The Next 100 Years

o pe n i n g s h ots
The destruction of the three Battle Stars will be planned for November 24, 
2050, at 5 p.m. At this time on Thanksgiving Day most people in the 
United States would be watching football and napping after digesting a 
massive meal. Some people will be driving home. No one in Washington 
will be expecting a problem. That is the moment that the Japanese will in­
tend to strike. Final course corrections of the missiles targeting the Battle 
Stars will begin to be executed at about noon, on the theory that even if they 
were detected, getting hold of the Washington national security team would 
eat up an hour or two, and that if the missiles were detected by 3 or 4 p.m. 
it would be impossible to react in time. In order to do this, launches from 
Japan’s lunar base will have to take place at various times on November 21, 
depending on orbit. Hence, the November 20 alert will be Plan B cycling 
up—the aforementioned shot from the hip. 

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The launches from the moon will go unnoticed. Many of the missiles 
will actually be detected by automated systems on board the Battle Stars, 
but none will have trajectories that indicate impact with the stations or 
represent a significant threat to earth. They will all be fired at different 
times in eccentric orbits. The data will not be passed on to human moni­
tors. One technician reading the daily summary on the second day will 
note that there appears to be a large number of meteors in the area, with 
several passing close to his station, but since this is not an extraordinary 
event, he will ignore it. 
On November 24 around noon, the rockets will reignite as planned, 
shifting the missiles’ orbit. The collision- tracking radar on Battle Star– 
Uganda will pick up a single warning at about 2 p.m. The computer will be 
asked to reconfirm the trajectory. In the next hour all three stations will pick 
up multiple projectiles on trajectory to strike each of them. The command­
ing general of the three platforms, on board Battle Star–Peru, will recognize 
at about 3:15 that his platforms are under organized attack. He will then 
notify Space Command Headquarters in Colorado Springs, which in turn 
will notify the Joint Chiefs and the National Security Council. 
Meanwhile, the commanding general on Battle Star–Peru will, on his 
own authority, begin firing lasers and kinetic missiles at the targets, hoping 
to intercept them. But the number of incoming missiles will strain his ca­
pacity to engage, as the system won’t be designed to cope with fifteen simul­
taneous incoming missiles. He will quickly realize that there will be leakage, 
and that some of the missiles will hit. 
The president will be notified, but, it being Thanksgiving Day, he won’t 
be able to immediately gather most of his advisors. The questions the presi­
dent will ask are the crucial ones: Who launched the attack? Where was it 
launched from? No one will be able to answer the questions immediately. 
The assumption will be that it is the Turks, since they will have been en­
gaged in the most recent crisis, but U.S. intelligence will be certain that they 
won’t have the ability to launch such an attack. The Japanese will be quiet— 
and no one would have expected such a strike by Japan. As more advisors 
gather, two things will be apparent: no one knows who launched the attack, 
and the Battle Stars are about to be destroyed. 

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The Japanese will inform the Turks as to what has happened at approxi­
mately 4:30 p.m. The Turks are Japan’s allies, but the Japanese are not going 
to give them detailed information until the last moment, as they won’t want 
the Turks to double- cross them. But the Turks will know that something is 
coming—the entire charade of early November will revolve around this, 
and they will be standing by to act as soon as the Japanese get around to 
alerting them. 
Less than thirty minutes before impact, the president will authorize the 
evacuation of the Battle Stars. With so little time, the evacuation won’t be 
able to be fully executed. Hundreds of people will be left behind. More im­
portant, even though no one will know who ordered the attack, the presi­
dent’s advisors will convince him to order a dispersal of all ground- based 
hypersonic aircraft from their primary bases to scattered locations. That or­
der will go out at the same time the evacuation order goes out. There will be 
many glitches in the system. Controllers—skeleton staffs, really—will keep 
asking for confirmation. Some of the aircraft will disperse over the next 
hour. Most will not. 
At 5 p.m., all three Battle Stars will explode, killing all of the remaining 
crew members and knocking out the rest of the U.S. space force—sensors 
and satellites that are mostly hooked into the Battle Star–Peru command 
center. They will be left uselessly orbiting in space. The Japanese will have 
launched satellites years earlier whose only job is to monitor the Battle Stars. 
They will note the disruption of communication from the stations, and 
Japanese radar will note the destruction of the stations themselves. 
The Japanese will activate phase two as soon as destruction is confirmed. 
They will launch thousands of unmanned hypersonic aircraft—small, fast, 
and agile to evade interceptors—at the United States and its ships and bases 
in the Pacific. The targets will be U.S. hypersonic aircraft, ground- based 
anti- aircraft missiles, and command and control centers. They won’t go af­
ter population centers. That would achieve nothing, plus the Japanese will 
want to negotiate a settlement, which would be inconceivable after massive 
civilian casualties. Nor will they want to destroy the president or his staff. 
They will need someone with whom to negotiate. 
At the same time, the Turks will launch their own attacks against targets 
they will have been assigned in joint planning for war with the Japanese 

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over the years. Joint contingency plans will already have been developed 
between the two countries. Given that the Turks are aware something is 
coming, and are in near- crisis mode already, they won’t need extensive 
preparation to execute the war plan. The Japanese will communicate what 
they have done—and Turkish sensors will observe the events in geosynchro­
nous orbit. They will move to quickly take advantage of the situation. Many 
targets will be in the United States, east of the Mississippi, but the Turks will 
also launch a massive attack against the Polish bloc and against India, not a 
major power but allied with the United States. The intention of the Coali­
tion will be to leave the United States and its allies militarily helpless. 
Within a few minutes, the missiles from the unmanned aircraft will be­
gin to hit U.S. forces in Europe and Asia, but those targeted at the United 
States proper will take nearly an hour to reach their targets. That hour will 
bring the United States some valuable time. Most of its space- based sensors 
will be off-line, but an old system, used to detect the heat of ICBM launches 
and too old to be linked into the Battle Star system, will still be download­
ing to Colorado Springs. It will pick up a vast array of launches out of Japan 
and Turkey, but little additional information will be provided. There will be 
no way to tell where the planes and missiles are going. But the fact that the 
two countries lit up with launches minutes after the Battle Stars are killed 
will be relayed to the president, who now, at least, will know where the at­
tack is coming from. 
The United States will maintain a database of military targets in Japan 
and Turkey. The Japanese and Turkish aircraft will already have been 
launched, and therefore hitting those targets will make no sense. But there 
will be fixed targets in both countries, primarily command and control cen­
ters, airfields, fuel bunkers, and so on, that could be attacked. Plus the pres­
ident will want his hypersonic fleet in the air and not on the tarmac. He will 
order a preset war plan to be activated. However, by the time the orders are 
transmitted and flight controllers are in place, there will be less than fifteen 
minutes until Japan and Turkey hit their targets. Some flights will take off 
and strike those two countries, but much of the force will be destroyed on 
the ground. 
The devastation to the Polish bloc will be even more intense. The bloc 
command center in Warsaw won’t be aware of the destruction of the Battle 

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Stars, so it won’t have the warning the United States will have before missiles 
start hitting its bases. In fact, hypersonic aircraft will be dropping precision-
guided munitions on bloc facilities with literally no warning at all. One mo­
ment they will be there, and suddenly the bloc’s strike capability will be 
gone. 
By 7 p.m., the U.S. space and hypersonic force will be devastated. The 
United States will have lost command of space and have only a few hundred 
aircraft left. Its allies in Europe will have had their forces overwhelmed. U.S. 
warships around the world will have been attacked and sunk. The Indians 
will have lost their assets as well. The American coalition will be militarily 
devastated.