Welcome back to the Two Navy Guys Debrief, the (mostly) weekly forum where we look at a national security issue and how we have explored that topic in our fiction.
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If you ask us for the “elevator pitch” of our latest series, we often say something along these lines:
The Command and Control series is a Great Powers conflict set in the 21st century. (emphasis added)
The term Great Power serves as a clever shorthand in this description. It has a historical ring to it, evoking sovereign countries exerting political, military, and economic influence around the globe.
In 2019, when we first developed this series, the term Great Powers seemed apt. Our series concept was to extrapolate the “real world” into the future along four axes:
Which countries have the military and economic juice to compete with the US
What are the new tools of power (AI, cyber, social media, private military contractors, for example)
How is new military technology being deployed, esp unmanned platforms
Who are the characters driving international relations and foreign policy
[For a more complete discussion of these points, you can revisit our July column, The Russian coup that wasn’t.]
Over the course of the next two years, we wrote the first three books and released them via Severn River Publishing in 2022.
But then a strange thing happened. The starting point for our fictional look into the future—the Great Powers model—started to fall apart.
Like so much in our recent history, we trace the beginning of our uneasiness to the pandemic. For the better part of two years, international relations, including conflicts, were frozen in time. (While this is not a column about pandemic responses, it’s interesting to consider how each country dealt with the same crisis in a way that was reflective of their principles.)
The next shock to our model came into focus after the failed Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. (Yes, we are rapidly approaching the two-year anniversary of Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War.) From this event, we realized two things:
Russia is NOT a Great Power, at least not in the military sense.
The model of allies banding together to fight back is not dead.1
It was time to go back to the drawing board and rethink our Great Powers model.
A Substack column by
called, You're not going to like what comes after Pax Americana, helped to clarify our thinking. While the whole article is worth your time, the premise is that Pax Americana is dead (or at least on life support) and we are not ready for what comes next. What was Pax Americana and why was it even considered a good thing in the first place?“What was Pax Americana? After the end of the Cold War, deaths from interstate conflicts — countries going to war with each other, imperial conquest, and countries intervening in civil wars — declined dramatically.”
He argues that since World War Two, the US has served as an effective world policeman. (Yes, an imperfect one, to be sure, but an overall force for good.) However, over the last twenty years, the US’s military and economic influence has waned. The world, he concludes, “is a more ungoverned, lawless place than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.”
We agree. Over the past two decades, the world has changed in fundamental ways. The threats (both foreign and domestic) have changed, and we need a new framework to ground our fictional look into the future. So, here goes:
Allies vs Autocrats
If Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War has shown us anything, it is the power of an effective allied response to an autocratic threat. But Mr. Putin has shown us something else, too. The United States can’t be the answer to every world problem.2 There are too many threats coming from too many sides to assume that the US can be the world policeman anymore.
The term autocrats does a solid job of describing what we’re up against. The conflicts in the world right now are not about ideology, they’re about greed. To the autocrats, the world is a transactional, zero-sum game. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, too.
Allies vs autocrats was our starting point as we wrote Covert Action, Book 5 of our Command and Control series. We looked all over the globe to find the right setting to tell this story of a post-Great Powers conflict. Central Asia checked every box.
If you feel like we’re in a blizzard trying to fix the plane and fly it at the same time, then join the club. The way forward is fraught and the outcome is not assured. We think
sums it up well:Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American hegemony, to speak derisively of “American exceptionalism”, to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of “world police”, and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like it better.
Be happy. Stay healthy. Read (or listen to) a book.
As always, thanks for being a supporter –
David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
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For context, recall that in 2014, Russia invaded Crimea, then part of Ukraine, without firing a shot. 2022 was a VERY different response.
Lest this point be misunderstood, we see the current political bickering over funding to Ukraine as incredibly short-sighted. The only thing more dangerous than a Putin who’s lost, is a Putin who thinks he’s won. The US—and all of our allies—should back Ukraine fully.