A techno thriller that is heavy on the techno and pretty light on the thriller. Pages of info dumps, rote character intros, forgettable characters, weird pacing, and so on, but it does have twenty pages of footnotes. Also, yet another fanciful, silly programmer UI from authors who clearly don't do any programming beyond Excel macros. ( )

Too many people in the Marine Corps recommended this, especially at EWS, so I put this on my Christmas list and got it from Rachel. I read it while at EWS. It was interesting as it talks about a possible future war with China and how technology (old and new) will play a part. Interesting in the context of how things could play out if a war with China breaks out, but then also has some very obvious fiction that makes it more interesting to read as a story. Not as good as many people made it seem when it was recommended.

Good on techno warfare, but writing not that good. ( )

A good solid techno thriller. It is a great attempt to suggest what may hypothetically happen down the road as the next major world conflict. Believe it or not! From advanced drone strikes, cyber-warfare, teenaged hackers, and the old naval warships named the “ghost fleet”, tensions run high as the United States is attacked by China, Singer may get another read. ( )

I was a bit late in getting to it, but I was pleasantly surprised by P.W. Singer and August Cole's Ghost Fleet. It took a bit of effort to get into it, but the temporal leap the novel takes into years after a second Pearl Harbor attack allows for some very interesting worldbuilding. The United States has been taken down a peg and enjoys little to none of its previous dominance. What does the post-hegemonic era look like for America? How, in the fabled era of "degraded ISR," can American armed forces operate and conduct operations? While we're living through that transition now, Singer and Cole explore what that future might actually resemble.

Riddled throughout with trenchant criticisms of the current political-military-industrial complex (such as a "Big Two" defense contractors, numerous references to the failings of the F-35, and the Air Force's institutional resistance to unmanned air-to-air platforms), the vision fleshed out in Ghost Fleet is not a flattering one to our current state of affairs. At times the references are a bit on the nose, but the degree of underlying wit makes up for it.

If nothing else, the opening sequence helps explain even to the layman the importance of sensor platforms and space-based assets, the US military's dependence on them, and their exquisite vulnerability. Finite quantities of ship-launched missiles and other material become apparent in a way that can be challenging to discern in real-life operations. Our reliance on Chinese-produced microchips and other advanced technology becomes a easily-exploitable Achilles' Heel, in a manner all too reminiscent of the Battlestar Galactica pilot miniseries.

A new techno-thriller is, of course, cause for comparison to Tom Clancy, and where this far outshines him is in its willingness to critique technology and current trends in military procurement rather than lauding it unreservedly, while crafting somewhat multi-dimensional characters (some of whom are even not white!). And as I've written before, even if wrong in the details, fiction like this helps broaden the aperture a bit and convey the potentialities of future conflict. If not China, then Russia; if not the F-35, then perhaps the long-range strike bomber: things will go wrong, technologies will fail, and the United States may well be caught unawares. Hopefully, with novels such as Ghost Fleet illustrating the cost of unpreparedness, it will be possible to forestall the future it envisions. ( )