The War Planners

by Andrew Watts

  Natesh looked out at his audience. Several of the military men had looks of skepticism on their faces. They saw a young Indian man trying to teach them about military strategy. That was fine with Natesh. Let them think what they want. He clenched his jaw a few times and focused on Lena, standing in the back of the room. She gave him a thumbs-up. She really was a nice coach.

  Natesh’ voice grew stronger. “What can China do better than the United States? And when you think about this, I want you all to keep thinking about the stated objectives that our spy uncovered. We went over them last night. Objective One: Capture and Permanently Occupy the United States. What are the implications of this? How does that limit China’s tactical choices?”

  Brooke said, “If China wants long-term control over US territory then they would likely want to do minimal damage. You don’t want to dent up a car before you steal it. That means they’d use non-nuclear tactics to preserve infrastructure.”

  David raised his hand, “If they want to be in the US long-term, that also means that they have got to plan to win hearts and minds. Kind of like what we tried to do in Iraq.”

  Natesh pointed at them both. “Exactly. Now you’re thinking about this the right way. What advantages does China have that they could leverage?”

  People started to shout out ideas. The energy of a high-participation classroom took hold. In a strange way, people were into this. He let the group conversation keep going for a while. He wanted everyone to get comfortable contributing and talking openly. There was a good discussion of several different ways China could capitalize on their size and resources.

  After about 20 minutes, Natesh looked at his watch and said, “Okay. We’re doing great. Let’s recap. We talked about Chinese advantages: Size, first-mover advantage, surprise, industrial capacity, and quantity of certain assets. We discussed how the US is more technologically advanced with most weapons. I heard someone mention that this could be an interesting route to explore as an opportunity for China instead of a weakness. In the business world, this is a valuable way to unlock competitive advantage. If we really can turn a perceived strength into a weakness, that should be a major part of our focus. Let’s flag that one and come back to it. Okay, so pulling these first few ideas all together: How does China execute a surprise attack that allows them to maximize first-mover advantage, take out America’s technological advantage, and leverage the numerical advantage of their troops? Secondly, how does China keep hold of the United States territory long-term without destroying needed infrastructure or creating a resistance movement? Does everyone agree that these were a few of our initial killer questions?”

  People gave cordial yet uneasy nods. It was hard to feel patriotic about planning your nation’s invasion.

  “Okay, let’s take a five-minute break.”

  The group got up and scattered to bathrooms and stocked refrigerators. Natesh got a plastic bottled water and went back to the podium. Bill and David were there waiting for him.

  David said, “Hey, nice job so far.”

  “Thank you, David. I appreciate the participation.”

  Bill said, “Yep, I think this group should do a fine job at this. I just wish I knew it was going to take this long.”

  “Oh? You got somewhere to be?” David said.

  Bill looked uncomfortable, like he hadn’t meant to share. “Well. The truth is, Allison’s been sick.”

  David looked at Natesh and then back to Bill. “Oh. Hey, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Bill said, “Ah, it’s all right. It’s been going on for a few years now, on and off. I agreed with my boss that I would go on this trip just a few days ago, before we knew her results. But just a few hours before I left, we found out. I told her I would cancel the trip, but she said the chemo wouldn’t start until I got back.”

  Natesh looked down at the floor. He was still in his twenties. He’d never known anyone with cancer. But he knew what it was like to lose a family member. “Bill, I am so sorry. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  Bill looked up as if he’s snapped out of a spell. “Oh ah, thanks there Natesh. Naw, you don’t worry about it. Sorry to bring it up. It’s just been on my mind. Let’s just get back to work and get this done right.” David and Bill walked up the stairs of the stadium-seating classroom as Natesh re-checked his notes.

  After everyone sat back down, he began, “I was not always a California guy. I went to high school in the Big Apple. I remember one field trip we took when I was 17. We went to see this professional pickpocket, if you can believe it. This guy had learned the trade from his family but he didn’t want to be a criminal himself. So he decided to teach seminars and do shows about being a pickpocket. He would call people up on stage and say, “Hi, my name is so and so, and in less than three minutes, I’m going to take your wallet.” And the thing is...he would do just that. It was unbelievable to see. And the audience members who were up there on the stage would have no idea it had happened until after the fact.”

  Natesh was getting comfortable now. He walked down from the stage and up the stairs, the way Lena had yesterday when they had all arrived. There she was, still in the back of the class. She wasn’t looking at him now. Natesh saw her watching people and then writing notes in her book.

  “This fellow was a professional pick-pocket. But not the kind that made a living taking people’s money. This was a man that had learned how to do all of those things on the street, but now lived an honest life by performing for audiences and showing people how it was done. He was incredible. I saw him take a man’s wallet, then his cell phone, and even his wristwatch without him knowing it. But that wasn’t all. He actually took the man’s eyeglasses off his face. The man’s eyeglasses. I know it’s hard to believe and I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it myself.”

