“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… "
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.”
“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.”