The Next 100 Years

RUSSIA
RUSSIA
IRAN
IRAN
ISRAEL
ISRAEL
KAZAKHSTAN
KAZAKHSTAN
SUDAN
SUDAN
CHAD
CHAD
BULGARIA
BULGARIA
ROMANIA
ROMANIA
ITALY
ITALY
UKRAINE
UKRAINE
POLAND
POLAND
Mediterranean Sea
Mediterranean Sea
Black Sea
Black Sea
Arabian
Arabian
Sea
Sea
Caspian
Caspian
Sea
Sea
RUSSIA
IRAN
ISRAEL
TURKEY
KAZAKHSTAN
SUDAN
CHAD
BULGARIA
ROMANIA
ITALY
UKRAINE
POLAND
Mediterranean Sea
Black Sea
Arabian
Sea
Caspian
Sea
Turkish Sphere of Influence 2050
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ers. They will drive on to Budapest, although their ultimate military goal 
will be the Carpathian Mountains in Slovakia, Ukraine, and Romania. If 
they take the Carpathians, Romania and Bulgaria will be isolated and col­
lapse, turning the Black Sea into a Turkish lake. Hungary will be occupied, 
and Poland isolated and facing a threat from the south. If, however, the 
Poles decide to concentrate on the Hungarian plain to protect Budapest, 
and therefore attempt to hold the bloc together, Turkish airpower would 
likely destroy the bloc’s forces. 
The Poles will request American air support so they can engage Turkish 
forces as they advance into Croatia, but the United States will have no air-
power to give them. The Turks, as a result, will capture Hungary in a matter 
of weeks and occupy the Carpathians soon after. The Romanians, isolated, 
will ask for and receive an armistice. Southeastern Europe, to the Polish bor­
der and Ukraine, will be in Turkish hands. All that will remain will be Poland. 
Turkish forces will proceed toward Krakow, with air strikes ripping apart 
the Polish military. The United States will become concerned that the Poles 
will be unable to resist and may be forced to sue for peace. The U.S. strategy 
will be to buy time to rebuild its strategic assets and then launch a sudden 
global strike on Turkey and Japan. The United States will not want to dissi­
pate its strength to support tactical combat in southern Poland. At the same 
time, it will not be able to risk losing its Polish ally, as that will end the game 
against Turkey. In order to get the Poles to carry on, the United States will 
have to seriously harm the Turks. 
In February 2051, the United States will launch a substantial portion of 
its remaining air force, including some new aircraft with advanced capabili­
ties, striking at Turkish forces everywhere from southern Poland to logistics 
centers back in Bosnia and farther south. It will take serious losses from the 
Turkish air force, but the Turkish army will suffer serious losses as hundreds 
of armored infantrymen are killed along with the destruction of large num­
bers of robotic systems and supplies. Turkey will be far from crippled, but it 
will be hurt. 
The Turks will soon realize that there is no chance of their winning the 
war. Their inability to reenter space, plus the Americans’ ability to create a 
new air force quickly, would, in time, defeat them. They also will realize 
that the Japanese won’t be in a position to help them because they will be 

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tied down with their own problems in China. The great gamble will fail, 
and with that failure it will be every man for himself. The United States will 
be clearly focusing on Turkey before Japan, so Turkey will need to knock 
Poland out of the war fast. But Turkish ground forces will by then be spread 
around a vast empire. Concentrating on Poland will mean stripping forces 
from elsewhere, and that will, in the long run, not be a viable option. The 
Turks would be deeply exposed to rebellion from Egypt to Central Asia. 
Before the beginning of the war, the Coalition will have wanted Ger­
many to join in the attack on Poland, but the Germans will have declined. 
This time when the Turks approach them, they will offer quite a prize. In re­
turn for helping Turkey in Poland, Turkey will retreat into the Balkans after 
the war, retaining only Romania and Ukraine. Turkey will build its power 
around the Black Sea, the Adriatic, and the Mediterranean, and the Ger­
mans will have a free hand from Hungary north, including Poland, the 
Baltics, and Belarus. 
From the German point of view, what had been a Turkish pipe dream 
before 2050 will now be a very practical proposal. The Turks would be a 
Mediterranean and Black Sea power and would need the Balkans to secure 
their hold. The Turks would have no interest north of there, as such involve­
ment would soak up forces needed in these areas. The Germans, like the 
Poles and Russians, will be exposed on the northern European plain, and this 
new arrangement would secure their eastern flank. Most important, this 
arrangement would reverse the trend that had been running against Ger­
many and Western Europe since the collapse of Russia. The Eastern Euro­
peans would finally be put back in their place. 
The Germans will know that the Americans will eventually refocus on 
the region, but it will take the Americans a while to come back. There will 
be a genuine window of opportunity for the Germans to seize. Self- absorbed 
and risk averse, they won’t be as adventurous as the Turks. But the alterna­
tive will be a Turkish force to their east or, worse, the defeat of the Turks and 
an even more powerful Polish and American force facing them. The Ger­
mans will not be risk takers in general, but this is a risk they will have to 
take. They will mobilize their forces, including their older but still capable 
air force, and strike the Poles from the west in late spring of 2051, while the 
Turks will relaunch their attack from the south. The Germans will recruit 

