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Asia-Pacific, Book Review

Red Phoenix Burning

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Bond, Larry and Chris Carlson. Red Phoenix Burning. Larry Bond and Chris Carlson, 2016. Kindle. 510pp. $11.99

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By Bret Perry

When it comes to the techno-thriller, most defense wonks reminisce about older titles from authors such as Tom Clancy, Dale Brown, and Stephen Coonts as the genre has moved away from its roots. So when I discovered that techno-thriller extraordinaire Larry Bond (read CIMSEC interview the authors here) planned to publish a sequel to his classic novel Red Phoenix on a large-scale Korea war co-authored with Chris Carlson, I immediately became excited.

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For readers new to Bond, Red Phoenix was his second book, following his collaborative effort with Clancy on Red Storm Rising. It revolved around a massive conventional war in Korea featuring a North Korea invasion of the South and a desperate counteroffensive by the Republic of Korea (ROK) and her American ally. When I picked up Red Phoenix Burning, I didn’t know what to expect. Would it just be a third massive conventional Korean conflict with even more explosions than its predecessor? It turns out that I was only right about the explosions.

Red Phoenix Burning takes place in the modern day featuring the notorious Kim Jong-Un regime in power. Even though the Kim regime was removed in Red Phoenix after the ceasefire brokered by Beijing, Bond and Carlson explain how Chinese displeasure with Seoul’s growth and American alignment triggered them to put Kim Jong-Un in power in order to maintain a balanced Korean Peninsula. This, combined with a US administration focused on more pressing conflicts in the Middle East, effectively creates a 2016 geo-political feel.

Keeping with what’s believable, Red Phoenix Burning does not open with another massive invasion of South Korea by Pyongyang. Rather, Bond and Carlson focus on the stability (or to others, instability) of the North Korean regime. After an assassination attempt eliminates much of Kim’s inside circle (who is shortly finished off afterwards in a brutal manner), civil war emerges in North Korea featuring three sides: loyalists to the Kim regime, the Korean People’s Army (KPA), and Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK). The obvious loser: the people of North Korea.

The way Bond and Carlson set up and present this three-sided civil war is one of the most interesting aspects of the novel. To many, including this reviewer, the Hermit Kingdom’s secrecy and propaganda make it hard for normal observers to identify the different power structures driving the Kim regime. The authors of Red Phoenix Burning fill this gap and provide a tremendous amount of insight as they describe the strengths and weaknesses of the three factions. One would expect for the KPA to easily sweep control with its military resources, but the WPK’s numbers and extensive involvement throughout North Korean society make them a formidable opponent. Loyalists to the Kim regime are nearly just as threatening due to their access to the state’s chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMD). As a result, clashes endure, only creating more causalities and a worsening humanitarian catastrophe.

Meanwhile, less than a couple hundred miles to the south, South Korea is trying to determine not only what is going on, but what they should do. At first, Seoul launches a couple of thrilling special operations forces reconnaissance missions into North Korea, but eventually decides to initiate a full scale invasion to achieve something very close to the hearts of the Korean people: reunification. As North Korean forces are bogged down in a civil war, the South Korean military is able to push north quickly and easily outmaneuver what remnants of the KPA try to defend their territory. Seoul’s American ally provides limited intelligence and humanitarian support as movement north of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) would trigger Chinese military intervention.

Nevertheless, the prospect of bordering a unified Korea led by Seoul and the uncertainty surrounding the former Kim regime’s WMDs force the Chinese to intervene. Like the South Koreans, the PRC’s military invasion faces minimal resistance and turns into a race to seize as much territory as possible. The US is forced to react and begins pressuring Chinese interests in both the Yellow Sea and South China Sea, but is hesitant to escalate the conflict and potentially start a third world war. Without revealing the ending—what’s left of the KPA command recognizes that a Chinese occupation would ultimately prevent reunification and attempts to reach a ceasefire with the WPK in order to ally with the ROK. More importantly, the firing of SCUD missiles by Kim loyalists reminds all factions of the risks of North Korea’s scattered and destructive WMD arsenal.

