After all, it's one thing for a small group of men to hijack a plane or for a group of men to hide in the mountains of Afghanistan/Pakistan, but quite another for those groups to try to function far beyond their home turf in conventional military battles against Western armed forces. He obviously loves warriors and makes the men at the heart of the story, on both sides, suitably heroic.īut what are we to make of a scenario where Japan, a basket case today, is the world's foremost superpower where Afrikaner South Africa and Soviet Russia both held on for an additional thirty years and where America has declined so precipitously? He did better with his vision of an aggressive and ambitious Islam, but even there one has to wonder if it will ever be realistic for Muslim extremists, no matter their passion, to project structured forces beyond the Middle East.

Peters presents the warfare and the military hardware of 2020 in convincing fashion. It's an exciting enough book, kind of in the Tom Clancy mold, mostly about the 7th Cavalry's experiences in a future conflict that pits Japan, white South Africa and various Islamic jihadis against a militarily degraded United States and a crumbling Soviet Union. At least in The War in 2020, you'd have to say his past vision was pretty foggy. Peters is still today making confident predictions about what the war on terror holds in store for us, so it seems worthwhile to look back and see how he did in the past. On the one hand, it seems almost cruel to revisit someone's predictions about geopolitics a decade after they made them.

Red army by ralph peters