The Next 100 Years

counterstrike 
At the same time, American society will be intact, as will be that of many 
U.S. allies. This is the underlying weakness of the Coalition strategy. The 
United States is a nuclear power—as, for that matter, will be Japan, Turkey, 
Poland, and India. Attacks on military targets will not trigger a nuclear re­
sponse. However, if the Coalition would try to force capitulation by begin­
ning to go beyond military targets and move to trying to attack the American 
population itself, the threshold at which the Americans, or their allies, 
might go nuclear could be reached. Since the Coalition will be looking not 
for mutual annihilation but for a political settlement that the Americans in 
particular could live with, and since the Americans are often profoundly 
unpredictable, using their hypersonic forces to start inflicting damage and 
casualties on American civilians would be incredibly dangerous. The posses­
sion of nuclear weapons will shape war to this extent. It circumscribes the 
degree of the conflict. 
Nevertheless, the United States will be militarily damaged and won’t 
know how far the Coalition will go. The Coalition’s hope will be that when 
the degree of damage is recognized by the United States, together with the 
unpredictability of the Coalition, it will opt for a political settlement that 
would include accepting Turkish and Japanese spheres of influence, defining 
limits to America’s sphere of influence, and introducing a workable, verifi­

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able framework for limiting conflict in space. In other words, the Coalition 
will wager that the United States will realize that it is now one great power 
among several instead of the only superpower, and accept a generous and se­
cure sphere of influence of its own. And it will hope that the suddenness 
and effectiveness of the assault in space will cause the United States to over­
estimate the Coalition’s military power. 
The United States will in fact overestimate the Coalition’s military power, 
but that will generate the opposite response from what the Coalition hopes. 
The Americans won’t see themselves as engaged in a limited war in which 
the enemy has limited and definable political goals that the United States 
can live with. Rather, the Americans will believe that the Coalition’s forces 
are vastly greater than they really are, and that the United States faces the 
possibility, if not of annihilation, then of a massive reduction of power 
and heightened vulnerability to further attacks by the Coalition and other 
powers. The United States will see this as an existential threat. 
The United States will react viscerally and emotionally to the attack. If 
it accepts the political settlement that has been transmitted to it on the 
evening of November 24, the country’s long- term future becomes uncer­
tain. Turkey and Japan—countries unlikely to fight each other—would be­
tween them dominate Eurasia. There would be two hegemons, not one, but 
if they were to cooperate, Eurasia would be united and exploited systemati­
cally. The ultimate nightmare of American grand strategy would be real, and 
over time the Coalition members—not easily manipulable into war with each 
other—would usurp command of space and the sea. Agreeing to the Coali­
tion’s offer would end the immediate war but would also initiate a long 
American decline. But this will not be carefully thought out that night. Just 
as it did after the sinking of the 
Maine
, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the 
shock of 9/11, the United States will go into a rage. It will reject the terms 
and go to war. 
The United States won’t make a move while Coalition reconnaissance 
spacecraft are in place. The Coalition won’t have anything to equal the com­
plex American Battle Star system that has been destroyed, but it will have an 
array of last- generation satellites that provide real- time intelligence on the 
United States. While they are operational, the Coalition will be able to see 
and counter any moves made by the Americans. The American recon ­

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naissance system will quickly have to be re- architected so that remaining 
satellites—of which there will be many—will downlink to earth rather than 
to the destroyed Battle Stars. That will allow the United States to begin track­
ing enemy movements—and to strike back. When that happens, the first 
thing it will have to do is knock out any space launch facilities the Coalition 
might have, so as to keep it from launching any new space systems. 
Japanese intelligence on U.S. assets, while not perfect, will be superb. 
The United States will have deliberately placed launch platforms for rockets 
in a variety of secret locations, carefully camouflaged. It will be one of the 
major black projects during the 2030s. By the time the Japanese begin sur­
veillance on the United States, the sites will have been constructed—and 
hidden—for a long time. The secret launch facilities will not be manned 
during peacetime. Moving personnel to the sites without detection will 
take several days, during which time the United States will send diplomatic 
feelers through the Germans, who will be neutral, about negotiations. The 
United States will be trying to buy time. The negotiations will be a cover for 
planning and implementing a counterstrike. 
The United States will be trying to even the playing field a bit with what 
assets it still has. To do that, it will need to blind the Coalition, taking out 
its space- based system (the United States will have stored hundreds of anti-
satellite missiles and high- energy lasers at its secret reserve sites). Crews will 
move into place, carefully so as not to give away locations to reconnaissance 
satellites. While the Coalition will be eagerly engaged in negotiations with 
the United States, the sites will be readied. About seventy- two hours later, 
the United States will destroy the bulk of the Coalition’s surveillance capa­
bility in a period of less than two hours. The Coalition won’t be blind, but 
it will be close to it. 
As soon as the satellites are destroyed, some of the United States’ surviv­
ing hypersonic aircraft will initiate attacks on Japanese and Turkish launch 
facilities, hoping to make it impossible for them to launch new satellites or 
attack the remaining U.S. satellites. Unlike the Japanese, the Americans will 
have an excellent idea of the location of Japanese launches based on past re­
connaissance. The United States, following the end of the second cold war, 
always had a massive advantage in reconnaissance capability. The United 
States’ map of the Coalition will be much better than the Coalition’s map of 

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the United States. The aircraft will hit them all. Shortly thereafter, U.S. 
satellite controllers will begin capturing signals from surviving American 
satellites. The Coalition will now be the ones blinded. The Japanese intelli­
gence failure about America’s black anti- satellite capability will prove their 
undoing.