Counterterrorism magazine published my Q&A with M. P. Woodward, the author of Red Tide: A Novel of the Next Pacific War.
You can read the interview via the pages below or the following text:
My Q&A With M.P. Woodward, Author of
Red Tide: A Novel of the Next Pacific War
TM.P. Woodward is the New York Times bestselling author of multiple thriller series including Tom Clancy Jack Ryan Sr., Tom Clancy Jack Ryan Jr., “The Handler,” and “The Fourth Option” with Jack Carr.
He served as a U.S. Naval intelligence officer before going on to an international career in the streaming media industry. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
M P. Wood Ward was interviewed by Paul Davis.
Editor’s Note: The interview was conducted prior to the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran.
IACSP: I read “Red Tide” and I liked it, partly because I served on an aircraft carrier when I was a teenage during the Vietnam War. Why did you write “Red Tide” and how would you describe the novel?
Woodward: I would describe it as speculative fiction of the likely scenario of war between the U.S. and China in our modern context. I wanted to illustrate that there are very few boundaries today between global businesses and traditional national sovereignty, to where businesses and governments are effectively intertwined. And because businesses are global, it can effect government relations in unexpected ways, and in writing what I see as a likely conflict with China, I wanted to mix together the complex history of Chinese and American relations particularly over Taiwan and the somewhat ironic situation where Taiwan has evolved to be the world’s foremost source of chips with their foundries, which is in itself a scarce resource for which businesses and governments are combined. So, to me that seems like a natural collision course.
IACSP: Why do semiconductors
play such an important role in your fictional war between the U.S. and China?
Woodward: Because semiconductors are the basis of all technology now, and technology is the basis of all business now. I spent 20 years in the technology industry. much of that in the chip adjacent industry and I worked for a time at a Taiwanese company. I have seen over and over again competition amongst companies for chip technologies. I've also seen just by virtue of the way companies make decisions, that it's much easier to design chips and the tools to design chips continue to get better, but to manufacture them takes billions and billions of dollars in capital, and so companies like Apple can design their own chips to improve the user experience of their products, but they still rely on the foundries that are so highly specialized they are in fact some of the most expensive valuable facilities in the entire world. So, just as in previous eras of history nations have competed over scarce resources, things like oil natural resources, I think that these foundries are in effect another scarce resource. That and the fact that they're in Taiwan is simply astounding.
IACSP: Why did you create Admiral Cole and the Cole family and have family members central to the drama?
I’m reminded of Herman Wouk’s Henry family in the “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance.
Woodward: Yes, the “The Winds of War and “War and Remembrance”
were two books that were very influential for me, as was “The Caine Mutiny” and
“Once An Eagle.” Those are probably my
four favorite books, all of them do an amazing job of reflecting the times
through personalities, and in the case of Wouk, he does that with not only
personalities but the families that come along with them. Having been a naval
officer myself and seeing the way the world has evolved, I felt that it was
high time someone's reflect what it's like for military families in our current
environment. And just as Myrer and Wouk did, that means showing that the
services sort of expand and contract relative to current political thinking or
current national demands. So I wanted to show that Admiral Cole was someone who
was commissioned at the tail end of the Cold War when the Navy was quite large,
but finds himself in a Navy that has half the size that it used to be, yet is
facing renewed global threats and is presiding over a Navy that was designed to
fight one kind of battle and finds itself fighting a different one. And I
wanted to have an officer who had been around long enough to recognize those
changes, but to grapple with them because he's got a love for the way things
were done, but he's intellectually flexible enough to recognize that it would
have to change.
IACSP: In addition to the Cole family, you created Gabe Sorkin, a naval reserve character. How would you describe him?
Woodward: That's something I wanted you to pull forward from my own tech career where I have seen in the past 10 years that there are a number of people in tech who have come to understand with China’s revanchism that they're grateful for the umbrella that the United States security has provided them in building global businesses. You see this today with Palmer Luckey. He’s the guy who invented Oculus and VR and now he's turned his talents to defense. You see that with Peter Thiel’s Palantir as well.
I have met several reservists who are in the tech industry who feel strongly about this, and I think some months ago the Trump administration actually created a program, and I laughed because I thought that's Gabe Sorkin, but they created a program where they commissioned certain tech executives who wanted to volunteer as 05-level officers (Lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, Army and Marine Corp, and commander in the Navy), so they can contribute. That's also very similar to what happened in World War II. So, I just wanted to echo in those eras in history and a little of my own experience.
IACSP: What kind of research did you do for Red Tide?
Woodward: I'm working on a doctorate at Harvard University right now and the big part of that has been Chinese history and government, so my research really came through two sources. One, through school, where I studied China extensively. But on the technology side, it was really my experience with tech firms and a Taiwanese company.
IACSP: Do you think a future war with China as you describe in “Red Tide” is possible, or even enviable?
Woodward: There's a Harvard historian named Graham Allison who talks about something called the “Thucydides’ Trap.” Thucydides was this historian who wrote about wars inevitability when there's one power that's rising and another power that's ruling, so Graham Allison sort of seized on that idea and wrote a book called “Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?” He's analyzed all these conflicts in history and seen a common pattern when there's a rising power they come into conflict with the ruling power and the situation we've seen is that the United states has been certainly since the end of the Cold War the single superpower and China is rising to challenge that, and because of the of the competition around the intermingling of business and government in the competition around that single source of chips to me that is a primary source of conflict as are other areas that feed the same technology industry such as rare earth materials for example, or the domain of satellites and spectrum to complete communications, So I do not necessarily think war is inevitable, but I think conflict in these areas is inevitable and that's why when I wrote “Red Tide” it's a naval war, but it's also something of a limited war.
