Tom Clancy's South China Sea and Cyberwar predictions summarised

It would be no exaggeration to say Tom Clancy, who died last year, was the Ian Fleming of the 1980s. He also had a famous knack for prediction, making his recent novel on South China Sea confrontations and Cyberwar something of a must read at the moment. It coincides with the release of another attempt to re-boot his main character, Jack Ryan, as a movie franchise.



This is the first of three blogposts on Tom Clancy. This first post summarises the events of Clancy's novel Threat Vector, which covers a confrontation between the US and Allies and China in the South China Sea. Currently a very topical subject. The second post will cover my own personal history with Clancy's books, how I've mostly enjoyed them despite seeing his politics follow the path of right wing US opinion, evolving from Reagan Republican to far right neo-con lunacy. The third post will be a review of JACK RYAN, the latest movie adaptation of a Clancy book - or at least that is what it appears to be.

"Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said Japan and China should avoid repeating the past mistakes of Britain and Germany, which fought in World War One despite strong economic ties, according to his main government spokesman in Tokyo."

We should all be worried about current events in the South China Sea. This territorial dispute between China, Japan, the Philippines and South Korea seems to be driven by the Chinese military and a far right government in Japan which has the full backing of the United States. We have to hope diplomatic efforts in 2014 are more effective than 1914.
For Chinese and Japanese readers, in 1914 my country had completed a century as undisputed world super power, just four years and 1 million dead later it was a bankrupt client state of the United States.

One sense that this is 1914 all over again comes from the general acceptance that some confrontation will be inevitable. This is a satirical Onion headline from 2001 just after the China-US air collision of 2001.

First Chapter In History Of Sino-American War Of 2011 Already Written

based on recent events, this could be only a few years out. At the same time the reports and evidence of Chinese cyber attacks have increased, demonstrating their capability to disrupt and penetrate Western information networks almost at will.

Aside from being excellent with technical detail Tom Clancy had a talent for prediction, he famously depicted a terrorist crash a 747 onto the Whitehouse in his book Debt of Honour in 1994, predating the 9/11 attacks by six years.

According to Colin Powell
"Tom’s books were incredibly accurate. He didn’t invent impossible schemes. He invented things that could happen. Some things that have actually happened over years bore some resemblance to scenarios that he put  together. Tom could sense things and see things in a way that others couldn’t. Even though he wasn’t writing nonfiction, some of the things he wrote became reality."

Here are some more Clancy predictions.

Tom Clancy's Threat Vector, co-written with Mark Greaney, was published in 2012 and covers the events in the South China Sea we seem to be able to see developing right now. Much as I enjoy the pace and detail of Clancy's work, the politics and most of the characterisation I find pretty nauseating (I will go into this in detail in the next blogpost). This isn't so much a review of Threat Vector as a summary of Clancy's view of how he thinks the South China Sea situation could develop, written for those who would laugh out loud and give up at the first exposure to some of the John Wayne dialogue.

The events of Threat Vector :

• Chinese land troops on disputed islands in the South China Sea
• US backs its allies and moves carrier groups into the area
• As a warning Chinese hack US military satellite uplinks and have start hijacking all the US military drones. A hijacked drone destroy a US base in Afghanistan - to cause confusion the Chinese make sure all this is traceable to Iran. This is intended to distract the Americans from South China Sea events and is conducted not by the Chinese military directly but by a group of military trained hackers hidden by Triads. In Hong Kong (?)
• US special forces (along with Clancy characters acting as President Ryan's private spy agency, The Campus) try a rather desperate grab for Chinese hacker assets in Hong Kong and it is nearly a fiasco.
• Chinese declare an exclusion zone over South China Sea and there is a dogfight over the straights between PRC and Nationalist Chinese and US pilots.
• Effects of Chinese action in SCS go beyond US involvement as the Indians are formally warned to keep their ships out of trading with Vietnam. Indians ignore this and Chinese attack the Indian aircraft carrier with anti-ship missiles.
• Americans take their Carrier groups out of range of mainland Chinese missiles (but not their ballistic Carrier Killer, which is mentioned but never used)
• US navy threatens to blockade oil through straights of Mallaca which instigates full on Chinese cyber war, severely comprising worldwide communications, transport and the safety of assets such as nuclear power stations.
• With US and China on the verge of full scale war US president orders American pilots secretly fly alongside Nationalist China forces in Taiwan.
• Having been relocated from Hong Kong, the Chinese cyber warriors are now all (?) headquartered in the Chinese Telecom building of a city near the coast (?). This is destroyed in an air raid by Taiwanese planes flown by American pilots.
• In the background a group of semi-independent Chinese special forces which will be disavowed by the Chinese are defeated by The Campus, a similarly independent group of (corporate) special forces, who stage the death of a militant Chinese general by blaming it on the Chinese death squad.

