The Next 100 Years

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The Coalition members will realize their original plan has failed. They will 
not be certain how well the United States can see, but they will know that it 
can’t see all that well. Most disturbing, their belief that the entire U.S. air 
fleet was annihilated will be proven wrong, and they will know that the 
United States still has the capacity to strike them. They can’t know that 
these are only the remnants of the force that was dispersed in the time be­
tween the detection of the attack on the Battle Stars and the Coalition air 
strike. They won’t know how deep American reserves are, and they will have 
no way to find out. The fog of war will be as thick in the twenty- first cen­
tury as in the past. 
The United States will make one additional move. Engineers will ana­
lyze data to show the origination point of the missiles that took out the Bat­
tle Stars, and the military then will launch a missile at the site and the base 
will be destroyed. The United States will also order military forces it will 
have quietly built up at its own experimental stations on the moon to pre­
pare and execute attacks on all Japanese bases on the moon. The United 
States will make sure it is not surprised again. 
As frequently happens in war, once the initial attack, planned over years, 
is executed, everyone starts to improvise, working from uncertainty. And 
most war plans anticipate that a war will be over quickly. It rarely is. This 
war will continue, divided into three parts. 
First, having reestablished a tenuous command of space, the United 
States will put in place a crash program to increase its hold and keep the 
Coalition out. The United States will gradually, over the next year, increase 
its surveillance capability until it equals preattack levels. The pace of re­
search, development, and deployment in a time of war is extraordinary 

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compared to peacetime. Within a year of Thanksgiving Day, the United 
States will have technologically exceeded the space- based capabilities that 
were destroyed. 
Second, the United States will move to recover its hypersonic fleet in the 
face of continual air attacks on known fixed production facilities by Coali­
tion aircraft. But the Coalition will not have the ability to maintain ade­
quate surveillance over the United States, and despite some setbacks the 
plants will quickly be in operation, building new hypersonic aircraft. 
Third, the Coalition will use the period before the United States recon­
structs its forces to impose a new reality on the ground. The Japanese will 
try to seize other areas in China and Asia but will be far less aggressive than 
Turkey, which will see the period of U.S. preoccupation as a chance to deal 
with the Polish bloc and position itself as the decisive power in the region. 
The war will have begun with a head fake toward the Polish bloc. Now it 
will become a concerted assault by Turkey on the ground, supported by its 
aerial capabilities. The elimination of the Polish bloc would give Turkey a 
free hand everywhere. Therefore, rather than dissipating its strength in 
North Africa or Russia, the Turks will bet it all on attacking north, out of 
Bosnia into the Balkans. 
The key weapon will be the armored infantryman—a single soldier, en­
cased in a powered suit that is able to lift substantial amounts of weight and 
protects the soldier from harm. The suit will also allow him to move rapidly. 
Think of him as a one-man tank, only more lethal. He will be supported by 
many armored systems, carrying supplies and power packs. The power pack 
will be critical. The systems will all be electrically powered and driven by ad­
vanced electrical storage units—batteries with a lot of power and life in them. 
But however advanced, they need to be recharged. That means that access to 
electrical grids will be the single most important thing in warfare—along 
with the electrical power plants pushing electricity through the grids. Elec­
tricity will be to war in the twenty-first century as petroleum was to war in 
the twentieth century. 
Turkey’s goal will be to draw the Polish bloc forces into a battle of anni­
hilation. Unlike the fighting with the United States, this will be planned as 
a combined arms operation, including armored infantrymen, robotic logis­

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tics and weapons platforms, and the now ubiquitous hypersonic aircraft
serving as precision artillery.
Following the devastating opening strikes, the Polish bloc will seek to
avoid concentrating its ground forces in order to evade air strikes. The Turks
will want to pressure them to concentrate their forces by attacking in a way
that will compel them to defend major targets or, alternatively, rip the bloc
apart when the Poles refuse to commit their forces for such defense.
The Turks will attack north out of Bosnia into the Croatian plains, and
into Hungary, where the country is open, flat, and lacking in natural barri-
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