The Power and the Money

Attack of the drones

 One day we have to continue our fisking of Ghost Fleet. I don’t like panning anything, but the book was full of howlers. Fine for fiction, but it was dispiriting to see so many people take it so seriously.

But one thing the book got right was the use of drones in future conflict, including a good scene during the Chinese invasion of Hawaii (page 69).

It now seems that life is catching up with fiction, right on schedule.

The Islamic State used drones regularly as weapons. Sometimes they placed bombs on the drones themselves; other times they would drop mortar shells from the UAVs. Now, however, the remnants of the Islamic State appear to have upped their game and attacked Russian forces en masse. They claim to have destroyed an S-400 missile launcher.

Unsurprisingly, the Russians claim something rather different.

A more neutral take supports the Russian claim that their Pantsir S-2 anti-aircraft cannon was successful in shredding the attack by a small fleet of commercial quadcopters.

All this said, the Islamic State no longer controls meaningful territory and couldn’t be expected to mount much of an attack. But what happens as the drones get better? Like, say, by mounting a small kerosene jet engine on ‘em? Or, more frighteningly, by going the other way and making ‘em smaller and smaller and ever harder to detect?

I’m relatively sanguine about this development. It won’t bring down civilization. But it may revolutionize ground combat. I’m not sure what the defenses against slaughterbots will look like, but I am sure that we’re going to see some dramatic changes in military tactics over the next decade.

Thoughts?

Ghost Fleet #5½: Why post now?

 Well, Foreign Policy just reminded me that people in the Pentagon are taking this book very, very seriously.

Sigh.

Fleet ghosting, or an American war on China?

 Recently, there has been some worry that a Chinese government facing internal challenges might choose to aggravate external conflicts. These worries are plausible, but it strikes me that it is far more likely that an American president might provoke a conflict with China than the reverse. After all, a war with China would be primarily at sea and in the air. It would provide the United States with clear victory conditions. And it is one that (as of right now) the United States would win.

So might an American president be tempted? Realistically, any scenario would need to fill several requirements:

1. No cognitive dissonance. I do not believe in a Reichstag fire scenario. Any series of provocative responses by an American president would have to be ones that she or he could justify in their own head. Which also means that they would be justifiable in the eyes of much of the public;
2. Provide electoral advantage. The lessons from George H.W. Bush are useful here. He came out of an amazing overwhelming victory in a popular war and still went on to lose in November of the subsequent year;
3. Retain East Asian support. Any series of American provocations against China would need to keep Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and (to a lesser extent) Vietnam on side at every stage. Lose them and you likely lose (2) as well;
4. Provide advantage short of war. Given the geopolitical circumstances, no single American action would lead to war. It would result from a cascading series of American actions and reactions. Each individual American action, however, would have to fill all of the above requirements, should the Chinese government not take the bait. In other words, the U.S. administration would need to believe that it would come out ahead regardless of the Chinese countermove.

One question, of course, is whether a short naval war with China would have adverse economic impacts on the United States. The answer to that question is surprisingly unclear. Chinese demand for U.S. bonds is irrelevant, given that we borrow in our own currency. A decline the U.S. dollar could be good for the American economy. Most Chinese imports are replaceable, certainly in the short run. The long-run consequences would not be good, but the assumption here is that the American administration is not worrying about the long run.

The question for you, then: what are the circumstances under which an American president might deliberately try to provoke a war with the People’s Republic of China?

Read this first.

Ghost Fleet #4: Anonymous is no match for the NSA

 Ghost Fleet’s climactic cyberwar scene reached a depth of stupidity suitable for a SyFy made-for-TV movie, only without the self-awareness. It would have been laugh-out-loud funny had the authors not been telegraphing what was going to happen for about 100 pages.

We have already covered most of what is wrong with the cyberwar climax on page 288 of Ghost Fleet. At the start of the scene, a Chinese superhacker is moving to shut off Akron’s power supply. The set-up, of course, makes no sense. The superhacker is attacking using software “modeled after the Americans’ Project Aurora malware.” You can go to this video to see what a cyberattack really looks like. She would not be flicking rings to “initiate attack protocols.” Maybe she would fool around with the utility’s control panel after the malware had executed, but she wouldn’t be “initiating” anything. 

Second, and more importantly, there is no way on God’s Green Earth that the United States would still be vulnerable to the Aurora vulnerability more than a year (or two; the book is remarkably unclear on chronology) into the war. Consider: “Mitigation is relatively inexpensive and straightforward. It entails placing a hardware device between each substation and its loads. That device monitors for the rapid out-of-phase condition associated with an AUORA event and isolates the substation from its loads before the torque of the grid can be applied to the equipment loads.” Sure, the United States might be vulnerable at the start of the war. But if the enemy doesn’t attack immediately, then it won’t be able to attack at all.

But the real idiocy is at the end of the scene, where our Chinese attacker is thwarted by … Anonymous. Yes, freedom’s secret weapon. Anonymous get a very Hollywood moment where the Chinese hacker’s virtual reality gear and interface to her hacking tools is obstructed by a rendering of a wall of Guy Fawkes masks. Anonymous then proceeds to take over the systems that keep her drugged up (WTF?) and kills her and all the rest of the cyberwarriors.

Anonymous is presented as an ally of convenience than “good guys” or “patriots” for the U.S. At that point, the accuracy stops.

The book paints Anonymous as a coherent and effective force. The truth is rather different. Fact checking their cohesion and ability is not terribly hard. In fact, Anonymous just conducted an operation. One deemed #OpParis.

