Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

Now that the Chernenko breeds have started making moves too, I simply can't spare the energy, so—"

"Understood, mission accomplished!" Slava saluted Andropov with his left hand.

Actually, President An could have sent someone else to do this, but why did he choose these two? Perhaps it's because he'll be qualified to participate in deeper decision-making only after these tasks are completed.

Mr. An is such a good person.

Is Comrade Ivanova going too?

“Go,” Andropov glanced at Director Nian and nodded. “Your role is his assistant, responsible for data processing and report writing. However, the situation in Iraq is different from that in Uzbekistan; it’s a war zone—your performance over the past month has completely exceeded our expectations—frankly, I think you should serve in the special forces; coming to the KGB is a waste of your talents.”

"Well, I'm not used to the ways of the military—of course, it's not that going to the military is bad, but staying here to work is much more open and flexible! With the guidance of senior leaders, I can learn more and avoid embarrassing you when I go out." Director Nian smiled.

"Besides, I wore a burqa for three months in Uzbekistan, so wearing it for a while longer isn't a bad idea."

Andropov's lips twitched, which could be considered a smile.

“There’s one more thing,” he said, standing up and walking to the window with his back to them. “You’ll be coming into contact with some military personnel in Iraq. Some of them share similar views with me—about military reform and technological advancements. If you feel the time is right, you can talk to them more. I’ll assign some people to follow up.”

He didn't say a specific name, but Slava knew who he was referring to.

"understood."

“And—you must be careful, don’t die there,” Andropov turned to look at them. “The Uzbeks have already almost died once, and I might not be able to save you the second time.”

------

On February 15th, Slava and Nian boarded a Tu-154 bound for Baghdad.

There were seven other people accompanying him: three officers, two military engineers, a translator, and a KGB liaison officer. The highest-ranking officer was a colonel named Kozlov, in his forties, with a scar on his face that ran from his left eyebrow to his ear, supposedly from Afghanistan. He clearly didn't like the people from the Slava and Niandao research institutes, speaking only to his own officer colleagues throughout the entire trip.

But another person caught Slava's attention.

He was a lieutenant colonel in the observation group, named Vorobyov, in his early thirties, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, and looking more like a university professor than a soldier. He had been reading an English technical journal on the plane; the cover had several large words printed on it:

“C3I——Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence”

Command, control, communications, and intelligence.

This was precisely the core concept of the military reforms that Ogarkov had been pushing for. Slava passed by his seat while going to the restroom, glancing at the journal. Vorobyov noticed his gaze and looked up at him.

"Comrade Velikoslav Ivanovich, are you interested in this?" he asked in Russian.

“I have some insight,” Slava pointed to the journal’s cover, “Is this the C3I system the Americans came up with?”

“Yes, the US military is building it.” Vorobyov closed the journal. “It integrates all reconnaissance, communication, and command systems to achieve real-time sharing of battlefield information. In theory, a division commander sitting in the command post can simultaneously see the location, status, and battlefield situation of all his troops.”

“I don’t know much about the military. Do we have something similar?”

Vorobyov smiled, a smile tinged with bitterness, which Slava immediately understood.

“We have a lot of tanks,” he said, then opened the journal again and continued reading.

---

Baghdad, Iraq, February 3, 1981

Baghdad isn't hot in February; daytime temperatures are in the twenties, but drop below ten at night. However, there's an indescribable smell in the air—dry dust, gasoline fumes, and a faint, acrid smell, carried by the wind from the south of the city.

The coalition military advisory group was based at a military base on the western outskirts of Baghdad, surrounded by barbed wire and sandbags, with armed Iraqi soldiers standing guard at the entrance. The base contained several bungalows, and the conditions were better than Slava had imagined—there was air conditioning, hot water, and even a shortwave radio that could receive broadcasts from Moscow.

But this is a war zone, and that was something I could feel from the very first day I arrived.

During the day, muffled booms could occasionally be heard from afar—the sound of artillery fire from the training grounds. Sometimes they would only blast once or twice before stopping, and sometimes they would continue in waves for ten minutes or more. The people at the base had gotten used to it; they ate and slept as usual. Only the newcomers would look up and glance south.