  Natesh gave a wide grin. “It was incredible. My friends, I’ve worked on strategy for a number of years. I realize that I’m younger than the majority of you here. But in studying our situation for the past day and comparing it to various past scenarios in the private sector, I think this may be one of the potential routes we can take. We need to identify how we can take America’s glasses right off its face.”

  Bill said, “You want the Chinese to become pickpockets?”

  Still smiling, Natesh responded, “Precisely that. You see, the pickpocket man told us all how he was able to do what he did. He told us all how much practice it had taken him to perfect the sleight of hand moves to take the various articles from people without them realizing it. But that was less than half the trick. It all has to do with cognitive science. Our brains can only process so much information at once. So if they get too much information all at the same time, they are forced to prioritize. Through the power of suggestion, the pickpocket helps them to suggest what priority they process the information by directing their attention to various other things. If he wants to take your wallet, he calls your attention to your wristwatch. While you’re looking at your wristwatch on your left hand, he’ll talk to you, pat you on the shoulder with one hand, and take your wallet with the other. He moves in close so there is less time to react. Before you know it, there are just too many activities happening at once to process them all efficiently.”

  David said, “So you think China should launch a bunch of distractions?”

  Natesh said, “Again, we’re here to plan the attack. I think that the people we have in this room can help us to identify and plan enough high-priority decoy events that the United States won’t see the eyeglasses taken off their face.”

  Brooke raised her hand and said, “Natesh, I appreciate a good story. But having worked in signals intelligence collections, we do a pretty good job of monitoring China. How do you propose that—”

  “I’m not saying that you don’t, Brooke. But I think we need to come up with ideas for how to create a distraction that would effectively require the majority of the United States’ time and resources to be dedicated to it. Better yet, let’s think
of a few distractions. Tie them together. But don’t tie them to China. So when the United States has its eye on its wallet and cell phone, the glasses become overlooked.”

  “And how do you do that?” asked Brooke.

  “Start a separate war. Make the U.S. go to war with another country so they’re spread thin and absorbed in it.” said David. “That’s what I’d do.”

  Henry said, “Okay, what country can we pick a fight with that would cause us to mobilize the most military assets? How about Canada? I hate those guys and their polite manners.”

  “Iran? North Korea? Russia?” said Brooke. Others chimed in with their own opinions. The group chatted about it and remained reasonable in their arguments for each nation.

  “It’s gotta be Iran.” Said Major Combs. “If the US went to war with Russia or North Korea, we’ll be in a better location to fight back against China. I wouldn’t want that if I was them.”

  “That’s true. You’d want the United States to be distracted and also in a bad position to respond.” said someone from the front of the room.

  “So how do we start a war with Iran? One that doesn’t get the U.S. pissed off at China for starting?” asked David.

  Natesh said, “Okay. Here’s the way we’ll do this. You all have plastic buckets with sticky notes and markers near your desks. If you don’t, share with the people next to you. Write down a few ways that you think we could plausibly start an Iranian-US war. Again, we are China for this exercise. How can China encourage the start of a U.S.-Iranian war without implicating themselves? Think about your own areas of expertise and use that if it applies. Everyone write it down on your piece of paper. Write down a few ideas if you have them. Then bring them up to these white boards behind me and stick them there. Brooke, would you mind helping me? We’ll bucket these ideas into categories once they’re all up here. Okay, you’ve all got ten minutes.”

  Soon the white boards at the front of the classroom were filled. Brooke wrote down different categories with her dry erase marker and stuck the notes in straight columns under each one. Natesh thought to himself how familiar this scene felt. It was the same exercise he had done a million times for corporate America. In the past, Natesh had filled white boards with things like consumer insights, software advantages, hardware designs attributes, and countless other service or product-oriented lists. He looked at the rainbows of sticky notes on the board and thought to himself how innocent it looked. And how within a year, one of these ideas may very well come to fruition and begin soaking the world in blood.

  *****

  The session lasted all day. During lunchtime, the group ate sandwiches at their desks and went over Chinese military capabilities and strategy. The afternoon was a share session. Various members of the team provided amplifying information from their respective fields. Brooke disclosed what she knew about the operation in Shanghai. An expert on Asian Pacific politics and military gave his opinion on the Chinese military buildup over the past decade. Henry said that several of the telecom companies he worked with had reportedly been hacked in the past few months. Word on the street was that the Chinese were testing their security.

  By 5 p.m., the constant talking had exhausted Natesh. The lead idea was becoming clear. The best Chinese attack would be to overcome America’s strengths by somehow negating their technological advantages. But the group still bickered back and forth on how that could be done.

  Bill was red-faced. He said, “Look, you’ve still got five thousand reasons why the Chinese couldn’t attack us. And each one of them has got a nuclear tip. Uncle Sam’s got submarines ready to fire off their missiles at a moments notice, and they can’t possibly have all of those boomers located. There are US air force bombers and missile silos that are still playing the same cold war game: deterrence. It doesn’t matter that China doesn’t want to launch nukes on us. If they try to attack us on land, we will launch nukes on them and obliterate their attacking force. Even our current liberal-ass president would use a nuclear weapon if someone were attacking his house. Excuse my politics.”