After the attacks in Paris, Anonymous announced they would go after Daesh, aka “the Islamic State.” They planned to take down twitter accounts associated with Daesh and compromising forums and systems associated with the same. After a week of their #OpParis, Anonymous reported taking down more than 20,000 twitter accounts and claimed to have doxxed several Daesh recruiters. (“Doxxing” means posting private information about names, locations, generally personal details, etc.)

Already one might start to wonder whether the authors of Ghost Fleet were grinding an ideological axe or (more likely) writing a scene they knew was immensely stupid in the hope of getting a movie deal. Taking down Twitter feeds and doxxing Daesh sympathizers is a long way from killing Chinese government operatives by remote control.

Except Anonymous is even less capable than than its claims about OpParis reports would indicate. After all, accounts that were supposedly taken down included such Daesh supporters as the New York Times, U.S. President, BBC and Hillary Clinton.

Wait! What?

Indeed.

Multiple sources reported most of the twitter accounts were active still after the so-called attacks. Twitter stated the lists of supposed Daesh accounts provided from some Anonymous members were wildly inaccurate. So is the claim they took down 20,000 accounts complete hogwash? Is there a way to reconcile Anonymous’ statements with the observations of the outside world?

Yes, actually, there is. At least for some of their claims.

To do so though will require examining how Anonymous attacked its targets. While there are a number of skilled hackers, the majority of Anonymous is little more than what we call script kiddies. These are users of prepackaged software meant to compromise systems. How such software works, we’ve talked about before. Such software is not, however, anywhere as near as sophisticated as Stuxnet or other real cyberweapons.

Anonymous essentially spammed the Twitter accounts so people could not, while under attack, use them. They sent wave after wave of messages including Rick Astley’s 1987 Song “Never Gonna Give You up.”

Yup.  Essentially Anonymous rickrolled the supposed Daesh accounts, spamming all incoming communication and making conversation impossible. The accounts were taken out … but only temporarily. As soon as Anonymous stopped their attacks, the accounts were usable again. This is what is called a denial of service attack, and, frankly, it’s a weak one. In other words, Anonymous didn’t take anything out. All it did was make a few accounts temporarily unusable until Twitter’s management stopped the nonsense.

That brings us to the greatest problem with Anonymous: its a volunteer organization attracting support based on enthusiasm and interest. Its a militia, of a sort. But it not a militia driven by concern for people’s homes or life. Rather, most Anonymous volunteers do what they do for the “lolz;” their own amusement. When they get bored, they stop. #OpParis petered out. The Islamic State steams on.

I’ll mention here that when Anonymous decided to doxx people who collaborated with the Zetas, they learned right quick that it was a bad idea. As for other ways of cyber-attacking the cartels, so far there has been nothing. The cartels are not running scared of Anonymous. 

To be sure, there are probably talented hackers out there affiliated with Anonymous, but the vast majority of them are not. That majority is the cyber equivalent of bunch of high school kids egging a house. Nothing more.

And certainly not the insanely powerful group portrayed in Ghost Fleet. And I see no way for the current group to somehow transmogrify itself into an all-powerful collective in only nine years ... or ever.

In short, the way the authors portrayed cyberwar may succeed as a way to catch a Hollywood agent’s attention. It failed on every other metric. Which is really quite disappointing, given that they have the knowledge to have written a good book.

Ghost Fleet 3½: Really, it makes no sense that the U.S. would not strike back

 Things are slowing down professionally, and so this series will continue. But I just finished re-reading the book ... and man it looks much worse than the first time through. Really shoddy work by the authors in what should have been a classic. I am befuddled by the positive reviews.

Any way, here is Politico (of all places!) reporting on America’s arsenal of offensive cyberweapons. Key quote: “One thing everyone I spoke to agreed on: The U.S. has the most powerful cyber arsenal in the world.” 

Weirdly, the article quotes one of the authors of Ghost Fleet. I know that they know all the stuff Will Baird explained here. So why does the book pretend that they don’t? They really could have done much better ... and realism would have introduced more drama, not less. It is weird.

Next up: the silliness of the way the book treats insurgency and counterinsurgency, followed by fisks of how it presents international politics, conventional military capabilities, and space travel. (Oh, God, the space travel.)

Ghost Fleet #3: Cyberwar is symmetric

 One of the most disappointing things about Ghost Fleet was the dog that didn’t bark: the massive immeidate American cyber-counterattack against China. It’s one thing to write an exaggerated warning against a threat that you believe your country is neglecting. It’s quite another to ignore the loud and massive preparations for cyberwar that the United States has already made — and that those very authors have reported upon extensively. It was weird; weird enough to remove much of our ability to enjoy the book.

One thing that the authors get completely right is that much of any future cyberwar will be fought using malicious programs that are pre-positioned inside hardware. Trojaned electronics are a very real concern. It is entirely conceivable that in a future conflict, the Chinese government could do serious damage to the American civilian infrastructure. Moreover, with the advent of the “internet of things” such an attack — when combined with the more “traditional” operations described in our last post — such an attack would consist of a serious Weapon of Mass Annoyance, as toilets seized up and heating systems went haywire. To their credit, the authors evocatively show just such effects: a home front dealing with unfixable automated refrigerators.

Unfortunately, the authors jumped (a lot of sharks) far away from the great fictional war classics like Red Army or Arc Light or The War in 2020. They moved out of the realm of the plausible. Let’s start with the idea that the Chinese could install Trojan horses in most of our military systems. They couldn’t. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding on how some of this works. Adding a modification to a chip is a pretty profound process. It is highly likely to add glitches that would be easily detected. It would likely add significant time to delivery as well … and sudden additional delays for manufacturing a relatively generic chip would catch people’s attention.