We've seen this in the Russian and Ukraine war; we've seen it all around the world in the age of nuclear weapons. So far, the governments have been forced into limited wars short of full-scale escalation or proxy wars, and the most likely scenario would be for the Chinese to simply blockade Taiwan, and then military forces that could do something about it, which in this case is the U.S. Navy/
IACSP: Does the U.S. Navy needs to build more ships and upgrade technology to counter the Chinese Navy, which is becoming more and more powerful each day?
Woodward: Quite definitely, yes. I would say that since the end of World War II, we've had historic prosperity and every measure of quality of life has improved in 80 years. In 1945 when nations got together to talk about how to treat the oceans, it was agreed that the oceans would be free, and that's where we came up with things like 12 nautical miles territorial limits, et cetera, and the US Navy for the last 70 years really enforced that. But the U.S. Navy can’t do that anymore and that's going to split up the oceans into regional hegemons. China is well poised to do that for two reasons. One it has illegally seized reefs in the South China Sea, and I think about 20 per cent of World Trade goes through the South China Sea, so that's one area. But the other area is around shipbuilding. They've matched the size of our amphibious fleet in the past five to ten years, something that took us decades and decades to build. Their ship building capacity is much greater than the U.S. and these are all issues that I’ve tried to highlight.
IACSP: Can you tell us about your background as a naval intelligence officer and later in the tech industry? Did you always want to be a writer?
Woodward: I always wanted to be a writer. The four books that I mentioned were all books that I absorbed in high school, and I graduated high school at the height of the Cold War and then went to school on a Navy ROTC scholarship and studied Russian with the intent of becoming an intelligence officer and then became an intelligence officer. I was commissioned around 1990 and so the Cold War was still functioning. The world very rapidly changed however and I kind of came in the interlude between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror, So I got a little bit of the tactical side of both, but it was a terrific career that exposed me to many different facets of the Navy. Also, as a junior officer, it got me very close to decision makers and commanders. Helping as a staff officer, you're really getting to see policy enforced, so that was that was one of my kind of worldview.
IACSP: Where did you serve?
Woodward: I was in the Philippines for a while and then after that I was in an airwing on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. I then worked for United States Pacific Command as a staff intelligence officer in Hawaii and San Diego. That brought me all around the Pacific.
IACSP: What was your rank when you left the Navy?
Woodward: I was a lieutenant. I was just coming up against 04 rank. I had gotten my MBA at night, and the Cold War was over, and the technology sector was booming, the Internet had just been invented, and the Navy was shrinking, so I thought it was a tempting time to leave.
IACSP: What about your career in the tech industry?
Woodward: I went into Internet communications immediately with Motorola and then the wireless industry and a wireless startup doing video transmission over very low bandwidth, and then that led to a career with wireless carriers and then with smartphone manufacturers. AT&T had got very involved in smartphones and launched the iPhone and then went to the actual smartphone manufacturer Android called HTC, which was bought by Google. Then I ended up at Amazon, where I spent the last seven years of my career before leaving tech in 2022.
IACSP: I suppose both your Navy experience and business experience aided you in writing Red Tide.
Woodward: Oh, completely yeah. The Navy experience gave me insight into people and personalities, strains on families, Navy operations, and where I saw how we interfaced with allies. But then at tech, I saw the constraints around chips and the criticality of chips, and in my last job streaming video with Internet for international partners, and so we were active in more than 40 countries. That was reviving my thoughts around the importance of the Navy and global commerce and the different points of view from people around the world and in their view of the United States and China.
IACSP: “Red Tide” was not only interesting and suspenseful, but it was also illuminating. I'm a Navy veteran, but I think even nonveterans will enjoy it. I've read that you've also written thrillers based on Tom Clancy's characters. How did that happen?
Woodward: My first book, “The Handler,” was published in 2021-2022. The editor who bought that series was also the editor for the Tom Clancy series. Tom Clancy died in 2014, but Putnam has carried on the characters with legacy authors, and so that editor offered me the job of writing the Jack Ryan Jr. series. I've written three Jack Ryan Jr. books, and they promoted me to do the Jack Ryan Sr. series. My first Jack Ryan Sr. book comes out later this year. Its called “The Coldest War.” It's about a conflict with Russia.
IACSP: I read that you are writing a thriller with Jack Carr. I interviewed him here when his first book came out. How did that come about, and what's the thriller about?
Woodward: Jack Carr called me up a year and a half ago and told me that there was a lot of demand for his books and he wanted to continue to write about the James Reese universe himself, but he also had an idea, he had two ideas actually, for four separate thrillers, and he asked me if I would be willing to partner with him and co-write and basically developed his idea into a full draft of the novel, and then and work together to bring it to market. So, I did that. Jack is a wonderful guy and a former naval officer like me, and he had really liked my work in “The Handler” and “Red Tide.”
This story is different than the genres we have been writing. It is about a veteran of the global war on terror with a special forces background like Jack, but who's been sort of used up and spit out by it. He needs purpose, needs something and finds that in helping people who are facing you know corrupt governments. So this story takes place in New Orleans where he's effectively investigating the death of the son of one of his old friends, who he lost in Afghanistan. The son is trying to become a journalist and rise on and do special things, and uncovered deep government corruption in New Orleans, and ended up being murdered. So, this character uses his skills to take on this corrupt government directly. So, it's sort of about justice at the end of the day.
IACSP: Thank you for speaking to us and thank you for your service.
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