Plot:
It’s the summer of 2024, and the world is in crisis. Twenty years of rising international tensions and competition for dwindling oil have split the strongest countries into two blocs: the Euro-American “Coalition” and the Sino-Russo “Red Star Alliance.” You are the leader of an elite American special forces squad fighting under the banner of the Coalition, and over the course of the video game, you’ll lead your men from the oil fields of Turkmenistan all the way to the heart of Moscow as your side fights to capture the remaining oil reserves and end the Russian threat once and for all. In your missions, you use futuristic guns and drones, and command weapons of war like jeeps, tanks, and helicopters to destroy the enemy. Not even nuclear strikes can stop you. It’s victory…or nothing!
THAT is the awesomest recap of the 2008 first person shooter game Frontlines: Fuel of War that I can muster, and I hope it grabbed your attention because the game actually wasn’t so epic. Putting aside the scarily evocative storyline, it was a paint-by-the-numbers FPS game with generic weapons, the occasional combat vehicle for you to commandeer, and mediocre AI enemies. Anyone who played Halo 2, which was released four years before this, will recognize all the same game elements.
Frontline’s missions are not imaginative and you don’t need any real tactics to beat them: Rely on your ability to absorb inhuman amounts of lead and keep blasting until all the bad guys are dead. The game has Black Hawk Down / Iraq War vibes, which is understandable given the time when it was made. I don’t have a good memory for this, but the graphics were probably above average for 2008.
Of course, I’m not reviewing Frontlines for its qualities as a video game; instead, I want to examine how well it predicted the future–which is now our present time–16 years ago. For better or worse, video games are a hugely popular medium that shapes global culture and how even our views of what the future will be like. The game is a work of science fiction since it’s set in the then-future and features technologies that didn’t exist yet, and like a typical work of this sort, it’s a time capsule that shows what the anxieties of its moment in history were.
The game was released in February 2008, near the height of an alarming, multi-year spike in the price of oil and only a year after the Iraq War–which some claimed was a secret oil grab perpetrated by U.S. leaders who had insider knowledge that Peak Oil was nigh–hit its bloody climax. Fears were widespread that oil would just keep getting more expensive and that the root cause was a global shortage. In fact, it proved to be a temporary problem caused by Saudi Arabia’s failure to pump more oil out of the ground to keep pace with rising global demand (particularly from China). This led to a temporary imbalance between supply and demand, which caused the 2004-08 global price spike. The U.S. occupation of Iraq also ended without the latter turning into an oil-producing colony of the former.
It’s important to keep the failures of works like Frontlines: Fuel of War in mind when contemplating how today’s science fiction films, books, TV shows, and games depict the future. The common themes in such recent works are American decline and internal strife (Civil War, The Forever Purge), rise of a fascistic American dictatorship (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Creator), the masses suffering under the cruel yoke of megacorporations and the rich (Snowpiercer), and disastrous climate change (also Snowpiercer). If you take anything away from this essay, let it be a strong skepticism of whatever future doomsday movie or book makes the rounds next.
Analysis:
The world is nearly out of oil. In the game, the world hit “Peak Oil” shortly after 2008 and oil production collapsed over the next few years. By around 2020, oil had become so expensive due to its scarcity that even rich countries like the U.S. were afflicted with chronic electricity, food and water shortages. The in-game reporter character who accompanies the Coalition unit even says at one point that mass riots had become common in U.S. cities, and hundreds would die in the disorder in one night. By 2024, the only remaining oil wells on Earth are in Central Asia, and the world’s major powers are so desperate to control it that they start WWIII over it. Obviously, none of this happened.
What saved us? Hydraulic fracking, an advanced method of recovering oil from underground deposits, which was pioneered in the U.S. It sharply increased the country’s oil output over the 2010s. By 2018, America was the world’s biggest oil producer, and it has held that title ever since. More than any other factor, the advent of fracking has kept oil cheap globally since 2008. The biggest pie in Frontline’s face is the fact that oil prices are actually much LOWER in 2024 than they were when the game was released, and that Peak Oil DEMAND could happen as early as 2030 thanks to the rise of electric cars and solar power.