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are even less susceptible to Trojan horses. (Elsewhere, the authors of Ghost Fleet have pointed out in ominous tones that two-thirds of all the U.S. military’s field-programmable chips are made in China and Taiwan. We’ll ignore the fact that Taiwan is not in fact a part of China but an ally of the United States and pretend that all the key chips come from the People’s Republic.) FPGAs are not where you need to worry about Trojan horses because FPGAs are blank slates: the customers can put whatever programs they want on the chips. There is no way for the manufacturer to know what the customer (whether the U.S. Air Force or Intel) plans to put on the chips.

Remember, in order to subvert a program, a hacker must have an understanding of a program. But there is no way to know what program will be placed on a FPGA. Furthermore, many FPGAs allow for a program to be permanently loaded —  written once, read many –  such that any attempt at overwriting with a new subverted program would be impossible.*

Moreover, the United States has a trusted foundries program administered by the National Security Agency to make chips for the military. (Bizarrely, the authors have the trusted foundries play a key role in the successful U.S. counteroffensive.) Now, the trusted foundries do not make the United States invulnerable. But it does make a breakdown on the scale depicted in Ghost Fleet very hard to believe. The worst case scenario is an attack allowing for the crashing of the software through understanding the hardware —  garnered through espionage.

Recovering from a cyberattack based on Trojaned electronics would “merely” require resetting the software. The scare quotes are because such a reset would be far from simple and would take a substantial amount of time. During a battle, such an attack could be catastrophic. We believed in the U.S. defeat during the initial offensive. (Save perhaps the actual invasion of Hawaii: more on that later.) But over the course of a war, the problem is entirely addressable, and the U.S. should have gotten a handle on the issue much faster than it did in the book.

But to be fair, while the scale of the attack may have been hard to believe, but it was not impossible to believe. Yes, the details were wrong, but the United States could in fact get punched in the nose as hard as it was in the opening battles of a future war.

What was impossible to believe was that the United States would not strike back, hard. The U.S. is already training offensive cyberteams. And this is the latest part of a long-standing program — viz the fact that the only documented cyberattacks in the history of the world have come from the Israel and the United States. Hooah, indeed.

As for Trojan Horses hidden in hardware, the Chinese have far more to fear than we do. They don’t know what they are manufacturing! It’s far more likely the U.S. is slipping in something into their chips than vice versa. Not because the U.S. is miraculous, but because we are doing the design. Chinese firms, for the chips made there, do the manufacture. It’s easier for us to verify that a design is what we think it is than it is for them to verify that a design does what they think it does.

Now, perhaps the United States isn’t installing Trojan horses in Chinese electronics. We’re perfectly willing to accept that as a premise. (Even if it’s improbable.) And we are willing to accept that the Chinese could inflict enough damage on American systems as to allow them to win a naval campaign in the Pacific. What we’re not willing to accept is that the United States would be unable to strike back against Chinese infrastructure.

A realistic counter strike would cripple the Chinese in a manner in parallel to the United States. Those same fridges taken out in the U.S. are likely to be taken down in China. The irony of the Chinese situation is with their modern infrastructure, they are likely to have far more of their critical infrastructure taken down in a cyberwar scenario. The analog systems of yesteryear are completely immune to the hacking of digital systems. Digital upgrades will be very uneven in the U.S. They will be almost ubiquitous in China. The Chinese could pummel the United States. The United States would equally pummel the Chinese in a cyberwar. The authors highlighted Los Angeles and the problems with fridges, a metropolitan area currently of 13 million people. What happens when Beijing’s 21 million can’t store food either?

A realistic scenario for cyberwarfare would be the race of the cripples: compromised systems on both sides will cripple each side’s military and homefront in unexpected ways. Both sides would go into battle with their equipment malfunctioning. Both sides would find some of their premier weapons unusable. No one has a monopoly on cyberwar. As of 2015, the U.S. has a significant lead, despite what the authors imply. It is certainly possible that the U.S. would lose that lead by 2024, but it is simply impossible that America would lose the ability to strike back.

The revelations about Stuxnet and the Equation Group have made it clear that the United States has adapted its Cold War approach to nuclear warfare to the new world of cyberwar. During the Cold War, it was theoretically possible to defend against nuclear weapons on a large scale. (Using nuclear tipped interceptors, for example.) But the costs — and there were many! — were deemed too large.

Instead, American war planners adopted an approach that worked surprisingly well: mutually assured destruction (MAD). If a power launches nuclear weapons against the U.S., then the U.S. will literally destroy them in response.

The U.S. could construct an economy invulnerable to cyberattack, but that would slow progress in development of computers and the internet to a crawl. Moreover, it would require civilian discipline unprecedented outside of the two World Wars: does your grandmother always update her computer? Or your uncle his phone? Your child her tablet? Or your husband his new smart thermostat?

Rather than attempt the impossible, the U.S. has applied MAD to cyberwarfare: China unleashes cybernetic hell on the U.S. and the U.S. will unleash it in turn on China.

Finally, there is no way that a cyberwar on this scale wouldn’t go global. The authors themselves have noted in other venues how Stuxnet spread to systems far outside Iran. The same would happen with Chinese and American cyberweapons unleashed in a Third World War. To some extent, that’s a minor point: why should the reader of a good WW3 yarn care whether municipal sewers and automated metros in Lyon are going haywire? They shouldn’t. But the rest of the world will be affected and they will be angry … and in a scenario where China strikes first, they will be angry at China. Maybe America’s NATO allies would refuse to invoke Article 5. (We’ll get to whether that is believable in a later post.) But there is no way on God’s green Earth that they would pretend as though nothing has happened.

In short: the scale of the effect of the initial cyberattack on the U.S. is believable, even if the depictions of how it was carried out make no sense. But it is improbable. And it is completely impossible that the U.S. wouldn’t strike back. We can believe a Chinese victory in the first phase of the war. But one of on the scale depicted was laughably silly and the lack of an American counterstrike was ludicrous fantasy.