We all live happily ever after.

Personal Observations 
With more knowing immorality this would be a great book. (Covered in next blog).

Few write an action scene as well as Clancy and the air raid is as close as Clancy ever go to writing the end of Star Wars.

The future of warfare is would seem to be low level covert special forces raids to attack cyber warfare centres. Cyberwar makes conventional (kinetic) military action against semi-private (and probably dispersed) very difficult. Direct military action would probably be limited to special forces, and all of this probably very mobile and probably most of it very non-official. Perhaps the most believable events in Threat Vector are semi-private (perhaps corporate) organisations doing the work of secret services which today are not not so secret.  Conflict between them is low level and could almost be mistaken for conflicts between crime gangs.

Clancy's non-official secret service is The Campus, which is basically Team America World Police - but even more offensive and ridiculous, as The Campus and literally paid directly by the finance industry (without inconvenience of it travelling through the political process, ironically one of the themes of his best early book, Clear and Present Danger).

I'm no more convinced that a team of elite Chinese assassins could operate in the US against IT centers than I am that a similar team of Americans (including the Presidents son!) can operate in mainland China. By the time you reach this in Threat Vector your sense of disbelief may be yearning to watch Thor 2 again.

When Jack Ryan Jnr, President Ryan's son (in a face mask) rescues a downed pilot from a Chinese mob in Rambo style after the bombing of the Chinese telecoms building - in China - he thanks the American pilot with words to the effect of
Those 8 ton of bombs you just used to flatten the China Telecom building may have just stopped a war!
which gave me my biggest laugh of January 2013. If the Chinese find some way to attack the Americans with irony they may be in trouble.

The destruction of this building somehow magically stops all the serious cyber attacks in a way that seems to work entirely without reference to how trojans actually operate. This is as much a cheat as it is fanciful, reminding me of those lame vampire movies where everyone returns to normal when the lead vampire is staked.

The effects of cyber warfare are seen entirely from the office of the President and amount to problems with infrastructure and connectivity. This is all disappointingly thin stuff from Clancy and probably obsolete 15 years ago. The recent worry that all IT hardware sourced from China contains built in back door access is ignored, perhaps because it leads to awkward questions about the relative importance Clancy's Republican "job creator" friends give to American national security compared to the god of the global market place.

This is the first the first time in a Clancy book we see limits to US Imperial power and if you've been reading him a while it is quite poignant, even if Clancy himself completely misses the chance to draw attention to this. The Chinese cannot be overwhelmed by superior technology and Clancy obviously has a healthy respect at least for their technical achievements.

The villian in Threat Vector,  Dr. Tong Kwok Kwan, the head of China's cyberespionage and cyberwarfare militia, is a mixture of Dr No and Fu Manchu, revealing in every way Clancy's problem with the Chinese
"What should I do when I get to this address?"
"KILL EVERY LIVING THING"
I should note I recently gave up on Flemings DR NO after a reading a pretty shocking description of the uses of mixed race Chinese and Caribbeans so don't think I'm finding problem with Clancy alone. (Ian Fleming born : 1908, Tom Clancy born :1947)

The last real person I heard using the phrase 'Chi-coms' was Douglas MacArthur.

The Indian navy is directly attacked by the Chinese and - at odds with everything I know about Indians and Pakistanis - they take this lying down and then recede into the background to let the Americans take over the response. Interestingly the Indian's are still using the ex-Royal Navy Hermes (as Viraat) which, as I speculated in my carrier post, has outlived an entire class of Royal Navy replacement carriers which cost the British taxpayer in the region of £5-6 billion (Invincible Class)

In the ages it took to post this I was able to consider my own countries role in this. In that previous carriers post I speculated that the enormous Royal Navy super carriers being built now would have little real world use within flight range of Europe and would be dangerously exposed elsewhere without American cover. Maybe their long term use is not intended for home waters around the UK. I hope not.

Lastly I should say and Mark Greaney does a seamless job with (presumably) ghost writing Clancy's work and this could easily pass as a solo Clancy book in my eyes. If anything it seems toned down from the later silly excesses of Executive Orders and the Bear and the Dragon. I listened to Threat Vector as an unabridged audio book (see Ipods for Sleep) voiced by much maligned actor Lou Diamond Philips, who does a magnificent job keeping the cheese level down to a fresh Cheshire rather than decade old Camembert.
If only we could have Brian Blessed voice Clancy's Executive Orders we could have a comedy classic on our hands.

THE REAL COST OF THE ROYAL NAVY CARRIERS

In case you have missed the latest on the fiasco which is the Royal Navy's new aircraft carriers: the word is that the cost of converting them use to the more effective (hugely delayed) US aircraft will be so much that the Admiralty may reverse its earlier decision and go with the inferior version of the same plane. OR - quelle horreur! - use the French plane which is available now, and that will probably end up operating from them anyway...