But even if global oil production had peaked in 2008, output levels never would have fell as sharply as they did in the game: the collapse was so total that just 16 years later, Turkmenistan was the only country with oil left (in fact, it is actually not even one of the top 10 oil producers in the world today). In reality, the decline would have been much more gradual, and the world would have largely compensated by using more coal and natural gas (and in some countries, greater use of nuclear power). Instead of mass blackouts and nightly, murderous mayhem, America would be swept by mass complaining and people having to make do with slightly smaller houses and cars. Likewise, the world’s major nations wouldn’t be so desperate for energy that they’d be willing to start WWIII with each other to get it.
A pandemic happened in recent memory. Though only spoken of briefly in the game, an avian flu pandemic swept the world in 2009. The game’s narrator was a youth at that time, and he mentions that his parents withdrew him from school because they couldn’t get him a vaccine. This was partly accurate: the COVID-19 virus outbreak started in 2019 and, among its many ill effects, forced closures of schools across the world.
Russia and China have formed a military alliance. The bad guys in the game are the “Red Star Alliance,” a military pact between Russia, China and a few smaller countries that border them. While Russia and China have closer relations than they did in 2008, it owes to shared hostility towards and exclusion by the West and not to any fondness of each other, and there is no mutual defense component to it.
China views Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a mistake and a potential flashpoint for a larger war that China would gain nothing from. As such, China has refused to sell Russia weapons for use in Ukraine, though it has provided large amounts of other goods (microchips, jet engines, etc.) that Russia used to build weapons of its own. Given the different temperaments and strategic priorities of the countries’ leaders, it is highly unlikely they will form a mutual defense arrangement unless there’s a major change to the global order. They don’t want to get dragged into the other’s wars: Russia doesn’t want to fight against Taiwan and China doesn’t want to fight against Ukraine.
U.S. troops don’t use the M-16 series rifle anymore. The Coalition troops that we see all have American accents and use a smoothly contoured, plasticky rifle that resembles the aborted “XM-8.” This means the U.S. military has abandoned the M-16 series as its standard rifle. This hasn’t happened, and the XM-8 was canceled before entering service because, though it was slightly better than the M-16 series in some ways, the advantage was not so great that it justified the cost of replacing millions of the older rifles.
There are now plans to replace the M-16 series with a heavier, more powerful rifle called the “XM-7,” but I’m skeptical the plan will be carried to completion and instead expect it will find a role as a specialist weapon.
All infantrymen, including the Russians and Chinese, have holographic eyepieces. Every soldier seen in the game has a square, holographic eyepiece jutting down from the bottom of his helmet rim and over one eye. Coalition eyepieces glow blue while Red Star eyepieces glow red, presumably because the two sides have an agreement to differentiate themselves according to who is good or evil. It’s unclear what the eyepieces display over their wearers’ fields of vision, though a fair guess would be the overhead battlefield map with objectives and enemy positions highlighted that the player sees at the top of the screen.
While augmented reality eyewear keeps making appearances at military trade shows across the world, and all modern militaries have some program dedicated to evaluating them, they are not in common field use. A notable exception to this is short-range drone pilots, many of whom wear virtual reality goggles to remotely fly their craft. However, they don’t wear those goggles when engaged in rifle combat with the enemy like in the game.
Rifle scopes are much more common and more advanced than they were in 2008, and duplicate one aspect of the game’s eyepieces: when looked through, the scopes show glowing reticles over the shooter’s field of view, indicating where their bullets will hit. This makes target acquisition faster and more accurate, and the scopes have become standard equipment in several major militaries. In that sense, “augmented” or “holographic” visioning devices are common on the battlefield in 2024.
There are hand-launched attack drones. In the game, you can launch handheld, hovering drones that you then remotely pilot to enemy targets whereupon you detonate them. They are small enough to fly through open windows and hallways and are best suited for attacking fortified positions like machine gun pillboxes. A drone’s explosive load is about the same a grenade. This is probably the game’s most important and prescient prediction about 2024.