And so, once again, our disbelief was desuspended. If you can’t believe the scenario is possible, then what’s the point? These guys know enough to have done much Much MUCH better.​

Ghost Fleet #2: Cyberwar is boring

 Neuromancer set the template for fictional depictions of hacking: colorful icons swooping through cyberspace in a glorified videogame. Sometimes the depiction is a little more sedate, but only a little: hackers frantically banging at keyboards as they break enemy defenses. Films like Swordfish or Hackers and many, many others make it seem rather glamorous, even visual. 

Ghost Fleet falls right into that trap early on. Page 41: 

“The young hacker focused on her attack, navigating the malware packet through the DIA networks while fighting back the desire to brush a bead of sweat off her nose with her gloved hands. The Pentagon’s autonomous network defenses, sensing the slight anomalies of her network streams, tried to identify and contain her attack. But this was where the integration of woman and machine triumphed above mere ‘big data.’ Hu was already two steps ahead, building systems components and then tearing them down before the data could be integrated enough for the DIA computers to see them as threats. Her left arm coiled and sprung, her fingers outstretched. Then the right did the same, this time a misdirect, steering the defense code to shut down further external access, essentially tricking the programs into focusing on locking the doors of a burning house, but leading a small ember on the outside for them to stamp on, so they’d think the fire was out.”

Needless to say, this is not how hacking works. 

Hacking comes in two major flavors. The first is the all-out assault. The second is the stealthy compromise.

The Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack is a prime example for the all-out assault. A large number of software bots are surreptitiously placed on computers all over the world, usually by getting someone to click on an infected link or attachment. The software then automatically downloads itself and send reports into a controller server (itself likely another hacked system). The number of bots can range up to the hundreds of thousands and be directed by a small handful of servers. When the attack is launched, all those computers fire off requests in such volumes to cause the receiving computers to lock up. This is somewhat like having several hundred 5-year-olds ask questions of one person at the same time.

A variation on this is a massive port scan: using the same botnet, hackers can check all the different places software listens to for communication. The bots will then try to crash the software listening on that port, hopefully getting the system to cough up another entryway in response, like a username or password. The botnet is effectively looking in all the computer’s pockets for a hole from which it can swipe the key. Again, the hacker “merely” pulls the trigger after aiming the botnet. You could, I suppose, have a scene of the hackers feverishly writing the code before they launch the attack. But nobody is going to be sitting in a room swooping through 3-D displays. No typing, no visuals.

Then there is the stealthy attack. The special forces to the DDOS tank army. The classic is stealing access to passwords, preferably from a network administrator. The attacker then moves through the network slowly and carefully. The problem with this method is lots of places log their access and strange places often get flagged. If it happens too often, they lock accounts. That is part of the reason why many sites require periodic password changes.

The problem with this model — the hacker working hands on — is that it’s far more traceable and slow. Better is to compromise a system and let a bot go to work. In fact, far better is to let a bot just plain do all the work. It’s faster and safer.

The most common bot for this is the infamous “malware”: viruses, worms, Trojan horses, etc. The single most famous example of malware that went above-and-beyond was Stuxnet. The authors of Stuxnet didn’t sit and click or wave their hands in real time as they manuevered their way into the Iranian nuclear facilities. They had someone pop in a USB drive and the rest was automated. 

This makes it tremendously unsexy. The Stuxnet infection took a significant amount of time before it compromised the systems at the Iranian nuclear enrichment facility. And once it was in, there was no way to know if it had worked until the U.S. received human intelligence that the centrifuges it targeted had actually broken. The infected Iranian facility wasn’t hooked up to the internet, but even if had been, it would have been very, very dangerous to report back. Communications can be intercepted.

Now, the Chinese hacker is working in nine years in the future. Why couldn’t she use virtual reality to hack systems in 2024? Well, maybe she would write code using a V.R. headset and virtual keyboard, although I’m unclear as to why. But she wouldn’t interact with the cyberattacks once they were underway. That would just result in detection once the communications were intercepted. Moreover, the time it would have taken to send back data about what was happening and send back the response could be up to ten seconds on the round trip. Add another ten seconds for her reaction time. That is a lot of time for the DIA to realize something is wrong and start shutting the doors. 

The authors talk about her and her bots trumping Big Data. It’s a nice buzzword, but it is totally meaningless in this context. Big Data might have been used as a way to train the DIA’s intrusion detection system to recognize which data flow patterns are normal activity and which might indicate an attack. But I have no idea what it would mean for the Chinese hacker to be “building systems components and then tearing them down.” As a description of cyberwarfare, it’s not even wrong; it’s meaningless. 

In summary, the hacking in Ghost Fleet is derived from the silver screen, not the reality of today. It also is highly unlikely to be what comes about in ten years. 

Now, to be fair, these scenes are just window-dressing. There is, in fact, a scene on page 37 in which a Venezuelan refugee accidentally infects U.S. defense systems in a realistic way. (Although I have to admit I have some doubts that you could actually copy malware onto a security badge — the article cited in their footnotes does not describe anything like the scene.) But there are much more serious problems with the way the cyberwar develops in Ghost Fleet, which we will get to in later installments.

Comments and criticisms very welcome!

Ghost Fleet #1: That’s a really dumb way to attack the Panama Canal

 On page 55-56, the Chinese attack the Panama Canal by smashing a giant container ship into the locks. “Two ships ahead, the Xianghumen, a Chinese-flagged freighter, had turned on its engines. This was craziness. What was Xianghumen’s captain thinking, speeding up inside the transit zone? The canal master was screaming over the radio for the Xianghumen to acknowledge and stop. But there was no reply.”

