Read Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 Online
Authors: Chris James
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.
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.
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.’
Many ordinary Americans displayed ambivalence regarding international affairs. Nancy Strickland, a thirty-two-year-old police officer in Kansas, wrote to a friend: ‘Sure am glad Maddy’s back for a second term, but what I wanna ask her is how building all those walls to keep the sea out for the next fifty years is gonna help us here, in the middle of a drought? Pete [her partner] says the crops this year are gonna be the worse [sic] in the last ten years.’ Ms Strickland was far from alone: vast swaths of mid-western and southern states had for several years been suffering the lowest rainfall since records began. In 2020, a mere 5.587% of the mainland United States was desert; by 2060, this figure had increased to 14.013%.
It has bearing on the narrative of the war to mention these issues. In addition to a range of domestic problems, President Coll found herself obliged to provide support to approximately two million American citizens who, unprompted, had travelled to numerous low-lying islands and regions around the world suffering inundation from rising sea levels to aid local populations. At home, millions of US citizens laboured under entirely local concerns, while many more regarded rearmament against a supposed Caliphate threat with the utmost cynicism, a mere ploy by arms manufacturers to improve their financial situation in an economy which remained obstinately stagnant.
In October 2061, British Prime Minister Napier visited Coll in Washington. This would be their last meeting before the war. Their briefing agenda reveals the order of priorities with interesting candour. Rising sea levels and aid to low-lying countries took up a great deal of their time. The UN’s waning influence in global affairs caused both women concern, as did Somalia’s forthcoming election, which promised a majority would vote to join the Caliphate. Napier attempted to pressure Coll to intercede with a US corporation called NanoTech, which was about to sue the English government for lost profits when it adopted a law banning one of NanoTech’s nano-bot treatments for cancer sufferers.
Napier’s aide, Crispin Webb, noted in his diary: ‘When they talked about the useless UN, the boss gave the President a history lesson. She asked Coll if she’d heard of the League of Nations. Coll tried to bluff it, but the boss saw the eye-twitch which gives everyone away when they lie. Instead of using it to embarrass the President, the boss just drew a neat comparison with the League of Nations in the 1930s, and the useless UN now. The President gave a little cough and invited the boss to see the garden. I don’t think they mentioned the potential Caliphate military threat at all today.’
The President and the Prime Minister had much in common. Born only two years apart in the 2000s, each had a lawyer for a husband and both had two children of similar ages. The strength of their cooperation would shortly be tested to destruction.
Prelude: The View from the East
I. RISING EMPIRES, WANING EMPIRES
In her 2047 book,
One Hundred Years of Change: The World from 1945 to 2045
, the historian Frieda Sauber says: ‘Each empire falls victim finally to the ultimate conceit: a sense that its superiority allows it to inflict its own methods of achievement on the rest of the world. “If only the savages would do things the way we do them, they too could live as well as us!” goes the cry. Thus it was with one of the shortest-lived empires in history: The United States of America. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, when at the height of its power, the US sought to export its brand of restrictive capitalist democracy to the Middle East; to tens of millions of people who had never known it, and the vast majority of whom had shown no material desire to experience it. Worse, the US did so at the point of a very powerful gun. In a few short years, with staggering political incompetence and not a little military overkill, the US succeeded in turning vast swaths of the Middle East implacably against it.’
She goes on to describe in great depth the machinations of the United States’ two adversaries, Russia and China, and how each methodically undermined whatever changes the US sought to effect beyond its own landmass. But, as with the US overtaking the British Empire a hundred years earlier, informed observers realised that the US had already been eclipsed by China. In the thirty years between 2020 and 2050, the Chinese economy grew 576%, while that of the US expanded a mere 44%. The global economic crisis in the mid-2030s saw Beijing dump trillions of US debt bonds onto international markets, and on 1 January 2038 the Renminbi, or Chinese Yuan, replaced the US Dollar as the currency in which the worldwide price of a barrel of oil was calculated. Chinese corporations expanded deeply into Africa, where they set about relieving hunger and poverty to a degree which the West had singularly failed to do in the preceding decades. Brilliant young minds began to flock to the leading Chinese universities, untroubled by the absence of democracy. Indeed, many returned to the West extolling the virtues of a fairer, managed economy with a stable dictatorship which, unfettered by concerns of losing power at the ballot box, could plan and implement long-term social goals that improved the lot of the bulk of its citizens.
In
The Chinese Miracle
, US property mogul Felton Drake summarised the prevailing mood: ‘Stability is the driving force behind sociological progress. What’s the point of changing left-wing or right-wing governments every few years, only so they can undo each other’s policies? The Chinese have shown everyone what can be achieved in a modern society without the need for frequent elections.’ This book and Drake’s high media profile were instrumental in promoting the democracies’ slow but steady extension of the periods between elections.
