- Scott, William B., Michael J. Coumatos, and William J. Birnes.
Space Wars.
New York: Forge, 2007.
ISBN 0-7653-1379-0.
-
I believe it was Jerry
Pournelle who observed that a Special Forces operative
in Afghanistan on horseback is, with his GPS target designator
and satellite communications link to an F-16 above, the
closest thing in our plane of existence to an angel of
death. But, take away the space assets, and he's just a
guy on a horse.
The increasing dependence of the U.S. military on space-based
reconnaissance, signal intelligence, navigation and precision
guidance, missile warning, and communications platforms has
caused concern among strategic thinkers about the risk of
an “asymmetrical attack” against them by an
adversary. The technology needed to disable them is far
less sophisticated and easier to acquire than the space
assets, and the impact of their loss will
disproportionately impact the U.S., which has fully integrated
them into its operations. This novel, by a former chief
wargamer of the U.S. Space Command (Coumatos), the editor-in-chief
of Aviation Week and Space Technology (Scott), and
co-author Birnes, uses a near-term fictional scenario set in
2010 to explore the vulnerabilities of military space and
make the case for both active defence of these platforms and
the ability to hold at risk the space-based assets of
adversaries even if doing so gets the airheads all atwitter
about “weapons in space” (as if a GPS constellation
which lets you drop a bomb down somebody's chimney isn't a
weapon). The idea, then, was to wrap the cautionary tale and
policy advocacy in a Tom Clancy-style thriller which would reach
a wider audience than a dull Pentagon briefing presentation.
The reality, however, as embodied in the present book, is
simply a mess. I can't help but notice that the publisher,
Forge, is an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, best known
for their Tor science fiction books.
As I have observed earlier in comments about the recent
novels by
Orson
Scott Card and
Heinlein
and Robinson, Doherty doesn't seem to pay much attention to
copy editing and fact checking, and this book illustrates the
problem is not just confined to the Tor brand. In fact, after this
slapdash effort, I'm coming to look at Doherty as something like
Que computer books in the 1980s—the name on the spine is
enough to persuade me to leave it on the shelf.
Some of the following might be considered very mild spoilers, but
I'm not going to put them in a spoiler warning since they don't
really give away major plot elements or the ending, such as it
is. The real spoiler is knowing how sloppy the whole thing is,
and once you appreciate that, you won't want to waste your time on
it anyway. First of all, the novel is explicitly set in the month
of April 2010, and yet the “feel” and the technological
details are much further out. Basically, the technologies in place
three years from now are the same we have today, especially for
military technologies which have long procurement times and
glacial Pentagon deployment schedules. Yet we're supposed to
believe than in less than thirty-six months from today, the
Air Force will be operating a two-storey, 75,000 square foot
floor space computer containing “an array of
deeply stacked parallel nanoprocessing circuits”,
with spoken natural language programming and query capability
(pp. 80–81). On pp. 212–220 we're
told of a super weapon inspired by
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
which, having started its development as a jammer for
police radar, is able to seize control of enemy unmanned
aerial vehicles. And so protean is this weapon, its very
name changes at random from SPECTRE to SCEPTRE from paragraph
to paragraph.
The mythical
Blackstar
spaceplane figures in the story, described as incoherently as in
co-author Scott's
original
cover story in Aviation Week. On p. 226 we're
told the orbiter burns “boron-based gel fuel and
atmospheric oxygen”, then on the very next page we
hear of the “aerospike rocket engines”. Well, where
do we start? A rocket does not burn atmospheric oxygen, but
carries its own oxidiser. An aerospike is a kind of rocket engine
nozzle, entirely different from the supersonic combustion
ramjet one would expect on an spaceplane which used
atmospheric oxygen. Further, the advantage of an aerospike is
that it is efficient both at low and high altitudes, but there's no
reason to use one on an orbiter which is launched at high altitude
from a mother ship. And then on p. 334, the “aerospike”
restarts in orbit, which you'll probably agree is pretty
difficult to do when you're burning “atmospheric oxygen”,
which is famously scarce at orbital altitudes.
Techno-gibberish is everywhere, reminiscent in verisimilitude
to the dialogue in the television torture fantasy
“24”.
For example, “Yo' Jaba! Got a match on our parallel port.
I am waaay cool!” (p. 247). On p. 174 a
Rooskie no-goodnik finds orbital elements for U.S. satellites
from “the American ‘space catalog’ she had
hacked into through a Texas university's server”. Why
not just go to CelesTrak,
where this information has been available worldwide since
1985? The laws of orbital mechanics here differ from those
of Newton; on p. 381, a satellite in a circular orbit
“14,674 miles above sea level” is said to be
orbiting at “17,500
MPH”.
In fact, at this altitude orbital velocity is 4.35 km/sec
or 9730 statute miles per hour. And astronauts in low earth
orbit who lose their electrical power quickly freeze solid,
“victims of space's hostile, unforgiving cold”.
Actually, in intense sunlight for half of every orbit and with the
warm Earth filling half the sky, getting rid of heat is
the problem in low orbit. On pp. 285–290, an
air-launched cruise missile is used to launch a blimp.
Why not just let it go and let the helium do the job all
by itself? On the political front, we're supposed to think
that a spittle-flecked mullah raving that he was the
incarnation of the Twelfth Imam, in the presence of the Supreme
Leader and President of Iran, would not only escape being
thrown in the dungeon, but walk out of the meeting with a
go-ahead to launch a nuclear-tipped missile at a target in
Europe. And there is much, much more like this.
I suppose it should have been a tip-off that the
foreword was written by George Noory, who hosts the
Coast to Coast AM
radio program originally founded by
Art Bell.
Co-author Birnes was also co-author of the
hilariously preposterous
The Day After Roswell,
which claims that key technologies in the second half of
the twentieth century, including stealth aircraft and
integrated circuits, were based on reverse-engineered
alien technologies from a flying saucer which crashed in
New Mexico in 1947. As stories go,
Roswell,
Texas seems more plausible, and a lot
more fun, than this book.
May 2007 