On the third day after their arrival, Colonel Kozlov led a military observer group to the front lines. They traveled south for more than five hours along the highway from Baghdad to Basra in two armored personnel carriers provided by the Iraqi army, then turned onto a dirt road and bumped along for another hour to reach a forward command post of the Iraqi Third Army.

The command post was set up in a palm grove, constructed with sandbags and camouflage netting. A dozen T-62 tanks and several BMP infantry fighting vehicles were parked around it, their gun barrels covered with dust cloths. In the distance, wisps of black smoke could be seen on the horizon—smoke still rising from the Iranian positions bombed the night before.

Standing outside the command post, Slava smelled the battlefield for the first time: the smoke of gunpowder, the fumes of diesel fuel, charred rubber, and a faint, cloying, nauseating odor—which he later learned was the smell of rotting corpses.

"First time on the front lines?" Vorobyov walked over to him and handed him a military water bottle.

"Yes." Slava took the water bottle and took a sip.

"You'll get used to it," Vorobyov said and left.

Over the next two weeks, Rislava saw a lot.

He saw T-62 tanks fighting in the desert, those steel behemoths gleaming in the sunlight, but upon closer inspection—the tanks' fire control systems were purely mechanical; the gunners had to manually measure range and calculate lead using an optical sight, resulting in a pitifully low hit rate when firing on the move. A T-62 fired three shots at a fixed target a kilometer away before hitting it, while the American-made M60A1 tank was said to have a first-shot hit rate of over 80% at the same distance.

The BMP infantry fighting vehicle also performed poorly in combat, consistently being penetrated by Iranian infantry's RPGs. Its armor was designed to withstand NATO machine gun fire and artillery shrapnel, but the shaped-charge jet of the RPG could penetrate it from any angle. One BMP burned for a full hour after being hit; only two crew members managed to jump out, the rest remaining inside.

Then there's the communication equipment in the command post—those massive, cumbersome radios that require specialized operators. Every order has to go through layers of relays, from the army to the division to the regiment to the battalion. A simple troop movement order can sometimes take half an hour to reach the front lines. And in that half hour, the battlefield situation could have completely changed!

Once, while standing in the command post watching Iraqi officers work out scenarios on a map, he couldn't help but ask, "Don't you have a real-time communication system? For example, one that would allow battalion commanders to speak directly with every company and platoon leader on the front lines?"

After the translator translated the sentence into Arabic, the Iraqi officers looked at each other, and then one of them burst out laughing and said something.

The translator translated the sentence back: "He said, 'We even have trouble communicating with the neighboring positions, and you expect me to communicate with every platoon leader?'"

How the hell are we supposed to fight a war like this? What's the difference between this and World War II?

Slava said nothing more. As a modern man from the future, he truly couldn't comprehend such extremely outdated weaponry. In his report to Andropov, he wrote:

"Today I witnessed a war from the early 20th century. Both sides were using weapons from the late 20th century, but fighting a war from the early 20th century!"

Warfare has changed. It's no longer about who has more tanks or whose missiles have longer ranges; it's about who sees the enemy first, who reacts first, and who transmits information faster! A commander who can grasp the battlefield situation in real time can defeat an enemy twice their size with half the troops!

If this is not realized, the West's 81 exercise will be meaningless except as an excuse to scare Europeans into expanding NATO's military capabilities!

If given the opportunity, I would really like to include some 'more modern' Blue Force units in Exercise 81. Our alliance has the most tanks in the world—over 60,000—but without modern command and communication systems, those 60,000 tanks are just 60,000 iron coffins.”

---

What made Slava realize the cruelty of war most was a scene he witnessed one afternoon.

That day, the observation team visited a frontline medical station. The station was located in an abandoned school, with classrooms converted into wards and several ambulances parked on the playground. It was packed with wounded soldiers—Iraqi soldiers, mostly young men in their late teens and early twenties. Some were missing arms, some were missing legs, and some were completely wrapped in bandages, with only their eyes showing.