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the French and a handful of other countries into the exercise, but their par­
ticipation will be more political than military. 
Britain, on the other hand, will be appalled at what is happening. Even 
though there will be a giant game of global power politics going on, the 
British will still be deeply concerned with the local balance of power. They 
will once again be facing the possibility of a German- dominated continent, 
however awkwardly achieved by Germany and however dependent on Turk­
ish underpinnings. The British will recognize that if this happens, any neglect 
toward Europe on the part of the United States, any cyclical retreat into isola­
tion, could mean catastrophe. Britain will have had no intention of getting in­
volved in this war. But at this point it will have no choice, and it could bring 
something valuable to the table: a small, intact air force that, when coupled 
with U.S. intelligence, could seriously damage the Germans and the Turks. In 
addition, its advanced air defenses to protect against Turkish and German air 
strikes will make Britain a secure base of operations. Britain will appear to 
hold back, while stealthily redeploying a substantial portion of its air force to 
the United States, where air defenses and warning time will be even greater. 
In the end, Poland will be attacked on two sides, from the west and 
south. The attacking forces will advance geographically as invaders have be­
fore, but the technology will be quite different. It won’t be the massed in­
fantry of Napoleon or the armored formations of Hitler; the force that will 
attack will be quite small in terms of actual troops. The human force will 
consist of armored infantrymen, fanned out as infantrymen usually are, but 
with clear and overlapping fields of fire—and these fields now will measure 
dozens of miles. Linked together by computer networks, they will com­
mand not only the weapons they carry but also robotic systems and hyper­
sonic aircraft thousands of miles away that they can call on as needed. 
The robotic systems will live on data and power. Cut off either, and they 
would be helpless. They need a constant stream of information and instruc­
tions. They also need a steady flow of power to keep them going. Since the 
space- based systems of the Turks are gone, the Turks will substitute un­
manned aerial vehicles hovering, swooping, and flying around the battle 
space to give them information. The information will always be incomplete, 
as the UAVs will constantly be shot down. The United States will have 
much better data but will lack the air force to decimate the attackers. 

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Providing enough power for the infantrymen’s armored suits and robots 
will also be a problem. These suits will be electrically driven and will need to 
be recharged or have their massive batteries swapped out every day or so. 
Tremendous advances will have been made in the storage of electrical power, 
but in the end the batteries will still run out. A key resource, therefore, will 
be the electrical power grid tied to electrical generation plants. Destroy the 
power generation plants, and the attackers will have to ship in massive, 
charged batteries from wherever there is power and then distribute them 
around the battlefield. The farther the troops advance, the longer the supply 
line will become. If the defenders are prepared to shut down their own 
power grid and, when necessary, destroy their power plants—a scorched-
earth strategy—the attack would be slowed by lack of power. Everything 
will depend on the tactical delivery of electricity. 
At a secret meeting of American, British, Chinese, and Polish com­
manders, a strategy will be worked out: the Poles will resist, and slowly re­
treat under the pressure of the Coalition forces. The two geographic thrusts, 
one from the west and one from the south, will converge on Warsaw. It will 
be agreed that the Poles will resist, fall back, and regroup endlessly, buying 
as much time as possible for the allies to rebuild their air forces. The Poles 
will be reinforced by several thousand American troops flown over the 
North Pole to St. Petersburg and deployed with the Polish troops in their 
delaying action. As the situation becomes more desperate, in late 2051, 
available airpower in Britain will begin to be released to further slow the ad­
vancing Turkish armies. The Herculean American industrial effort will be 
under way, as thousands of advanced hypersonic aircraft are built, capable of 
traveling twice as fast as prewar systems, and with a payload double in size. 
By mid-2052, the American force will be available for a massed and devas­
tating strike that, when coupled with major improvements in space- based 
systems, will devastate Coalition forces worldwide. Until then, the rule will 
be hold, retreat, and buy time. 
The Coalition will massively underestimate U.S. industrial capacity. It 
will think it has several years to battle the Polish forces. At first, the Coali­
tion will choose not to attack Polish electrical generation systems, not want­
ing to have to rebuild them after the war and needing their power to fight 
after they’ve captured them. The Poles, on the other hand, will destroy their 

