(In this blog article for the Erudite Aardvark, Stephen Walker discusses part of the premise and background for his upcoming thriller Rubicon.)
My parents grew up in a very different world than I did. My son and my daughter have grown up in a world much different and much more frightening than the one I grew up in. as well. The small towns in West Virginia where my parents lived had one telephone and it was located at the coal company general store. When you wanted to talk to someone you went to see them if they lived close by and you wrote them a letter if they didn’t. As a young man my father and his four brothers ate a breakfast every morning that was cooked on a stove heated with wood. His mother got up routinely at four AM to start a fire in the coal fireplace and to get a fire going in the stove so that coffee could be put on to percolate. The five brothers all went to school where first graders and twelfth graders were located in the same building, as was everyone in between. The bus stop was about three miles from their house, and while, no, it was not uphill both ways as the tired old adage goes, it was a long walk both to and from the spot to catch the bus for the thirty minute ride to the schoolhouse.
My father fought in World War II. His favorite shows to watch on television now are those that talk about the battles and the strategies and personalities that shaped the outcome of that war. His concept of warfare is that of large bodies of infantry and armor, seizing and defending against the seizure of important cities, bridges, crossroads or terrain features. War meant carpet bombing of cities, massive artillery bombardment of targeted areas, lots of casualties and lots of displaced civilians with no place to go to escape the carnage.
That was less than seventy years ago. My father has difficulty understanding the concept of a tank that can drive fifty miles an hour and shoot on the move with a better than ninety per cent hit probability with each shot, much less a stealth aircraft that can fly halfway around the world and deliver as much destructive power as two hundred B-17’s did in 1944 with almost one hundred per cent certainty of the target being hit at the precise spot that it’s supposed to be and without anyone ever knowing the aircraft was there until things on the ground started blowing up. He also has difficulty comprehending why anyone would send a text message to another person when you can just dial them on the phone. My folks have call waiting but refuse to use it and they have had cordless phones provided to them but refuse to walk further from the base than the six feet or so that a cord would stretch. There are some things that technology just can’t overcome.
Since the end of World War II American strategic military doctrine has been to envision, fund, design, manufacture, deploy and utilize the most technologically sophisticated machines and weapons systems in the world. For more than fifty years that proved to be a sound strategy. The nations of the so-called Warsaw Pact may have had three times the number of fighter aircraft and five times the number of tanks as the NATO allies did, but when your aircraft and your tanks can destroy your enemy’s on a ration ten to one or twenty to one you don’t need massive numbers.
In 1990-1991 I was at Fort Benning, GA as a young infantry officer during the buildup to the Gulf War. One day on a land navigation exercise my radioman and I came across three young Rangers in the middle of nowhere on the sprawling base. One was seated on the ground with a second one kneeling at his side. The first soldier had a map spread across his lap, a pencil in his hand and an opaque plastic square in his mouth that had the very outer edges trimmed off with scissors. The second man was looking over his shoulder with a pencil and pad of paper in one hand and the lanyard of his compass in the other. Anyone reading this who has ever served in an infantry unit will instantly recognize the little object I’m referring to with the useless artillery mils trimmed off. The third soldier was standing about five feet away from them with a small black device up to his eyes. It looked similar to a pair of opera glasses or miniature binoculars with a short antenna coming out of the top. We approached the three soldiers and inquired what they were doing. They explained that the Ranger battalion that they were a part of (the 3rd) was testing a new piece of equipment utilizing something called Global Positioning Satellites, or GPS. They put this device up to their eyes, clicked a button and it would give them a six digit grid coordinate generated from the triangulation calculations of multiple military satellites in orbit. Six digits only got you to within one hundred meters of accuracy but it was still mind blowing. We couldn’t believe what we had seen. That was only twenty years or so ago. In that short period of time I went from never knowing of this technology’s existence to not being able to get more than twenty miles from my home without employing it.
There is no doubt that we are living in a time of unprecedented change. It’s not just the change itself but the pace of change. Our lives have all sped up without us even realizing it. Technological advancement is now coming so fast that we can’t keep up with it. The pace of technological change with regard to military and intelligence matters is also moving so quickly that nations can no longer keep pace with the rate of change. That was the initial backdrop for writing this book.
I’ve read several articles about The Singularity but learned most of the little I know from the Raymond Kurzweil book The Singularity is Near. You may have read it as well. The singularity is the as yet undefined point in time when artificial intelligence will become so robust that it will surpass the ability of human beings to keep pace with it. Although Kurzweil doesn’t spend a great deal of time ruminating on the potential negative consequences of the Singularity many view it as a Faustian scenario where the servant becomes the master. It is not my intention to make a statement one way or another on this question. I firmly believe that technological capability is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. It simply is. When put to use for good, technological innovation is wonderful. When used to harm innocent people it can be and often is nightmarish. It’s really more a question of who possesses the capability in question and what is done with it rather than the capability itself.