After the Chinese freighter crashes into the locks, “crushing the doors inward,” a Filipino sailor watching it happen thinks : “[He] wasn’t sure how long it would take the Chinese companies that ran the Panama Canal Zone to fix this mess, but their investment had clearly gone down the tubes.”

This was the second moment where I was yanked out of the book, because the scenario is impossible on multiple levels.

The first problem is that ships are not allowed to enter Panama Canal waters under the control of their captains. A Panamanian pilot takes full control. The Xianghumen would have to start its kamikaze run several miles away from the locks, which would making smashing into them a pretty impressive feat of navigation. Moreover, it would give the game away hours before it crashed. The Canal Authority would mobilize tugboats to push the ship away. 

Now, the story is set in 2024. So maybe the Chinese ship has some sort of ghost computer system that can seize control back from the pilot and start its run close to the locks. Still, there will be plenty of warning; ships do not accelerate quickly. 

But that brings us to the second problem: it is goddamned hard to get to the locks. Look at the above picture. Better still, look at this video, which shows a ship clonking into the side of the canal as it approaches the locks:

How in the name of God is a kamikaze vessel supposed to navigate that entrance? Even now, ships cannot safely transit without being hooked up to those locomotives that you can see in the video. 

Finally, we should point out that the Panama Canal has three separate lock systems. You would need three kamikaze vessels to crash simultaneously. That kills your robot scenario, since the Panama Canal Authority does the scheduling. Be hard to make sure that you have three ships in the right places at the right time. 

The scene is just fantastically silly.

If the Chinese really want to knock the Panama Canal out of action, then they should send a commando team to blow the Gatún dam. (Or just hit the damn thing with cruise missiles, as was pointed out in comments.) 

And it gets worse, because there is no reason to take out the Panama Canal in a hypothetical war. The Canal cuts the transit time from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but presumably the U.S. Navy will have the initiative in any counterattack. As Carlos Yu and I showed in our book, the Panama Canal had no substantive effect on anything in World War 2 other than the the marginal campaigns in the Aleutians and the timing of the Doolittle Raid. If the Canal had no strategic benefit in World War 2, why would it have one in World War 3? 

The final nail in the coffin of my suspended disbelief was at the end, where the Filipino sailor wonders “how long it would take the Chinese companies that ran the Panama Canal Zone to fix this mess.” Chinese companies do not run the Canal. The Panama Canal Authority runs the Canal. Chinese companies do run some of the port facilities on either side the Canal. But those ports are a different thing.

Ghost Fleet admirably has footnotes, so I checked the ones for this passage. They footnoted   “Chinese companies that ran the Panama Canal Zone” to an article in the Economist. Go read the article. Now come back. You will note that the Chinese interest the article cites is about the possibility of financing a fourth set of locks or building a competing canal in Nicaragua. How did they turn that into Chinese management of the existing canal?

It is a minor plot point, but it planted the skepticism that will blossom in this space over the next few days. 

Ghost Fleet

 Novels about great power war have long held fascination, particularly since the world hasn’t really seen one since the Korean War ended in 1953. Red Storm Rising is well known, as is Red Army and the Third World War. All three dealt with a conventional European war against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. All wrestled with the specter of nuclear weapons and all got most of the technical stuff right. The best of the bunch is Red Army, in part for the characters, and in part because the author dared to have the United States lose.

All of those books, however, took place in what was more-or-less the present at the time they were written. Today, unlike the 1980s, the United States holds near-absolute military superiority. War is still possible, of course ... see, for example, Eric Harry’s Arc Light. It portrays an accidental war between the United States and the Russian Federation in the early 1990s. What makes Arc Light unique is twofold: it gets the politics and economics absolutely and it lets nuclear weapons out of the bottle without destroying the world. (I won’t spoil it by saying how; the book is worth reading. James should take a look at it for this series.) The war depicted was a great power war, of course, but it was accidental and it was not between peers. 

So to consider what a modern great power war between peers might be like we need to move into the future. On this blog, Martin Skold discussed what a near-future great power war might be like. But that excellent discussion was heuristic and only tangentially touched upon operational or technological issues, let alone the politics. (Go read!) 

And now we have Ghost Fleet, by P.W. Singer and August Cole! In it, China and the United States go to war in 2024. (The authors give away the exact year on page 48.) A real, genuine great power war. Both sides refrain from using nuclear weapons (for reasons I find plausible) and the conflict plays out over land, sea and space. It has gotten good reviews and it is a book that we really wanted to like.

But we have read it, and while it is a good gripping read ... we just cannot give it a thumbs up. The reasons are basically technical. The authors appear to get enough issues seriously wrong to make it impossible to keep our disbelief suspended. 

Over the next few days and weeks Will Baird and Noel Maurer will be collaborating on a series of short posts pointing out the problems with the scenario laid out by the authors. We are doing this for three reasons. First, it is a fun bit of procrastination. (The book is well-written and fun to read!) Second, the book has gotten a lot of attention in policy circles ... and if we are right about the flaws, then that is a problem. Finally, we think we might be able to learn something. These posts aren’t intended to pan or fisk the book; rather, we think of them as opening up a conversation. Are we missing something? Do the authors know something we don’t?

We have divided the apparent errors into three types:

1. “That’s Not How It Works” technical problems that affect verisimilitude, but not the main plot.  

2. “That’s Not How It Works” problems that don’t affect the plot, but are so major that they yank you out of the book completely. “WTF moments” is another good term.

3. Serious screw-ups that make whole sections of the book impossible as portrayed.

Watch this space.