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grids as they retreat, wanting to complicate the Coalition advance and forc­
ing the Germans and the Turks to divert resources to shipping heavy electri­
cal storage units to the battlefield. Those lines of supply are exactly what will 
be most vulnerable when the counterattack comes in the summer of 2052. 
When the American armored infantrymen arrive on the battlefield, with 
their sophisticated, space- linked systems, the Coalition will realize that 
Poland is not going to fall quickly. The Coalition will also see that the elec­
trical generation plants are the foundation of allied power and that unless 
they are taken out—and the Americans reduced to shipping electrical stor­
age units to the battlefield from their own country—the United States will 
be victorious. Therefore, in the summer of 2051, the Coalition will begin to 
destroy the Polish electrical system, hitting plants as far east as Belarus. 
Poland will go black. 
The Coalition will wait for two weeks, forcing the United States and its 
allies (the Alliance) into continual combat to make them use up available 
electricity. Then they will attack on all fronts simultaneously, expecting Pol­
ish and American troops to be out of power and out of luck. Instead, they 
will not only meet intense resistance but also find that the U.S. troops are 
calling in air strikes that are devastating Coalition lines. Allied command 
will send British air forces into combat, and the superbly coordinated space-
based reconnaissance systems—coupled with a new, more sophisticated Bat­
tle Star management system—will identify, target, and destroy the German 
and Turkish armored infantry. 
It will turn out the United States will have learned not to put all its eggs 
in one basket militarily, particularly in terms of space- based systems. Before 
the war begins, the United States will have another Battle Star—a next-
generation system—built but not yet launched due to a lack of funds. Con­
gressional inaction will for once be a godsend. The station will be secret, 
and on the ground. It will be launched into space just months after the sur­
prise attack and the destruction of Japan’s lunar base. The jury- rigged archi­
tecture created immediately after the war began will be replaced by one 
centered around the new Battle Star, stationed near Uganda but capable of 
rapid maneuver to new points along the equator as needed, as well as tacti­
cal maneuvering to avoid attacks such as those that destroyed its three pred­

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ecessors. The United States will restore its command of space—to a degree 
that will far surpass its space dominance of several years before. 
The Turks and Germans will be stunned by one thing. Having decided 
to destroy Polish electrical generation and distribution, they will expect re­
sistance to weaken dramatically, as their own forces run out of juice. Yet the 
Polish and American armored infantry will be going full blast. It will seem 
impossible that the Americans are flying in enough batteries to maintain the 
troops. The question will be, where is the power coming from? 
The Japanese won’t be the only ones experimenting with the commercial 
uses of space. During the first half of the century, a consortium of American 
entrepreneurs will have spent a great deal of money both developing the in­
expensive, plentiful launchers the Americans will be using and trying their 
hand at electrical generation in space, beaming energy to earth in micro ­
wave form, then reconverting it to usable electricity. As the U.S. military 
commanders game out the problem of defending Poland, they will under­
stand from endless war games that the problem will be maintaining electri­
cal power. When the Turks take only a few weeks to overrun southeastern 
Europe, the United States will realize that defeating them depends on the 
supply of electrical power to Alliance forces and the destruction of Coalition 
electrical supplies. The key to victory will be keeping Poland supplied with 
electricity. 
The core technology will have been developed. The space launchers will 
be able to be built quickly, as will the solar panels and microwave beaming 
systems. The real challenge will be to get the receivers built and out to the 
field, but once again, with unlimited budget and motivation, the Americans 
will be able to perform miracles. Unknown to the Coalition, the new Battle 
Star will have been designed for two purposes: battle management and man­
aging the construction and operation of enormous arrays of solar panels and 
their microwave radiation systems. Mobile receivers will have been delivered 
to the battlefield. 
When the switch is flipped, thousands of receivers on the Polish side of 
the front will begin receiving microwave radiation from space and convert­
ing it to electricity. In a way this will be like cell phones replacing landlines. 
The entire architecture of power will change. That will be important later. 

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For now, it will mean that the resistance facing the Turks will not decline, as 
their enemies inexplicably will have far more electricity than Turkey expected. 
The Coalition won’t be able to take out the power generation system in 
space or identify the microwave receiving stations. There will be too many 
solar panels in too many different places, and they will be moving around. 
Even if they could be taken out, they would be replaced faster than they 
could be destroyed, given the Coalition’s capabilities. 
The Coalition won’t be able to break the Polish- American force through 
logistics. The defenders will survive because the Coalition will have inade­
quate reconnaissance, having lost its satellites early. Now, its command of 
the air will slip as well, as the smaller Allied air forces will have enormously 
better intelligence—and will therefore be infinitely more effective.