It is likely to make for a fascinating Easter budget statement.

If you thought you knew how much the new Royal Navy carriers have cost the UK budget, you are probably wrong. Originally budgeted at £3 billion, now at 7, likely to rise to an eventual 12, the real cost of disastrous budget decisions on this subject going back to the 1960s has been closer to £30 billion, plus the lives of hundreds and British and Argentinian servicemen and a long running international dispute which poisons Britain's relations with the entire of South America.

The first of the Queen Elizabeth Class carriers is due for launch next year without any aircraft. The preceding class of ships, the much smaller but Illustrious class, have just been scrapped early due to budget issues, leaving the Royal navy without any carrier capability for nearly a decade. While this happens the other Royal Navy carrier veteran from the Falklands War, HMS Hermes, will continue to serve, as it has done for decades, as INS Viraat, the flagship of the Indian Navy until 2020.

What happened to the the management and procurement of the Royal Navy's assets to allow billion dollar assets to be sold and scrapped while their even more expensive replacements sit useless for years?

In the 1960s The Royal Navy had six carriers, all laid down just after World War Two, all in various states of refit. The two major assets where the 50,000 ton Audacious class carriers, HMS Ark Royal and HMS Eagle, capable of flying the biggest baddest jets of the era, the supersonic Phantom II. The others, of which HMS Hermes was one, were half the size at 26,000 tons but considered useful as helicopter platforms. The plan was to replace the larger ships with one or two large but easy to use ships, codenamed  CVA-01 , and keep one or two of the smaller ships for the Royal Marines.

Unfortunately the fleet flagship, the Audacious Class Ark Royal, was an infamous lemon, an expensive money pit who spent more time in dockyards being fixed than at sea. Her sister, HMS Eagle, was much easier and cheaper to run but had missed a crucial upgrade to her flight deck in the 1950s (cost cutting already).

When the inevitable decision was taken to scrap both Audacious Class ships, Eagle had just finished a refit, was considered to be in excellent material condition, estimated to be at least ten years live left in her. And, as the subsequent carrier of Hermes has proved, estimates on the life of aircraft carriers have since proved to be hopelessly pessimistic.

Hesitating at the decision to replace the larger carriers with the new CVA-01 design, a decision was taken shortly after to abandon all Royal Navy operations East of Suez and to scrap the entire carrier fleet.

Such was the political stigma of "aircraft carrier" in the UK budget at the time, a form of replacement, the compromised anti-submarine Invincible Class (including a new Ark Royal) was only ordered as "through- deck cruisers". Of the others, HMS Hermes and one sister ship were retained for use by the Royal Marines as helicopter platforms.

With the even further scrapping of RN resources in Thatcher government's defense budget of 1981 the military dictatorship in Argentina decided this was a signal to re-occupy the Falklands. Previous UK governments had directed a nearby RN frigate to sail around the islands in times of tension. In failing to do this the UK government most responsible for the political failure of allowing the conflict to start reaped historic political benefits from the war which followed. The withdrawal East of Suez was forgotten as a whole new requirement South of Suez was discovered.

 Approximately a thousand deaths later, with a new disputed base to be defended 8000 miles away, with HMS Hermes dragged out of retirement and HMS Illustrious dragged out of a sale to Australia, carriers become a fashionable subject again within budgeting terms and new long term planning began on their replacement.

HMS Hermes, thought to be beyond her useful life, was sold to India in 1986 to become INS Virrat.

Illustrious and her two sister ships sailed onto two decades of semi usefullness with their tiny air group (12-18 short range, subsonic, Harriers) attracting criticism for their limited capability, until a straight budget decision in 2010 between them and a 40 year old RAF relic from the 1970s resulted in the entire Harrier force being scrapped to allow the UK to keep the Tornado (a very hard but correct decision as the RAF role in the Libyan uprising proved.)

Figure 2 HMS Illustrious size comparison with US carrier

Meanwhile, as INS Viraat, the old Hermes, a contemporary of the old Eagle and Ark Royal but half the size, sails on as flagship of the Indian Navy. The Indians had bought a Russian carrier, the Admiral Gorshkov,  to replace her but having found problems with the Russian ship (a similar hybrid compromise to the Illustrious class) the Indians chose to keep refitting the old ship and she is now set to continue until 2020, by which time there will be no spares left for her aircraft. Hermes will then have served for 60 years, when her original estimate was 20.

British naval experts, who seemingly prefer shiny new ships with half the capability of the old, would scoff at the Indians for sailing around in ships of that age, but the Indians  are practical enough to realise something that has also occurred to the US Navy. An aircraft carrier does not have to be stealthy, fast, economical, pretty or even rust free. It is a floating air base. All it needs is to be big enough and mobile enough. For this reason apparently ancient designs, even for the limitless resources of the US Navy, work just fine. USS Enterprise is due to be retired in 2013 after 51 years of service. 