The Ukraine War has seen mass use of drones by both sides. This includes countless, small quadcopter drones that closely resemble those in the game. Some are kamikazes that are sacrificed upon use while others are reusable and drop mini-bombs. They’re so effective and cheap that they’re commonly used to hunt down lone infantrymen and don’t have to be reserved just for valuable targets like tanks. If anything, the game UNDERestimated how pervasive and transformative aerial drones would be on the 2024 battlefield.
There are small ground drones. However, the game’s prediction that small ground drones would be in common use has failed for several reasons. First, small vehicles with little wheels and low ground clearances can’t negotiate the uneven terrain found on typical battlefields: a barbed wire fence, log, or pile of rubble that a human could easily step over could be an impassable barrier to mini-tank the size of a coffee table. Sizing them up to overcome these issues results in them no longer being small enough for infantrymen to carry into the field. Second, since ground vehicles move slowly and basically in just two dimensions, they’re easy targets for enemy troops (contrast this with aerial drones, which can move fast and in three dimensions). This means they’re less survivable and might need some kind of armor, adding to their cost and bulk. Third, small ground drones are expensive because they require more material for their manufacture than flying drones. Above a certain unit price point, it doesn’t make sense to use them sacrificially like you can with aerial drones.
There’s a particularly unrealistic moment in the game where you use a skateboard-sized, remote controlled suicide drone to drive under an enemy tank and blow it up. Again, this would only work if the route to the tank were over flat, hard ground with no debris in the way, which you would never count on being the case in combat. The real 2024 solution would be to use a shoulder-launched missile or a small aerial kamikaze drone loaded with a shaped charge explosive. Those missiles and drones can also target the thin armor on the top sides of tanks, which is almost as vulnerable as the belly armor that a skateboard drone’s explosion would tear into.
That said, future advances in robotics will eventually fix the problem: small ground robots with legs instead of wheels would be able to quickly negotiate difficult terrain and attack other ground targets. This draws inspiration from history: during WWII, both sides experimented with bomb-laden dogs that were trained to run across the battlefield, dive under enemy tanks and then explode. While the dogs were fast and nimble enough to do it, problems like the animals being spooked by gunfire foiled its viability. It will surely take decades, but dog-like robots will become a reality, and I’m sure they’ll have combat niches, but can’t say whether they will be preferred to other kinds of futuristic weapons for specific tasks like destroying tanks.
Russian troops are bad at fighting. From the start of the game, in every mission where you fight Russia, you do nothing but drive them back. For a country with such a fearsome reputation, this seems paradoxical, but it actually isn’t: The ongoing Ukraine War, the first Chechen War, the first year of WWII, and the Russo-Finnish War bear out the fact that the Red Army fights poorly (sometimes disastrously so) when the stars align in the wrong way. Though Russians are more courageous and brutal than average on the battlefield and have great skill improvising, poor training, bad leadership, and supply shortages perennially undermine their overall performance. The problem gets worse when the war involves a place and an objective that average Russians don’t care about.
Russia’s military reputation has taken a major hit due to its poor performance in Ukraine since 2022: appalling losses have forced it to fall back on antiquated weapons drawn from Soviet stockpiles and on convict troops and paid foreign mercenaries. The Russians have made strategic blunders, and on the battlefield rely on uncreative tactics (mostly wearing down the Ukrainians with mass artillery strikes and frontal attacks with infantry). Aside from their tenacity, there’s little to be impressed with, and in a direct conventional war with U.S. troops like the “Coalition” team you lead in the game, the Russians would badly lose in peripheral places like Central Asia. However, they would fight much harder inside Russia itself, as it is their sacred homeland.
