by Chris James
From January 2058 until the outbreak of war, the USAF lost no fewer than two hundred-and-fifty-three super-AI surveillance satellites in attempts to establish to what degree the Caliphate was producing arms. At the US Congressional hearings after the war, Vice Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, Gen. Mark Cody, expressed the sense of frustration: ‘Every time we told a satellite to take a look, it just vanished. These were very clever machines, and they should’ve been able to tell us what was destroying them before they got destroyed, but it didn’t work out like that. Finally, we had to conclude the Caliphate’s lasers must be more powerful than we thought, but it wasn’t a simple process.’
Indeed, this confusion in western military hierarchies is the hallmark of those years, but cannot bear material responsibility for the disaster which followed. At the same US Congressional hearings, Col. Kenneth Partridge spoke for many when he declared: ‘Hell, we guessed their lasers were more powerful than we wanted, we guessed they were building independent weapons’ systems as fast as they could, but we didn’t and couldn’t know the true extent. The Caliphate hid too much from us; it’d been closed to outsiders for decades.’ When pressed on how he thought NATO’s military technology could fall behind that of a totalitarian dictatorship, Col. Partridge replied: ‘Ask the geeks. They told us we were ahead in tech and arms, and they were wrong.’ This plain-speaking colonel had articulated with unerring clarity the key reason why the onslaught was so effective, but the causes were many and varied.
English government security files recently released under the thirty-year rule underscore how endemic disbelief held sway over the West. These reveal that in November 2061, a twenty-seven-year-old Caliphate subject called Kaliq Zayan boarded a Chinese container ship at Jeddah. When it left Caliphate waters, Zayan’s implant duly released the nano-bots which shredded his heart. A search of his possessions yielded a small data-pod, whose contents the ship’s captain dutifully transmitted to Beijing. There it was shared among that country’s intelligence and military communities, but otherwise suppressed. At the end of the year, however, a young British diplomat, who had been having an illicit affair with a high-ranking member of Chinese intelligence, became aware of the data-pod’s existence and used his wiles to obtain a copy.
Thus through this circuitous route did the only certain evidence of the extent of the Caliphate’s preparations for war reach MI5 and the English government. At a COBRA meeting on 17 January 2062, English Prime Minister Dahra Napier expressed her initial disbelief that the figures in Zayan’s data-pod could be accurate, but the Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury, insisted they should be taken seriously. A fractious debate ensued.
In the seventh year of her premiership, Napier’s analytical mind realised what the likely outcome would be in the event of any confrontation, if the data were true. One of her aides, Crispin Webb, confided afterwards in a diary which has recently come to light: ‘The boss shook that raven head back and forth, refuting, but I saw a glimmer of real fear in her eye. First. Time. Ever.’ Napier refused to accept the Caliphate could have produced so many ACAs, or that this force could be supplemented by the alleged three million warriors.
General Sir Terry Tidbury was in 2062 a taciturn fifty-three-year-old ex-paratrooper, with piercing eyes which seldom blinked. As had many others, over the preceding seven years he had come to view the Third Caliph as the greatest threat to world peace. But he also comprehended the Caliphate’s full potential in a way few of his peers in the democracies were willing to. In his seminal post-war memoir, In the Eye of the Storm, he recalls this meeting with: ‘We’d had some intel[ligence] which confirmed my fears, but I still couldn’t get the PM to increase ACA production any further.’ This was another key mistake, only a few weeks before the Caliphate struck. With the recent release of previously secret security files, it is plain that Napier and her cabinet considered Zayan’s data-pod a diversion, deliberately planted with no purpose other than to cause panic in the West.
When Defence Secretary Phillip Gough resigned later in the year, once the scale of the disaster began to unfold, he told a packed House of Commons: ‘I stress at no time has His Majesty’s Government misled the House. However, the tragedy unfolding in Europe today could not have reasonably been foreseen.’ Despite the tremendous uproar this statement caused, the most of which Gough can be accused is that he made an oversimplification.
Each NATO member received a summary of the data-pod’s contents, marked low priority as the data were considered unreliable. As such, few noted it, much less took the warning seriously. One who did was Lt. Gen. Studs Stevens of the USAF. Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury related a conversation that took place between the two men during the emergency NATO summit two days before war broke out: ‘Studs came over to me and asked if I agreed with the official position. I told him certainly not, but without hard evidence what could we expect? Studs mentioned the data-pod which, he said, everyone else thought was planted. He and I agreed that if it were true, things could get very tricky. It gives me no satisfaction now, after the war, to know that this warning should have been taken much more seriously - if only to save thousands of lives in the navies. But at that time the war was almost on us, in any case.’
In this Sir Terry is correct. At this late stage, little could have been done to avert the disaster. In addition, in the weeks and months leading up to hostilities the Third Caliph publically used his dominion’s apparent lack of military might to play down speculation in the global media. Many highly respected outlets in the West cast doubt on the rumours of Caliphate mobilisation. Since the war, historians have attempted to explain how the West could have been so wrong-footed; indeed, many of the war leaders endured substantial opprobrium at its conclusion. However, it is necessary to take a more nuanced view.
