Tag Archives: fiction

Parallax and Bullseye Buoys: The Future of Naval Aviation

By LT Jon Paris

It was Day 43 of the war everyone said would never happen: The war that assured mutual ruin and held little tangible benefit for either side. Yet, here he was, hurtling through the sky in the pitch black nothingness of the western Philippine Sea in mind-numbing turbulence and a driving rain. One wouldn’t think that silence would be possible with the rain and the wind and the two howling General Electrics back aft, but it was silent. Eerily so. Lieutenant “Slider” Wilmore pondered this reality as he checked his instruments and reflected on the air wing’s losses to date. They were not catastrophic, to be sure, but for a man on his third cruise, they were more than he had ever seen. They were also the first of his career that were credited to the enemy, rather than pilot error or malfunctions.

 In this command and control denied environment with no GPS or voice communications, the challenge of getting the force from the Boat to the beach and back was infinitely exasperated. The Navy quickly innovated, the industrial base responded swiftly, and “bullseye” became a tangible object. The Navy thus required its ship drivers and pilots to execute precise maneuvers based on pre-planned maritime trigonometry and dead-reckoning. The concept was on the fringes, it had obvious weaknesses, but it was all they had.

These thoughts – and many others – flickered through his brain like an insomniac flips through the channels of late-night TV. He snapped out of it when his newly-installed, low-tech WRN-100X waypoint tracker flashed three times, though. He sighed, looked down into the inky nothingness, took a deep breath, and hoped that his dead-reckoning had been correct. No Carrier Control Area, no GPS, no TACAN, no nothing, as far as he was concerned. All he had was another example of futuristic low-tech; a lonely, beeping ALQ-80 Self-Correcting Bullseye Buoy bobbing in the middle of nowhere, launched that day by the submarine CHICAGO. With this on his mind, he flipped down his night vision goggles, rolled his Rhino to port and pulled back hard. He was either in the Break, or he was bleeding speed over a watery grave – there was no way to be sure. His radios were silent, of course, as they had been for weeks. He slapped down his flaps, then his gear. After steadying up, he lowered his tailhook, eased off the power, and prayed that this blind-man’s waltz would guide him to the Groove. No lights were visible – anywhere. Up until recently, this type of recovery – bastardized as it was – would never have been conducted at night. The mighty enemy hackers to the west had done their number, though. They had exploited the recovery methods specifically developed for just this type of denied environment to devastating effect. Now, he and his mates were looking for the Boat in a slightly more advanced manner than Columbus had looked for the New World.

The sweat on his back made him shiver. There – another three flashes of his waypoint tracker, itself completely reliant upon the buoy’s ability to self-correct for currents and his own trigonometric skills conducted at 500 knots some 2 hours in the past. Another pull to port, cutting some more power. As he settled onto his final course, he saw nothing. His heart sank along with his altitude. Easy with it, easy with it. The mantra pulsed through his brain. Then, rising and falling with the swells, he made out the impossible – a slightly blacker spot than the surrounding abyss. He puckered tight and squinted, just as a Chem-Light was broken and hurled into the middle of the blackness. He aimed for that spot and nearly closed his eyes as he sunk lower and lower towards the endless depths. CRASH! Though the sudden deceleration was welcome and expected, it never ceased to take his breath away. He retarded the throttles, raised his hook, and followed the ghostly Yellow Shirts across the lightless deck. Lieutenant Wilmore, soaked, jittery and tired, had not killed anyone tonight, for that was not his mission. The two jet-black ALQ-X99 pods under the wings were his mission and, many thought, the U.S. Navy’s only hope.

LT Wilmore sized up his surroundings. He was in “Oz” – Flag Country. Not a Lieutenant’s favorite place to be and certain to cause any junior officer additional anxiety – something he did not need as he stood there still trembling from his mission, cold in dripping flight suit. His CO stood in front of him and gave him a reassuring nod. He knocked and they both entered the space together.

The two aviators found themselves surrounded by the Strike Group Commander, Rear Admiral Patrick Aiken and his staff. “Have a seat,” the admiral said after shaking the junior pilot’s hand. “Let us cut-to-the-chase. How did they respond to the ALQ-X99? Did they fall for it? We only lost two tonight so you must have had a pretty hairy time up there. Iron Hand… I never thought we would bring it back. Are you alright? Tell me what you saw.” The admiral spit out his comments rapid-fire as Lieutenant Wilmore sat there in a daze, thinking about his special cargo and of the terror he had felt only hours ago. He slowly blinked.

The adversary had the U.S. Navy in a corner. Their coastal defenses seemed impenetrable, extended out hundreds of miles, and appeared to have an endless inventory. They had more aircraft in theater than the Americans and were not afraid to lose a handful in pursuit of big gains. Their surface ships had been hit hard, but their submarines still roamed the seas hunting for targets.  And their surveillance was top-notch. The U.S. Navy had to do its best to remain invisible while at the same time, launching highly-technical and heavily-laden Alpha Strikes from extreme ranges to hit both coastal and inland targets. Winning the war depended on the Navy’s success. Unfortunately, this meant facing an angry swarm of fighter and attack aircraft, as well as a blinding throng of missiles reaching out like tentacles for F/A-18s, destroyers, and carriers, alike.  While the enemy’s inventory was deep and their supply lines were well-defended, no force could keep up their blistering pace of sorties and missile launches without the occasional pause for reloading, re-targeting, maintenance, and rest.

