Today’s post is inspired by anyone who has ever read or reviewed one of our books. Thanks to you, the Two Navy Guys hit a major publishing milestone this week:
Counter Strike, Book 2 of the Command and Control series, has more than 5000 reviews.
We. Are. Gob. Smacked.
A decade ago, we were just a couple of friends who embarked on a creative project together. We both loved old-school thrillers from writers like Clancy, Follett, and Forsyth. Could we do that? As we’ve written before, our goal was to just finish writing a book together (without killing each other and while staying friends). Publishing? That was a problem for another day.
Today, we write to you as authors who have a book with over 5000 reviews (and counting).1
Thank you. We are humbled by your praise and your continued support.
In the first chapters of Counter Strike, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army stages a blitz invasion of the island nation of Taiwan. (Unlike Order of Battle, our fictional account of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Counter Strike is (thankfully) still fiction.)
In Chapter 2, on the eve of Chinese Lunar New Year, Major Gao2 leads strike teams from roll-on, roll-off ships docked in Keelung Harbor outside of Taipei, Taiwan. Commonly known as RoRo ferries or just RoRos, these ships are essentially car carriers, used to transport any kind of wheeled vehicle. If you have a desire to go down an internet rabbit hole on military uses of Ro-Ros, here’s a gateway video.
Major Gao’s strike teams deploy into Taipei to rapidly seize critical government locations and personnel. Rapidly is the operative word. The key to success for this operation is speed. If the element of surprise is lost, the PLA’s advantage is gone.
How do they pull this off? The old-fashioned way: Practice, practice, practice.
Anyone who has ever been in the military knows about drills. Aboard ship, every day is Drill Day. Fire drills, reactor drills, collision drills, flooding, cascading scenarios…you get the picture. It goes on and on.
And that’s the point. By running variations of the same drill over and over, the actions become part of muscle memory. When the fire alarm goes off, you know exactly where to go. You know exactly what to do. You don’t think about it, you do it. In a real emergency, seconds count.
The same thing holds true for an invasion. You train for success.
For example, if the PLA wanted to run a series of drills to decapitate the political and military leadership of Taiwan, they might build a mockup of the streets in the governmental district of Taipei so they could practice different scenarios in a full-scale setting. Maybe something like this:
The text next to the picture reads: A Chinese military training site in China’s Inner Mongolia region [upper photo] is an exact replica of the road network near Taiwan’s Presidential palace [lower photo]. Photo clarifications added.
This was sent to us by an interested reader who saw it on the platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter. While we cannot verify the sourcing of this material, it’s a safe bet the PLA has built something like this somewhere.
Building scale replicas of an attack site is not a new idea. No Easy Day, the Navy SEAL tell-all about the Osama bin Laden raid, talks about SEAL Team Six training on a full-scale replica of the bin Laden compound at a CIA training facility in North Carolina.3
Let’s expand the aperture of this discussion. At the start of 2024, the Chinese military opened its annual training session with this statement:
Any military activities by foreign forces aiming to cause disturbances and tensions or sensationalize regional situations in the South China Sea are under close watch by the armed forces.4
Whether this mockup in the desert of Inner Mongolia is real or an internet hoax, let’s treat it the way it’s intended: a not-so-subtle reminder that China has long-term designs on the South China Sea and the island of Taiwan.
As always, thanks for being a supporter –
David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
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PPS - This email is free, but it's not cheap. If you'd like to show your support, here's where you can find all the Two Navy Guys' books.
It’s worth noting that Book 2 of our series has more reviews than Book 1. (As of this writing, Command and Control, Book 1, has about 4450 reviews.) That’s unusual and probably worth a future column.
Yes, Major General Gao made his first appearance in our series as a lowly major in Counter Strike.
http://eng.mod.gov.cn/xb/News_213114/Features/16278652.html