Condition Zebra: The Next War - 2025

Author’s Note:

Dear Readers,

November 2019 finally saw the LRASM certified for Early Operational Capability (EOC) with the United States Navy. The carrying platform is the F/A-18 Superhornet, and the missile was also certified for the B-1 bomber last year. So the day of the old Harpoon is finally coming to an end, and the Navy is getting a valuable standoff strike weapon with range at long last. Oh, they always had the Tomahawk, for land attack, and a program converting some of those to the Multi-Mission variant so they could also strike ships. (Sometimes called the Maritime Strike Tomahawk, or MST). The Navy has also officially selected the Konsberg-Raytheon Naval Strike Missile for their struggling Littoral Combat Ships, as I have been modeling them here in this series.

We still won’t see them in the VLS bays of the destroyers, but that is coming. It is all part of the slow awakening of the US Navy to the fact that its mission is no longer to support the hunt for small cadres of would be terrorists in the mountain and desert wilderness areas of the Middle East, or to simply show the flag with freedom of navigation patrols in the South China Sea. The new mission is reorienting the Navy for “Great Power Competition,” and at the top of that list of competitors is China.

At this time, and thankfully, China presents no sign of ever acting in the way they do here in this series. The modern segments of the story present hypotheticals, showing what China would be capable of doing by 2021 in Season Six, and in the 2025 to 2030 timeframe here in Season 7. The cost of a war like this, in economic and social disruption throughout the world, would be profound, and that is one reason why the proverbial “cooler heads” may prevail, and we may never see such a war. This story, however, is an attempt to model what might happen if such a conflict ever came. At the same time, it takes a hard look at what the various militaries are and are not really capable of, a kind of warfighters testbed that reveals the strengths and weaknesses on all sides.

Last season we saw the US go to war with no more than 123 LRASM’s by the year 2021. They had 700 SLAM-ER’s, 625 Standard Missile-6, and just 296 Multi-Mission Tomahawks, though that conversion program continues on Block IV models. In this war in 2025, I add four more years of procurement and production, and with an awareness that Great Power Competition is the name of the game in those future years. The fact that the 2025 conflict is also arising from the alternate history crafted in the main series (Books 1-40), allows me to show you a US Navy that has corrected many of the glaring deficiencies it labors with today.

The USN in 2025 has standardized on the MMT or Maritime Strike Tomahawk, though it still is using up its older inventory of TLAMS and TACTOM’s for land strike missions. It has the LRASM, for both naval aircraft and on many of its destroyers. It has given the Zumwalt class destroyers ammunition for its advanced deck guns. It has Standard Missile-6 in good numbers, and SM-3 deployed on most every cruiser, and on some destroyers. It put the Naval Strike Missile, and a VLS section with the ESSM on its Freedom Class Littoral Combat Ships. It has the F-35 on all of its carriers. Beyond that, it has some interesting fringe aircraft like the rebuilt Super Tomcats, a new carrier based strike plane, the Avenger II. In short, I’m showing you a US Navy that will be as good as it could possibly get by 2025. Even though there are fewer big deck carriers, those that are active here are all one might expect to see operational from our current group.

As for the Royal Navy, I have boosted their strength a great deal, with twice as many Daring Class destroyers, and the addition of some Type-31 Frigates, and more of the Type 26. Yet the combats I modeled suddenly showed a glaring weakness with their new Sea Ceptor missile system—it can’t track, catch, or kill very high supersonic or hypersonic missile threats. As for their carriers, I floated both Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, but also showed how Britain built an intermediate carrier class between the Invincible class and those newest flattops. That said, note well the effectiveness, or deficiencies, of the British carriers when it comes to actual combat. They just don’t have any effective standoff strike munitions fir their F-35’s.

As for China, you will see a much stronger navy, assuming the Chinese go all out with their breakneck naval production. (They built 24 new ships in 2019). As I was writing this, China commissioned its second aircraft carrier, Shandong, on December 17—a copy of the Russian built Liaoning. Here they get six carriers, though one has already been sunk. They also get a big production run on the new Type 055 destroyers, using them as the heart of all their many surface action groups, and this at a time when the US is retiring its own cruisers. Antietam, Bunker Hill, Leyte Gulf, Lake Champlain, Mobile Bay and San Jacinto are all scheduled to be decommissioned.

Yet in spite of that, the Chinese carriers can’t really get out into the Deep Blue, and also have limitations in strike capability. Yet the adoption of the J-31 as the primary carrier based fighter here gives them good defensive ability, as you will see. Their main naval strength, however, is in the formation of massive fleets built around strong Surface Action Groups, with submarine screens.

We’ll take a look at how even a revitalized Royal Navy fares against this new Chinese fleet, and then the big kid on the block shows up, the USN. Just where can China fight, and for how long? Can it protect and secure its maritime lines of communication, or are the “String of Pearls” strung along the maritime silk road a will-o-the wisp fantasy? In the end, naval power boils down to one thing—sea control, and we will see who can deliver that, looking closely at China, the UK and the USN.