Operation Iron Hand was a Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses mission-set executed by both the Navy and Air Force during Vietnam. It focused on localizing Surface-to-Air gun and missile radars ahead of the strike package and then neutralizing the threats with anti-radiation missiles before they could cause the friendly formations harm. In today’s war, localizing was less of a problem. The enemy was not being shy about using radars or their associated weapons, not to mention the fact that most of the launchers, and of course the ground-based aircraft, were mobile. The Navy quickly realized that this was no Vietnam and that there would be no sneaking in to exploit the enemy’s thirst for a kill prior to overwhelming them with a strike-force. The Hail-Mary solution had actually come from one of the most heart-pounding chapters of naval fiction ever to grace a Tom Clancy novel. “Dance of the Vampires” depicted a Soviet strike on a U.S. Carrier Battle Group. The strike was unique in that the Soviets led off with a massive launch of drones, duping the Americans into committing most of its anti-air missiles and its interceptors and leaving it nearly defenseless once the barrage of anti-ship missiles was loosed. Though modern surface-borne electronic decoys were nothing new, they were vulnerable to submarine attack, had limited capabilities, and did nothing to address a deceptive air battle – relatively useless in this scenario.

The ALQ-X99 attempted to solve this. It used extremely realistic electronic decoys – blips on the enemy radar – absorbed existing radar cross sections, and utilized a form of parallax to show a massive ghost-force that was sufficiently off-set from the aircraft carrying the pods. A number of F/A-18s now flew on the deck and carried these pods to the front, attempting to draw the enemy to a fight that did not exist while allowing strike packages to attack when the enemy was either exhausted or otherwise focused. Though the ploy was easy enough for the enemy to decipher after repeated use, they could not afford to ignore it. Thus, Naval Aviators like LT Wilmore were left to keep their critical packages intact, stay alive, and truly feel the mental exhaustion and strain of today’s Operation Iron Hand II.

His blink seemed to last a year. He snapped to. “I did what I had to do to stay alive, sir. Missiles exploded to my left and right. The bad guys were everywhere. They ate it up. The Alpha Strike got through. The ALQ-X99 works, sir, but I don’t know if I’ll ever stop shaking.

LT Jon Paris is a Surface Warfare Officer and Department Head. He has served aboard three Aegis ships in the Western Pacific and Middle East.

This article featured as a part of CIMSEC’s September 2015 topic week, The Future of Naval Aviation. You can access the topic week’s articles here

The Future of Warfare

 

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Ghost Fleet. P.W. Singer & August Cole, (2015). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. New York, NY: 404 pp. $28.00.

Review by Brett J. Patron

If you’ve ever wondered what an operationalized version of Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” might look like, noted national security analysts Peter W. Singer and August Cole have a book just for you.  A true triad of military, bureaucrats, and corporations overthrows a long-running government to form an uneasy alliance to run a rather large country. Singer and Cole throw us the first of many curves by teeing this up, not in the US, but China…or, as they now call themselves, “The Directorate.”

This first fiction effort by the duo delivers wide-ranging action at a frenetic pace.  The story begins in outer space and, in mere moments, the action plunges far below the Pacific Ocean’s surface. Throughout the  story, as venues change, the reader gasps for breath and delves back in as the action continues. This is a Tom Clancy-esque thriller with most of the pieces one would expect: people unexpectedly thrust into difficult situations; well-researched, accurate portrayals of current capabilities; imaginative exploration of new, emerging, or desired technology; as well as good old fashioned palace intrigue and political gamesmanship.

For those making the Clancy connection, you’ll find this book of the Red Storm Rising genre — a look at how a world war type scenario would likely go.  Ghost Fleet looks at how the “Pivot to Asia” could go – and it can go bad pretty fast. It also plays on many of the fears that serious analysts ponder regarding military procurements, military readiness and other economic tradeoffs.  Buoyed by the massive changes spurred by their recent revolution, the Directorate decides that it is time to achieve their “Manifest Destiny” in the Pacific. A major energy discovery gives them the opportunity to challenge US supremacy in the Pacific and even take on the US militarily, with the tacit assistance of Russia.

What ensues is a massive and coordinated sneak attack that cripples US capabilities throughout the Pacific Rim, most notably in Hawaii. The Directorate, now occupying US sovereign territory and positioned to prevent response either from space or across the vast ocean, looks to turn America into a third-rate client state. To counter this the US decides to reactivate ships (and some aircraft) mothballed by the significant  cuts that US politicians foisted upon itself. This is the rebirth of the Ghost Fleet that gives this story its name.  It also evokes a slightly different comparison: this is the Navy’s version of “Team Yankee.”  Team Yankee was a very popular “must read” in the late 1980s, especially popular with the mechanized/armor community of the Army. It is about warfare at its base level, but with existential impact. In this case, the crew of a one-of-a-kind ship, which was rejected by the Navy when cuts were made, is being brought back to life by a crew desperately trying to make it work in trying circumstances and fights the battle of its life for a noble cause.

