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    Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War
    Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War
    Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War
    Audiobook14 hours

    Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

    Written by P. W. Singer and August Cole

    Narrated by Rich Orlow

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    The year is 2026. China has taken over as the world's largest economy, while the United States, mired in an oil shortage, struggles to adjust to its diminished role. Then, a surprise attack throws the U.S. into a chaos unseen since Pearl Harbor. As the enemy takes control, the survival of the nation will depend upon the most unlikely forces: the Navy's antiquated Ghost Fleet and a cadre of homegrown terrorists. Ghost Fleet is unique in that every piece of technology featured in the novel already exists or is in the works. Peter W. Singer is Senior Fellow and Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution and a consultant for the US Department of Defense and FBI. August Cole is a journalist and writer specializing in national security issues and is an Adjunct Fellow at the American Security Project.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 30, 2015
    ISBN9781490684192
    Author

    P. W. Singer

    P. W. SINGER is an expert on twenty-first-century warfare. His award-winning nonfiction books include the New York Times bestseller Wired for War.

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    Reviews for Ghost Fleet

    3.5/5

    194 ratings13 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The book was exciting and well-written, and you can tell that the authors did a lot of research on weapon systems, but woke themes really turned me off.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      very good book, i will tell my friends about this book
    • 2/5
      A techno thriller that is heavy on the techno and pretty light on the thriller. Pages of info dumps, rote character intros, forgettable characters, weird pacing, and so on, but it does have twenty pages of footnotes. Also, yet another fanciful, silly programmer UI from authors who clearly don't do any programming beyond Excel macros.
    • 4/5
      Good on techno warfare, but writing not that good.
    • 3/5
      A good solid techno thriller. It is a great attempt to suggest what may hypothetically happen down the road as the next major world conflict. Believe it or not! From advanced drone strikes, cyber-warfare, teenaged hackers, and the old naval warships named the “ghost fleet”, tensions run high as the United States is attacked by China, Singer may get another read.
    • 1/5
      Unreadable. Recommended to me by an Air Force pilot friend who undoubtedly loved the technology and science sprinkled throughout the book. I'm dull tho and also like to see characters that aren't cardboard, a writing style that doesn't move around constantly (creating confusion and eventual lack of interest), and a plot that really doesn't make too much sense once you get past the gimcracks. Good ideas here, but a failure in execution.
    • 4/5
      An excellent book. Exciting and fast paced - full of action and adequate character development. Much of the story was focused on the technological "advances" and their impact on warfare & communications. The authors were still able to devote adequate time to character development & their back stories. Maybe the two authors can pick up the mantel of Tom Clancy and keep this branch of the genre alive and interesting
    • 4/5
      This gripping thriller about what the next world war might look like has captured the attention of Washington policymakers and defense industry insiders alike. Singer is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank, and Cole is a former defense industry reporter for the Wall Street Journal.Unlike so many other speculative fiction outings, this one is based on technologies already plausibly “in the works,” and the authors provide 374 endnotes to backstop the action and interfere with readers’ ability to sleep peacefully at night. Ghost Fleet is a novel of the post-Snowden world, in which the techniques the U.S. National Security Agency used on others are turned back against the Americans. The story begins at the International Space Station. Russia and China have declared war against the United States, and a U.S. Air Force Colonel, on a disastrously timed space-walk, becomes the unwitting point of the spear. Oblivious to the political developments taking place on the blue globe spinning below, he finds the ISS reentry hatches sealed against him. “Goodbye, my friend. I am truly sorry. It is orders,” says his Russian cosmonaut colleague. It’s the initial action in a war fought not solely, but significantly, in cyberspace. Takeover of the ISS enables the analogous Chinese space station, Tiangong-3, to systematically knock out every communications satellite that U.S. armed forces depend on. It soon becomes apparent that not only the satellites are down, all local-area communications networks are compromised, because military suppliers have been using low-cost Chinese-made computer chips in their planes, ships, and communications equipment by the unidentifiable thousands, and these chips are insecure, tiny moles. Only the mothballed planes and ships destined for the scrapyard are now safe: “The 707 passenger-jet derivatives did not have a modern chip anywhere, unlike the new KC-46s, which had turned out to be missile magnets like all the other Chinese-chipped gear.” This new top-to-bottom vulnerability of the military, which has become overly confident in the security of its communications systems, shows in brilliant and