What War Might Be Like — guest-blogger Martin Skold

 As a follow-up to my recent piece on differences between the modern world and the world on the eve of World War 1, Noel and I discussed how a modern great power war might play out in the near-future and what it might look like. Obviously, there are a lot of factors to consider (not least among them being who would fight whom, when, and over what), and for that reason I must warn that what follows should be read as little more than (barely) informed speculation. Nevertheless, I think we can make a few guesses about the nature of major warfare in the 2020s and possibly beyond.

We are largely leaving nuclear weapons out of this discussion. There is, in fact, reason to do so: there is a rich literature on nuclear deterrence, enough to show that the concept is not as simple as it appears, and although there is a consensus that nuclear weapons deter something, it is not always clear what that something is: the questions of credibility and probability involved are not simple. Suffice it to say that, as long as neither side of a major war involving nuclear combatants appeared to be in extremis with no hope of survival, it is quite possible that mutual deterrence would be enough to keep nuclear weapons from being used, at least initially. But more importantly, forgetting about nuclear weapons for a moment allows us to look at the other factors involved and see what they imply.

Without necessarily predicting exactly where conflict might erupt, we can probably predict a few things about how it would unfold. We can speculate that it would proceed in roughly four distinct stages.

Stage 1: Rapid attrition. In the past two World Wars, it was actually the norm for the combatants to fail to knock each other out of the fight initially. The great exception appears to be France, which suffered what can only be described as a total knockout in the first round of World War 2. In all other cases, although one side or the other might make some gains, it usually failed to completely destroy its opponent. One could point to the Battle of Britain, operations on the Russian Front in 1941, initial Japanese gains in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, the stalemate on the Marne in September 1914, the inability of Germany to eliminate Russia after its victories at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes at about the same time, and so on.

There are reasons for this. In many cases, the wrong set of assumptions was in play: Germany, for example, did not begin serious industrial mobilization in World War 2 until after Stalingrad (arguably, after it had already lost), trusting in the ability of the blitzkrieg to deliver quick and decisive battlefield victories. In other cases, it simply took time for resources to become available: Britain, which had always focused as much of its defense budget as possible on its navy, entered World War 1 with a professional army (the crack units in the British Expeditionary Force, who, according to legend, fired their rifles so rapidly as to appear to be using machine-guns), only to enroll large numbers of after hostilities commenced (the so-called “Kitchener Battalions” that were slaughtered on the Somme two years later). In all such cases, however, the great powers were close enough to evenly matched to be able to survive the initial shock and awe.

This scenario would probably prevail in the world of the 2020s. (Right now, the United States has a good chance of achieving a rapid knockout blow in a conventional conflict.) The trend towards professionalization (absence of conscription in most big states) and reliance on high technology (the inflation-adjusted costs of major weapons systems being significantly higher than in past wars), combined with the likelihood that at least one side would not have a long warning time prior to the onset of hostilities suggests that replacing lost equipment and personnel would require more mobilization and preparation than either side would likely have at the start of conflict.

In other words, unless one side or the other prevails decisively in the first weeks of the war, the initial forces of both sides are likely to be destroyed. Let’s first consider personnel. Most modern militaries invest large sums of money and large quantities of time in training their personnel. That makes lost personnel difficult to replace, particularly in the absence of conscription, which few states (and no great powers except Russia) employ. For that matter, mass conscription by definition implies sacrificing quality for quantity: professional armies throughout history have invested more training resources in each individual soldier, sailor, or airman than militaries based on mass conscription. The IDF and South Korea are partial exceptions, but those are armies geared for territorial defense (and in Israel, occupation of hostile territory) not expeditionary warfare.

The size of modern armies is small for this reason: in terms of military participation rates, the modern great powers are closer to medieval kingdoms than to pre-World War 1 states. (Modern great powers have less than 1% of their populations in the military, including reserves, compared to 5% of European populations on the muster rolls in 1914.) Although some of this reflects a choice (conscious or unconscious) some of it is a function of technology and the time it takes to learn to use it. It is quite debatable whether a modern state could replace combat pilots, for example, at the same rate as Britain and Germany did in 1940 — even allowing for the fact that both countries tolerated a much lower standard of proficiency than the prewar norm.

What applies to personnel applies even more strongly to equipment. At least as of now, modern weapons systems are a boutique industry. The days in which aircraft carriers could be repaired in a few months and fighters mass-produced in converted automobile factories are effectively over. In theory, mass production of modern weapons systems is possible. Lockheed-Martin, the producer of the much-maligned, exorbitantly expensive F-35, has claimed that with sufficient orders, economies of scale and an assembly line-style plant you could produce one F-35 per working day. This is still a slower piece rate than the production of, say, P-51s in World War 2, but it might pass muster for wartime purposes.

If you stop to think about it, though, the numbers do not add up. It was expected during the Cold War that a major confrontation with the USSR would result in the destruction of the US Air Force’s entire A-10 fleet within two weeks of continuous combat — rather shorter than, say, the Battle of Britain, where it took something between four and sixteen weeks (depending on your definition) to grind down the Luftwaffe  — and the Battle of Britain still left the combatants with air forces. It is an open question how long it would take to set up new factories to ramp up production of the F-35. And even if we did, 365 aircraft a year is not a very large number. What applies to aircraft applies even more strongly to ships: modern aircraft carriers take seven years to build (compare one year to build HMS Dreadnought before World War One or less than two years to build an Essex-class carrier in World War Two). Some of these build times could be cut short via a crash program or economies of scale associated with wartime mobilization and production — but not right away.

It is therefore likely that, once it was clear that neither side had achieved complete superiority over the other in the immediate opening of the war (whether at land or at sea) attrition would result in the destruction of equipment faster than it could initially be replaced. This would be especially true of the air war, since aerial combat is attrition par excellence.