Singer and Cole introduce a number of characters:  A navy officer whose transition to retirement is rather violently interrupted; a Marine thrust into the role of guerrilla; a Sun Tzu-quoting Chinese admiral; and a seductive assassin. The story explores the very tempestuous relationship between father and son bonded in a moment of crisis while wrestling with demons of the past. The duo’s style offers some nice bonuses. The reader gets a murder mystery. The idea of “privateers” in the 21st Century is presented.  For the geopolitical thinkers, Singer and Cole skewer a lot of the shibboleths of current alliances and ask “who will really ‘step up’ when the going gets tough?” The authors present some very interesting ideas of what could happen and what could emerge if all the geopolitical knowns were to suddenly change.  Rather than distract, these threads are woven into a complex but compelling story that is both provocative and frightening.

What this book does do well — and in a scary way — is show how pervasive a wired world could be and what would happen if a major actor were to severely upset the proverbial apple cart. Among the discoveries in the opening salvos of The Directorate’s aggression are the vulnerability of so much of the electronics used both in military equipment as well as the networks that course through the US.  Ghost Fleet explores the extent to which autonomous systems change life and warfare.  Can we trust the electronics we buy from overseas? Do we depend too much on automatic, autonomous and “linked” systems in our basic and daily lives? What if a major competitor played on those fears with ruthless precision and execution? This will confirm the worst fears of the Luddite or conspiracy theorist. Those that are on the fence about the impact of autonomous systems will likely find that this book tips them one way or the other.

Two things that one would expect to find in such styled books are not found in this one. One is probably the book’s only serious flaw. The story does not give time stamps and the reader may not realize that the scenario has advanced in time as it changes chapter. Without this context, the reader may become confused on why or how things changed so fast within the story.

The other creative difference is a positive: there is very little discussion of the machinations of the American politicians. Singer and Cole — in a choice very likely calculated to avoid the politics of the moment — do not really describe much, if anything about the moves, motives, or response of the President, or most of the national security apparatus. While the Secretary of Defense is omnipresent, no one else is — nor are there any real discussions on national politics at play. Some may be greatly disappointed by this while others may find it a welcome departure in the genre.  Although cyberspace capabilities are a significant aspect of the storyline, this is not a book about “cyber war.”

If anything, this is may be the first real exploration of Demchakian “cybered conflict” in story form. Cybered Conflict is a construct provided by  Naval War College professors Chris Demchak and Peter Dombrowski. The premise is that the nature of conflict remains the same but that cyberspace capabilities add a new dimension. They further purport that cyberspace is not a separate domain, per se, but is instead just another aspect of how humans interact and compete. Cyberspace is itself not decisive but can certainly tip the scale in an existential conflict. There are ample examples in this book on how this could occur. It is certain to ignite debate on the nature of “cyber war.”

Thriller readers will find this a welcome addition to their collections. Thinkers, advocates, policy wonks, geeks and nerds will all find something to chew on that will confirm or challenge their own biases. Scheduled for a June release, this highly recommended story is a daring look at the fusion of traditional and modern warfare, delivered at “machine speed.”

Brett Patron retired from the US Army after serving twenty-two years with Special Forces, Special Operations, Infantry, and Signal Corps units. After retirement, he’s worked as a defense analyst, supporting Navy, Army, Marine, Special Operations, Joint and Cyberspace organizations. He is now an independent consultant, focused on cyberspace capabilities integration, doctrine development, and policy/law. He makes his home in Yorktown, Virginia.

Readers interested in reviewing books for CIMSEC can e-mail the book review editor at books@cimsec.org.

Maritime Security and the Arts

Earlier this year we ran a short series of submissions highlighting fiction’s power to illuminate insights about possible futures. Our colleagues at War on the Rocks and the Atlantic Council run a similar, on-going project – the Art of Future Warfare – that is well worth checking out.

Next week we’ll use the power of historical fiction to likewise draw out timeless themes of warfare and security with the help of our friends, the Scots. If you’re in DC and would like to participate, let us know. Here’s the official press release:

Introducing #Shakespeare and Strategy

Image-5-470x394This February, the Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC) is bringing the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of David Greig’s Dunsinane to the nation’s capital. The STC’s Young Professionals Consortium, in partnership with The Strategy Bridge and the Center for International Maritime Security, has organized #Shakespeare and Strategy, a special online seminar to accompany this exciting play.

Dunsinane picks up where Macbeth leaves off, telling the story of the fight to restore order and stability to Scotland after regicide. Grieg’s work is much more than a sequel to one of the great entries in the Western canon; written during the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Grieg explores both the clash of national identities as well as the challenge of restoring peace and nation building in a hostile foreign land. As STC Artistic Director Michael Kahn says “Dunsinane is a timely and powerful piece, and one that serves our mission to produce works inspired by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, delivered in a modern voice. This is a play that will resonate with today’s audiences.”