A young soldier lay on a cot in the corner, his legs missing below the knees. He looked no more than twenty, his thin, small skin tanned dark by the sun. His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, but his gaze was vacant, as if his soul had left his body.

A photograph sat on the wall by the bedside, taped shut. It showed a woman and two children in a mud-brick house in the background.

Slava stood there for a long time. The young man didn't know why he was fighting. He might have been conscripted, ordered, and told it was to defend the country—and then his legs were gone. Now he lay here staring at the ceiling, while his wife and children smiled at him in a photograph.

This scene is playing out all over the world: in Afghanistan, in Iran, in Africa, in Palestine...

This is not a Cold War at all; it's just a hot war between two superpowers that avoids accidental clashes.

He wanted to change history; he wanted to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union and make the country a better place. But what does changing history mean? It means some wars will be fought, some won't; some people will die, some will live; behind every decision are human lives.

If he were a leader, he would only see data on statistical tables, but now he sees living, breathing people like this young man, people with families, people with coffins covered with national flags, and people with families!

Does he have the right to make this choice? Does he have the right to make the choice for them, even if it is a necessary sacrifice?

Was he able to make these choices because he accepted that "revolution is not a dinner party," or because he wasn't the one going to the battlefield?

Director Nian had somehow ended up standing next to him.

"Have you seen enough?" she asked softly.

"I've seen enough."

"Let's go, they're waiting outside."

A few days later, one evening, Slava met Vorobyov in the base's mess hall.

Only the two of them remained in the canteen. Vorobyov sat in the corner with a beer in his hand, writing something in a notebook in front of him. Slava got a meal—rice with stewed mutton, made by an Iraqi cook, which was actually quite good—and sat down opposite him.

"Write a report?" Slava asked.

“Hmm,” Vorobyov said without looking up, “The General Staff needs a combat evaluation of the armored forces’ communication system.”

What is the conclusion?

Vorobyov stopped writing and looked at him: "You really want to hear it?"

"I really want to."

Vorobyov closed his notebook and took a sip of beer.

"They beat us terribly." He said those four words crisply and decisively.

Then he started talking, speaking very quickly, as if he had been holding it in for a long time and had finally found someone to confide in.

"Suka! The Iraqis are using our R123 vehicle-mounted radios. This equipment was designed in the 1960s, with short communication range, poor anti-jamming capabilities, and virtually no encryption. On the battlefield, communication between a tank battalion and its superior command post is frequently interrupted. The battalion commander doesn't know what the regimental commander wants him to do, and the regimental commander doesn't know what's happening at the front. As a result, everyone is fighting their own battles, and no one can coordinate!"

Is this a problem with the Iraqis or a problem with the equipment?

“Both are true, but ultimately it comes down to equipment—the Americans say they’re going to start providing military aid to Iraq, and to be honest, I’m really worried about American-made equipment taking over the Iraqi market.” Vorobyov put down his pen. “The Iraqis are indeed poorly trained, but even if the Soviet troops were to operate this equipment, the problems wouldn’t be any less. Because the design concept of this equipment is outdated—it was designed for the last war.”

"The last war? World War II?"

“Yes,” Vorobyov said, “our military communications thinking is still stuck in 1945. Orders are given from the top and carried out by the bottom, and information flows unidirectionally from top to bottom. But modern warfare is not like that—modern warfare requires networking, where every node can send and receive information simultaneously. The Americans are already working on this; they call it C3I.”

"That journal you were reading on the plane wasn't easy to get your hands on."

Vorobyov nodded: "That's a publication from the U.S. Army War College, obtained by the KGB. There's an article in it about the U.S. military's application of the C3I system and the lessons learned in the Vietnam War. You know, although the Americans lost the Vietnam War, their experience in information technology is invaluable, and what about us?"

He shook his head with a wry smile.

"Tens of thousands of tanks, tens of thousands of artillery pieces, thousands of aircraft... but our command and communication system is still at the level of the 1960s. If we go to war with NATO tomorrow, our tank onslaught will be able to see the position of every single one of our tanks from the command vehicle on the other side, and then use precision-guided weapons to point them out one by one."