Russia used nuclear weapons to defend itself from land invasion. After beating up the Russians in Central Asia, the Coalition decides to keep going with a land invasion across the Kazakhstan border into Russia itself, with the objective of conquering the latter. This makes little sense since the Coalition had already accomplished its goal of capturing the last remaining oil well in the world, and since an organization composed of democratic Western governments would never behave so recklessly. The response is predictable: Russia launches nuclear missiles against the Coalition armored force, causing major damage to it. (That mission is the most stunning in the game as it involves you fighting a tank battle punctuated by nearby nuclear explosions)
Thankfully, no one has tried invading Russia since 1941, so it has never used nuclear weapons in self-defense. And let there be no doubt they would: Russia clearly states in its defense doctrine that it will use nuclear weapons if its territory is threatened. The game’s depiction of how this would play out is accurate: Instead of launching an all-out nuclear attack against all Coalition’s cities, Russia started by only using smaller, tactical nuclear weapons against the Coalition’s military forces that were crossing the border, and in a remote area with few or no civilians. This wasn’t mentioned in the game, but it would surely be preceded by top-level warnings from Russia to the Coalition governments about what was coming.
I think Russia, the U.S., and China are the world’s three “unconquerable countries” because of their sheer size and nuclear arsenals. The armies of other countries might be able to defeat them on foreign soil, but it would be hopeless to invade any of the three in an attempt to take them over since too many troops would be needed and they have enough nuclear weapons to annihilate any attacker. The final mission of the game is the storming of downtown Moscow, and in it, mushroom clouds are visible in the distance, meaning Russia has been using nuclear weapons against Coalition troop concentrations during their travels through its territory. I can’t fathom how any army could survive repeated nuclear attacks like that, nor do I see how the home fronts in the Coalition countries would avoid falling into chaos over widespread panic that Russia would nuke them at any moment as well.
Big tank battles are happening in Europe. As mentioned, the Coalition invasion of Russia is spearheaded by a large number of tanks. In the first invasion mission and subsequent ones set deeper in Russia, there are instances where your character must command a tank and fight with Russian tanks. To the surprise of people in 2008, this turned out to be accurate.
The Ukraine War has seen many tank battles since 2022, with a series of particularly large ones happening in early 2024 for control of the town of Avdiivka. Up to this point in the War, 17,168 of Russia’s armored vehicles have been destroyed and 2,925 captured by Ukraine.
China has conquered Taiwan. The game focuses on the European theater of the war, so almost all of the combat is against Russian troops. Midway through the game, it is mentioned that China invaded and quickly took over Taiwan. Thankfully, this didn’t happen, so Frontlines: Fuel of War can be added to the enormous trash heap of sources that have wrongly predicted such an invasion since at least the 1980s. Additionally, the insinuation that Chinese ground troops could easily take over the island is almost certainly wrong: while China’s army is massive, its amphibious forces are small, which creates a major bottleneck for getting its troops across the Taiwan Strait and providing them with supplies.
U.S. attack subs lurking underwater and long-range antiship missiles fired from Taiwan and by U.S. warplanes might fatally damage a Chinese landing fleet before it reached the beaches. More generally, marshalling a naval fleet for a D-Day scale invasion is sure to be an extremely risky and high-casualty endeavor in today’s age of 24/7 spy satellite surveillance and long-range precision missiles. While the world has been primed to expect a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan to be an inevitable and unstoppable juggernaut, it could actually be the most legendary naval defeat since the loss of the Spanish Armada.
Links:
- Fracking sharply boosted U.S. oil production starting in the 2000s.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25372 - Thanks to fracking, the U.S. has been the world’s biggest oil producer since 2018.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37053 - Peak Oil Demand could come as early as 2030.
https://www.iea.org/news/slowing-demand-growth-and-surging-supply-put-global-oil-markets-on-course-for-major-surplus-this-decade - In WWII, both sides experimented with using bomb-laden dogs to blow up enemy tanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog - In the Ukraine War, ground drones have proven far less effective than flying drones.
https://www.rferl.org/a/ground-drones-war-russia-invasion-ukraine/32911118.html - The U.S. Army is experimenting with battlefield applications of augmented reality goggles, but the devices aren’t close to being approved for common use.
https://www.gizchina.com/2023/09/14/us-army-orders-more-microsoft-ar-glasses-as-new-version-works-well/ - ‘In One Brutal Tank Battle Outside Avdiivka, The Russians Lost As Many As 21 Tanks. The Ukrainians Lost Two.’
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/12/28/in-one-massive-tank-battle-outside-avdiivka-the-russians-lost-as-many-as-21-tanks-the-ukrainians-lost-two/