For the rest of the run of the play, you can look forward to hearing from the unique perspective of part of Dunsinane’s audience – young veterans, military officers, and defense professionals who will share their reactions on the play and how it relates to their own experiences and challenges.

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Participants:

Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Young Professionals Consortium is an enthusiastic network of innovative young professionals from around the Nation’s Capital with a mission to cultivate an appreciation for theatre among young professionals through the productions of the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Learn more about the YPC on Facebook.

The Strategy Bridge is an online publication on strategy, national security, and military affairs. It is edited by Nathan Finney, Rich Ganske, Mikhail Grinberg, and Tyrell Mayfield and features writing from a diverse collection of military officers, defense civilians, and academics. Join the conversation at www.thestrategybridge.com.

The Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) is a non-partisan think tank formed in 2012 and as of 2015 has members and chapters in more than 30 countries. CIMSEC’s mission is to build a global community of professionals, academics, and forward thinkers from a variety of fields who wish to further international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. Join us at www.cimsec.org.

 

Follow all of the entries, including those from CIMSEC and Nate Finney’s kick-off post at the STC’s Asides blog. If you have the chance to see the show and would like to participate, let us know.

 

The Wasp Keepers

This piece by Mark Jacobsen is re-printed with permission from the War Stories Anthology as part of our Future Military Fiction Week for the New Year. The week topic was chosen as a prize by one of our Kickstarter supporters.

By Mark Jacobsen

HAMZA HAD JUST FINISHED PUMPING gas into a fruit truck when he jerked upright and swatted the back of his neck with one palm. He whirled around, eyes bulging, searching frantically for his Wasp before his eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed sideways onto the hot pave- ment. The fruit truck was already pulling away. The driver didn’t stop.

Um Hamza didn’t see it happen, but that was how Tariq described it through his breathless sobs, the screen door still banging on its hinges behind him. She had been sitting at her desk composing an email on her phone. When Tariq finished, he threw his arms around her and cried into her neck like a child. Um Hamza set the phone down carefully and sat and stared into the distance, heart beating savagely.

She had lived this moment so many times in her nightmares, both sleeping and waking. How could she not? Even without war, there were so many ways it could come: a neighbor backing out of a driveway, an aspi- rated grape, a toppled bookcase, a tangled bed sheet, an electrical outlet, a few centimeters of water in an unattended bath.

For Um Hamza, it was immeasurably worse. There were government tanks, air strikes, roadside bombs, poison gas, cruise missiles, collapsing buildings,  malnourishment,  disease, kidnappings,  Farsi-speaking  trainers with rocket launchers and machine guns. And of course, there were the masked militiamen who had executed her brother, burned their home, and driven them across the Jordanian border into the Za’atri refugee camp. So when she’d held that warm bundle for the first time in the camp clinic and looked into her son’s wrinkled pink face, all she could think about was his death. For two weeks, depression kept her in bed. Her mother changed Hamza’s diapers, rocked him, played with him and brought him to her for mechanical feedings. Hamza’s seventeenth birthday was like a sentencing. When the card arrived from the Syrian Transitional Authority, she sobbed for hours. It still sat on her desk, a wretched, superstitious totem that she was terrified to destroy. Birthday cake and candles on one side; on the other, a happy, smiling, cartoon bee. FOR YOUR PROTECTION, the card said in Arabic above a QR code and an explanation of “What You Need to Know.” When the Wasp itself buzzed into the olive grove a few days later, she watched it for hours, shaking feverishly. For weeks she wouldn’t let Hamza outdoors without her. She even walked him down to the gas station and back, to his burning shame, their two Wasps buzzing along in trail. It was inevitable, she knew. And she was right.

She put an arm around Tariq’s shoulders and walked outside with him. Her Wasp sat on a sunny spot of the porch railing, recharging. When it saw her it fluttered skyward, an obscene little blot against the blue sky.

As they walked the kilometer down to the gas station, she could see the cars pulling off the highway, the men running. When she came around from the back of the gas station, she saw her husband kneeling on the pavement, muttering to God and rocking their limp boy in his arms. A ring of bystanders stood around them, whispering and praying. Uncle Fouad stood among them, red-faced, yelling into his cell-phone. Something about a fruit truck.

The Wasp lay on the ground, broken, twitching. Hamza must have caught it with his final slap. A machine, gray and small, muscle wire sup- porting insectile wings that were solar cells, coiled around a microproces- sor and communications link and of course the toxin pouch and stinger. She raised a foot to grind it beneath her heel, but then considered how her own Wasp might react and gently placed her foot back on the ground.

She looked back to Hamza. Her beautiful, sweet boy, undiminished by seventeen years of poverty and war. Her boy, who had spent his summer turning wrenches and changing spark plugs with his father and grandfather in the auto shop. Who went door-to-door each Ramadan, on his own initiative, collecting donations for the Islamic Relief Mis- sion. Who once sobbed with guilt when he shot a stray cat with a pellet gun, back when the possession of such things was not a death sentence. Dear, sweet Hamza.

She realized there was a separate group crowding around the doors of the convenience store on the far side of the pumps. She blindly grabbed at Uncle Fouad’s arm. He pulled away from the cell phone for a moment.

