by Andrew Watts
The room was filled with curious men and women from a variety of places. Some wore power suits. Some had crew cuts and wore military fatigues. Still others had on skinny jeans with fitted tees. David gathered from several informal introductions that their backgrounds were as diverse as their looks suggested. There were computer programmers and scientists, engineers and psychologists, military officers and policy analysts. All were well educated and incredibly bright. David counted twenty of them in all. Like Henry and Bill, each had been told that their purpose there had something to do with a very important national security project. But that was all they had been told before flying to the island. It seemed that Tom was the one recruiter who had spilled the beans. David’s friends from his plane had already started to spread the word that this was about China, creating quite a bit of excitement.
The chatter hushed as a tall and very attractive Asian woman walked to the center of the classroom’s lowered stage. She wore black slacks and a sleeveless silk shirt. She looked out at the members of the classroom and they looked back at her, silenced.
She said, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Red Cell. There are two reasons that you are here. First, to piece together our collective knowledge so we better understand what we now know to be true about a future Chinese attack on the United States.”
The statement drew a mix of shock and disbelief. A few shouted questions but the woman held out her hands for silence.
She continued, “I know this is hard to believe for most of you. But I assure you it is real. I ask that you hold all of your questions until the end. I believe I will cover a lot of them right now, and we will be providing a lot of amplifying details into the night. But I say again, we have reason to believe that China is planning to attack the United States in some type of large-scale military operation within the next 12 to 18 months.”
Shouts erupted from the room and, again, the woman held out her palms until people quieted down. David found her calm and confidence remarkable. “We’ll answer all questions in due time. The second reason you are all here is to actually develop plans for China to attack the United States. I know this sounds ludicrous at first, but hear me out. That is the main objective of a Red Cell. Because we don’t know exactly what the enemy will do, we want to be prepared for what they could do. Over the next three weeks, you will have no communication with the outside world. You will work from early in the morning until late at night. And it will be crucially important work.”
She walked off the stage as she spoke. She stepped up the tiered levels of the classroom, careful to make eye contact with everyone in the room.
“We want you to collaborate and innovate. Do what you do best—find solutions to challenging problems. Each of you has been chosen because you are one of the top minds in your field. This was a highly selective program. You each have been handpicked for a certain relevant skill set. You should be proud of the service that you will perform for your country, although it will not be something that you can ever put on a resume.”
David watched as she marched back down the stairs and stood on the lower stage. She had perfect posture, tanned skin, and great muscle tone. She was very tall. He figured she must be five foot eleven. And she spoke with a captivating charisma that made it hard to take his eyes off her.
“Many of you have top secret clearances with our government or the military prior to arriving. Those of you that did not have been rushed an interim clearance. Normally that can take a year or more. But this was an exceptional case...and we’ve done our homework. Everyone has been quickly and fully vetted. When I’m done here, you will all file in to the next room to sign some admin papers, including a non-disclosure agreement. Nothing that goes on here will ever be made public. These sessions are classified at the highest level.”
She stood completely still. Every pause seemed to signify the importance of what she was saying.
“Secrecy is not our only priority. We want the work here to be the very best quality. It must be. You have authority from the highest levels of our government to share any and all knowledge of your prior work experience in order to ensure that we take every possible consideration into account on this project. You will all be free to discuss anything with each other, regardless of classification level, to achieve our ultimate goal of protecting the United States.”
David noticed some of the people sitting in the seats around the classroom raise their heads a little higher. They were proud to be chosen for something that was deemed so important. A few squirmed at the idea of sharing classified information in an unfamiliar setting.
“My name,” the woman said, “is Lena Chou. I am normally one of the CIA’s clandestine operations officers. Here on this island, however, I represent a joint task force that includes, among others, the NSA, CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, all branches of the military, and several other agencies...even DARPA. That’s right, the geeks that invented the Internet.”
Lena gave a bright smile that lit up the room. There were nervous chuckles in the audience.
“I will be the supervisor of this Red Cell for the next three weeks. I’ve done this twice before. In past Red Cells, we’ve used people like you from very creative and diverse fields to help build mock attack scenarios. We have even used authors of techno thrillers to help us create fictional terrorist attack plots. While we don’t have any authors here this time, we are trying something new. Natesh Chaudry is the CEO of a consulting firm located in Silicon Valley. Natesh would you like to say anything?”
A young man that couldn’t have been past his late twenties stood up from his seat in the back row. He wore stylish jeans and a collared Lacoste shirt. David thought he looked like he was from India or Pakistan.
He said, “Hello guys, I’m Natesh. I am glad to meet all of you. I just arrived here today like you. Also like you, I didn’t know where I was going or what this exactly was about. Lena gave me a little bit of a preview about 30 minutes ago. Needless to say, I’m still in shock. Probably like a lot of you. But I’m glad that I’m getting the opportunity to contribute to something so important.”
