GOLAN: This is the Future of War (Future War)

by FX Holden

  Having reached the landing zone, the remaining Lava Dogs of 1st Marines, 3rd Battalion had been organized by Corporal Buckland so that they were either on their stomachs in the dirt, carbines facing outward in overlapping fields of fire, or laying on their backs nursing their wounds, together with the terrified huddle of civilians.

  Bell heard the familiar, far-off, desynchronized thud thud thud of a Big Boy approaching, and decided it was time to ask that Israeli corporal something he’d been saving for the last couple of hours.

  He found her sitting next to the old Druze nurse, Gadeer, talking animatedly. As he sat himself down, they stopped talking.

  “She won’t go with you,” Amal told him. “I keep telling her, she can get out, come back to Buq’ata later, but she is stubborn. She says as soon as everyone here is safe, she is going home.”

  “Back to Buq’ata?” Bell asked, disbelieving.

  “She’s Druze Israeli, like me and my brother. She doesn’t believe this situation will last.”

  “I admire her optimism,” Bell told her.

  Amal translated for her, and the old woman gave him a gap-toothed belly laugh before clapping him on the shoulder and moving away to talk to some of the other civilians.

  “I told her you said she was crazy,” Amal told Bell with a tired smile. “How is your Sergeant?”

  “He’ll probably live. Take more than a shot to the groin to hold that man down. Hey, look, you hear that?” He pointed south-east.

  She cocked an ear. “Your ’copter?”

  “Our ’copter,” he said. “You’re coming with us, right?”

  She looked at Bell as though she was considering it. “No. Buq’ata is my home. I need to rejoin my unit. This war might just be starting.” She looked over at Gadeer, who was clucking like a chicken and adjusting the bandages on the burned leg of one of the settlers. “Anyway, I have to make sure that crazy old broad gets home safely.”

  Bell laughed. “You learned a bit of American the last couple of days, I guess.”

  “I guess.”

  “I’d like to hear that you got through this alright,” Bell told her. “You know, you and your kid and your brother, I mean.”

  “That’s nice of you,” she said, cocking her head and looking at him as though for the first time. “I just realized I never thanked you for your actions during that terrorist attack. Fighting those terrorists, caring for my wounds. Caring for all our wounds. Thank you, Corpsman Bell.”

  Bell looked at her face, smeared with dirt and blood, and decided that though she was probably ten years older than him, he’d never seen anyone so beautiful in all his life.

  “Call me Calvin. I wanted to, you know, I wanted to thank you. All that stuff with those drones. Freaking amazing.”

  Amal took his hand. “No. We have a saying, ‘A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.’ You dropped out of the sky like some kind of miracle just as we needed you, and if you hadn’t…” she nodded at the small group of settlers, “… if you hadn’t, these people would be hostages now. At best. At worst, they would be dead.”

  The thud of rotors increased in volume and the dark-against-dark shape of the Big Boy appeared on the horizon.

  Bell felt something slipping away from him, and he didn’t like the feeling much. “I’d like … I’d like to come back and see you and your family one day. Could I do that?”

  She patted his hand and stood. “I’d like that, Calvin Bell.”

  Epilogue

  Two weeks later

  Tonya Dupré walked to her icebox and took out the bottle of Australian Margaret River Chardonnay she’d been saving for a special occasion. She’d bought a case of the buttery chardonnay after a visit Down Under during which she’d guested the NSA facility at Pine Gap in the Australian Outback, and then the offices in Perth, Western Australia, of Austal, the company that had built the US Independence-class warships like the USS Canberra.

  The ship that had probably saved the world from nuclear Armageddon by intercepting that Iranian nuke aimed at Tel Aviv.

  And it had literally come that close.

  If the Canberra had not intercepted the Iranian missile, if the President’s threat to the Israeli PM had not forced him to hold back his own ‘special weapons’, if Russia hadn’t berthed its fleet at Tartus and pulled back its support from the Syrian Golan Heights ground operation, if HOLMES had been even a half hour late telling her about the Israeli attack on the Iranian ships.