She pointed at the store. “What…?”

“It’s your father. They got him too. I’m sorry.”

Her legs gave out, and she sank to the pavement beside her husband. She had held herself together only because she had rehearsed this dreaded theater so many times in her mind’s eye, but this was a blow she had not seen coming.

She touched Hamza’s cold face and began to scream.

 

The police were afraid to approach the bodies, as this was an Occupation strike. There was no telling what might provoke another Wasp attack. They masked their fear and incompetence by blowing whistles and barking orders and making half-hearted efforts to clear out the spectators who were shooting video with their mobiles or AR glasses. One officer ques- tioned witnesses, but his questions followed no logical path and he didn’t bother to write down the answers. No, sir, he didn’t do anything threaten- ing. He was pumping gas. Yes, gas. He was filling up a fruit truck.

Ten minutes after the police came, Uncle Fouad’s phone rang. He

listened without speaking and hung up. He said, “They took out the fruit truck about five kilometers north of here. Three people.”

A murmur passed through the crowd. Another piece in the puzzle.

Above them, their Wasps whirled and danced, glimpsing faces, recording their expressions and judging their body language.

An entourage from the mosque arrived in a rusting blue van. The crowd parted as Hajj Omar disembarked, leaning on a wooden crutch to compensate for the leg he had lost in Homs. A scar divided the right side of his face from top to bottom, running clean through a cloudy gray eye. The crowd fell silent before this presence. He recited the Fatiha and per- formed the final rites for Hamza and Abu Khalid, and then delivered a sermon which became a blistering tirade against the Syrian Transitional Authority and the Occupation.

Um Hamza left before he was finished. She collapsed into bed and cried until sleep took her.

She  woke  after  sunset,  when  Abu  Hamza  climbed  into  bed  and touched her shoulder. She turned brusquely away from him, but he started to cry. Ashamed, she rolled over to touch him. It was dreary sex, sad and distant, a feeble echo of what their marriage had once been. Afterwards they held each other, but even that tenderness lacked intimacy. It was like two strangers holding hands as their crippled plane careened to the earth.

 

She woke to sunlight and quiet. The entire household was still asleep. She brewed a cup of tea, then went outside to pluck some fresh mint from the garden. She marveled at the serenity of the still-waking world. The olive trees were perfection itself: rows of them standing like sentinels, unmoved by even the faintest of breezes. A single black bird flapped across the sky.

She sat beneath an olive tree and leaned up against the trunk and sipped her tea. This is all she had ever wanted, this moment stretched into a lifetime. Cool mornings and olive trees and silence.

Her Wasp took up station over her.

“Good morning,” she said in English.

The Wasp gave no indication it had heard, but of course it had. It heard everything. Saw everything. Even smelled everything. All that data was aggregated and beamed to the United States and Canada and God knew where else, where it was filtered and analyzed and processed in vast server farms. Intelligent algorithms crunched away, drawing connections, matching words and behavior to pattern libraries, then sent their conclu- sions before hordes of young analysts sitting in the blue wash of computer screens. Perfect seeing. Perfect knowledge. And, when the wrong two pat- terns overlapped, perfect death.

He’d been pumping gas. What kind of pattern was that?

She went inside and found a pack of cigarettes in her husband’s jacket. She returned to her shaded spot under the tree and lit up. She smoked three cigarettes while she cruised the social networks on her phone, trying to forget, procrastinating. She’d been a queen in that world, once, back in the heady days when the revolution was young and the future was theirs for the making.

She had been a true believer. She marched with the protestors and shot video and live-tweeted massacres and built a following of more than fifteen thousand people. She made friends with activists and journalists and Middle East experts across the world. When the regime met  their  protests  with  war,  she  redoubled  her  efforts.  And  then, when the artillery barrages and the gunmen came to her village and they fled across the border to the Za’atri camp, she blogged every- thing.

She won prizes. Journalists sought her in person. She struck up an online friendship with a hacker in the Free Syrian Army, and when they discovered weeks later that they were both in the Za’atri camp, the future was written. The pregnancy came first, then a hasty marriage. A few years earlier this would have destroyed her family, but in Za’atri honor and shame were relics. They had never imagined the war would rage for nearly two decades. Never imagined it would end like this, in this frozen horror that was somehow worse than all that had come before. All that history had ground her down to almost nothing.

Her writing output was a lethargic trickle these days, and she was mostly forgotten. Mostly, but not entirely. She still knew people.

She started to compose an email.

It was around five o’clock that evening when Tariq came running to tell her that Wasp Keepers were approaching on the highway. She sent a text to Abu Hamza and Uncle Fouad, who were down at the gas station work- ing, and then went to the bathroom to wash her face and reapply her makeup. When she was finished, she put on her hijab and went out to the porch. The convoy had just turned off the highway. A cluster of dusty children watched mutely from the side of the road, one of them holding a soccer ball under his arm.

The convoy consisted of a mine-resistant  Army truck and a silver

BMW surrounded by a swarm of Wasps. A squat steamroller the size of a Smart Car preceded the vehicles, feeling for IEDs buried in the road.

