flair attack , the US works on figuring out how to respond . Cole and Singer fragment the narrative into a photomosaic of actions : a ship ’s maitre d’hotel tax with leading a fleet of obsolete and high - technical school ships out to the Pacific , insurgents in Hawaii trace on what they read in Afghanistan , Silicon Valley billionaires , Russian spies in China , Chinese Taikonauts in the Tiangong Space Station and more all come together as events spread and build to a engrossing conclusion .
In many ways , Ghost Fleet is the opposite of another book we review recently , Tin Menby Christopher Golden . Where Golden ’s record focalise on the actions of a humble , robotic unit , Cole and Singer play it grown : they wait across the world as World War III erupts , and are more concerned in playing with the big picture stuff than they are with the actions of a handful of people . For the most part , it works out well , even if the Holy Writ is hard laden with figure , acronyms , new technologies and more .
https://gizmodo.com/tin-men-is-an-action-packed-examination-of-drone-warfar-1714376443
What sets Ghost Fleet apart from just about every other military science fiction novel is its reliance on realism . All of the technology present in the book is fairly plausible – I ’m pretty certain that I ’ve project model vanish retiring onP.W. Singer ’s twitter provender . But more than just induce the applied science right , the twosome get how it works , and how it ’s integrated into a wartime scenario . There ’s a telling scene when one American insurgent talks about how she basically got her military - grade computer hardware from a hunting store , and much of the engineering science that ’s used is n’t too far from the remnant consumer . This is a telling point , especially in a Clarence Day and old age when you could foot up a poke off the shelf at your local store . More significantly , they take to heart the lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan when it come to how good insurgents were against their better - equipped counterparts .
Above all , Ghost Fleet is a gripping novel , on equivalence with anything Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton might have put together during their life history . The novel is lightning - tight , jump between Hawaii , Washington DC , Shanghai , the Pacific Ocean and to Low Earth Orbit without pretermit a beat , and the brace direction in a smattering of characters defend the action throughout , even if it ’s a bit of a shallow facial expression .
Cole and Singer basically distil all of the major tech and military trends and put them to use in Ghost Fleet . While a future warfare might not really roleplay out like in this Word , it ’s existent enough to be utterly terrific : the next looping of warfare will be more complicated and weird than we ’ve ever imagined . It ai n’t pretty .
book review
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