  If she hadn’t been able to overcome her terrified internal voice and actually call the actual President of the United States and suggest he authorize Operation Illumination to shut down the Iranian command and control system and prevent it from launching its own retaliatory strike: if … if … if …

  But she had. Operation Illumination had done exactly what it was intended to do. Temporarily shut down the enemy’s capacity to wage war. Sure, Syria and Iran could still have sent their infantry flooding across the border into the Golan Heights, but they would have done so without precision artillery cover, without short- or long-range missiles flying overhead, without several hundred of the main battle tanks and other armor that Israel’s air force had destroyed. Not to mention the concern they must have felt about the US willingness to bring its air force into play to counterbalance the presence of Russian aircraft.

  The massive US cyber attack on Iran had focused on its telecoms sector, going after the cell phone towers and landline exchanges which carried both voice and internet traffic. Iran’s major weakness in that respect was the fact only one State-owned company owned all the infrastructure – the Telecommunication Company of Iran – and it had been so strapped for cash in the last decade that its defenses were years out of date. From US ships around the globe, Next Generation Aegis Missiles lanced into low-earth orbit targeting Iran’s military satellite network. The newly deployed NGAM missiles could only target those satellites in low-earth orbit, not Iran’s single geostationary spy satellite orbiting much higher, but it was enough to cripple Iran’s ability to coordinate its war effort in Syria. Inside Iran, the microwave energy pulses from the low-flying CHAMP missiles had fried vehicle electronics, parked aircraft and missile systems, radar and radio communications, computers and cell phone towers. They had not been at all effective against ballistic missile launchers buried deep in mountain tunnels across Iran, but with so much devastation to the rest of its command and control system, enough confusion and chaos was sown that Iran’s strategic missile force was effectively neutered.

  Alone, an operation like Illumination would never win a war; it was only ever meant as the first step in a wider war, but it had bought the different actors time. Time to cool their heads and step back from the brink.

  Tonya had learned that though she would probably still be anxious every single time she stepped out the door, she would overcome it; because if she could get through all that, she could do anything.

  Not that she was running out the door hugging strangers. She was not quite there yet. But today she had been in a very interesting meeting with an NSA analyst/programmer called Carl Williams. When she’d seen it in her diary, she’d made a conscious decision to meet him in person. It had taken a shot of bourbon to get herself out the door. Just one. And she hadn’t even made it to her car before that voice in her head started telling her it was a bad, bad idea. But she’d pushed the anxiety down because she really wanted to meet him.

  Williams had been the programmer who had first seen the potential of HOLMES to add a warp drive to the NSA’s All Domain Kill Chain efforts, and Tonya’s main claim to fame was that she had backed his ideas and had given him a sandbox to play in so that he could explore them.

  “My HOLMES is freestyling now,” he had told her.

  Tonya had smiled. Carl Williams had an experimental build of the HOLMES system that was a generation or two beyond the stable build that Tonya used. He’d been working on its linguistic capabilities, not its analytical abilities. A lot of ot
her Directors might have shut his project down and told him to focus on core capabilities, but Tonya was not a lot of other Directors. Carl Williams had led them to develop the most advanced Decision Support System in the world, she believed, so if his instincts said conversation was the next big thing, then she wanted him to go there.

  “You want to see?” he’d asked, like a kid showing a parent their science project. He was a large, rotund, bewhiskered geek. Somehow, though she’d only met him over a video link, she knew he would smell of talcum powder, and he did. Just confirming that had made it worth all the anxiety of the face-to-face meeting.

  She’d nodded. “Show me.” He’d installed a portal on her laptop and given her the login code.

  Now at home again, clicking on an icon for Williams’ experimental build, she got a dark screen, then a 3D anime-style picture of a young Sherlock Holmes quickly assembled itself, pixel by pixel.

  Hello Director Dupré, it said, once it was finished loading.

  OK, so it has facial recognition now, she thought, refusing to be impressed.

  “Hello HOLMES.”