There were four soldiers, enveloped in so much armor and gear that the only things recognizably human about them were the square jaws ex- posed beneath the black goggles. When the first three dismounted, they went right past her and took up positions on the road. The fourth was a captain.

The captain nodded at her, then looked expectantly back to the BMW. The sole occupant of the car was a Syrian man about her father’s age, dressed in a striped collared shirt and a dusty blue sport coat. AR glasses enveloped his face. He did not immediately get out of the car. His window was rolled down, and Um Hamza could hear that he was on a call, negoti- ating a price. He drummed one hand on the steering wheel and gesticulat- ed with the other. He looked familiar, so while they all waited, Um Hamza discreetly snapped a photo of him and ran a search. The match was instant. The district police chief.

When he was finally finished, he got out of the car and both he and the captain came forward.

“As-salaam aleykum,” the captain said. He raised his goggles and there was a human face beneath, handsome and blonde and blue-eyed. “Ana kteer aasif likhsarit ibnik wa abooki.”

Um Hamza was impressed that this soldier had learned enough Arabic to say that. She also thought that if he offered any more sympathy for her loss, she would rip out his tongue and shove it down his throat.

The captain said that it would be best to visit the scene of the strike, so they walked down to the gas station, their Wasps a snarled cloud above them. The captain took off his helmet as they walked, a gesture Um Hamza knew was calculated to demonstrate trust, as if the mere act of exposing his sunburned scalp could somehow atone for the death of her boy and her father. By the time they reached the gas station they were pale with dust and the sweat ran down their backs. The captain intro- duced himself to Abu Hamza and Uncle Fouad, and then they all sat in plastic chairs in the customer service area adjacent to the auto shop while Tariq served Arabic coffee. When they were finished, he stacked the cups and sat down opposite the captain, glaring murderously at him. Um Hamza’s sister-in-law Noor arrived shortly after with a fruit tray and a bowl of dates. Um Hamza took the plate from her and offered it to the captain, and kept insisting until he finally took a single slice of apple. The police chief waved at her dismissively and lit up a cigarette.

“Why did you come?” Um Hamza asked while Noor poured a round of tea.

“You have some friends who really care about you,” everyone heard in a mechanical Arabic dialect. The captain subvocalized in English as a device on his chest translated.

“For God’s sake, turn that thing off,” Um Hamza said. “Which one was it?”

The captain shrugged and touched the device. In English he said,

“Logan Keesler ran a story. It got noticed in Washington.”

Um Hamza translated for her family. “So they sent you to pacify me?” “I just came to talk,” he said. His eyes were bloodshot and distant. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. “You have the right to know why your son was targeted.”

“He was seventeen,” Um Hamza said.

The captain opened a camouflage bag at his side and handed them each a pair of AR glasses. Everyone turned them over in their hands suspiciously before putting them on. The captain said, “We know your family has been in the auto service industry for a long time. A whole chain of gas stations and auto shops before the war, right? You lost everything at the start of the war, but after three years in Za’atri, the three brothers returned home and got back into the business. It’s pretty remarkable you were able to finance all this.”

Um Hamza translated. Fouad glared at the captain.

The captain rose and stepped outside to survey the gas station. He said, “You made some interesting friends.”

They rose to join him so they could see what he was looking at.

A row of beat-up pickup trucks and vans was parked in front of the little masjid where customers  could pray during gas  stops. Gathered outside the door was a crowd of grim, thickly bearded Salafists toting handguns  and  AK-47s.  The  imagery  was  perfectly  positioned  and scaled, but it was black and white and heavily pixilated. While she watched, a younger clone of Uncle Fouad appeared and embraced one of the Islamists. They exchanged kisses on their cheeks.

“They were fighting the regime,” Fouad said in Arabic. “They just came to pray.”

“Understandable,” the captain said without missing a beat. He was probably still receiving machine translations. “But you spent hours with them. And they came a lot. Even after you knew they were pledged to al- Qa’eda, even after they toppled the regime and created their own government and you saw what they were capable of. Your brother Abu Khalid led prayers for them. He sat for hours with them teaching them about Islam. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say he was a spiritual mentor of sorts.”

“He taught anybody who would listen,” Um Hamza protested. “He thought they were misguided, maybe not even Muslim, but he thought the answer to that was more Islam, more truth.”

“And that’s why he smuggled weapons for them?”

Um Hamza broke into tears. The captain knew so much, he knew everything, and yet he understood nothing. It was all wrong, it was all cameras and robots and a string of connected dots that added up to something different from the wretched story they had lived.

She remembered when the Islamists first turned up at their gas sta- tion. Uncle Fouad, as it turned out, had worked some kind of deal with a mujahideen group in the Za’atri camp. They’d needed to smuggle weapons and ammunition into Syria, which meant they needed someone who knew vehicles and logistics. Fouad had acquired startup capital, bought the gas station, and used his contacts on both side of the border to build up a logistics network to import auto parts into Syria. Auto parts, that is, with a few bonus packages in the mix.