In short, Stage 1 would pit professional militaries with high-tech weaponry against each other. The high-tech weaponry will be subjected to merciless attrition and destroyed without replacement in the first week or two of the war. Destruction is a lot easier than creation, so most of the high-tech weaponry that Western militaries in particular rely on disappears and the states that rely on it have to go to plan B. 

This would bring us to ...

Stage 2: Stalemate. The destruction of equipment and loss of trained personnel would probably lead to a lull in the fighting. (Tom Clancy envisioned something like this in his now-famous fictional story, Red Storm Rising, in which a conventional conflict in Europe between the West and the Soviet Union bogged down into a stalemate after a few weeks.) Both sides would have to look for new reserves of manpower and equipment to continue the fighting; depending on how unprepared they were at the start of the war, this might take weeks or years.

In such a circumstance, negotiation might be inevitable. This was not the norm during the World Wars — neither in World War 1 after the war had bogged down in the trenches, nor in World War 2 after the blitzkrieg had failed to defeat Russia, was there much impetus for a diplomatic solution. In an older, richer, and more peace-loving world, though, the exhaustion of immediately available resources might lead one side or the other to consider coming to the table. (When Foreign Policy discussed a hypothetical Sino-Japanese War of 2014, they came to the conclusion that a stalemate was likely ... which in that case meant an effective Japanese victory, since China would have little incentive to press the war further.)

It is probable the U.S. would not follow this pattern. The experience of Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq has shown that even when a war is divisive, unpopular, and not going well, there is usually enough political will to fight to overcome opposition to the war for several years. It is an open question, however, what would happen if the will to fight existed but the means to continue could not be found right away.

If they could, though, things would probably go to ...

Stage 3: Mobilization. As noted, when great powers expect a quick war and do not get it, they historically have geared up for a longer struggle. And, as noted, this will be much harder in an era when militaries are more dependent on expensive and hard-to-replace technology than before. It is also probably more difficult in an era in which states have less slack capacity: when states spend a larger percentage of their GDP than in the era of the World Wars on providing services to their populations, who have come to expect those services and in fact have paid taxes that they cannot get back for them, and when those states also have aging populations in greater need than in the past of healthcare and related services, and again when those states in many cases have unusually high levels of private debt that their populations expected to be able to service, those states’ populations are likely to be more sensitive than in the past to fluctuations in the government’s ability to care for them. That said, there are many ways to finance a war effort, including, but not limited to, debt, taxation, inflation, and directly commandeering hard assets and resources (including rationing necessities and raw materials). With the possible exception of inflation, all of them would likely be more challenging in the modern era.

We have some experience to draw on here:  as mentioned earlier, the German practice in World War 2 was to avoid full-fledged industrial mobilization until Stalingrad. Something similar is likely to happen in a future war.

This is when some states that kept fighting after Stage 2 will opt out — the costs are too high. But even for those that remain, many combatants will have little to fall back on. Nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, supersonic stealth fighters, and main battle tanks don't just materialize out of thin air, and repairs to damaged ones take a while. Whatever the belligerents come up with is going to be low-tech, ad-hoc, and inexpensive, to the extent practicable. This might knock the U.S. out of the fight just for that reason: even if you solve the technical problems, getting the necessary equipment across the ocean to fight might be tricky, depending on expenses. It might also lead to all sorts of interesting innovations. Cheap slow mass drone assaults? Self-driving kamikaze cars? PT boats armed with modern missiles?

The other mainstay of large-scale mobilization, conscription, will be less useful than in the past. (Note that “less useful” ≠ useless.) The reason, again, is the modern reliance on expensive technology. Put differently, obtaining World War 2 levels of military participation assumes that they will be transported and supported by World War 2-style aircraft and ships and ride in World War 2-style vehicles. An M4 Sherman tank cost about $715,000 in 2013 dollars; a modern M1 Abrams costs about $8.6 million. A World War 2-era P-51 cost about $700,000 in 2014 dollars, compared to anything up to $150 million for an F-35. Even an F-16, one of America’s more cost-effective fighters, cost $19 million in the 1990s when the current fleet was built and would cost about $27 million today.

At the height of the Iraq war, a common gripe among recent veterans ran “We’re at war; America’s at the mall.” Something similar might prevail in at least some great powers in in the early parts of Stage 3 and the political effects could skew either way. The war might become easier to sustain (because of fewer casualties) or harder to sustain (because of a lack of desire for revenge for family members killed in action, combined with discomfort with the economic costs of mobilization).

Nonetheless, if Stage 3 lasted for any length of time some sort of limited conscription would be likely. The U.S. military faced severe recruiting problems by the end of the Iraq War; it is not clear that new volunteers would be enough to fill the gap in a future prolonged conflict. In addition, governments may want to conscript civilians with skills useful for the war effort. Finally, conscription is a cheap way to save on manpower costs, at least from the point of view of the government’s cash flow. Draftees are generally cheaper than volunteers.

That said, conscription on the scale of the world wars is unlikely. It is hard to see why the U.S. would need, say, to put 27 million Americans under arms — the current equivalent percentage of Americans as the U.S. had in uniform in 1945. Even 7.0 million (the equivalent of the current active-duty Israeli Defense Force) or  5.5 million (the equivalent of the U.S. active-duty military at the 1968 height of the Vietnam War) seems unlikely at this stage, at least for the United States. (Other countries, gearing up for potential invasion with most of their initial high-tech kit in shreds from Stage 1, might have different incentives.) 

But at least part of the war might become manpower-intensive in due course, because as territory changed hands, it might well progress to ...