  A few people grinned. Most ignored the jab.

  “He’s right,” said Brooke. “Not only that, but American communications and navigation technology is best-in-class. We have more technologically advanced ships, aircraft, and weapons that can do real damage at long range.”

  “It’s called hyper war,” said one of the military officers. “Speed is the key factor. We can talk about China head-faking with a war in Iran till we’re blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is, if America really wanted to, we could mobilize a global attack that would destroy a majority of Chinese military assets within 24 hours.”

  Natesh rubbed his eyes, “But I thought we had discussed this. These technologies rely on a few key activities to take place, correct? So if those activities are removed, there goes the advantage. This—”

  Another of the military officers in the front row said, “Natesh, look...military strategy isn’t like in the business world. We aren’t talking about apps on your smartphone. We’re talking about complex, interwoven technologies like the navigation systems in an F-18 and the GPS smart bombs it carries. We have technologies like the secure data link that connects all of our armed forces so that they can combine each other's sensor data and look at one enhanced battle picture. There isn’t one silver bullet that could take out all of these technological advantages and eliminate the nuclear threat. I appreciate that we’re all here trying to prevent a war. China’s nothing to scoff at, certainly. But we’ve been talking about different ways to do it all day and I just don’t see how this threat can go beyond just that...a threat.”

  There were nods of agreement in the audience as others backed up the idea of American superiority. Brooke said, “There’s just no way for China to overcome the technology advantage and nuclear response of the United States.”

  Lena hadn’t said a word all day. She stood tall in the back of the room. The light from the windows contrasted against her silhouette. But now her voice was firm.

  “Actually, there is...”

  CHAPTER 4

  "Tricks, traps, ambushes and other efforts resulting in the surprise of one party by another have been commonplace in Chinese warfare from as far back as we have records…" –historian David A. Graff, associate professor at the Institute of Military History and 20th Century Studies at Kansas State University

  The class sat in stunned silence, waiting for Lena to finish.

  “What do you mean?” asked Bill.

  Lena said, “The Chinese have a way to wipe out America’s satellites. It’s a new and very powerful cyber-weapon, developed in America. We don’t know how or when they got it, but our latest intelligence confirms that they are in possession and testing it out.”

  The blood drained from David’s face as he realized why he was chosen to come to this island. “They have ARES?” he asked, knowing the answer.

  “Yes.” replied Lena.

  Brooke asked, “What’s ARES?”

  David said, “It’s a cyber-weapon, like she said. The place I work...we keep an eye out for different types of information technology that might be useful to our intelligence agencies. About a year ago, some students at MIT created a type of worm that could bypass all known security in several key communications channels. It was designed to work on data farms and the vast majority of military and communications satellites. When coupled with other programs that the Defense Department already had, the applications became devastatingly potent. It could potentially take satellites offline, hijack their signals, or even crash them into the earth’s atmosphere. In data-server farms, which much of the cloud-based world is now reliant upon, the theory is that it could cut power long enough for the servers to overheat and become seriously damaged. The MIT students had used a lot of the same code that the NSA’s STUXNET used to sabotage Iranian nuclear centrifuges a few years ago. But this worm was several orders of magnitude more advanced than that. What these kids came up with was unreal.�
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  “And the Chinese have this?” said Henry.

  Lena nodded. “We believe so.”

  Henry said, “Awesome. Glad my taxes are being put to good use. So, let’s say there are between 1500 and 2000 active satellites right now. Most are communications satellites. About a third are military satellites. Those numbers include foreign ones. There are another 2000-3000 inactive satellites just floating in orbit. I would think that the most efficient means of F-ing us over would be to program all of the active ones to crash.”

  The classroom was quiet.

  Bill said, “Can they really do that?”

  Brooke said, “Well it wouldn’t be easy. There are a lot of protections. But ultimately it comes down to two things—do you have the hacking capability and the hardware capability? Russia and China would likely be the only nations that could do something like that. And they’d only be able to do it for a short period of time as far as I know. I’m probably not supposed to admit this, but China actually took control of two of our satellites back in 2008 - a Landsat 7 and a Terra AM-1. They had control for 12 minutes. People got fired. But it’s hard to do. It takes an incredible amount of energy to power the dish on the ground. Probably around 5 to 10 million watts.”

  Someone asked, “How much is that?”

  Henry said, “About the output for a really big TV antenna, or a small African nation. It’s a lot of power, and that’s just for one satellite. But we aren’t talking brute force here. This ARES, if I understand correctly, wouldn’t just help them grab a satellite with a high-powered dish on the ground. Am I right?”

  David nodded. “Yes. You are. It’s a game-changer because the worm gets past the security systems and takes it over with a cyber-attack. You no longer need brute strength to hack into a satellite. They effectively steal our username and password and then replace it so we can’t regain control. And they aren’t just limited to one satellite at a time. They can scattershot multiple vehicles. If they developed the hardware that the U.S. Air Force and NSA have, they could theoretically take over all of our satellites in under 12 hours.”