by Paul O'Neill
First published 2025
Defense analyst Sarah Chen watches as NATO's most advanced weapons systems crumble under sustained assault from a peer adversary. The West's post-Cold War strategy of deploying small numbers of sophisticated platforms proves catastrophically inadequate. Chen advocates for dissimilar rearmament, combining elite military hardware with mass-produced second-tier systems like the converted commercial drones proving effective in Ukraine. Military commanders resist her proposals, clinging to expensive legacy platforms while enemy forces overwhelm their defenses through sheer numbers. Chen must navigate Pentagon politics and industrial lobbying to convince skeptical generals that survival depends on embracing a high-low capability mix. She faces the challenge of developing new tactical doctrines that integrate precision weapons with cheaper alternatives, while simultaneously reforming military organizations and defense industries to produce capabilities at unprecedented scale. The novel explores whether Western militaries can abandon their attachment to exquisite systems and adopt the organizational changes necessary to implement dissimilar rearmament across research, industry, and armed forces before strategic defeat becomes inevitable.
Genres: science-fiction, military-fiction, political-thriller, academic
Vibes: suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-allies, organizational-change
Setting: NATO, Pentagon, Ukraine
Period: Post-Cold War
122 pages · Paperback · Routledge