Russia, meanwhile, produced a string of progressively thuggish, dictatorial leaders whose pragmatism in both domestic and global affairs was unencumbered by morality. In his book
The 2036 Financial Crisis: Winners and Losers
, Aiden Horrocks notes that Russian citizens were among the greatest sufferers of their leaders’ venality: while a protected elite enjoyed the revenues from the country’s natural resources in the Arctic, most saw their standard of living drop to levels not seen since the 1930s. Nevertheless, Horrocks said: ‘… with Chinese support, Russia maintained the shrewdest manoeuvring, especially in Middle-Eastern affairs. President Maklakov took great satisfaction from establishing pockets of stability in countries such as Iran, Syria and Iraq, in the process highlighting to the world that America and its allies had lost the little credibility they retained in the region. What will ultimately happen in these countries remains to be seen.’
Horrocks wrote those words in 2042, the year in which the Caliphate came into existence and these countries, whose names are all but forgotten today, ceased to exist. The Caliphate’s first steps were to sever as many ties to the outside world as possible. For example, as the countries it subsumed disappeared from the map, the Caliphate rejected repeated invitations to join the UN and other global forums. Quickly it established its defining characteristic: isolation. Anyone was free to enter the Caliphate, but few ever found they could leave it. Elaborate digital jamming technology prevented communication for the vast majority of Caliphate subjects, rendering modern civilian mobile communications devices redundant. The Caliphate established secure, encrypted communications for its rapidly expanding network of
majlis
, or district overseers. For much of the following two decades, the rest of the world relied on stragglers, satellites, and the Russian and Chinese Foreign Ministries.
David Benn in
The Rise of the New Persian Caliphate
says of this period: ‘Although it seemed remarkable to citizens of the open societies in the West, the New Persian Caliphate was a product of two highly controlled, centralised cultures - Russia and China - which, it has to be said with worthy intentions, attempted to bring peace and stability to a region of the world that had suffered bloodshed for decades. Their only mistake was to fail to foresee that their child would grow into a bloodthirsty adolescent intent on avenging centuries-old insults, and settling scores in a manner which would make the twentieth century’s World Wars appear honourable affairs.’
Despite the trace of hyperbole, Benn is correct. As the Caliphate absorbed more territory, contradictory information emerged: the regime undoubtedly used the strictest interpretation of the Quran and sharia law, but most ‘provinces’ could be led either by a Sunni or Shia. While the nascent Caliphate instigated isolation from the rest of the world for its peoples, its rulers utilised all means available to get the measure of their enemies. Within a few years, outsiders could only reach the Caliphate’s ports, which acted as the hubs of its exports and imports: mostly oil to China, while in return China supplied the Caliphate with all of the raw materials it could not produce itself.
In the ten years from 2049 to 2059, some ninety-five investigative journalists from the US and Europe are known to have entered Caliphate territory. Only one ever returned. Ghatis Rafiq was a third-generation English Muslim who worked for
The Guardian
media outlet. In his 2057 book,
Inside the New Caliphate
, he describes his six months of adventures, first in Baghdad Province, on to Tehran Province, then finally in Basra Province. Among the drama and narrow escapes, Rafiq makes some salient observations: ‘… then I saw a depth of wisdom in the old village headman’s eyes. Abruptly, he stopped talking about Allah and infidels. He pointed around the barren landscape and said: “Look at those old women mending clothes. Look at the young children, playing. I am their headman, and my first duty is to protect them from violence, if I can. This is what the new order gives us. We abide by their laws, and they give us peace. Only in peace can we gather enough to feed everyone in the village.” It struck me as a remarkably pragmatic view, out of place in this new society which put adherence to sharia law above all else.’
Here, then, is an important clue to how the Caliphate expanded so rapidly. At the local level, it could guarantee security and safety to villages and towns, dependant only on their acceptance of the Caliphate’s strict laws. While there can be no doubt of the Caliphate’s murderous barbarism to those whom it considered unbelievers, its ability to protect localised populations soon caused a material shift in its image in the Arabic world. Indeed, such did its popularity grow that the assimilation of the last portion of Saudi Arabia merely required the execution of the Saud royal family and a few thousand of their followers, who singularly failed to see which way the wind had begun to blow.
From the beginning, the only authorised information to come out of the Caliphate emerged from its Ministry of Information, first based in Baghdad then subsequently relocated to Tehran. Through a number of spokesmen, each Caliph made his pronouncements, most of which hold no value to the historian, any more so than Soviet displays of ‘perfect towns’ or Nazi proclamations on the relocation of Jews. Of greater significance are the diplomatic fusillades which the West exchanged with Moscow and Beijing. These contain the material indications of the democracies’ waning authority as China’s ability to project its political power globally increased.
