by John F. Antal
Philadelphia & Oxford: Casemate, 2023. Pp. xiv, 240.
Illus., maps, graphics, chron., gloss., notes, biblio., index. $24.95 / £22.50 . ISBN: 1636243355
How We Will Fight?
The US armed forces are obsessed with the pursuit of magical “game changing” Wunderwaffen (wonder-weapons) that will guarantee victory in future conflicts, minimizing the bothersome expense of recruiting, training, supplying, and retaining pesky human warfighters. Contractors and “national security analysts” are all too eager to feed this obsession, to ensure a steady flow of those sweet, sweet defense dollars. A genre of “techno-triumphalist” literature has emerged in recent decades to promote these ideas by describing the triumphs of our exquisite technology against tomorrow’s imagined adversaries.
After introducing the concept of “Battleshock” defined as “the operational, informational, and organizational paralysis induced by the rapid convergence of key disrupters in the battle space" (p. 10), Next War goes on to describe these disrupters in the course of sixteen chapters:
In an extraordinary bit of bad prediction, Chapter 5 describes in detail the decisive defeat of an imagined Hamas attack out of Gaza by the sophisticated Israeli defensive barrier. As we learned on October 7, 2023, even the most advanced AI-enabled system of wonder-weapons doesn’t work if it is left essentially unmanned.
The author of sixteen books and many articles, John Antal is a retired US Army colonel. Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) wrote the Foreword.
Our Reviewer: Mike Markowitz is an historian and wargame designer. He writes a monthly column for CoinWeek.Com and is a member of the ADBC (Association of Dedicated Byzantine Collectors). His previous reviews in modern history include To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923-1940, D-Day Encyclopedia: Everything You Want to Know About the Normandy Invasion, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, Loyal Sons: Jews in the German Army in the Great War, Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler’s "Final Solution" Undermined the German War Effort, Governments-in-Exile and the Jews During the Second World War,‘ Admiral Gorshkov, Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler, Rome – City in Terror: The Nazi Occupation 1943–44, A Raid on the Red Sea: The Israeli Capture of the Karine A, Strike from the Sea: The Development and Deployment of Strategic Cruise Missiles since 1934, 100 Greatest Battles, Battle for the Island Kingdom, Abraham Lincoln and the Bible, From Ironclads to Dreadnoughts: The Development of the German Battleship, 1864-1918, Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City, and The Demon of Unrest.
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