Another factor to be included in these early years of the 21st century, when discussing the usefulness of carriers, is what their actual effective use would be. How much real danger are we expecting to put these ships in? In a world of 'power projection' and flag waving are such vessels, of whatever age, really going to be thrown into the sharp end of a modern conflict? Might some future UK government feel constrained to justify the expense of a new carrier by actually using them? The previous RN carriers were protected by 14 frigates and 20+ destroyers. Today we have the bright and shiny Type 45s. But there are only 6 of them (and currently we can only afford to equip them with one type of missile)

The two new carriers, The Queen Elizabeth Class are named Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales. As has been mentioned elsewhere the previous HMS Prince of Wales was a modern capital ship of another era sent into a hostile zone without adequate support to make a strategic political statement. She then faced state of the art weapons and was sunk (along with HMS Repulse) with huge loss of life. It was a loss of naval prestige in the East which the RN never recovered from and which led directly to the original decision to scale back East of Suez.

Of course, to avoid being wholly pessimistic, we could play the historical game another way, and say the previous Queen Elizabeth Class served with huge distinction in both World Wars and were arguably the most cost effective weapons ever ordered by a British government. The decision to order the deployment of Prince of Wales and the decision to order the Queen Elizabeth super dreadnoughts were both taken by the same man, Winston Churchill, underlining the difficulty ordering and deploying weapons from another era.

Nevertheless, to get the cost of the new carriers in perspective let us put it alongside the budget decisions that followed on from the original carrier savings in the 1970s.

Starting with the most heinous losses.

FALKLANDS WAR

£3 Billion +

255 lives (649 Argentinian)

Six ships sunk

plus permanent state of cold war in South Atlantic and ever worsening relations with South America

ILLUSTRIOUS CLASS "aircraft carriers/through deck cruisers"

Three built, entered service by 1981, all scrapped by 2014

£0.8 billion+

QUEEN ELIZABETH CLASS

Two ordered

Original estimate £2 Billion

Likely to be £12 Billion

Cost and type of aircraft currently unknown, ships unusable until 2020

The cost of the much reviled CVA-01, cancelled in the 1970s is estimated at £100 million, a bargain in today's terms but impossible to justify in the climate of the time. (More difficult decisions for politicians: the decision to scrap the carriers in the 70s was taken by the man who later have to beg for help for the financial bailout from the IMF, Dennis Healy.)

Seen with hindsight the real disaster was to scrap the assets available at the time. It was estimated that a fully modern refit of HMS Eagle (twice the size of Hermes) would have cost £5 million. The cost of continually refitting the carrier since, in a method similar to Hermes/Viraat, is unknown but likely to be less than completely re-inventing the industry, expertise required to operate modern fully capable carrier aircraft for the new carriers after an absence of 35 years.

The US Navy is due to help the RN re-acquire these skills and it is from this direction that we have the most compelling argument to go ahead with the carriers, and not necessarily because we actually should use them. Much of the pressure to get the new carriers came from the US tired of footing the bill for European defence and acutely aware it is the only nation currently deploying large carrier task forces. Regardless of the actual usefulness or obsolescence of the new RN carriers this is the best reason for acquiring them.

In a world were anything from satellite weapons, cyber warfare, nano-technology and drones could be decisive in a future conflict, and the UK has little to no capability in any of these areas, the billions spent on the carriers actually is billions spent on keeping the UK, and Europe, some way underneath the US hi-tech defensive umbrella.

And speaking of Europe, it is again here where the carriers make sense in a larger international context. Operating alone as only as part of a massively cut down Royal Navy the new carriers would be an exceptionally juicy target. However, along with the likely French carrier contribution, and protected by the significant and effective naval assets provided by the rest of Europe they will likely be the core of EU naval defence for at least the next 30 years. 

In this context the initially surprising thought of flying French aircraft from the British ships actually makes sense, and it would perhaps balance some of the idiotic lack of common sense that has plagued the issue of Britain's carriers for the last 40 years. The real cost of the new carriers has been in lives and is a result of vacillation and short term thinking. Having made a hard decision to build and pay for the new carriers let us make sure we get the most from them for as long as possible without needlessly expending them - or their crews.

From the budgetary perspective of 2012 ordering the new RN carriers looks insane. From the international political perspective of future generations the investment in securing our allies across the Atlantic and in Europe is priceless. Whether our allies would agree that defending Europe includes the South Atlantic is another matter.

Each of the new Royal Navy 65,000 ton super carriers will sail into action with a crew of 1600. Hopefully the only sacrifice made on this issue is the financial one we have to make now.