I thought I would spend a lot of time in Tangent Fire describing the nuclear exchange in 2021, but found it would be too ghastly to sit there putting all that into descriptive prose. The stories and fates of the major characters were therefore uppermost in my mind, and so they led us on to 2025, the future they helped to forge, and perhaps the only future where any of them might survive.

The nuclear holocaust on the 2021 timeline involved the destruction of most major cities, terrible aftereffects caused by radiation and fallout, and a general collapse of civilization. All those nukes also lit firestorms, which raged through outlying areas, darkening the skies with radioactive smoke. Keeping in mind that the Demon Volcano had already thrown over 100 cubic kilometers of ash and gas into the atmosphere the resulting effect on the climate was profound. The winter of 2021 on that unfortunate timeline was the coldest ever recorded, and there was nothing resembling a summer the following year either.

The diminished sunlight from soot, ash, and other materials in the atmosphere quickly cooled off the planet, until the average temperature fell by eight to nine degrees Celsius. This persistent cold reduced precipitation by as much as 45% across the globe. Such a severe blow to the climate would cause worldwide crop failure. Without adequate sunlight or water, nothing grew or thrived, and rivers and streams were contaminated by radioactive fallout and “Black Rain.” It was estimated that it might take as long as ten years for all the soot aerosols in the upper stratosphere to clear, and during those years, the survivors of the cataclysmic event itself would cope with famine, disease, and the violence of a ruined society.

The EMP effects of all those nuclear detonations would have shut down anything electronic, and caused the collapse of all electrical power systems. So the survivors would be forced to a subsistence level of life, struggling to secure shelter, clean water, food, and a way to keep warm in the increasing cold. As burning wood only exacerbated the already polluted atmosphere, it became a vicious circle.

In such a scenario, what happens in the Baltic States, the Ukraine, or the East China Sea becomes irrelevant. The outcomes of these military engagements were seen only as the prelude to the real war, which was fought by the ICBM’s and their deadly warheads.

Yet there was one last effect, at least in this saga. We have all learned that these detonations affect more than space. They also impact time, or rather spacetime as Einstein defined it. The temporal condition of the world throughout this saga has been like a great pane of shattered glass, still holding together after the baseball called Tunguska plowed into it, but slowly being compromised. Webs of cracks and fissures spread out from that center point of impact, and our characters have been navigating them, and creating more cracks with each nuke they used.

So in addition to all these terrible physical effects, we also have catastrophic temporal damage when several thousand nuclear warheads all go off in the space of a few hours. Believe me, it is not a world you would ever want to spend any time in, and those that perished in the initial holocaust may have had the easiest fate.

Fedorov and Karpov saw this oncoming train wreck as inevitable, and so they made good their escape, along with Tyrenkov. The Fairchild group came forward on Argos Fire, and Ivan Gromyko followed with Kazan. So here they all are, together on the only future left to them, and yet still facing the dangerous scourge of war in 2025.

Here, in these altered states, nuclear arsenals are perhaps only ten percent of what they are now in our day, and so it is Fedorov’s hope that the conflict will remain a conventional war. After the initial clash that set off the war in the Pacific, Tangent Fire portrayed the alarming escalation that soon swept across the Med. There, China had just enough of a fleet to raise havoc, and bring the flow of seaborne commerce to a halt. Those events cut the maritime connections to Persian Gulf oil, and forced all that traffic to shift south around the Cape of Good Hope. Yet even that route is by no means secure, which brings us to the events of this volume, Condition Zebra.

Admiral Wells has been heavily reinforced with the arrival of the Prince of Wales carrier group, which will now join the two standing British carrier TF’s that were already there, centered on Victorious and Vengeance. The Royal Navy now moves around the Cape to Durban, and is about to begin operations aimed at clearing the Indian Ocean of enemy shipping, and opening the vital sea lanes to the Middle East. They will soon be joined by the US Navy Carrier Strike Group Roosevelt, which mustered at Darwin to reinforce Saudi Arabia after an ominous buildup by Saddam’s military on the borders of Kuwait.

The Gulf War that was never fought in this altered future history may now be another battle that cannot be avoided. While I refer to “Saddam’s” military here, it really belongs to his son Qusay, who led the Republican Guard for many years, and was named Saddam’s successor when the old man retired years ago. (Saddam still lives at the ripe age of 88 years, but now acts only as a figurehead advisor to his son Qusay.)

In our history, 2020 greeted us with an escalating situation in the Middle East. The US strike that killed Iranian General Soleimani was more significant than many realize. This is the man who invented Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the man principally responsible for exporting Iranian Jihadi mischief around the world. He was behind the design of ingenious armor penetrating IED’s to kill and maim US soldiers in Iraq. He was the builder of scores of Iranian “Shiite Militias,” whose only grace was that they set themselves in opposition to ISIS, which was a predominantly Sunni based movement. So no tears here for the fate he suffered, and good riddance.

While the man had a lot of blood on his hands, his death is equivalent to the assassination of the head of our own Joint Chiefs by a foreign power, and was a fairly clear act of war. That said, virtually everything he conspired to do was a fairly clear act of war against Western countries he targeted, principally the United States.

