Clancy and Bond jump around the battlefield, following different characters, so the plot’s conflicts are not personal. Red Storm Rising is probably the best Cold War-gone-hot book in print. Tom Clancy (co-written Larry Bond), Red Storm Rising (1986) The book is also valuable for the global picture that it presents-the United States is forced to deal with the Chinese threat across multiple domains at the strategic level. The technology in the book is from the future but a near future.

If you can overlook some of the Hollywood plot twists, Harry presents a compelling future where the United States is forced to find a strategy to defeat an enemy with overwhelming industrial and numerical superiority. The plot centers on a mix of characters including the US president and his daughter, an infantryman. The Chinese military has conquered most of Asia, after the United States embraced an increasingly isolationist foreign policy.

Invasion begins just before a Chinese invasion of the United States. Written just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is set at that time and has some of the best descriptions of a war that never happened. Peters also offers a compelling vision of future war with decisive information operations and a tempo driven by new (at the time) computers. It is, if there ever was one, a character-driven book about World War. It’s not about Americans or NATO forces, but neither does it fall into the trap of stereotyping the adversary. Ralph Peters spent much of his Army career as a military intelligence and foreign area officer focused on the Soviet Union, and more than anything, that deep knowledge is the allure of his book. Red Army is an excellent imagination of the Cold War turning hot-but from the Soviet perspective. Ralph Peters, Red Army: A Novel of Tomorrow’s War (1989) We believe that this list does that, and does so by offering a list of books you will also enjoy reading. Perhaps most importantly, a good reading list should also contain tension within itself, which encourages critical thinking and analysis. Any worthwhile reading list should address a specific theme or topic and collectively present a degree of depth and breadth. Each one has a unique and valuable perspective on great-power competition and future war.

In pursuit of this aim, we’ve chosen a selection of ten books. As we continue to pivot to great-power competition, perhaps we should turn to fiction to better understand what it might look like in a contemporary context-visualizing not just the competitive phase, but also escalation and even high-intensity conflict with a peer competitor in the twenty-first century. For almost three decades, the US military has operated in a world devoid of the type of parity it now seeks to prepare for. Within weeks, the Soviet Union collapsed. The Berlin Wall fell nearly thirty years ago. This is a challenge for a military with very few uniformed members who served during the Cold War. This shift requires new ways of thinking about conflict and revisiting historical conflicts like the Cold War that can serve as educational examples of great-power competition. These documents unapologetically and repeatedly named China and Russia as the focus of the new strategy. The 2017 National Security Strategy (and the 2018 National Defense Strategy and National Military Strategy that derived from it) codified a shift in focus from low-intensity conflict and counterinsurgency operations that characterized nearly two decades of America’s post-9/11 wars. “Great-power competition” has become one of the defining defense buzzwords of our time, if not the buzzword.

Red storm defense strategy