The economic burden of War can push nations to the point of collapse. Finite resources will curtail the will to fight. Creative thinking will be required. ⬇️
We’ve previously opined about the Western way of war being not fit for purpose for a long and large war. Million dollar missiles to defeat thousand dollar drones is a long term losing hand. But how is Beijing viewing the present conflict in the Middle East and the way the United States and its allies are waging war?
Defense One features a creative short read from regular columnist and author Peter Singer. Singer crafts a fictional memo by a Beijing bureaucrat assessing the performance of the United States in its war against Iran. Singer is renowned for the realism he injects into his speculative fiction and his writing touches on one of the key challenges to the way the United States has fought Iran:
“The U.S. political and military apparatus boasts of hitting an astounding 13,000 targets. Yet the cost to do so, measured in munitions alone, averaged $4 million apiece. Their defensive posture suffered from a similar, and fatal, structural cost asymmetry. The Americans routinely engaged mass-produced, low-cost assets, such as $20,000 drones, using multi-million-dollar interceptors designed for high-end fighters and even ballistic missiles. The American way of war is unsustainable in not just cost but capability. The conflict showed that the adversary’s interceptor inventory is dangerously shallow and exposed.”
Speculative fiction is a useful way to breakthrough biases and inject imagination in to your thinking. Equally, turning the chess board around and considering a challenge from the adversary’s perspective is an incredibly useful way to sharpen strategy and buttress blind spots.
Peter Singer and August Cole’s novel ‘Ghost Fleet’ imagined a second Cold War turning hot before most experts were even willing to talk about the true state of affairs between the United States, China and Russia in 2015. Australia had just hosted Xi Jinping to address parliament in Canberra and sign a free trade agreement. So Singer’s prescient novel and his interview with The American Conservative magazine stands up well over a decade later:
“If you look at the 20th century, it was shaped by great power politics, both the world wars that we actually fought, and the one that we didn’t fight but defined the last half of the century’s politics, the Cold War. After the Berlin Wall falls and then 9/11, that idea of a war between great states is off the table, it’s not even thought of. It’s all about terrorism and insurgency. Conflict doesn’t go away but it’s not about the big boys anymore. It’s not even thought of. But now the risks of a big war between great states is back on the table.”
If you haven’t read ‘Ghost Fleet‘, add it to your reading list.
📷 of the Coliseum and Congress created with CoPilot.