"You're exaggerating a bit. Precision-guided weapons aren't advanced or cheap enough to send every single one of our tanks to meet our mentors. I'd rather trust small drones and attack helicopters than NATO's cruise missiles." Slava knew that the US military's information warfare wasn't that mature yet. Real achievements would have to wait until the Gulf War, that would be truly impressive.

“But this is indeed a big problem. Is anyone pushing for reform now?” Slava asked.

Vorobyov glanced at him and hesitated for a moment.

“Yes, Marshal Ogarkov, the Chief of the General Staff, has been pushing for a military technology revolution. He advocates that we should focus on electronic warfare, precision guidance, and automated command systems. But—” he lowered his voice, “Defense Minister Ustinov is not very supportive. Those people in the military industry prefer to build tanks because tank orders are large and profits are high. Developing electronic equipment? It requires a large investment and has a slow return; nobody wants to do it.”

"Indeed, and the alliance's electronic equipment is pretty bad to begin with, so is that why reforms can't be implemented?"

“It’s progressing very slowly,” Vorobyov said, putting his notebook back in his bag and standing up. “However, there’s a major exercise this fall—West 81, which Marshal Ogarkov is in charge of planning. He intends to showcase some new concepts in the exercise, and if it goes well, he might be able to gain more support.”

He patted Slava on the shoulder.

"Are you an IT professional?"

"I guess so. I know a lot about computers, and I also have some knowledge of information technology and cybernetics."

“Then you really should go and watch that exercise.” He said and left, leaving Slava alone in the empty cafeteria.

The night sky outside the window is occasionally illuminated by distant flares. Those lights flicker like fireflies on the horizon.

This war, which will last for ten years, has only just begun.

------

The observation team returned to Moscow in mid-March.

Slava walked out of the airport with a notebook full of notes and a head full of ideas. It was still snowing in Moscow, a stark contrast to the dry heat of Baghdad.

Andropov didn't come to pick them up personally; he was still busy with his group of dogs in Moscow and didn't have time to see them. But Serov was waiting outside the airport. He drove a black Volga and took Slava and Nian to the unassuming KGB apartment.

"Comrade Andropov asked me to tell you," Shelov said, "that he has read your Iraq report and found it well-written. He will also introduce you to some military factories—the KGB recently needs to order a batch of new equipment, so you can use this as an excuse to get in touch with the military-industrial complex."

When can I see him?

“No rush,” Sherov opened the car door for them to get out. “He’s been very busy lately and isn’t feeling well. The situation in Poland has taken up a lot of his energy. He’ll contact you when he has time.”

He paused for a moment, then said, "However, there is one thing he asked me to tell you in advance."

"what's up?"

"He has already arranged positions for you in the September exercise—West 81—and the information technology ideas you mentioned in your previous report have interested some of the people under Chief of the General Staff Ogarkov. You can meet with them in your military schedule later. You might actually find a new position in the fall exercise."

Sherov closed the car door and took one last look at them through the car window.

"This isn't an audit or a war spectatorship. Dealing with military personnel requires extreme caution; we mustn't mess things up."

The car drove into the twilight of Moscow in March. Slava stood at the entrance of the apartment building, watching the snow falling from the sky.

Director Nian stood next to him and tightened his scarf.

"What are you thinking about?"

Slava looked at the falling snowflakes and said, "I'm thinking about how we should perform in the September exercise."

"Go inside first," Director Nian gave him a push. "It's freezing outside. Your arm is just healed, don't make it worse for me."

His experiences over the past six months have completely changed his understanding of the country. The Soviet Union's problems were not just corruption or rigid systems. Its military—the so-called world's strongest armed force—was also lagging behind in certain key areas. This backwardness might not be apparent in peacetime, but it would be fatal once war broke out.

Although he believes the Cold War will not result in a direct confrontation between the two superpowers, gaining an advantage for the alliance in some regional conflicts might be a good bargaining chip for climbing the ranks.

What if I really do become the president someday?

Thinking of this, Slava smiled and followed Director Nian into the apartment building.