While it was in progress, it would be called World War III. After it was all said and done, it would be called Armageddon. Whatever it was referred to as, it would go down in history as the bloodiest, costliest, most destructive event in human history. Though not a single nuclear or fusion weapon and not a single chemical warhead would be used during the ten long years of the war, more than six hundred million people would be killed as a result of the fighting.
It would also be the most unexpected war in human history. No conflict had ever been thrust upon the world with such shocking surprise, with such shocking speed. On December 31, 2012, the world was relatively at peace. Armed forces throughout the globe—those that were not to participate in the opening attacks anyway—were at the lowest level of alert possible. Twenty-four hours later, on New Year's Day, 2013, Chinese and Indian forces, in a surprise attack of staggering complexity, burst with lightening speed into the resource rich Siberian region of Russia and into the strategically located western Russian steppes. That the Asian Powers (as they would quickly become known) of China, Japan, India, Korea, and Vietnam had been planning the attack for nearly two decades would be apparent only after the massive invasion took place. The rest of the world was completely clueless about their intentions beforehand.
The primary reason the Asian Powers were able to penetrate so deeply into opposing territory in such a short period of time could perhaps be summed up in one word: underestimation. The Americans, the British, the French, the Germans, and especially the Russians, underestimated both the strength of the Asian countries and their ambition. They had allowed their own armed forces to be cut to the bone, to a staffing and equipment level that had not been seen since before the First World War. They had allowed the Asian Powers, whose numbers equaled more than a third of all human beings on earth, to amass an army, a navy, and an air force of staggering size right under their noses.
Most of the military hardware and weapons the Asian powers would use were old, outdated models of American and Russian equipment. The Russians had sold them the very tanks they used to smash across their border. The Americans had sold them the very planes they used to wipe out their carrier groups at the beginning of the war. They had sold them this equipment and had pocketed the currency, using it to beef up their own economies, all the while telling themselves that the outdated equipment would be ineffective over the high-tech, computerized and satellite guided weaponry they themselves possessed. They told themselves they were doing the old divide and conquer trick, getting China and Japan and India to engage in a military build up against each other and against their neighbors. This mistake would turn out to be the most deadly one ever made in the history of warfare.
For a period of more than ten years the three primary countries of the Asian Powers had seemed to be at each other's throats. Nobody, not the CIA, not the British Intelligence, not the Mossad, not the Russian intelligence, ever suspected the whole thing was just an act. The three powers would constantly chip at each other in UN sessions. There would be the occasional border skirmish or naval clash. There would be the occasional scuffle between opposing air forces. That the Asian Powers could keep such a massive secret for so long had been inconceivable. The Western powers and the Russians had simply watched in concealed amusement as the Asian countries went through their paces and kept buying up weapons, tanks, and planes.
Of course none of the western countries were foolish enough to sell the Asian Powers the sheer numbers of weapons they eventually amassed. Though they liked the hard currency they were receiving from the sales they were not about to arm up Asia with enough military might to actually become a threat. In intelligence files formulated just days before the outbreak of war, the total strength estimate of the Asian Powers' tank forces and air forces were listed at less than one fourth of what it actually turned out to be. Again, this was due to a vast underestimation of the enemy. While the Asian Powers had been pretending to chip at each other during those years, their factories, particularly those in Japan, had been turning out three tanks, three airplanes, three artillery pieces, and three bombs for each one they had been sold. They built these weapons from steel that they had purchased from the United States and Russia, and they stored them in secret hangers and staging areas.
On the eve of January 1, 2013, the Russians had no idea that they had more than four million soldiers sitting on their border ready to smash through and seize their country. They had no idea that thousands of attack planes were idling at Chinese air bases ready to take off and penetrate their airspace. Such a deception, had it been suggested prior to the war, would have been thought impossible to achieve. After all, satellites peered down upon the world constantly, monitoring every move that is made by any country's armed forces. But satellite passes are predictable and heavy combat equipment, as the Asian Powers showed, can be moved from place to place between passes a little at a time; it can be effectively camouflaged during the pass, letting the peering eyes see exactly what they expected to see. It took the better part of three years for this build up to happen, but the Asian Powers were nothing if not patient. Again, with hindsight it was easy to see the deceptions for what they were. It was easy for the NSA and CIA analysts to look back at those old satellite pictures and wonder how they had not known, how they had not seen what was about to occur. They had not seen because they had not been expecting to see and probably wouldn't have believed it even if they had.
The goal of the Asian Powers in this endeavor was a very grand and wide-reaching one. They were gambling everything that they had on their success, literally everything. After all, every one of the countries of the Asian Powers had extensive business holdings in the United States, in England, in South America, holdings that were frozen and confiscated by the first week of the war. Each of the Asian Powers countries also had thousands, in some cases millions, of their citizens living abroad, citizens that were arrested and confined to POW camps. That they were willing to sacrifice these things, some of their most valuable foreign possessions, some of their most influential and wealthy citizens, spoke volumes about the grand scale of their intentions. They were not just intending to take Russia and the resources of Siberia. Their goal was no more and no less than complete world domination. They planned to initiate a new world order of their own, to enforce the principals of world communism under a single government by force of arms.
Their plan, which was intended to require less than a year of fighting, was to seize the world's oil supplies as quickly as possible, thus making it impossible for any country to oppose them. They were counting on the sheer overwhelming numbers of their forces coupled with the lightening speed of their attacks to insure victory. Their planning was sound, well thought out, and very detailed. Their armed forces were well trained and well motivated. Despite all of this, things did not quite work out the way they had planned. Things rarely do in war.
It would be an underestimation of their own that would make the war so costly and so long and so bloody. They had assumed that the powers that they were fighting would not be able to guess their intentions and would not be able to react quickly enough to stop them. The Asian Powers had studied their history well and knew that the failings of other would-be world domination schemes had been in attacking too soon at a prepared enemy. They were attacking after years of planning at an unprepared enemy whose industries were gripped in a peacetime recession. They had thought that it would be enough. It very nearly had been. Historians after the war would realize that the difference between a quick Asian Powers victory and the bloody, decade long stalemate that killed hundreds of millions on three different fronts would turn out to be a single decision, a single lucky guess made on the part of the United States early in the war.