Stage 4: Insurgency. Large territories with hostile populations have been known to swallow great powers in the past, as Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Algeria have shown. Ironically, the Truman Administration’s decision not to intervene militarily to stop Mao from taking over China amounted to a decision to avoid the same scenario the U.S. bungled into a decade and a half later in Vietnam. Particularly when a government has had some warning, it can lay a deadly trap for a would-be invader. Finnish ski-mobile light infantry surrounded and cut off Russian armored columns during the Russo-Finnish “Winter War” of 1939-40, effectively stymying the Russian advance and forcing Russia to stop short of total conquest. The Fedayeen Saddam menaced U.S. supply lines during the invasion of Iraq, and it has been noted that the fighting around Al-Nasiriyah in the very early stages of the invasion already resembled the insurgency that followed, with U.S. forces facing irregulars as well as the Iraqi military. A little more preparation could have made for an even deadlier insurgency from the outset.  

Some of the tactics of modern mass opposition depend on global political norms and interaction with global media that can condemn a conqueror’s actions and urge democratic states not to legitimize them; this sort of help could not be taken for granted in a world conflict in which global norms had broken down and the political stakes were higher. This might point toward an insurgency based more on classic paramilitary or guerrilla opposition rather than mass protest, and for that reason the conflict in the areas taken by one side or the other might be even more violent. As long as weapons and supplies could get to insurgents, such a conflict could continue indefinitely, span a wide geographic area, and involve large numbers of participants.

Policing such an area in the home territory of a large great power would involve more manpower than could be had via normal enlistment and would therefore require conscription — as Vietnam and Afghanistan have showed, such a scenario rarely ends well for the occupying state, even if something like success is achieved.

If exhaustion of available resources without military success failed to end the conflict, and if the problems of military mobilization in a modern state likewise did not force states to the table, the prospect of a “forever war” in a vast geographic area with a large population for minimal gain, while still having to face a conventional opponent on the front lines, almost certainly would. Nuclear weapons would not even have to come into play — sheer exhaustion might be sufficient.

Global wars often look futile in retrospect — for every World War 2, there is a World War 1. One suspects that, even without the prospect of a nuclear exchange, a future world war might come to be viewed as very futile indeed.

2014 is not like 1914, but less than some think

Courtesy of Will Baird, I read this post by Martin Skold, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of St. Andrews. The title is “Troubles of our Own: Why 2014 is not like 1914 (but is scary anyway).” He lists six differences:

1. We have nuclear weapons now, and we don’t make light of them. 
2. It is more difficult to hold onto conquered territory, and less useful to try. 
3. There is no military conscription in most great powers today, and there are demographic and technological reasons why it is unfeasible.
4. The great powers are broke. 
5. Finance is globalized.
6. And finally: people are older, richer, more heavily taxed, more heavily subsidized, and more cynical.

The first two points I agree with. The third is incomplete. The penultimate two are incorrect. And the last is irrelevant. Allow me to take them in turn.

Nuclear weapons: Skold’s discussion is excellent. I would only add that it was not clear in 1945 that the taboo on their use would be so universal. The world could have become a far more dangerous place. 

The difficulty of conquest: Skold’s discussion is even more excellent and worth reading. Key quote: “This is not to say it is impossible for a state to conquer territory in the modern world and hold it. It is to say that the costs of doing so have gone up and the benefits have gone down. This, rather than anything the international community did, may be the main reason Vladimir Putin chose to overtake parts of Ukraine by fomenting unrest and sending covert thugs rather than by force majeure.”

Conscription: On one level, he is merely stating a fact. The Western powers, China and India do not have conscription. This is different from 1914!

The problem is that he goes on to say that conscription is both impossible and useless, which is an entirely different proposition. An argument about modern mass conscription that ignores Israel, Singapore and South Korea is one that it is hard to take seriously.

In addition, he mentions an interesting point about modern military equipment — “As is readily apparent in observing the procurement process for ships and aircraft, the replacement of lost equipment will be a more complicated matter in any future war than it was in 1914” — without drawing any inferences about what that means for future great power war.

National debts. There are two claims here. The factual one is that debt-to-GDP ratios are high compared to 1914. For the U.S., yes, although there have been many periods like today. For the U.K., not so much. Ditto France: in 1914, it had a debt-to-GDP ratio of 67%, lower but not hugely lower than its current 91%. (The 91% figure is up from 64% in 2008 as a result of the Great Recession.) Moreover, France had a national debt of 101% of GDP in 1890. (See this paper, page 23.) Germany also walked into WW1 with a national debt of 63% of GDP. In short, the factual claim is incorrect.

The implicit theoretical claim is that even if modern countries were more indebted than in 1913, it would somehow interfere with their ability to mobilize for war. That claim simply makes no sense to me. Perhaps it is correct, but anyone claiming that it is needs to make the case. They cannot simply assert it as self-evident, because it is not. After all, debt-to-GDP ratios soared in the Napoleonic Wars and both World Wars to levels much much much higher than current ones ... you don’t need any familiarity with the complexities of historical war finance to conclude that modern governments could issue a lot of debt if they needed to fight another world war.

Finance is globalized. This part of the essay should be a little embarrassing, especially in light of the quality of earlier discussions. The worst part: “This [American debts to China] is in stark contrast to the financial world of 1914, in which governments overwhelmingly owed money solely to their own citizens.” No no no no no. 

The effect of the globalization of supply chains on the likelihood of interstate war is more interesting to think about. I am skeptical of the claims, but unlike finance we truly are in uncharted territory in that respect. 

Older, richer, more taxed, more subsidized, more cynical. All that applied to the citizens of the Yugoslav successor states in 1991. Perhaps that is not a good example, but it makes me wonder if those differences between our world and the world of 1914 matter all that much.

To recap: the discussion at the link of nuclear weapons and nationalism is excellent. The discussions of conscription and culture is incomplete and the discussions of fiscal issues are wrong. That said, the essay is worth a look.