As the aforementioned plot illustrates, Bond and Carlson do an excellent job with creating a believable geopolitical environment. Their defense expertise, wargaming experience, and extensive research allows them to color in well-written military engagements—most notably the urban assault on Pyongyang. But unlike some of Bond’s previous titles that revolved around epic conventional conflicts (such as Vortex—this reviewer’s personal favorite), Red Phoenix Burning is not a novel purely focused on the military dimension of another flashpoint crisis-turned-war. Rather, Bond and Carlson place a greater emphasis on political factors such as US-PRC relations, the ramifications of a North Korean humanitarian crisis, America’s reluctance to dive into a Korean crisis due to more pressing Middle East engagements, and how the world’s superpowers treat North Korea’s WMDs.  Although this entails fewer scenes featuring first person accounts of tank battles and naval engagements, it creates a more plausible environment that readers can buy into and envision as a potential future scenario for the Korean peninsula.  Even though Red Phoenix Burning features less battlefield action than some of Bond’s previous novels, it demonstrates how fiction can better help us understand the most significant geopolitical ramifications of the collapse of the Hermit Kingdom.

Although readers might have appreciated some maps accompanying the military engagements, Red Phoenix Burning is a solid book for defense professionals eager for some fiction, and a must for those interested in the Korean Peninsula. For readers, Red Phoenix Burning will keep you entertained while feeding your intellectual curiosity.

Bret Perry is a graduate of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The comments and questions above are those of the author alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily reflect those of any organization.

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History, North America, Podcast, Seamanship and Leadership

Sea Control 113 – Abraham Lincoln’s Self-Education

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Most people know that Abraham Lincoln was an avid reader and self-educated man. But how much did this education influence his conduct during the Civil War?

A tower of books about Abraham Lincoln as seen from the top down.
A tower of books about Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater (Photo from NPR)

Join Sea Control: North America for an interview with Matthew “Matty” Keller, a retired member of the U.S. Navy who is working out the answer to that very question. During the course of the discussion, he addresses how Lincoln taught himself to be a military leader, how a First Lieutenant’s thoughts remade the Union Army, and how reading a map led to the destruction of a Confederate ironclad.

DOWNLOAD: Sea Control 113 – Abraham Lincoln’s Self-Education

Asia-Pacific, Territorial and Law of the Sea Disputes

Transparency as Strategy: The Maritime Security Initiative and the South China Sea

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The following article is adapted from a report by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS): Networked Transparency: Constructing a Common Operational Picture of the South China Sea.

By Dr. Van Jackson, Dr. Mira Rapp-Hooper, Paul Scharre, Harry Krejsa, and Jeff Chism.

South China Sea watchers know it as a strategically important and resource-rich area, crucial to the lifeblood of U.S. and Indo-Pacific economies. It is also a highly contested space, and the proximate sources of tensions are well-known. Ongoing sovereignty disputes among China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei lead to competition over hundreds of islands, reefs, and reclaimed land.

Yet underlying these resource and sovereignty tensions is something even more pernicious: The South China Sea is an opaque, low-information environment. Most South China Sea islets are hundreds of miles from shore, making it especially difficult for governments and commercial entities to monitor events at sea when they occur. This dearth of situational awareness worsens regional competition in the South China Sea. The region is already rife with rapid military modernization, resurgent nationalism, the blurring of economic and security interests, and heightened geopolitical wrangling with China (by great and small powers alike). Left unchecked, these pressures make conflict more likely by tempting major military accidents and crises that could drag down the economic and political future of the region.

These negative trends converging in the South China Sea also create missed opportunities among regional stakeholders for positive gains. South China Sea stakeholders have many transnational and economic interests of growing importance in common – from counterpiracy to maritime commerce and disaster response – but the competitive nature of the South China Sea today impedes collective action to solve shared problems. States have trouble engaging in cooperation, even when it would advance shared interests. This challenges the foundations of a stable regional order. The more states believe they live in an anarchical neighborhood, the more likely the region sees the worst of geopolitics: security dilemmas, arms races, and policies motivated by fear and greed rather than reason and restraint. 

