Peter Thiel, über-entrepreneur, hedge-fund manager, co-founder of Palantir and PayPal and author of Zero to One once commented,  “In reality, there’s nobody sitting around plotting the future, though sometimes I think it would be better if someone were.” Having read P.W. Singer and August Cole’s Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War I have to disagree with Thiel. The authors deliver a highly believable vision for what the next world war could look like. Ghost Fleet is a book serious thinkers about the future need to read.  In a quick read you will be exposed to just about every emerging technology on the drawing boards today.

The authors have -ala the Greeks using the Trojan Horse - snuck massive amounts of deep thinking about the implications of emerging technology into a readable at-the-beach or on-a-plane thriller. There are many lessons modern executives might take to heart.

Lesson One: The Technology Supply Chain
In the novel, the American homeland is undone by its everyday reliance on technology. The lesson being – if you are totally dependent on technology you should understand a] how it works and b] where it comes from.

Modern executives need to understand the implications of their global supply chain. In the story, American defense contractors seeking to reduce costs rely heavily on Chinese microprocessor manufacturers who implant malicious code into products intended for critical defense systems. Government computer and phone systems are compromised.

Lesson Two: Stress Test Assumptions
Bad assumptions can have devastating consequences. Most American military scenarios assume a perpetuation of connected and coordinated high-tech weaponry. The effectiveness of such systems depends on pinpoint GPS targeting and secure communications. Ships, subs and planes are flying blind when the satellites that maintain the specialized wireless network that connects them all are destroyed. If a nation’s satellites are blinded and its systems compromised by cyber-attacks, it doesn’t matter how advanced its military hardware is. Aircraft become a liability. Carriers become coffins.

New Battle Spaces
Historically global conflicts played out in three dimensions – land, sea and air. In the future Singer and Cole envision two completely new battle spaces: cyber and outer space.

New Actors
We are presented with non-traditional actors – Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and hackers. Typically not included in war games, the authors ask, “what role would these new actors play in a future global conflict?” Would Anonymous fight for the U.S. or its adversaries?

New Technologies
Synthetic “stims” boost soldiers’ reaction time and alertness. Unmanned aerial combat drones interdict billion dollar fighter planes. Millennial officers and enlistees on all sides wear “viz” glasses similar to Google’s Google Glass.

Old Alliances
The book questions whether WWII vintage alliances [e.g., NATO] would stand up in a modern global war. Which American ally would really ‘step up’ when the going gets tough?

The book’s title, Ghost Fleet is the U.S. Navy term referring to partially or fully decommissioned ships kept in reserve for potential use in future conflict. These ships are older and less technologically sophisticated than their modern counterparts. Singer and Cole use this concept to illustrate a key motif in the book: America’s next generation of high-tech warfighting machinery while capable of inflicting greater levels of punishment, are also vulnerable in ways that its lower-tech predecessors were not.

Executives need to deepen their understanding of the technologies driving the modern world.