It had seemed a small enough thing, the kind of shadow bargaining on which survival depended in those violent days, but that deal took on a life of its own. The gas station got a reputation. Anti-regime fighters converged there, both the moderate types who’d been trained by the Americans in Jordan and the sneering Salafists who were just as likely to kill in- sufficiently pious Sunnis as they were regime soldiers. At first they negotiated business deals. Then they asked favors. Then they made demands. Uncle Fouad said no precisely one time. That experiment ended with Uncle Hatim, the third brother, dead in a ditch after torture by power drill.

That was the partnership Um Hamza remembered. Angry, bearded men. Guns. Terror. Extortion. But the captain walked them through his own narrative of these events, which unfolded before their eyes in a hurri- cane of light and color, the quality of the visuals improving sharply as the years raced by. Here was a full-service gas station that was a virtual safe house for terrorists and a key node in an arms smuggling ring. That’s what the Wasps saw. What the fusion centers assessed. Seventeen years of fear, condensed into one storyline, missing context and everything that comprised the normal fabric of their lives. Yes, they’d made terrible compromises, but hadn’t everyone? What choice did they have?

“But Hamza had nothing to do with this,” Um Hamza said.

“Three months ago your son took possession of an SA-14, an advanced MANPAD for shooting down airplanes. He was to hold it for safekeeping. He stashed it right there, in the back of your parts storeroom.”

Fouad swore in Arabic and wiped his face with one hand.

The transaction unfolded before their eyes, a living recreation of the past. An old gray Mazda pulling up to the pump. Hamza leaning in the window and talking to the driver. The driver extending a wad of bills. Hamza looking around, then signaling the driver to pull into the auto shop. The visuals were flawless. Um Hamza fought the urge to run to him, to embrace him, to plead with him to stop.

“He just wanted money,” Um Hamza said, the tears running down her cheeks now. “He probably didn’t even know what it was.” “He knew. Later he showed Tariq.”

Um Hamza shot a look at Tariq, who shook his head violently. He was crying.

“Yesterday, a customer arrived to claim the package,” the captain said. Here came the fruit truck, rumbling up to the gas pumps belching greasy black smoke. Hamza went to meet it, oblivious to the fact that he had only minutes to live.

The captain said, “It was an active plot. The Islamists intended to use the weapon a few hours later, when the Syrian president returned from Paris. The Transitional Authority acted.”

The captain slowly took off his glasses and tucked them carefully in the bag, as if sobered by the tragedy of what he had just explained. “I am genuinely sorry for the loss of your loved ones, but you brought this on yourselves. This is the life you raised Hamza into. When he came of age, he made some terrible choices of his own.”

“You know nothing about him!”

“On the contrary, we know everything about him.”

“Do you have any idea what it’s like?” Um Hamza cried. “What? ”

“War. ”

“I know about war. ”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Not what you’re doing. I mean war. The things you have to do. The choices you have to make. The consequences if you don’t. The fear. ” She wiped her eyes. “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. ”

The captain frowned and looked out at the horizon for a long time, as if lost in some terrible memory. Despite all his gear, armor, and the cloud of Wasps ready to make war on his behalf, he looked exhausted beyond his years, even a little fragile. Um Hamza wondered how many times he had had this conversation.

“Just once,” he said softly, still looking to the sunburnt horizon, “I want to find one Syrian who is grateful for what we’ve done for this country. What we’ve sacrificed, the friends we’ve lost. You’ve been at war almost as long as I’ve been alive, and we’ve stopped the cycle. Do you realize how incredible that is?”

“You killed my father and my son.”

“They chose to fight,” the captain said, shrugging. “I don’t get it. I wish someone could explain it to me. How many more decades of war do you want?”

“We want to be free,” said Abu Hamza.

“You are free, as long as you don’t fight. No one dies unless he chooses to. There’s no more strategic bombing, no more ground occupation,   no   more   drone   strikes,   no   more   collateral   damage.   It’s just…awareness. Knowledge. Insurgency is impossible. We’ve freed you from violence, given you the best chance in years for a peaceful new future. I don’t understand why you can’t accept that.”

Peace? she thought, looking at the police chief, who had wandered off and was negotiating some new deal on his expensive imported AR head- set. This is peace?

“I am sorry for your loss,” the captain said “This was a needless tragedy. I hope you’ll think long and hard about the choices that lie ahead. You still have one son. I pray to God that you will choose a future of peace, in sha’ Allah.”

The captain put on his helmet and nodded to the police chief that it was time to leave.

“Thank you for the tea,” he said.

 

That night they sat on the patio, drinking coffee and smoking sullenly. Their Wasps hovered above them in the warm orb cast by the porch light. It would have been safer to stay inside, but it was a pleasant night and they refused to be intimidated. There was something thrilling about sitting in front of those watchful eyes, putting their hatred on open display. In a world where resistance was impossible, even talking was an act of courage. “That police chief,” Fouad said between angry puffs on the nargeelah.

“That fucking BMW.”

He was drunk. Um Hamza didn’t know when or how he’d achieved that feat, as he never drank in front of the family, but he’d done a thor- ough job of it.

“You know him?” Um Hamza asked.

