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

by FX Holden

  But that was the price that had to be paid to recover the remaining ‘special weapons’ in the torpedo tubes of the INS Gal.

  And the bodies of First Officer Ehud Mofaz and Captain Binyamin Ben-Zvi. Not to mention the ‘black box’ data from Gal’s servers that might explain what in the screaming hell had happened out there in the Aegean Sea.

  Another person was wondering exactly what had happened over there, all those weeks ago. Seven-year-old Afra Delavari held her grandmother’s hand tightly as they stood in front of the body draped in a white cloth outside the mosque. Beside her were her six brothers and sisters, and in front of them were young soldiers with green, white and red sashes across their uniforms, green caps and white gloves. One soldier was holding a large photograph of her papa in a picture frame.

  Six of the soldiers had carried her papa’s body out of the mosque and placed it on a table covered in a blue velvet cloth. Now, they stepped aside and the man with the photograph placed it at the end. Someone was holding a speech. Afra had asked her grandmother if she could see her papa and help wash him, but she had been told that military funerals weren’t like that. She’d wanted to stand with their mother, not their grandmother, but her mother had to stand together with some Army officers and there was no place for children there.

  They laid her father’s medals on top of the white cloth, along with his rifle. Then six soldiers lifted up the body, and six more soldiers with their rifles held up straight stood beside them. Two more soldiers carried a big wreath of white roses higher than themselves. Imams in dark robes led the way, with the men from their family next, followed by Afra and her grandmother and sisters, her mother and her father’s Army friends, and a lot of people she didn’t know following behind or standing on the side of the road.

  At the cemetery the hole was already dug, and the soldiers put her father’s body in it and filled in the hole with a handful of dirt each. They put the wreath on a stand beside it. But they took his hat and medals and gave them to her grandmother. There were some more soldiers there with guns, but they were dressed in green like her father’s normal uniform. There were ten of them. They stood behind the crowd, but then someone called out to them and everyone turned around and they pointed their guns in the air and fired them all at the same time.

  Afra hated the sound and put her hands over her ears, but they only did it once.

  When the soldiers were finished, other people came and started putting white flowers on the grave until there were so many flowers you couldn’t see the grave anymore. Her grandmother never let go of her hand. She didn’t look sad. She looked angry.

  When it was all over people stood around talking, or started walking back to the mosque, and Afra was looking for her mother when a big man with a wide belly in one of the green uniforms with the gold tassels and a lot of buttons came over to Afra and her grandmother.

  “The medals, may I?” he asked.

  Her grandmother held out the box full of her father’s medals and he picked out one. Then he knelt down in front of Afra.

  “You see this medal?” he asked her. He laid it across his palm. It had three gold palm leaves over a crest, and a green and red ribbon. “This is the Fath Medal. Usually it is only awarded to the bravest military commanders, but it has been awarded to your father. Do you know what he did?”

  Afra looked up at her grandmother, who was just looking straight ahead, so she shook her head.

  The man started to pin the medal on Afra’s dress. “Your father helped rescue fifty civilians that the Americans had taken prisoner. They were keeping them in a house in a country called Syria and your papa, with just his rifle, helped those people escape. This medal recognizes the fact he did many such brave things. Many.”

  Afra nodded. That sounded like her father.

  He finished fixing the medal to her dress and patted it gently. “Your father talked about you often, all you children.” The man tapped her heart. “And I know he missed you every day he was away. He was on his way home when the Americans shot him. They are bad, bad soldiers, the Americans.”

  Afra frowned at him. “Father used to say there were no bad soldiers, just bad colonels.”

  The man coughed and stood up, bowing slightly to her grandmother. “Tasliat arz mikonam,” he said, offering her condolences. He turned and walked away, hands behind his back.

  Afra saw her grandmother smile for the first time that day. “Moteshakeram, Colonel.”

  Author Notes

  One of the aims of the Future War series is to show future wars and conflicts from the points of view of the soldiers, sailors and airmen who will fight them – on all sides of a conflict. Nations will disagree, and the disagreements between the nations in this novel can in some cases be traced back a thousand years.

  I believe this is a conflict waiting to happen, and it is not a question of if, but when. I have tried not to take sides, but rather let the ebb and flow of the events – which often take a life of their own while being written – come to a natural, unforced conclusion. Any writer of course brings their conscious and unconscious bias to their work and if yours differs from mine, then I hope we can agree to disagree. You are welcome to open a debate on my FB author page!

  In each Future War novel I focus on the possible application of one or more emerging military technologies. In GOLAN, that focus is primarily on the battlefield application of small armed drones. These are drones usually weighing under 20lb. or 10kg which can be carried by infantry squads, deployed from manned or unmanned ground vehicles, and even printed on demand using parts made by 3D printers.

  If you need an example of how advanced this technology is, and where it is going, think about this: as I was writing GOLAN, NASA flew a tiny unmanned drone … on Mars!

