Red Army
Ralph Peters
402 pages
published in 1989

Infinity star general Ralph "Blood 'N Guts" Peters (as seen on Alicublog) is one of the more loonier cheerleaders for the War on Musl^wTerror. He's a firm believer in both what Matt Yglesias dubbed the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics where America just needs the Will to vanquish its enemies and nothing else and in the unlimited threat of the Islamofascist menace, which so far, apart from a few exceptions, has been pretty weak. It's not an uncommon strain in American conservatism, this doublethink about America being both the strongest and bestest country on Earth and its unique vulnerability to the enemy du jour, which is so much more cleverer, stronger and dedicated than the American people. It's no surprise then that Peters has written a future war novel about a succesful Soviet invasion of West Germany, in 1989, just as the Berlin Wall fell, the Warsaw Pact countries overthrew their communist leaders and the USSR looked on without firing a shot in their defence. Of course, he's not the only one to have been surprised by the fall of the Soviet Union; plenty of science fiction writers were embarassed too. Still, it's typical of the man that he would write a novel warning of the dread Soviet threat at the exact moment it was all revealed to be hollow.

The main reason I bought Red Army then when I saw it at a secondhand bookstore was to have a laugh, to see what Peters would make of it. I expected it would be dreadful, with awful prose and awful writer, but in fact it turned out to be quite readable. His writing is easily on a par with the king of technothrillers, Tom Clancy, which is damning with faint praise, I know. But then you don't expect good writing with these sorts of novels. Peters writes clearly, is good at describing the nature of war without bogging down into needless details, keeps the story moving quickly and uses immediately recognisable if stock characters: the young conscript with no clue what's happening, the grizzled Afghanistan veteran airborne captain, the dedicated, toughminded but fair general and so on, and so on. Interestingly enough, unlike other World War III novels, Red Army is written solely from the Russian point of view and they get to win too. One further point in Peters' favour is that he doesn't share Clancy's tendency to geek weapon systems and describe endless details of the weapons used. Peters talks about tanks, "the big guns of the battallion", the "company's fighting vehicles" rather than T-72s or BMP-1s.

The plot is simple. The Red army does what it had been poised to do for some forty years and invades West Germany; the focus of the book is on the struggle in Northern Germany. No reason or context is given to the war, Peters starts the book just before the first shots are fired and ends it with the West Germans requesting a ceasefire. The soviet plan is explained early in the book: a northern offensive aimed at the Dutch forces in Germany, combined with a southern attack against the Belgians, while in the centre the elite Thord Shock Army will attack slightly behind the first two offensives to allow reserves to be drawn to the flank, then batter through the German and British defences. At the end of the first day the Soviet forces should have reached the Weser, with the Rhine only a day or at most two after that. The idea is to not just break through the NATO defences, but also split up their forces along national lines, as part of an overall political plan to put such pressure on NATO it collapses before it can recover from its initial shock and fight back or can even think about using nuclear weapons to stem the tide.

For those of us who grew up in the endstages of the Cold War and who were fascinated enough with warfare to read about the Fulda Gap and such like, this is a familiar scenario, NATO's greatest nightmare for decades. In fictional treatment we've seen it in other WWIII novels as well, from Clancy's Red Storm Rising to General John Hackett's The Third World War, though in those two examples NATO won, if barely. Peters was one of the few who let the other side win, for whih he had an ulterior motive of course. Like Hackett, he must've intended his novel as a warning. Where Hackett intended his as a warning largely aimed at British ears, to take care of their army and make it fit for its duties In Europe, Peters aimed its criticism at NATO itself, as the afterword makes clear. In Red Army the Soviets ultimately win the war while it's military still in the balance, with a major NATO counteroffensive gaining ground against the Soviets, as the West Germans lose the will to fight and sue for peace. In contrast he shows the various parts of the Soviet army as determined and ruthless and in fanatical pursuit of its goals, if not without its flaws.

As a novelist Peters has the advantage of making the outcome confirm his own prejudices, but if we compare Red Army with what really happened in 1989 and beyond, we see he was wrong about both the Soviet threat and NATO's vulnerability. For all the fears about it shared by Peters and several generations of NATO planners, the USSR never seriously considered the invasion of Western Europe. As to NATO, it would prove its endurance beyond the Cold War, in the First Gulf War, Kosovo and Afghanistan. It has reinvented itself so succesfully that it now encompasses not just the original NATO members, but also most of its Warsaw Pact enemies! NATO turned out to be not so brittle after all. It's an essential neocon trait this, the constant overestimation of the evil intentions of their enemies and a pessimism about their countries' own willingness to fight.\ Reading Red Army shows how little people like Peters have changed.