There is no silver bullet to entirely resolve the historical, strategic, and technological factors that are contributing to a more contentious security environment in Asia. Nevertheless, there remain practical and politically viable initiatives that could have a substantial effect in mitigating insecurities while fostering cooperation on issues of common interest.

Our new report with the Center for a New American Security—Networked Transparency: Constructing a Common Operational Picture of the South China Sea—proposes that enhanced, shared maritime domain awareness (MDA) among ASEAN states is a realistic means of addressing some of the underlying and proximate problems facing this strategic waterway. An MDA architecture may engender cooperation in a region devoid of trust, prevent misunderstandings, encourage operational transparency, and lead to capacity-building efforts that contribute to the regional public good. Our report explores how advances in commercial technology services, regional information-sharing, and security cooperation can contribute to enhanced regional security. We believe these advances can do so by moving the region closer to establishing a common, layered, and regularly updated picture of air and maritime activity in the South China Sea – a common operational picture (COP) for a tempestuous domain. 

Transparency: The Next Phase of the Rebalance

Over the past year, U.S. policymakers made two major public commitments linking South China Sea transparency to larger goals of stability and assured access. The first, the Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Strategy, lays out what the Department of Defense sees as the most pressing challenges facing the region, as well as the most promising openings for future collaboration and improvement. The second, the Maritime Security Initiative, seeks to make these opportunities reality, funding regional capacity-building efforts to the tune of $425 million. Both initiatives rightly prioritize enhancing local partner military abilities, regional cooperation, and maritime domain awareness in the South China Sea, but they focus much more on framing past actions and justifying present initiatives than on laying out a road map for the future.

Our report builds on these initiatives, prescribing for the United States a maritime domain awareness road map comprising four broad lines of effort:

  • Coordinated capacity-building among a concert of outside stakeholder powers;
  • A U.S.-centric effort relying heavily on U.S.-controlled information collection and distribution;
  • Expansion of the capacity and reach of extant institutions that perform maritime awareness and information-sharing functions in the region; and
  • An inclusive approach that empowers regional institutions and relies on private-sector partnerships.

Each of these strategies—detailed at length in our report—prioritizes different ways of enhancing maritime domain awareness, and each has distinct benefits and drawbacks. In aggregate, the types of activities constituting these strategies offer policymakers menus from which they can pick and choose to build better maritime domain awareness given political realities, cost constraints, trust, and other salient conditions that may shift over time. Advancing shared situational awareness in practice will likely require drawing on all four strategic approaches, and our report identifies several key near-term tasks for policymakers and operators to render the region’s most volatile waterway into an open, transparent, and stable one. 

Read the full report: Networked Transparency: Constructing a Common Operational Picture of the South China Sea.

Dr. Van Jackson is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at CNAS and an Associate Professor in the College of Security Studies at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. The views expressed are his own.

Dr. Mira Rapp-Hooper is a Senior Fellow with the Asia-Pacific Security program at CNAS.

Paul Scharre is a Senior Fellow and Director of the 20YY Warfare Initiative at CNAS.

Harry Krejsa is a Research Associate with the Asia-Pacific Security program at CNAS.

Jeff Chism is a Commander in the U.S. Navy and at the time of writing was a Military Fellow at CNAS. The views expressed are his own.

Members' Roundup

Members’ Roundup: March 2016 Part One

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By Sam Cohen

Welcome to part one of the March 2016 members’ roundup. Over the past month CIMSEC members have examined several international maritime security issues, including an increase in Russian naval activities and deployments, recent U.S. naval exercises demonstrating the Fleets’ application of the distributed lethality concept, laser technologies and the U.S. defense acquisition program and as usual, the increasingly tense security environment in the Asia-Pacific.  