  Israel is a world leader in the research and development of this technology. Already in the Israeli inventory now, or in advanced stages of development, are: reconnaissance micro drones the size of large insects; high-level reconnaissance drones almost invisible to radar and the naked eye and able to loiter over targets for hours; combat drones which can be launched by infantry to attack targets inside buildings or hiding behind cover, with anti-personnel or anti-armor grenades; unmanned remotely operated weapons systems; aerial drones which can be used to detect mines, or even to lay mines. At a larger scale are unmanned aerial vehicles – both armed and unarmed – and unmanned ground vehicles.

  Another application many military writers explore is the potential of AI to support both tactical and strategic decision making. In GOLAN I took that one further, asking myself what would happen if a nation combined AI with an autonomous underwater vehicle and – not least of all – atomic weapons. AI breakthroughs will offer the opportunity for the makers of naval vessels to reduce, or even eliminate, human crews on maritime platforms. In GOLAN I chose a model by which a nuclear-armed vessel was still crewed by officers who had the ultimate responsibility for using nuclear weapons – their commands cannot be overridden by the AI. But with the human crew much reduced in size, I wanted to explore how decisions between a limited number of individuals, prompted by an AI, might play out.

  Finally, in GOLAN I explore the idea of an All Domain Kill Chain – a military strike which utilizes data from space, air forces, ground radars, ground and naval forces – to quickly and effectively destroy a target. Also taking that to its ultimate end, the All Domain Attack, which is how major wars in the future will be fought. A surprise attack – the future equivalent of a Pearl Harbor – can be executed with almost complete anonymity in the cyber and space domains. Economies can be crippled, and communications catastrophically disrupted, by nation-states hiding in the shadows. How then should a nation respond to such an attack? Against whom should they direct their retaliation?

  Imagine a Pearl Harbor in which the US could not prove it was Japan who had attacked them. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the allies of the US declared war on Japan within days, sometimes within hours. But if the attacking aircraft had b
een invisible, if the damage caused had been entirely deniable, would the allies of the US have rallied around it so quickly and completely?

  Imagine now a Pearl Harbor where this invisible attacker went after Wall Street and the communications infrastructure of the USA first. Where the bombs they dropped didn’t hit battleships, but the economy, the internet, cellular, satellite and electricity networks, both military and civilian. Where kinetic air, sea and ground warfare was the second phase of the attack, not the first. How much pain would the US have been able or willing to suffer before it lashed out at its perceived adversary – with or without proof?

  Now add nuclear weapons into that mix and imagine that one adversary had either a complete or partial nuclear weapons advantage over the other.

  If you see parallels between events in GOLAN and the Cuban Missile Crisis, they are deliberate, right down to the element of ‘fog of war’ President Kennedy complains about in the opening quote. Oliver Henderson’s address to the nation in GOLAN was modeled on President Kennedy’s address at the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But where President Kennedy managed a crisis that stretched over nearly two weeks, modern warfighting, intelligence gathering and dissemination, and speed of communications, will not give our future State leaders the same luxury. Hence the All Domain Attack described in GOLAN takes place over just four days.

  Students of the Cuban Missile Crisis may also detect echoes of that conflict in the argument between Admiral Daei and Hossein Rostami on the bridge of the Sinjan. It mirrors a similar argument with a different outcome that took place on a Russian nuclear-armed submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Submarines, even today, are particularly vulnerable to lapses in communication. In that case in 1962, thankfully, the Russian flotilla commander Vasily Arkhipov prevailed in preventing the rattled, out-of-touch captain of submarine B-59 from launching a nuclear torpedo at a United States carrier task force – an attack which almost certainly would have triggered a nuclear war between Russia and the USA. It is not for nothing Arkhipov is dubbed by many ‘the man who saved the world’. In GOLAN, I chose to show how such an argument could easily have gone the other way.

  In military matters, Israel rarely puts international relations above its own military priorities. In GOLAN Israel does not wait for world opinion to gel, or the full intelligence picture to emerge, before it responds to the first phase All Domain cyber and space attack being waged against it, by counterattacking those it believes responsible. GOLAN also highlights how questionably effective such a kinetic counterattack is. Israel knows that both Iran and Russia are behind the cyber attack on it and it retaliates in a way it has done many times before – with its Air Force, against ground targets in Iran and Syria, and against Russian aircraft. But none of this actually alleviates the cyber attack on its infrastructure and Israel is forced to agree to Iran’s proposals for arms control negotiations as the only avenue it has to halt the continuing attack on its economic and technical infrastructure.

  I hope as the reader, similar to myself as the author, you found it was very hard to pull a winner or a loser out of this conflict. In GOLAN, Israel’s economy is brought to its knees briefly, at huge cost, and its Air Force is seriously attrited as it faces the veteran pilots of a superpower for the first time in its history. But it survives. Syria’s attempt to regain the Golan Heights stalls before it can even begin due to the Israeli air onslaught and the collapse of its atomic alliance, which can be considered an Israeli win. Committing very limited forces, Russia cements its bond with key allies in the Middle East. Its pilots gain valuable experience but it also suffers significant losses and is relegated to a back seat diplomatically. Iran gains agreement regarding arms control negotiations, but at the cost of three of its most advanced naval platforms, not to mention significant damage from Israeli air strikes and the US cyber and EMP attack, Operation Illumination.