Yet every action of this magnitude in the Middle East has consequences. Amazingly, the attack was made right after the US embassy in Iraq had been under siege for the last two days. Its timing could not have been worse, but these target opportunities often present themselves at awkward times. Now we have had to rush a company of Marines to the embassy, and a battalion of the Ready Brigade of the 82nd Airborne to Kuwait, with the rest of the brigade following soon after. That’s about 4000 troops, and plans already exist to send as many as 120,000 troops back into that simmering cauldron of the Middle East if so ordered. Iran has a standing army of about 545,000 troops, including the Revolutionary Guards, and 350,000 reserves. So just what, exactly, is the Ready Brigade to do? It’s there for things like embassy or base defense, nothing more.

Iraq today has been vacillating between allegiance to the US, or embracing Iran, as they do here in my story. Many Iranian militias were actually helping kill off ISIS cadres in the region’s strange patchwork of odd alliances and rivalries. When ISIS went down, those cadres and militias remained in Iraq, the equivalent of another well-armed and trained political faction in the country now. They have been stirring the pot in Iraq, and when you bring in a good old Western enemy like the US, an attack like this does little to push Iraqi sentiment our way. Could we see a kind of alliance develop between Iran and Iraq as I portray here in this story? That remains to be seen.

Now to the consequences…. This assassination, carried out by US military assets, will certainly trigger a strong reprisal from Iran, a country that has already mined and commandeered oil tankers, shot down US unmanned aircraft, and launched a big drone attack that took 50% of Saudi Arabia’s oil production off line for weeks. What could we see from Iran in the weeks and months ahead?

Start with mines, all through the Strait of Hormuz or the Gulf of Oman. Add in the ever present swift boat nuisance. Those won’t bother a US destroyer, but they will chill the spine of a commercial tanker Ship Master. I’ve already modeled Iranian operations with their Ghadir class mini subs. They are a harassment, but don’t last long. Shore based SSM batteries will also have to be considered if things continue to heat up.

Expect a cyber war too, with power grids being key targets, including those that run all those refineries over there. That will go both ways, with the US military prepared to launch a blistering cyberattack code named “Nitro Zeus.” I’d bet on the US in that realm.

Then come jihadi attacks against soft targets in the Gulf States friendly to the US, or in Israel. Think car bombs, drone attacks, IED’s, and shooting incidents like we suffer here in the US on a monthly basis. Face it, when people have guns, they end up using them, and so will Iran.

As in this story, it will either take stealth fighters to get in and start taking down Iran’s air defense systems, or it will take bombers with standoff missiles. But something always remains hidden, and we saw the Iranians use their ballistic missiles in both the 2021 scenario and here in 2025. Right now, they have avoided hitting the refineries and oil terminals, but if they realize they can never control them in the 2025 war, all bets are off. So we will see a lot of this play out in the series books ahead.

In our own history, this level of escalation will have some pretty grave consequences, but let’s remember that this was a path chosen by the current administration three years ago when the US pulled out of the nuclear deal with Iran. That country was in complete compliance with the agreement, as verified monthly by independent inspection teams. Then the treaty was torn up, and heavy sanctions put in its place. We had years of relative stability before that happened, now look at what’s in front of us with these dramatic escalations over the last several months.

This new flashpoint sparks off after the big setback in Syria that saw us abandon the Kurds because of a desire to extricate ourselves from endless wars in the Middle East. Ironically, the troops are now flowing into the region in much greater numbers, and facing the prospect of a greater war that would dwarf the actions in Syria. The reason given for the killing of Soleimani was that he was planning more attacks against US assets in the region, but the law of “blow back” will now assure that we get those attacks in droves. These are the “unintended consequences” of this chest thumping between the US and Iran, and they will be nothing but bad, for both sides.

In this story, we are about to see how all of this might play out, a war involving Iraq and Iran in the most volatile region of the world. While that fight would be a mismatch in the naval / air arena, on the ground, throughout that entire region, Iran’s ability to conduct ongoing “asymmetric” warfare would never end. Nor will we ever invade Iran to defeat its conventional military. If you thought ten years of fighting in Iraq was a waste of lives and treasure, a war in Iran would be much worse.

It isn’t likely to happen, so all this escalation does is further destabilize an already fragile and vital region of the world, which presently maintains 50% of global oil production. You think gas prices are high now? You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet if this thing blows up. Iran’s ability to put harm on our regional allies and partner states in the Middle East cannot be underestimated, and this could go on and on and on….

Old Indian saying: ‘If you keep heading in the direction you are going, you just might get there.’ The direction we are heading in the Middle East is, to say the least, quite dangerous. Yet when has it ever been otherwise? If left alone, our enemies there would have continued to expand their terror and mayhem throughout the region. Someone has to present a countervailing power to check Iran’s dark ambitions, and that someone had been the United States, under four different Administrations. Things just never seem to get better over there, but after this stunning strategic blow with the assassination of Soleimani, I wonder what the House of Saud is thinking about it now?