Ghost Fleet: Required Summer Reading

When two experts on modern warfare get together to write fiction I get in line to read it. Peter Singer’s Wired For War, which tracks the rise of drones and robots for war fighting, was a primary resource for me as I attended classes at King’s College. In all of my research Singer was the only one to hint that maybe all of this automation and networking was introducing worrisome vulnerabilities. Singer’s co-author, August Cole, was a defense industry reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He is non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council where the Cyber Statecraft Initiative addresses the future of the Internet and its impact on nation state interactions. I’ll admit that, like many cybersecurity writers I have been tempted to write the “Tom Clancy” for cyber (see Richard Clark’s Sting of the Drone) I even worked with a couple of journalists to write a cyber thriller, which I will not link to. (It is currently ranked #7,851,049 on Amazon.) For a first novel Singer and Cole have succeeded in creating a summer block buster. War on the Rocks compared it to Clancy’s Red Storm Rising.