  I don’t much like quoting failed leaders, but the thoughts of British pre-war PM Neville Chamberlain are apt here: In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.

  FX Holden

  Copenhagen, June 2021

  PS: Military buffs may recognize the words quoted by the child Afra in the epilogue: ‘there are no bad soldiers, only bad colonels’. For those who don’t, the original quote was attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Preview: Archipelago

  Featuring real-world advanced prototype technologies, with new and pre-loved characters, the next volume of the Future War series will take readers into a future war of an entirely different kind. The war against piracy.

  Hong Kong Harbor, February, 2035

  Karen O’Hare had never been aboard a superyacht. In fact, now she thought of it, she’d never been aboard a yacht of any kind. She’d sailed on a destroyer – not her own choice – and piloted an unmanned submarine while sitting comfortably ashore, but that was the closest she’d ever wanted to come to actually being a sailor.

  She was perfectly at ease pushing a stealth fighter through the sky at Mach 2.5 with a Russian K-77M missile on her tail, but put her on a deck at sea with nothing but the ocean deep and sharks and box jellyfish and stingrays and giant octopuses around her … no thank you. Sure, it might have something to do with the fact Karen ‘Bunny’ O’Hare didn’t have gills or webbed feet and couldn’t swim to save her own life, but she didn’t have feathers either and she wasn’t afraid of flying.

  “So how big is that thing?” Bunny asked the water limousine driver who had picked her up at 9 p.m. from a wharf near the ferry terminal and driven her to Repulse Bay on the other side of Hong Kong Island.

  The ship that lay dead ahead of them had five decks that Bunny could see above the water, and probably two or three below. At the rear was a dock for a smaller boat that anyone else would probably call a luxury yacht in itself. Even sitting still, the behemoth looked fast.

  “The Sea Sirene?” the limo driver replied, almost dismissively. “It is 62 meters long and 12 across the beam. Draft three and a half. Tonnage, about 1,280.”

  “Is it as sexy on the inside as it is on the outside?”

  The man shrugged. “I’ve never been aboard it.”

  “Well, give me your cell number, I’ll send you pictures of me at the swim-up bar with a daiquiri.”

  “I doubt that,” he said with a smile. “I’m not taking you to the Sirene. Mr. Sorensen’s new yacht is behind it.”

  By ‘behind it’ Bunny took him to mean ‘smaller than’. Because as they approached the Sea Sirene, Bunny couldn’t see any other ship.

  As they swung around the bow of the superyacht she got her first glimpse of the ship hiding behind it. It had only four decks above the water, which explained why it wasn’t visible, but what it lacked in height it made up for in length. The area in front of the low, curved superstructure was at least two hundred feet long, and it had a newly arrived tilt-rotor chopper parked on it, the blades still turning.

  “The White Star Warrior,” the man said, putting on his best tour guide voice. “A 120-meter aluminum and titanium trimaran hull, rotating master stateroom, indoor and outdoor dining for up to 30 guests, indoor cinema, gym and spa, jacuzzi and a 25-meter lap pool.”

  “What, no roulette table?”

  He ignored her. “The entire ship is designed for a zero carbon footprint. The 70,000-kilowatt engines…”

  “Kilowatts, that’s like…”

  “94,000 horsepower.”

  “Right.”

  “The engines are powered by hydrogen fuel distilled from seawater and can drive her at up to 20 knots…”

  “I fly jets,” Bunny told him. “So 20 knots is kinda … not fast.”

  “Cruising.”

  “Ah.”

  “And 40 knots when aquaplaning.”

  Bunny turned her face away. “Still not fast,” she said to herself, refusing to be impressed. But if an alien ship landed on earth and floated on the water, she was pretty sure the White Star Warrior is what it would l
ook like.

  Bunny was more interested in the tilt-rotor. For a start, it had wings. Secondly, it had two turboprop engines turning rotors at the end of the wings. And lastly, it had two turbofan jet engines nestled between V-shaped tail fins. But it disappeared from view as the limo driver swung his boat around to the back of the ship where there was a water-level fantail landing dock and two sailors – a man and a woman – in cream t-shirts, pants and spotless cream shoes to help her out.

  There was also a woman in a red silk lounge suit with cream blouse, leaning up against a bulkhead by a door and watching O’Hare negotiate the transfer with amusement. She was tall, lithe, with long raven-black hair. Not exactly beautiful. Handsome was the word you’d probably use if describing how people look was your thing. Bunny preferred to judge people by how they handled themselves, by their range of creative swear words, and the variety and location of their tattoos and/or piercings.

  “Ok, I got it,” Bunny said, waving away one of the sailors. The tall woman kept her hands in her pockets and detached herself from the wall with a shrug of her shoulders, stepping down to greet O’Hare.

  “Ms. O’Hare, I am Roberta D’Antonia, would you like to come with me?” Italian accent. Of course she had an Italian accent. It was going to be either that, or French.

  She led the way, taking the steps up to the flight deck two at a time despite the three-inch heels she was wearing. They passed one deck level on the way up, but didn’t stop.