“Yeah, I know him,” Fouad said, the smoke pouring forth from his lips, as if he was trying to excise the very memory of the police chief from his body. “You two haven’t asked the question, but I know you’re dying to. Why the hell is it Fouad that’s sitting here smoking and drinking instead of your father?”

It was true. She had wondered exactly that. Her father had been a simple man, kind and pious and respectable, without a hint of guile. Fouad was the shrewd empire builder who had turned an auto parts supply chain into a profitable arms smuggling network.

“About six months ago, that police chief came by the gas station. The Occupation was sharing all its intel with him. He knew everything. You know why he came by? He wanted a cut. To keep quiet. I told him no.”

Fouad started to laugh, and swung his head from side to side in exag- gerated, drunken disbelief.

“Son a bitch knew how to pay me back,” he said. He raised his coffee cup. “Long live the peaceful new Syria.”

 

Um Hamza knocked gently on the boys’ door. When she heard nothing, she turned the knob. She stood in the doorway, the light behind her illuminating the shape of Tariq asleep in one bed and the tangled, empty sheets on the other. She studied the sheets, marveling at them. Exactly as Hamza had left them when he rose from bed yesterday.

She knelt beside her living son. He was so different from his brother.

Even with all that had happened, Hamza had a natural sweetness to him, a legacy of his grandfather. He loved God. But Tariq hated, and for him life itself was a war. That manifested itself in everything. The rage. The argu- ments. He often came home bruised and bloody, and refused to say where he had been or what had happened. At least twice, he had sent other boys to the hospital. He needed violence the way he needed air.

Sleep effaced all that, wound the clock back to a time before the war had damaged him. Amazing that her child still lurked in there, after all that he had suffered. It wasn’t his fault, being the way he was. He was a good boy, a strong boy who in a better life would have gone on to do such great things. But here…

 

In three years they would receive another birthday card, and another Wasp would find its way into their olive grove. One more node would appear in the Occupation’s vast Syrian intelligence matrix. When that hap- pened, Tariq would die. It might be two days or it might be two years, but the boy who couldn’t help fighting in the streets would most certainly fight the Occupation.

If the Occupation did not end, Tariq would die. But it wouldn’t end. It couldn’t. The least relaxation of control would mean chaos.

She thought back to the captain’s words. The Wasp Keepers had ended almost two decades of war. It was nothing short of a miracle, unprecedented in history. Perfect knowledge. Perfect killing. War that was as intimate as a friend sitting next to you, a friend that would protect you from all harm but would also kill you with a kiss if you let slip any hint of treason.

It was hatefully, intolerably perfect.

And yet there were no winners, not even the Occupation. The captain had understood that. He was exhausted and embittered by a war that, for all his impressive ability to control, had not delivered victory. The things that mattered most were still beyond their reach.

If they could not win, that meant they could still lose. The thought electrified her. After that revelation, everything fell into place.

She kissed Tariq on the head. Maybe she could yet save his life.

There was one thing she could still do. One choice they could all make. It was the single choice that eluded the Occupation’s control, and that terrified them.

The rest of the night passed like a dream. For the first time since childhood, she was free. She went to her husband and gave herself to him, not because he was entitled to it but because she chose to. For a few moments she felt something of what she’d once known with this talented young revolutionary in the Za’atri camp. Afterward, while he slept, she wrote letters. Longhand. Beyond the reach of the Occupation. She left them trifolded on her desk, the names written on the back in elegant Arabic calligraphy.

After that she sat outside beneath her olive tree. It was still, and silent, and the stars wheeled freely in the sky as if there had never been a war and war was something altogether inconceivable. The peace she had always wanted. She recalled memories of Hamza, and of Tariq, and of her husband before the war had changed him. Of her father, leading prayers in the gas station masjid for poor refugees with their battered cars, limping their way northward again after the first lull in the fighting.

 

She sat beneath the tree until the sky began to lighten in the east, and the first cars appeared down on the highway. Then she rose on stiff joints and brushed herself off. One leg had fallen asleep. She hobbled over to the porch, shaking the leg awake again. She had composed the email to Logan Keesler earlier in the night. She sent it now, then propped the phone up on the railing and started a video recording.

She said a few words into the camera. Then she smiled and turned.

Her Wasp stared down at her, a motionless black smear in the sky. The  other  family  Wasps  were  perched  on the  railing,  charging  in the morning sun. Stupid, mindless  things. They knew everything  and they knew nothing.

She reached into the folds of her robe and withdrew the cigarette lighter and the can of hairspray. With one flick of her wrist, her Wasp was a burning point of brightness in the sheet of flame.

It hadn’t yet hit the ground when the other Wasps converged on her. She felt the hot pricks of the stingers, and a moment later the olive grove spun sideways.

Mark Jacobsen is a C-17 Instructor Pilot and Middle East Specialist in the US Air Force, and is currently working towards a PhD in Political Science at Stanford University. When he isn’t writing about drones in Syria, he is building them; as the Executive Director of the Syria Airlift Project  he is developing a new paradigm for swarming humanitarian aid into besieged or hard-to-reach areas. He has one novel available, The Lords of Harambee, about a military peacekeeping force that is ordered not to intervene in a genocide.