'Deny the Space': Policing Space in War and Friendship Games
In a couple of podcast interviews (here and here), I talk about Friendship Games and answer questions. These kinds of interviews are live and on-the-spot with no preparation or questions in advance. They are fun, but I don't always answer to my own satisfaction.
For example, in the first podcast, in an offhand comment interviewer Blaine Pardoe mentions Iran's "over-reaction" as America openly prepares to wage war against her. In Friendship Games, the principals of Iran fear a war with America as an existential threat. Consequently, when war appears unavoidable and imminent, they don't hold back and pull out all the stops. Certainly, from the Americans' perspective, Iran's reaction might be regarded as over-the-top, but not from Tehran's view. That was kind of the point.
I also wanted to mention something that hasn't come up in interviews, nor in written reviews, and I am kind of surprised that no one has mentioned it. In Friendship Games (small spoiler alert), as Iranian troops swarm through southern Iraq and then down the western coast of the Persian Gulf – romping through Kuwait, eastern Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE – except for a band of American soldiers caught up in it, nobody actually fights back.
The point was surprise, of course: everyone was caught off guard, and Iran's attack was swift and debilitating, even if chaotic. But another idea I was playing with was the notion of space. Not outer space, but earthly space. The small Gulf states (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE) notwithstanding, countries are typically large. Even the Gulf states, which are really a collection of city-states, have wide open deserts outside of their cities. It was striking to me back in 1990 how Iraqi forces simply drove down the highway from Basra to Kuwait City and captured the whole country in just a few hours. Then again, in 2003, US forces freely entered and moved about in Iraq during its invasion, and they didn't have the 500,000-troop buildup like it did before the First Gulf War.
This was the Rumsfeld Doctrine in 2003, named after the Secretary of State at the time, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld emphasized cutting edge warfighting technologies and air power over numbers of troops on the ground.
The Rumsfeld Doctrine differed from General Colin Powell's philosophy. General Powell was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the First Gulf War. Powell insisted on overwhelming force with clear, limited objectives, and public support. The execution of the First Gulf War with its six-month build up of hundreds of thousands of troops largely confirmed the efficacy of the Powell Doctrine.
Rumsfeld insisted on small, nimble ground forces backed by airstrikes and the use of the latest technologies like drones and telecommunications technologies. The Rumsfeld Doctrine, too, proved its efficacy in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, at least at first. But once Saddam Hussein's regime had been overthrown, Iraq entered a prolong period of civil war and insurgency against US occupation. After a decade of war and occupation, the US eventually withdrew from Iraq. However, US forces were sent back after Iraq's insurgents morphed into an Islamist movement that called itself the Islamic State.
The Islamic State captured territory on both sides of the Iraq and Syrian frontier after Syria also succumbed to civil war. US forces remain in Iraq, and also in parts of Syria, as it fights to contain the Islamic State.
I am not at all trained in Army doctrine, nor any other form of warfare. I am a veteran, yes, but I was an enlisted logistics specialist. I ordered aircraft parts and kept track of their whereabouts. As Samuel Huntington outlines in his classic work The Soldier and the State, it is the Officer Corps that are trained in warfare strategies, on land and at sea, and in logistics management for such a major undertaking as prosecuting a war. Enlistees are soldiers and worker bees and do what they are told. Military officers, on the other hand, are part of a higher profession, like doctors or lawyers. I hadn't realized nor appreciated the degrees of difference between officers and enlisted when I was in the Navy. I just knew I had to salute the officers and do what I was told.
These days I am a trained geographer, and space is at the heart of my discipline. I am fascinated by, for example, distributions of technology and jobs across the earth and how they change through time.
Now that I write in the genre of geopolitical fiction, technothrillers, war fiction, etc., I've come to appreciate the role of space in warfare – outer space, for one (as you would see in Friendship Games), and also space on the surface of the earth. It becomes immediately obvious that policing space is at the heart of military and law enforcement professions. It is also much easier said than done, hence the need for military and law enforcement institutions in the first place. And because policing space is quite difficult, it's no wonder that crime and war still happen. Policing space is very far from easy. You can't be everywhere all at once.
Further, frontiers—the wide-open territories beyond large cities and settled areas found at the margins of geographically-defined nations—are even harder to police. Personnel need to be present at forward bases. Or, open spaces need to be monitored and be in range of rockets, mortars, drones, and the like.
The Russo-Ukraine War
If you've been following the Russo-Ukrainian War, you might have some questions. In that war, it appears that Russia has had a devil of a time capturing much territory in the 2-and-a-half years war beyond the secessionist Donbass oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk. Before the invasion of February 2022, Russia controlled less than half of Luhansk oblast and about a quarter of the Donetsk oblast after supporting ethnic Russian secessionists in 2014.
Now, however, Russia controls all of Luhansk oblast and more than half of Donetsk oblast. It has also captured all of Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts south of the Dnieper River, thereby creating a Russian occupied corridor from Crimea to the Belgorod oblast of Russia, a territory larger than Portugal.
What happened?
Let's remember that Russia seemed bent on capturing all of Ukraine and overthrowing its government. It specifically targeted Kiev, Ukraine's capital, and also Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city. Russian scouts and special forces had even entered Kiev.
The rest of the invasion force got bogged down on what looked like back roads. In fact, Ukraine lacks major highways that link it to Belarus from where Russia launched its incursion on Kiev. The trouble, we learned, was poor planning by Russian generals. Convoys stretched for miles, and soon faced shortages of fuel.
They were sitting ducks.
This debacle afforded Ukraine the time to scramble up its defenses and launch hit-and-run attacks. The West stepped in with emergency supplies of modern industrial warfare, including high-precision rockets and mortars, drones, missiles, and aircraft. Ukraine became a death trap for Russian tanks and armored vehicles.
None of this happens in Friendship Games. There simply wasn't enough time. And modern highways from Basra, in Iraq, all the way to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates – with Kuwait City, Danann, Manama, Doha, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi in between – facilitated Iran's military movements.
The whole point was to deny the US the space to build up invasion forces and from which to bring forth the kinds of weapons listed above as they prepared for war against Iran.
I can't go further than that. You'll have to read Friendship Games to
see how it all comes about, and what happens next.
Friendship Games is a modern take on the USS Maine incident that launched the Spanish-American War in 1898; this time it is a US aircraft carrier that sinks in the Persian Gulf amid tensions with Iran and a changing world order. Friendship Games earned a coveted Kirkus starred review and consideration for the Kirkus Prize for literary excellence. It was selected by the editors of Kirkus Reviews as one of their Best Books of the Year. It earned a Bronze Medal Award from the Military Writers Society of America, and was named a Global Thriller of the Year by Chanticleer Reviews. It is also a Finalist for Chanticleer Reviews' Clue Book Award for Suspense/Thriller of the Year.