Paul Pryce begins the roundup in the Asia-Pacific with a discussion, on what he refers to as, the new era in Singaporean defense procurement. In his article at Offiziere, Mr. Pryce highlights that previous procurement strategies for the country’s Navy have focused on acquiring mainly European designed vessels, either built specifically for Singapore or purchased following a short period of service in the initial European country. However, the planned construction of eight indigenous Independence-class littoral mission vessels beginning in 2016 and the expected procurement of a domestically built light aircraft carrier through 2021 suggests that the Singapore’s shipbuilding capacity and overall maritime force projection capabilities are becoming increasingly strengthened – a significant implication for Singapore’s role in South East Asian security dynamics.

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Alex Calvo, for Asian Military Review, discusses the challenge Taiwan faces in securing a replacement for its four aged hunter-killer submarines (SSKs), two of which are vintage Tench-class World War II boats while the other two were commissioned in the Netherlands in 1987 and 1988. Mr. Calvo explains how Europe has become reluctant to support Taiwanese military procurement needs for fear of angering China while the United States no longer produces SSKs. He suggests that Taiwan may look to Japan as an alternative source for its SSK replacement largely due to recent efforts by the Japanese shipbuilding industry to win the contract for the Royal Australian Navy’s SSK procurement requirements while also noting a lack of other feasible alternatives.

Kyle Mizokami, for Popular Mechanics, discusses China’s plans to establish aircraft carrier battle groups tasked with defense of the country’s territorial sovereignty, maritime rights and overseas interests both regionally and perhaps globally. Mr. Mizokami highlights the nature of China’s first operational aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, as he explains its training role and limited capacity to carry large numbers of combat capable aircraft. However, he also notes that China has confirmed the construction of the Dalian carrier, which will have more hangar space for support and combat aircraft – but will still only displace about 50 000 tons, or half that of a modern U.S. carrier.

Leaving the Asia-Pacific, Dave Majumdar outlines the implications of Russia’s planned massive live-fire nuclear exercise being conducted by two Project 955 Borei-class ballistic missile submarines deployed with the Northern Fleet. In his article at The National Interest, Mr. Majumdar explains how one of the missile boats will sequentially launch all sixteen of its RSM-56 Bulava missiles at a depth of 164ft while highlighting that such an exercise, whether a U.S. or Russian ballistic missile boat, would only launch their entire payload in conflict as part of full-scale retaliatory or offensive nuclear strike. In a second article at The National Interest, Mr. Majumdar discusses the spotting of a Russian Project 667 BDRM Delfin-class ballistic missile submarine near French territorial waters – the boat carries sixteen missiles capable of carrying four nuclear warheads each with a range of 7500 miles.

Bryan McGrath, for the War on the Rocks, provides the ‘First Principles’ that will help guide the difficult task of structuring the U.S. Navy’s future fleet. Mr. McGrath emphasizes that the Navy must be sized and shaped into a fleet that allows for both combat-credible and presence forces to be positioned globally in a manner that secures national interests while effectively deterring major power conflict. He also mentions the implementation of the distributed lethality concept, where individual platform lethality is increased even as the force becomes geographically dispersed. On this point, Mr. McGrath argues that an individual combat capacity increase should not compel policy makers to reduce the size of the fleet, as one does not necessarily balance the others strategic importance. On the same topic at The National Interest, Dave Majumdar describes a recent test of the SM-6 missile where it was revealed that the system now retains effective anti-surface capability, a major step for distributed lethality implementation across the fleet.

Members at CIMSEC were also active elsewhere during the first part of March:

CIMSEC has also recently (February) published a compendium discussing a range of strategies, challenges and policy options concerning Distributed Lethality. You can find a download link for all of the articles here.

At CIMSEC we encourage members to continue writing, either here on CIMSEC or through other means. You can assist us by emailing your works to [email protected].

Sam Cohen is currently studying Honors Specialization Political Science at Western University in Canada. His interests are in the fields of strategic studies and defense policy and management.

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