Customer Reviews

The Future of Warfare

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This book opens with and excellent explanation of the vital interests of the United States that would result in war. It goes on to discuss the probable near term trends and development in warfare, with historical examples to explain these trends. If your interest is military history and probable near term military developments, this is an excellent book. I have read several of Bevin Alexander's books and consider him to be a fine and insightful author and historian. As with all of his books, this one could use more maps, as this would greatly facilitate following his explanation of battles and campaigns.
My main criticism is that this book fails to look over the horizon where the future of warfare lies. There is no mention of the military future of space. One of the first commercial applications of space colonization will be to build large solar collectors that could supply the power requirements of our nation. These would have auxiliary uses in warfare. They could be used in varying intensity to raise the temperature of a battlefield or small country from a few dozen, to hundreds of degrees, in order to discourage or kill an adversary. They could also be used indirectly to influence the weather and rainfall on the planet. Another aspect of a space presence is that it results in complete command of the seas. It is extremely expensive to operate our carrier battle groups and they are more vulnerable than purported. This would be unnecessary if we had a military presence in space. From space one can "shoot" asteroids accurately that would strike at approximately 20 times the muzzle velocity of a rifle. These dumb iron asteroids could be sized from a few ounces (with and ablative coating) to millions of tons. They would provide the ability to sink any ship, destroy any bunker, or country on earth. In the airburst mode they would be effective against soft, or small fast targets i.e. tanks, missiles in the boost phase, or troops. Asteroids are cheep and impossible to defend against. These systems would be operated by a small number of people who would be invulnerable to retaliation. In a nutshell, military control of space can result in low cost, uncontestable, absolute, military dominance of the planet. This is the future of warfare and it does not even receive comment in this book.
Another benefit of industrializing space is that it would eliminate another of the causes cited for future wars, namely a monopoly of vital commodities, chromium, cobalt, oil etc. Oil would be less critical if there was limitless cheep electricity from solar power satellites. We could also create synthetic oil or hydrogen using this electric power. All other critical elements should exist in the easily mined moon.
In short a means of obtaining low operational cost, long term military dominance of the planet while at the same time eliminating most of reasons he cites for going to war deserves at least a chapter. But, even given the above, the first chapter alone is worth the price of the book and the time to read it.