Review of: Coumatos, Michael J., William B. Scott, & William J. Birnes. Foreward by George Noory. Space Wars: The First Six Hours of World War III, A Wargame Scenario. New York: A Tom Doherty Book, 2007.

     Deadsats: A wargame exercise by US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) on the likelihood of attacks on US commercial and military space assets. What if. . . ?

     Suspiciously, in April 2010, yet another US defense link satellite goes off-line. Dead in space, drifting, useless. How did that happen? That made the sixth Department of Defense (DoD) or military-contracted dual-use commercial satellite to completely fail in the last several months. Wall Street workers griped that the commercial aspects of the orbital satellite network failures left them unable to communicate with PDAs. Non-working satellites damage the economy. The insurance industry began to take hits in claims and forced them to raise premiums on the existing fleet and new satellites to cover their losses. Things get muckier.

     Little doe the public suspect until “leaked,”, but the US with all of these so-far “coincidences,” a huge gap in the military’s ability to defend the country has formed. The STRATCOM combatant commander responsible for space warfare, General Aster, believes the country may be under a attack. How? Who? What? Where? Why? Even if a lone hacker, or a terrorist group stood behind it, holes rip open in world-wide defense communications and intelligence networks.. Military hardware and software all fail to keep the advantage once given for total US military global domination.

     General Aster and his immediate superior, the former general and now Defense Secretary, worry about terrorist groups who might be able to launch attacks inside the US because of holes in the security systems. Most worrisome, what if Russia, China, Korea, or Iran launch nuclear weapons on missiles at US forces around the globe, seeing the opportunity to knock out THE superpower while it sits deaf and blind, oblivious to a surprise attack in a one-time opportunity. Before the news gets out, or the other competing nations fully understands the problems, Aster needs to answer these questions. And from these answers, he needs to plan and implement actions to defeat the “attack,” if there is really an attack underway. Aster turns to his aide, Colonel Androsin.

     Update the Deadsats scenarios, Androsin says. In a theater-sized room with computers at every stadium-arranged bucket flight seat, STRATCOM’s game room gets played out on the huge wall monitors. Data comes in, gets played by cells of teams–Blue (US), Red (Opposing Forces or OPFOR), Green (allies and neutrals), and the control group led by Admiral of the Navy (Ret.) Lee. Androsin, a modern-day computerized Clausewitz, runs the technical inputs and analysis of over fifty wargamers from all the armed services, civilian agencies, and industry, running deductive exercises with the aid of a secure world-wide DoD internet.

     Lee, however, is a combat veteran on the retired list recalled to temporary duty for use his great intellectual insights. Lee is the armed forces’ recognized and preeminent authority on the philosophy of war and Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general who wrote the timeless The Art of War 500 years before Christ. Waging the largest and most decisive victories with the least costs and effort, Sun Tzu is embeded into the minds of the human gamers by Lee lest they forget the primary art of war: Know your opponent as well as you know yourself and you shall not lose too much. In the Deadsats game, human error and personality still cannot be programmed and modeled into a computer simulation. But the model can account for it.

     Over a week under attack, confirmed by the enemy killing all the astronauts on the International Space Station, the Deadsats game incorporates the actual operators of STRATCOM, the battle staff, in order to integrate the information on the range of possible threats and responses with the decisions taken and action made in the real-live shooting war. Some of this war involves a re-useable combat space plane that fills both critical gaps in the satellite coverage with temporary sensors and launches a sub-fractional orbit attack on an aggressor’s nuclear storage facility. Who started this war, why, when, where and how is found based on theories from the game. The human-computer model simulation game uses all the sources available, including the Treasury Department and an Israeli Mossad financial crimes investigator. Deadsats as a human reasoning process finds the answers in order to frame the proper questions that need to be asked first.

     The United States, under the direction of US Strategic Command, does what Sun Tzu emphasized and US Air Force Colonel John Boyd institutionalized: Get inside the enemies mind, his “decision-making cycle,” and make him react to your actions. Let him or her make the erros upon which we can benefit or exploit. Boyd’s “OODA loop” (Orientation, Observation, Decision, & Action) method for fighter pilots, not an end in itself, has may be become the self-deluded mantra of US military thought. We need more than that in our national security policies. Knowing the enemy as well as yourself, and seeing yourself as does your enemy, forms the basis of model simulation games used in all forecasting. Allowing human reason to act might stem logic that says the only option is “mutually assured destruction.”

     Space Wars use of today’s technical possibilities and probable future conflicts and strategies, tell decent “reality” fiction for the writer or analyst, but not real drama. The weapons and politics in Space Wars exist now, not knowing two years from now what the world will have the ability to do or produce. Not really Tom Clancy in-depth character plots (Clancy used a version of the wargame Harpoon to write his first major success–The Hunt for Red October), Space Wars explains and forecasts better the range and style of future war than the mid-1990s book The Next War by former Secretary Defense Caspar Weinberger.

     In that book, Weinberger and his co-authors saw possible wars with Russia, Japan, and Mexico. Whereas The Next War incorporated anti-ballistic missile systems as part of the still-possible war with Russia, Space Wars really extends to the next level in a national military strategy: Space power now and for years such as sea power and then maritime supremacy helped formed a modern era since the Reformation 500 years ago.

     Space Wars shows the utility that computer modeling already has on human affairs. As more things come under computer supervision, and if such model simulation gaming and theory can anticipate the actions of an “enemy,” who benefits if computers really do go “on-line” in artificial awareness? Would they correct errors people program them to see and anticipate? Then, human error could be eliminated completely. What then for our freedom for the art of living, let alone artist like Sun Tzu?