In the 2050s, for example, replication technology was still in its infancy. Food replicators cost a disproportionate amount of average annual salary, and remained either playthings for the wealthy, or, more prosaically, a means for entrepreneurs to turn an easy profit. While the economic upheaval non-organic replicators wrought on Westerns societies continued apace, for the ordinary citizen these devices merely delivered a supply of cheap, unhealthy food. In result, a wide-ranging survey by the WHO in 2058 found that 68.1% of the British population were clinically obese. This figure rose to 72.3% in the US, while France and Germany registered 67.8% and 65.2% respectively. Despite the wealth of medical evidence known by that time which linked obesity with reduced cognitive function, in the years leading up to the war, the governments of the democracies appeared reluctant to rein in technology’s simple way to feed their populations cheaply.
Moreover, it must be borne in mind that Europe had enjoyed more than a century of peace. Its peoples had found much common ground, despite their cultural differences. The Middle-Eastern lessons of the first two decades of the century had been forgotten, and the prospect of some far-off enemy threatening them seemed implausible to many. Confiding to his diary in the summer of 2061, twenty-two-year-old undergraduate Sean Dowell articulated an important sentiment of the period: ‘Everyone knows the Persian Caliphate’s isolationist stance - it says again and again it wants nothing to do with the rest of the world, but it beggars belief when the hawks in NATO keep hammering on about the danger from them. I was having a glass with a couple of the guys last night, and we agreed that even if the hawks were right - and not just whining to help increase the arms manufacturers’ profits, as they usually do - our militaries are more than capable of handling the Caliphate.’
The cynicism of Dowell and his friends typified the feelings of many. While some since the war have tried to suggest that the Caliphate employed spies inside NATO governments to promote the view of an isolationist but otherwise harmless political entity, no evidence has come to light to support this. A far more likely explanation can be found in the aggregated media reports of the period. In the five years before the war began, 77.3% of popular media articles which mentioned the Caliphate al
so used either the words ‘poverty’, ‘chaos’, ‘hopeless’, or ‘starvation’. By contrast, 81.2% of articles in the same period which mentioned NATO additionally used either the words ‘certainty’, ‘security’, or ‘safety’.
Total immersive gaming also played an important role in the democracies’ sleepwalks to catastrophe. Led by an Australian corporation called Innerscape, which enjoyed nearly two billion subscribers around the world by 2061, the five largest providers offered a form of escape unknown to previous generations. In combination with intravenous feeding, these virtual gaming worlds allowed participants to exist almost permanently outside reality. The British charity Gamers Anonymous published a report in late 2060 estimating that some twelve million Britons spent ‘all or substantially all’ of their lives immersed in virtual gaming. Despite protests, the English, Scottish and Welsh governments were reluctant to legislate as they collected significant tax revenues from gamers. This pattern was repeated in other NATO countries, with only France passing legislation obliging corporations such as Innerscape to cap the amount of time for which gamers could immerse themselves.
Innerscape and its competitors, however, also introduced a permanent virtual existence for their customers. Originally designed as an alternative to the critically flawed and discredited cryogenic suspension fad, elderly and terminally ill patients could have their corporeal selves put into stasis and live in a virtual universe through an avatar. The extensive popularity of this service caused its rapid expansion, and at length began to attract otherwise healthy younger people with the promise of near immortality in a virtual universe of their own design. (In the event, a number of Innerscape’s European facilities were overrun, costing the lives of more than six thousand of their ‘residents’.)
Hence, for a majority of citizens in the Western democracies, growing real-world imperatives took second place to the immediate concerns and desires of their own lives. To a degree, this can be said of all societies before they are thrust into conflict. But the early-2060s were unique in that the countries to be attacked had enjoyed an unparalleled duration of peace and had such a wealth of technological playthings to amuse them, up to and including their citizens’ complete obviation from society itself. A fair assessment is that complacency caused by these distractions and an unreasonable belief in Europe’s security played the largest roles, rather than subversive Caliphate activity, as some historians tried to suggest after the war.
II. THE NATURE OF WARFARE
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, NATO governments had continually reduced the size of their frontline armies, navies, and air forces. The nature of warfare changed to require specialist, rapid-response units, and lean, dedicated formations. As the century progressed, technology played a bigger role, and took a correspondingly larger share of diminishing funds. Some NATO countries insisted on maintaining headline nuclear deterrent systems, which as time passed also required expensive replacement. The most drastic reductions came in the older services: in 2020, the British Royal Navy had seventy-seven combat vessels; by 2060, this number had dropped to only nineteen. The US Navy’s capability followed a similar pattern, as over the same period its nine carrier strike groups were reduced to five.
However, the most significant advancement of this era was the automation of the battlefield. The key objective of any army throughout history has been to inflict the greatest number of casualties on the enemy while allowing the minimum number of casualties to its own forces. Military scientists in the NATO powers had always striven to reduce the mortal risk to their soldiers, sailors and airmen, and in the mid-2030s their reward came in the form of super-artificial intelligence: battlefield-management ACAs which could theoretically control an unlimited number of target- and function-specific devices.