David thought this young man looked like he was out of his league. He seemed nervous. David didn’t blame him. Still, he spoke with an easy-going tone that made him instantly trustworthy.
Natesh continued, “Like Lena said, my team and I work in California with a variety of companies. We help some of the top firms in the world increase their level of innovation in new products and services. Normally I bring members of my team with me. Due to the sensitive nature of this project, it’s just me here this time. To put it simply, I’m an idea guy. I’ve built my company by helping other companies create winning ideas. I have been brought in to act as a moderator during the sessions. I plan to break us up into teams for much of the time, and I’ll float between stations. Sometimes, if the conversation goes to one of my areas of expertise, I’ll offer insights. Honestly, while I don’t have much expertise in the invasion department...” Natesh was half-laughing in disbelief as he said that. “...I’m a strategist at my core. I think you’ll find that I can help connect some of your insights in ways that will make our overarching ideas more powerful.” The classroom smiled with a tense politeness. David could tell that from the expressions that people were just beginning to wrap their minds around what was going on.
Natesh said, “Please use your area of expertise where it is helpful, but be flexible and open to new ideas. Try not to say `that won’t work’ too much. Use the people around you to find out new ways that it can work. Think about the links from one activity to another. Try to help figure out all of the possible connections and solutions. I will help out with this more as we go. Thanks, and I look forward to working with you all.”
Lena said, “Thank you Natesh. Today, we’ll go over what we, as representatives of our country, know to be true right now. Our big-picture goal for week one is to identify potential vulnerabilities. The goal of week two is to plan out how to best take action to capitalize on
those vulnerabilities.”
A deep voice from the back of the room spoke up, “Are we going to be planning the actual defenses too?”
Lena looked up and cocked her head. She spoke with the effortless rhythm of someone who had done a thousand public speaking events. “Could you please state your name and your background?”
The man cleared his throat. “Sure. Sorry. Uhum. My name is Bill Stanley. I’m a defense contractor. I work on satellite connections to drones and reconnaissance aircraft. And I’m retired Air Force.”
Lena said, “Excellent. Mr. Stanley, welcome to the island and thank you for your service. To answer your question, we want you to help build out a potential Chinese attack plan with your knowledge of what the expected American response would look like. We want you to plan around that as if you are really trying to win the war for the Chinese. Some of you have actually worked on counter-terrorism plans. Some of you have worked on plans to counter “what-if” scenarios...like if North Korea invaded the South or if China invaded Taiwan. But ladies and gentlemen, this is going to be different.”
She clicked a remote control in her hand and a large flat screen monitor in the front of the room went from a black screen to a map of the Pacific Rim.
“The short answer to Mr. Stanley’s question is no. We are not here to plan our nation’s defense. Some of you might have good ideas about this and could even be considered experts...but that isn’t why you are here. We want you to play the bad guy. If we brought you in to this project to also plan the defense, you’d be thinking of problems at the same time you would be thinking of solutions and you wouldn’t be as good at creating attack plans. At least that’s what our psychologists have told us.” She gave a nod to the grey-haired man in the second row who nodded back. Apparently, he was a psychologist.
She clicked on the remote and the screen changed to a black map of the United States with a bunch of different sized blue dots scattered throughout.
“Anyone know what this is?” she asked.
“Those look like where our bases are.” Bill responded.
“That’s right.” She clicked on the button again and 2-D images of ships, tanks, soldiers, and aircraft popped up next to each of the bases with numbers next to them. “And what’s this?”
“That’s our order of battle.” Someone said from the back.
“Correct.” Lena said. “Does everyone know what that means?”
There were a lot of heads shaking no. “An order of battle is essentially how many of each type of weapon or fighting asset that we have. Let’s look at a few statistics.”
She clicked again and a grid popped up.
“What are your takeaways here?” Lena asked.
David watched from the back of the class. He remained quiet, never one to like speaking up in a classroom setting.
A young man in jeans sitting in the front row said, “It looks to me like we’d kick China’s butt in a fight because our air superiority would probably blow everything else up before it could do any damage.”
Lena said, “Okay. Now let’s look at a different set of numbers.”
“Thoughts?” Lena asked.
Someone whistled. David knew it was a mismatch. Everyone knew how big China was. But if it really came to a land war...those numbers were a bit scary.
Natesh said, “That’s a lot of manpower. And a lot of production capability when compared to the U.S.”
One of the uniformed military officers said, “Okay Lena, this is great. But it’s not like we’re talking about China who can drive right over and attack us in hand-to-hand combat. That’s just not the way warfare works. The militaries would clash and I know for a fact that we have a pretty serious technological advantage over most of the Chinese platforms.”
“So if China was to attack us, do you think that our military would be able to hold them off?”