I set out to pose the question of what would happen if the world were to reach what I call the sW, the Singularity of Warfare. To the best of my knowledge this is not a term that presently exists outside of my imagination. Although the characters in the book discuss the sW as if it’s a known quantity I do not believe that it exists. The sW would be the point at which the pace of technological change outstrips various nation’s military ability to adopt it. There is an inherent dilemma in this technological rush; nations that are large and wealthy enough to invest billions of dollars into weapons of war and espionage are usually too big to effectively implement that technology quickly enough to employ it in a meaningful way. For example, a few years ago the Army decided to replace its aging but effective self-propelled artillery piece, the Paladin, with a new all-weather, all-terrain model known as the Crusader. After spending several billion dollars on the project the Army realized that advances in artillery technology (not a field exactly known for high-tech advancement) would make the Crusader obsolete before it was ever fielded to the first unit. That project was then turned into the NLOS Cannon project. The NLOS took advantage of a better understanding of high-strength polymers to use a non-metallic but still very durable tread. It also utilizes advancements in alloy technology to provide a barrel that is steel alloy blend that strips hundreds of pounds from the weight of the overall platform. Advancements in the speed with which mathematical calculations can be made by the units’ CPU combined with laser precision-milled parts allow for a reliable automatic loading system which can fire projectiles into the air in rapid succession at varying angles so that they impact at precisely the same time on their targets.
Between the active duty military and the National Guard there are somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred Paladins in existence right now that would need to be replaced. By the time that the project moves from design to full implementation more than ten years will have passed. Just as it did with the Crusader system, this NLOS Cannon will be rendered obsolete by a lighter, faster, more fuel-efficient and more lethal model before it’s ever fielded. In this example I’ve used a relatively low-tech vehicle (literally, a vehicle) to illustrate the point. This scenario is magnified exponentially when you begin to discuss high-tech items such as fighter aircraft, drones, satellites and surveillance systems.
The flip side of the discussion is that a numerically small military force like that of South Africa, Denmark or New Zealand wouldn’t face the troubles associated with replacing large numbers of equipment. They don’t have large numbers of equipment. They would be able to field and use such advanced equipment in a relatively short period of time. However, they don’t possess the billions of dollars needed to research, test and develop super high-tech weaponry on their own. They can’t be players in that game. That dilemma really gave me the overall premise for the book. The only groups that could capitalize and stay abreast of this surge in technological advancement would be a very small but very highly trained and specialized group that was also very well funded. It wouldn’t matter to a great degree what nation they came from, only that they had the available funding and the desire to participate. That allowed me to create the fictional Doctrine of Oligarchical Warfare, whereby a small group like the one described above could possess the power and ability to project it like a nation-state. The Doctrine of Oligarchical Warfare gets its name from the fictional book by Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell’s 1984, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. In fact, you’ll find many references to 1984 sprinkled throughout the book. In my opinion it’s one of the greatest works of literature ever written. In the book the group is a privately funded operation in some regards not unlike many contract security providers that exist today.
As is pointed out in the book, this doctrine is not something on the horizon of possibility. Although the written doctrine is a creation of my imagination it is quite real. From October 2001 until December 2001, less than one hundred members of the US Army Special Forces, supported from a relatively small number of aircraft from the Navy and the Air Force, were able to decimate the Taliban in Afghanistan militarily and destabilize them politically. Yes, they had help from the Northern Alliance, but those militias had fought each other with neither possessing the ability to completely destroy the other for decades. With a handful of men, they accomplished in two months what more than one hundred thousand Soviet soldiers couldn’t accomplish in ten years.
If a small group can project military power like a nation-state, what would happen if they were empowered with access to the greatest collection of electronic intelligence and data-mining in the world? They would then have the ability to use their strike prowess to act preemptively against any group or country that was perceived to be a threat, sort of an inter-national Minority Report. Many policy analysts feel that this is realistically the only way that terrorism can truly be defeated. The intelligence gathering is used to find and identify anyone and anything that might be involved in the proliferation of terrorism; training camps, universities, madrases, military facilities, mosques, charitable groups, banks, weapons dealers, scientists and even government heads of state and high ranking officials themselves. Once the players can be identified, direct action can be taken and people or groups who are believed to have even the ability to act contrary to another nation or groups interests or who are suspected of having ill motive toward that country are eliminated before they can develop into a full fledged threat. While the technological creations described in this book are figments of my imagination, the technology behind each of them is very, very real. For the most part, they could be employed without leaving any discernible trace of who or what government had used them. Of course, in our scenario no government actually is involved. The Rubicon team, functioning much like a terrorist cell themselves would, isn’t beholden to any one nation for its operating base and doesn’t rely on any nation’s air force for transport. The Rubicon operatives move about within the framework of international corporate travel or they simply hide in plain sight by flying commercially like everyone else, including terrorists. As is the case with real-world espionage and with terrorists sometimes as well, they often hide behind front organizations or develop covers that can withstand fairly tight scrutiny. Is adopting the same tactics that terrorists use to defeat terrorists playing by the rules? If one side in a conflict refuses to limit itself to any rules of conduct, does the other side in that conflict have any obligation to restrain itself? By resorting to the tactics of your enemy do you then become your enemy? These are tough questions.
The premise of the book is to explore the perils of runaway technological advancement, and to explore what might happen if the desire to employ this technological advancement faster than your enemies can could allow a small group of highly trained and well-funded operators to become a de facto world power. The pace of technological change is now so swift that there are only a handful of major players in the game. None of these player nations involved can afford to hold back, or even to stop and examine what kind of Pandora’s Box they may be opening by forging ahead with unbridled military application of technology. This also allowed me to write about how the actions of a handful of pivotal men throughout the last several decades set the stage for a race to acquire this technological superiority that could instantly make any nation an elite power in the world.
Stephen Walker writes blog articles on a wide range of topics. He is a novelist and short story fiction writer who writes for the Erudite Aardvark and other online concerns. He can be reached at stephen.walker@eruditeaardvark.com.
This article is the intellectual property of The Erudite Aardvark, which reserves all rights to the content. It may not be copied or re-transmitted in any fashion without the express, written permission of the owner.
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