Super AI had been anticipated for decades, but when it finally arrived, teething problems presented themselves. Victoire Tasse, in her 2094 book A History of Warfare in the 21st Century, summarised these: ‘Super AI meant, at the foremost, that flesh and blood could be as far removed from the battlefield as possible. It required a sea change in thinking among military personnel, however, to realise that autonomous systems were in fact not that autonomous at all: at every stage they required human supervision, even if this would very quickly be limited to an ‘abort’ option lasting less than half a second. With this finally established, the key issue centred on how best to utilise the super AI in practical terms. From 2040, the NATO militaries had to answer some difficult questions: should the management ACA stay out of harm’s way, controlling the battle ACAs from a safe distance? How could the prevention of enemy jamming then be guaranteed? If the management ACA needed to be above the battlefield, how many armaments should it have to operate effectively?’
In 2041, the UN attempted to impose a ban on wholly autonomous military systems. For the NATO powers, acquiescence came easily as they fully understood the implications of autonomous offensive weaponry; the democracies still enjoyed an expansive measure of open debate, and the humanitarian organisations of that period could make their voices heard. The US placed vast diplomatic pressure on China to accede to the United Nations’ Ban on Autonomous Weapons’ Systems, but Beijing began a procrastination which would last over half a decade. Faced with this intractability, the US Department of Defense in particular began to quietly ignore the ban which its government had signed.
Then the formation of the Caliphate the following year gave the Western powers a new concern. Through diplomatic channels, China and Russia made clear their support for the Caliphate as the only way to stop the bloodshed and finally bring peace to the Middle East.
Over the next two decades, front-line battle management systems evolved to find the most appropriate balance of speed, durability, and firepower: for all the advances in software, ACAs still needed to carry enough military punch to defeat the enemy with sheer destructive force. By the time the US military unveiled the systems with which it would begin the war, they were already obsolete. The Caliphate, it transpired, was far better informed of NATO than NATO was of it. But it would cost many lives before this shortcoming could be corrected.
Another technological development in which, unknown to the West, the Caliphate had exceeded NATO’s abilities, was shielding. First developed as one of a range of defensive battlefield measures by the US Department of Defense, the weight of the equipment needed to generate the protective electromagnetic field around its subject was at the time deemed too great, and would slow ACA response times by an unacceptable margin. In addition, if fitted with shielding, ACAs would also be obliged to forego a fair portion of their armaments.
Much has been written about the controversy surrounding how China began to develop its own shielding program, which it then sold to the Caliphate. The story of hapless Northrop Grumman employee Chet Newman, his disappearance and subsequent murder, is well known even today and need not be repeated here. The fact remains that the US Congressional hearing which reported in October 2057 drew no firm conclusions because no evidence could be found to prove a Chinese connection. In the final analysis, it is equally plausible the Chinese had begun to develop their own version of shielding, without any assistance from Newman. History is littered with examples of separate societies making the same discoveries or arriving at the same scientific conclusions and technological advances without mutual contact. In any case, the concept of shielding had been prevalent in popular science fiction for almost a century, thus it would have been unlikely for any advanced nation not to explore its feasibility.
The mistake of which the US and the NATO allies are undoubtedly guilty is their failure to pursue research into improving shielding with sufficient rigour. Funding was cut back as the US military preferred to concentrate on offensive rather than defensive technologies. There was some justification in this: The N4-1A Abrahams autonomous main battle tank was the best super-AI tank deployed by any combatant during the war. However, other research led down blind alleys. In particular, the faith put
in infantry exoskeletons was to prove desperately misplaced when flesh-and-blood troops were obliged to enter the battlefield of Europe.
III. DISTRACTIONS
On 20 January 2061, US President Madelyn Coll was sworn in to begin her second five-year term of office. Aged fifty-four and a former nurse, Coll and her Democrat party had fought a successful campaign against Republican challenger Chuck Steele. The most significant achievement of the first Coll administration had been the comprehensive coastal reinforcement program to protect at-risk littoral areas of the US against sea-level rise, which had reached its maximum extent, employing some two million workers. In contrast, it was generally judged that the Republican campaign suffered from Steele’s funding by nano-pharma start-ups that were strongly implicated in the Z-T-Cell cancer treatment fiasco.
On the day of Coll’s inauguration, The New York Times editorialised: ‘The President deservedly returns to a full desk. Top of the pile is the delicate balancing act of managing relations with China and Russia. On one hand, Coll knows she has to show resolve towards the Caliphate, but on the other China is likely to insist the rest of the world respects the Caliphate’s isolationist stance. Coll needs to continue our military’s measured rearmaments program without antagonizing Beijing unduly.’
By contrast, on the same day The Wall Street Journal prophesised, with surprising accuracy: ‘The American people spoke, and they will now see this once great country humbled even further. Coll will undoubtedly continue to appease China as it carries on its expansion in Africa and maintains its support for the Persian Caliphate. If that bastion of dictatorship truly is not lying, then Coll’s biggest foreign policy problem will be Russia. But if the Caliphate is not the benign home of Muslims it’s been making out to be, then Coll could find events overtake the United States faster than she thinks possible.’