The man shifted in his seat and said, “I mean...I would guess...yeah. I think so, probably.”
Lena said, “Okay. We as a group are going to get very smart very quickly on some of the data that might help us answer this question. Many of you are asking yourselves right now, can China beat us? But we don’t want you to think of it like that. We want you to think of it like this. How can China beat us? Assume that they can. Uncover the path they must take. Only then can we really prepare our defense. It is thinking like this that kept us safe from another 9/11 for so many years. Now, you each shall get familiar with China’s capabilities and use your collective expertise to identify America’s weaknesses. There will be a different set of experts that will create the defensive response plan based on our learnings. That will be weeks after we are finished, and most of you will not be involved. For us, these next few weeks are about figuring out the most effective strategies and tactics that China could use to make war on the U.S. Does that make sense?”
“Yes ma’am.” said Bill.
Lena continued, “After September 11th, we created a Red Cell designed to prevent another major terrorist attack. Typically, the opposing force in a military exercise is red and the allied force is blue. A Cell, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is the unit where plans are made. Hence, the Red Cell is used to create the enemy's plans. After September 11th, we used this organization to help us think outside the box and hypothesize what our enemies might do. At that time, it was terrorist attacks that we were focused on. It helped us tremendously in identifying what defensive mechanisms needed to be strengthened, and what targets had no adequate defense in place.”
She stood looking at the group. The audience was captivated.
“Each of you were carefully selected for having a great combination of current and past expertise in fields that will likely be very important to these plans. But you have also been selected for another very important reason. You can be trusted. Or more accurately, most of you have bosses that can be trusted. Each of you was handpicked by the person who sent you here. This group has not been compromised. We put this operation together as a way to prepare now while another op is underway to root out Chinese spies that have infiltrated us. More on that momentarily. The consultants in this Red Cell need to figure out what we think we could be up against. What plans are already in motion? Some of you know bits and pieces that will inform this. What do we think the Chinese could do? The rest will be hypothesis. What should their targets be and how would they attack them? Each of us knows something that will likely prove crucial. It’s up to us to work efficiently so that we are well prepared for what’s to come. ”
David listened to Lena speak and his doubts began to recede. It was all starting to make sense. Didn’t In-Q-Tel constantly worry about the Chinese hacking their systems? There were cyber-attacks going on back and forth between the East and West every day. It was a modern cold war. She was an excellent speaker. The more he listened to her, the more a war with China seemed realistic. Either that or Lena was a remarkable liar.
Lena said, “We’ll begin sharing out tonight after dinner. We want to know what you all think are the biggest weaknesses in our defense. When you look at 9/11 and at Pearl Harbor, our nation was not prepared. We did not see it coming because we had been conditioned to not look in the right places. Attacks like those are what we are here to prevent. We are here to think of all the different ways a foreign power might try to do serious harm to our nation. Some of you have extensive knowledge of things like nuclear power plants and the electrical grid. Some of you understand very different things like how the US populace might respond to propaganda or psychological operations.”
The classroom collectively raised their eyebrows at that one.
“Oh yes...that’s right. Bill, you asked what we would be doing in week three? I never finished answering. Well here it is: We won’t just be looking at a one-time kinetic attack. This isn’t a hit and run that we’re planning for. We’ll also be looking at ways that China might be able to invade us and successfully occupy our nation. That will be week three. What would they do? How would they go abo
ut it? Shock and awe? Win hearts and minds? We will conduct psychological operations planning. We don’t want our defense team that looks at our work to just build a big moat with nothing behind it. You must think of what China should do to control the castle once inside the walls. Only then will our defense planners be able to cover our castle grounds with spikes.”
There was commotion in the room.
“Many of you doubt our reasons for concern. You may believe that China could be planning an attack. But you are saying to yourself, everyone knows that the US is the mightiest country in the world with the greatest military in the world. I ask you to please hold those assumptions in check while we’re here. We have a duty to our country to suspend disbelief, to prepare for the worst, and to think outside the box of ways that China could overcome our advantages. Only then will we truly be able to see all of the possible vulnerabilities.”
There were nods of understanding in the audience. In David’s office life, most meetings involved tables of people with laptops open and cell phones out. He was struck by the level of undivided attention that Lena commanded when she spoke. Granted, there were no computers or phones in anyone’s possession. But it was more than that. Between her charisma and confidence, she controlled the eyes of everyone in the room. Aside from her speech, the only sound was the thrum of the air conditioning coming through the floor vents.
She said, “This threat requires urgent action and new ideas. We can’t use the same lessons learned in the sessions that were held a decade ago when trying to protect against another September 11th. For we are no longer trying to protect against terrorists, but against the country with the largest economy and military on the planet.”
The room became quiet. David could sense that reality was setting in for the others in the classroom.