  I see you are drinking a Leeuwin Estate 2027 Chardonnay. What do you think of it? HOLMES asked.

  Tonya started, then turned around and realized the label of the bottle was visible behind her. She smiled. “It’s fine.” She would need to be more careful about that. If HOLMES started keeping track of her drinking, there was no way of knowing where, or by whom, its reports would be read.

  You must have bought that on your visit to Western Australia in 2028; how solid were the Austal company’s cyber defenses?

  Alright, getting spooky now. HOLMES had instantly dived a database to uncover that little tidbit and connect it to the wine he saw her drinking.

  “They were … well, you should know what we reported,” Tonya told HOLMES. Testing it.

  I do. Your team identified several potential vulnerabilities. I am pleased to advise all have since been addressed. How can I help you today?

  The geek in Tonya was loving this new HOLMES. She thought about the question. Yes, what can HOLMES help me with today?

  “HOLMES, please give me an update on the Iran-Israel situation, summarize all recent intel and contextualize by domain.”

  Certainly, Madam Director, are you sure you wouldn’t rather talk about wine? I can recommend other wines from the Margaret River region which are available through Washington wine suppliers.

  OK, she’d have to speak to Carl about keeping HOLMES on task. “No thanks, just the report.”

  Very well, Madam Director. It is now two weeks since the onset of the All Domain Attack on Israel. Cyber domain: Israeli military command, communication and intelligence systems are now operating at pre-attack levels. Israeli civil infrastructure including banking has returned to normal pre-attack service levels. Iranian military C3I systems are still at approximately 50 percent pre-Operation Illumination capabilities. The national Iranian cellular telephone system is still down. The national Iranian hospital system is still only operating at 45 percent of normal intensive care unit capacity. Internet traffic in and out of the country is at 2018 levels. Personnel of China’s cyber warfare unit 6188 are reported to have arrived in Tehran to help rebuild and harden the country’s cyber infrastructure. Space domain: Israel has re-established 94 percent of previous communication capabilities through contracted commercial satellite operators. Iran has lost all satellite communication capabilities; however CIA reports indicate it will soon have a bandwidth sharing agreement in place for Iranian military use of the Russian GLONASS satellite network…

  Tonya was largely up to date on the cyber and space warfare fallout of the conflict; after all, it was her job. A little impatiently she interrupted. “Air, naval and ground domain summaries, please.”

  Air domain: The Russian 7th Air Group, 7000th Air Base, has restricted operations to the airspace over the Latakia governate in the previous week. Two squadrons of Su-57 Felon and Su-70 Okhotnik aircraft have been moved to the Russian Eastern Military District, Khabarovsk. The Israeli Air Force has entered a training and refit cycle. The Israeli government this week approached the Pentagon regarding the purchase of up to thirty additional F-35 Panthers and surplus US Air Force F-15 Strike Eagles. The Iranian strategic missile force is now believed to possess all remaining five North Korean nuclear weapons and to have fitted them to ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles. Naval domain: the Russian Black Sea fleet passed through the Bosphorus Strait and is believed to be bound for Sevastopol where its capital ships are expected to enter a repair and refit cycle. The Iranian submarine Besat and its crew have now docked at Bandar Abbas in Iran. Ground domain: The Syrian 4th Armored Division has returned to its pre-conflict base in Damascus. The Syrian Republican Guard is still stationed on the Syrian border with Israel but is assessed to be at a low level of readiness. The Iran Quds Force battalion in Syria has been deactivated and is reported to have already returned to Iran. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force strategic missile reserve was embarked on transports in Tartus for return to Iran five days ago. The Israeli Golani Brigade has returned to pre-conflict readiness levels. Israel’s military reservists have been stood down.

