Ghost Fleet, Ten Years Later: An Interview with P.W. Singer and August Cole

New America Strategist and Senior Fellow, and ASU Professor of Practice, Peter W. Singer, spoke with War on the Rocks on his novel Ghost Fleet ten years after its publication.

When we started working on Ghost Fleet in 2012, most of the focus in the national security ecosystem was on an assumed future of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. In turn, there was a belief that the United States would be able to induce or even cajole China into becoming a partner with a shared stake in the rules-based international order created by the United States. Based on a mix of research on history, Chinese military doctrine, Chinese Communist Party messaging, as well as our gut instincts, we just didn’t see the next 20 years that way. Rather than non-fiction, we chose to use a new model we called “useful fiction” to blend research with narrative and explore how the future could very soon become one of great power competition and even outright globe-spanning conflict.

Read the full interview here.