The American diplomat and political scientist Preston Grant became one of the leading proponents of
realpolitik
. Born in 2007 into a scion of a wealthy Wisconsin real estate family, he enjoyed a successful political career and served as Secretary of State in Phelps’ Republican Administration from 2051 to 2056. When Democrat Coll took office, she convinced him to remain in a supporting role, as over the years he had travelled to Moscow and Beijing hundreds of times and had become familiar with the leaders of both countries.
Grant published three books, the last of which underscored with surprising frankness the problems facing the NATO allies. In
Night Flight to Beijing
, he criticised members of the English government: ‘… [Foreign Secretary] Blackwood was pissed I wouldn’t take him with me. He kept acting like he could make a difference to the negotiations. I told him the English needed to take a back seat on this one. Hell, Chinese corporations owned over half of his country’s energy production, including all of its nuclear plants, controlled nearly all of its banks and hospitals, and with Chinese individuals owned something like three-quarters of all the real estate in London. To the Chinese government, the whole of the British Isles was just another pseudo-vassal state, like Nigeria or Zambia. But Blackwood didn’t get it.’
Grant understood that the British Isles were in an especially weak position, although to some degree all NATO members employed Chinese hardware and software in their civilian and military infrastructures. As will be shown below, in many cases these systems could be manipulated, with devastating consequences.
The negotiations to which Grant refers concerned Chinese exports to the Caliphate; he had the unenviable task of convincing Beijing to moderate its supplies (for example, in 2045 annual Chinese steel exports to the Caliphate amounted to fifty million tonnes; by 2060, these had increased to almost two hundred million tonnes). With a pragmatism which earned him as many detractors as plaudits, Grant ‘… conceded the Taiwan issue. I wanted [Chinese Interior Minister] Xueping to agree to allow free elections on the island for a minimum one hundred years, but he insisted on a maximum of fifty years, exactly as they’d given the British for Hong Kong. I had to use the reduction in heavy metal exports to the Caliphate before I could give Taiwan up like that. I felt a complete shit, to be honest, but there was no way the US would ever go to war with China over Taiwan, and Xueping knew that. So he got the fifty-year limit on free elections in Taiwan, and we managed to get China to reduce her heavy metal exports to the Caliphate by a lousy 10%.’
Grant and other diplomats endured many such morally dubious compromises. As Western governments analysed and tried to unpick the Chinese threads woven into their societies over the preceding decades, often they found themselves at risk of causing serious problems to their countries’ infrastructure. Grant himself appeared to despair, writing in
Night Flight to Beijing
: ‘For the first time in years, I reached a point where I just did not believe Washington was getting it anymore. When Madelyn [Coll] told me to push for bigger concessions concerning exports to the Caliphate, I replied, “We don’t have the leverage. They see the Caliphate as a stable political entity which works far better than anything before it.” But she only tilted her head at me and those hazel eyes narrowed in her usual considered frustration. I wanted to scream at her, at all of Washington - hadn’t they learned a damn thing since the crash twenty years ago? How could they still believe that the West wielded any significant amount of power? I’ve met so many people in my life, argued and negotiated and bartered the best terms for the US every single goddam time. And getting my chiefs to understand how little leverage we actually had was the hardest thing I ever tried.’
Grant can be accused of being slightly churlish here: certainly a number of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 2050s did comprehend the vast shift in the global balance of power which had taken place over the preceding generation, but few could find any solution which would be acceptable to their electorates or their consciences. As the East grew in economic strength, the West saw this unwelcome development through uncomprehending eyes, understanding what the raw data announced but unable or unwilling to take the necessary steps to adjust to the new reality.
Nevertheless, Grant deserves recognition for his tireless work to promote diplomatic solutions to trends that worried Western military and economic analysts. However, it is unlikely Grant’s continued efforts could have significantly changed the course of events. Grant was killed in July 2061, aged fifty-four, along with nine-hundred-and-twenty other people, when a disgruntled city employee tampered with the super AI managing the Los Angeles autonomous freeway system, causing pile-ups throughout the city involving over six thousand vehicles.
Subterfuge also played a role in the West’s pre-war efforts to pierce the impenetrable fog around the Caliphate, which resulted in yet more obfuscation. Recently released English government files detail a series of COBRA meetings which also involved the British Defence Council. The minutes of these meetings show the degree of frustration to which efforts to monitor the Caliphate were subject. Since the debacle in 2058, when the Caliphate displayed the bodies of four British Special Forces’ troops caught on a clandestine reconnaissance incursion near Tripoli, Napier had blocked any further reckless plans to use flesh-and-blood troops. Instead, NATO maintained a permanent naval presence in the Mediterranean and the Arabian Seas, launching high-altitude ACAs to eavesdrop on Caliphate digital traffic. However, unknown to the West, those devices which survived the Caliphate’s defences for more than a few hours were being fed false data.