Code Red is the first Vince Flynn/Kyle Mills book I’ve read, but won’t be my last. This book deals with an asymmetrical warfare threat, the development of a highly addictive and lucrative drug for purposes of facilitating conquest of perceived enemies, and the direct military response to thwart it in the form of a complex, unsanctioned, covert operation. The main idea of developing a highly addictive drug that causes permanent brain damage is seen as being an effective way to trigger societal collapse, greasing the skids before machines of war move in for an easier takeover. I was unaware, before reading this book, of the concept of asymmetrical warfare, but found it similar to “unrestricted warfare” as presented in a 1999 book (Unrestricted Warfare: Two Air Force Senior Colonels on Scenarios for War and the Operational Art in an Era of Globalization written by two colonels in the People’s Liberation Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui). The Russians call it New Generation Warfare or NGW first described in 2013 by Valery Gerasimov in his Gerasimov Doctrine. A 2014 PDF report (“Russia’s New Generation Warfare in Ukraine” by Janis Berzins) described NGW, “The main objective is to reduce the necessity for deploying hard military power to the minimum necessary, making the opponent’s military and civil population support the attacker to the detriment of their own government and country. It is interesting to note the notion of permanent war, since it denotes a permanent enemy. In the current geopolitical structure, the clear enemy is Western civilization, its values, culture, political system, and ideology.” Today, Fifth-Generation Warfare (5GW) characterized by its "omnipresent battlefield" is also similar, “employing political, economic, and technological violence" utilizing social engineering, misinformation, cyberattacks, AI and autonomous systems, that could prove more devastating than conventional war if applied on a global scale.
Asymmetrical warfare is about how to wage war without direct involving costly direct military conflicts, but by employing “war without bounds,” that includes unconventional warfare methods that might involve everything from hacking into systems, using biological agents, terrorism, creating division and unrest within a society, sabotaging systems with chips implanted in technological products, using social media to indoctrinate youth; it’s basically a dirty tricks grab bag of strategies that could enable a less technologically advanced country to gain an advantage over more militarily technically equipped nations. There was a US Army unit Asymmetric Warfare Group created in 2006, and deactivated in March of 2021. Code Red gives readers a close up look at an asymmetrical warfare operation, which seems particularly timely now, so why the Army deactivated the group in 2021 escapes me, maybe cost cutting or integrating it in another unit.
The book was a fascinating read. I liked the main characters, the choice of the issue of asymmetrical warfare, the realistic depiction of Middle East locations and life, the fluency in planning such an ambitious covert attack, understanding how the power players game each other, the action, the fast pace, the authenticity, all of it. The main issue in the book is frighteningly a possibility we might someday see play out, if it’s not already happening now. Code Red was believable, gripping, unputdownable as the operation unfolds, and I’m sorry to see it end, but it was a great ride with a satisfying conclusion.
To borrow a line from the book to make a point, “While perhaps not a connoisseur of Michelin-starred restaurants, he was a connoisseur of expertise. In his experience, it was perhaps the rarest thing in the universe.” Flynn and Mills have expertise, and it shows. Another line in the book that really resonated with me was this: “It was human nature to embrace the inferiority of one’s enemies. A bias so strong that it tended to prevent people from thinking too hard about the actual plausibility of it. No one liked a killjoy.” You need only turn on the news or go on social media to see evidence of this.
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