“Ashes, to ashes, dust to dust”

“2034, A novel of the Next World War” is all too close at hand. This cautionary tale, written by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid. Ackerman and Stavridis take us inside the minds of a global cast of characters–Americans, Chinese, Iranians, Russians, Indians–as a series of arrogant miscalculations on all sides leads the world into an intensifying nuclear conflagration.

On March 12, 2034, US Navy Commodore Sarah Hunt is on the bridge of her flagship, the guided missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones, conducting a routine freedom of navigation patrol in the South China Sea when her ship detects an unflagged trawler in clear distress, smoke billowing from its bridge. On that same day, US Marine aviator Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell is flying an F35E Lightning over the Strait of Hormuz, testing a new stealth technology as he flirts with Iranian airspace.

By the end of that day, Sarah Hunt’s destroyer will lie at the bottom of the sea, sunk by the Chinese Navy and Wedge will be an Iranian prisoner. China and Iran have clearly coordinated their moves, which involve the use of powerful new forms of cyber weaponry that render US ships and planes defenseless. In a single day, America’s faith in its military’s strategic pre-eminence is in tatters. A new, terrifying era is at hand.