devastating relief.This is a multiple point-of-view novel, with short scenes from many locations involving numerous protagonists, though most of the action takes place in the Pacific, San Francisco, and Hawaii, where “The Directorate”—comprising Chinese military, along with Russian elements under their command—has established an important outpost. At the story’s heart are the trials of the USS Zumwalt, an oddly designed, mothballed ship recalled into action after much of the modern U.S. fleet is destroyed—again at Pearl Harbor. The Zumwalt’s newly appointed captain, Jamie Simmons, is challenged militarily and by relations with his estranged father, retired chief petty officer Mike Simmons. Like the vintage tin cans—seagoing and aerial—rescued for the U.S. counterattack, retired military personnel are called back into service, and by some inevitable cosmic sense of humor or irony, Mike is assigned to the Zumwalt. Other principal characters include: a Hawaiian woman working as a freelance assassin who is tracked by the omnipresent surveillance drones and a live Russian operative; a small team of surviving Marine insurgents harassing the Chinese forces on Oahu; a Russian who attempts to aid the Americans and ends up in a neuroscience laboratory nightmare; Sun-Tzu-spouting Admiral Wang, captain of the Chinese battleship Admiral Zheng He; and a wealthy Brit-turned-space-privateer. Other non-state players also emerge, providing a level of DIY unpredictability. The epigrams for the several parts of the book come from Sun-Tzu’s advice to warriors, and the one for Part 3 is “All warfare is based on deception.” The levels of deception between the Chinese and Russian “allies,” between the antagonists, and arising from the inability to rely on secure communications is paranoia-inducing. Meanwhile, the roles of drones and robots escalate, which is great when they’re yours. If you are a fan of techno-thrillers, like I am, this novel is the ultimate: fast-paced, high stakes, well-grounded, and, one may hope, consequential. International readers may be disappointed that the book is so US-centric—a casualty of “write what you know”? The book doesn’t come to a too-tidy conclusion, either, and that, is also sadly realistic.
    • 4/5
      Though I'm not an avid reader of Clancy-style fiction, this story of a near-future war between the US and China (told largely from the US point of veiw) totally sucked me in. It starts much stronger than it finishes and some of the hacking bits are a little too magical, but I've been finding myself thinking about parts of it even weeks after finishing it. Also, the rationale portrayed by Chinese leadership for starting the war, while not entirely convincing, is a definite step up from the sort of hand-rubbing, cackling, Yellow Menace crap we might have been subjected to a couple of decades ago. Space dedicated to the Black Widow story line might have been better used on something else. (Also, they probably didn't need to resort to hardware hacks to bring down a bunch of F-35s. Just sayin'.)
    • 2/5
      2 stars - save your $The idea is excellent: near future technothriller by two writers who supposed have the tech and defense chops so the tech mcguffins are plausible. They provide a LOT of endnotes but I lack the tech expertise to critique THAT part.What I can critique: really bad world building. The events are implausible, mutually contradictory and in many ways a rehash of the US-Japan crisis of 1941. For a technothriller, there was no thrill aspect. It was readable…BARELY. Writing was at best adequate and some parts descended to jejune. The characters were cardboard and many of the character subplots did nothing to advance the story. The pacing was shaky – a series of jump cuts that don’t fit together well. It was not unreadable but wait for a used paperback if this is your bag. I’m very much the target demographic and I felt mildly ripped off.
    • 4/5
      More in the vein of didactic enterprise than literature, the authors give you a lot of plausible background on what a near-future confrontation involving the great powers might look like as the globalist structures created following the end of the Cold War crumble. This is while the authors try to be careful so as to not draw a straight line between today's political actors and a decade or so out. That's the good. On the other hand, some of the dramatic situations given are more plausible than others and even on that basis there are more loose ends then I'd care for in a novel. This is unless the authors have a follow-up book in mind.
    • 4/5
      An exciting book, akin to early Clancy. Lots of action. Very, very well researched (just see the footnotes, they're awesome)! Would have been five stars, if there had just been more attention (or any at all) paid to what was happening in the government and NATO during the whole war. But will definitely read his next book!
    • 3/5
      I picked up a copy of this book because it sounded right up my alley. Which I did like this book but the story was just that "Ok". IT was intriguing enough that I was already half way through it before I put it down. Yet, if you asked me to describe what happened in the first half of the book, I could not really tell you. It did not stick with me completely. It was like it was almost there for me but not quite. This is because while the story was interesting, this time for me it was about the characters. There was no one or two or even three characters that I could attach myself to emotionally in this book. If I had been able to get close to at least someone then this would have been a different reading experience for me. I would have been able to immerse myself more into the storyline and be fighting. Also no country stood out for me as a strong contender in this story as well.