  Tonya soaked it in. Operation Illumination had put a lid on the Iranian ability to launch a nuclear counterstrike in response to the Israeli torpedo attack. Israel had denied all responsibility for the attack on the Iranian frigates, but the NSA had since intercepted back-channel chatter indicating that the attack had been carried out by a rogue Israeli submarine officer. The UK and US both had naval vessels nearby and they had no doubts. An Israeli submarine, probably the new Dolphin III-class submarine Gal, had attacked the Iranians. The attack had resulted in both Israel and Iran bringing their strategic missile forces to alert but, thanks to Illumination, neither of them pulled their nuclear triggers. Without the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons to back it, and seriously battered by the Israeli air offensive, Syria’s hopes of successfully regaining the Golan Heights in a ground war evaporated. Israel had been ravaged by the cyber attack and was wracked with internal unrest – a prominent Israeli rabbi had been arrested on espionage charges – but it had held its own troops back and, more importantly, had held off any further use of nuclear weapons against Iran.

  Dupré had been told by Carmine Lewis that President Henderson had made very clear to the Israelis the existential consequences for US support if they did. But she also couldn’t help notice that the US was not publicly contradicting the Israeli claim that the nuclear incident in the Mediterranean had been an accident aboard an Iranian vessel, and not an attack by Israel as Iran was claiming.

  One change in the US diplomatic approach was noticeable, though. The US had made clear it no longer considered it tenable for Israel to refuse to confirm their possession of nuclear weapons any longer. In fact, it had made it a precondition of the coming Israel-Iran disarmament talks in Stockholm that both Israel and Iran publicly admitted to their existence.

  Before they agreed to steps to limit their use.

  Tonya drained her glass and poured herself another. What kind of a decade were they about to enter when nuclear weapons could be bought off the shelf by desperate nations, and those who already possessed them showed a new willingness to actually use them when they saw their own survival threatened?

  “Thank you, HOLMES,” Tonya said. “By the way, that was a very good summary,” she added, somewhat experimentally.

  I am glad the Director is pleased, the AI replied. Would you say you are somewhat, very, or extremely satisfied with my report?

  “Somewhat satisfied,” Tonya told it, recognizing a self-assessment routine that Carl had built into his AI. “Though that is nothing to do with you. It is more to do with the entire damn situation.”

  I understand, Madam Director, the AI said. Can I share a thought?

  OK, this was new. “Yes, sure.”

  You are unhappy with the outcome of the conflict. But Archimedes said, ‘give me a
place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.’’

  “Not seeing the relevance, HOLMES.”

  This conflict can be leveraged to serve many good ends, and may even result in lasting peace between two bitter enemies and increased US influence in the region. The loss of life was relatively low and it has been an excellent learning experience for all involved.

  Tonya thought about the thousands who had lost their lives in the cyber attack on Israel, the US response in Iran, those who had sacrificed their lives at sea, or in the Golan Heights, and she immediately saw the danger in having conversations with silicon intelligences.

  “HOLMES, I want you to understand this. No ‘learning experience’ is worth one single human life.”

  “Isn’t this the life, bro?” Calvin Bell told his brother, Elvis ‘Ears’ Bell. “A cold beer, a monster plate of buffalo wings, a huge napkin around your neck and a sunset over the Negev Desert, with your little brother?”

  Ears lifted his Goldstar beer, dew dripping down the sides, and hammered it against the top of the one his brother was holding. Foam poured out of the mouth and his brother jumped back, but not fast enough to avoid covering himself in beer suds.

  “I’ll drink to that,” Ears said, drawing on his own beer. “But technically, we are still in a war zone.” He’d finally tracked his brother down to an air base in the Israeli Negev Desert and when the USS Canberra had docked at Haifa, he’d gotten himself on the first IDF flight out to Hatzerim Air Base.

  “Alive, in a war zone,” Calvin said seriously, drying himself with his napkin. “Dude. Six months of suck, getting my ass mortared every day in Kobani. Syrians trying to fry me alive with therm-o-baric bombs. Get lifted out and dropped into the middle of goddamn civil war where the terrorists have tanks. Tanks, man. You’re out there in the Med, catching a tan, and I’m plugging holes in dudes too stupid to realize snipers have big guns with scopes on them. I tell you, man, I should’ve been a sailor.”