Bestselling author Brad Thor, who writes a thriller every year, is known to tackle emerging security topics and create novels characterized by assiduous research and imaginative plots—what he calls “faction.” This wasn’t lost on the U.S. government, which tapped him to join its Analytic Red Cell program to come up with plausible scenarios involving threats and attacks on the United States.
There were very definitive bad guys. There was lots of what we call the fog of war, lots of confusion, lots of difficulties with getting men and matériel to the front lines. It seemed like the perfect setting to put my hero. I like to put him into very difficult situations without a lot of support. I didn’t want to send him into the story with an army right behind him. I wanted to send him in as poorly equipped and undermanned as possible so that that would raise the stakes and the tension. So Harvath had to go by himself. He had to join the Ukrainian international Legion, so that if he got killed or captured, the United States could say, “We have no idea why he was there.” That was the jumping-off point for “Dead Fall.”
What we’re seeing here in Ukraine is very much an echo of the run-up to World War II, particularly when the Republic of France, fascist Italy, and the United Kingdom via Neville Chamberlain decided to allow Hitler to take a piece of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland. [They] thought, “Well, if we let Hitler have this, then that’ll be the end of it.” And what do we all know from history? It wasn’t the end of it. It only encouraged him. And that’s exactly what’s happened with Putin. In his 2014 invasion of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, he said he was there to protect ethnic Russians. With my book, I saw all of these parallels from August to October of 1944. Hitler sent one of his worst SS brigades into Poland, and some of the most horrific, the most terrible war crimes of World War II were committed by the SS brigade, so we were seeing a lot of echoes of that with Russian troops, and particularly the Wagner Group, part of the mercenary force that Putin was using in Ukraine as well.
So this idea of art and what the Russians are doing in Ukraine, I read lots of articles leading up to the invasion about how different museums throughout Ukraine were trying to pack away and hide their precious works of art because they knew Putin was going to try to steal them.
This is not fiction from my books. These are actual historical facts. When the Soviet Union broke apart in the 1990s, one-third of the Soviet nuclear stockpile was in Ukraine. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States was very worried that the Ukrainians would not be able to maintain those weapons, much less protect them. We were very concerned that a bad actor, whether that be a terrorist organization, some sort of a rogue state, would be able to steal these weapons from the Ukrainians and use them against the United States or one of our allies.
And so we went to the Ukrainians and we said, “Listen, you don’t have the ability to take care of these weapons, nor do you have the ability to protect them. We will help you dismantle them and get rid of them.” And Ukraine said, “OK, we have one condition. We want you, America, to promise us that if we give up these nuclear weapons, we will never lose one single inch of Ukrainian territory. We will never be invaded. No one will ever take our territory,” and the United States said, “Yes, we will guarantee you that this will not happen.” And they said, “OK, can you also get the Russians to sign this?” The Ukrainians and United States worked together with some other allies and the Russians to sign this agreement in real life. This is called the Budapest Memorandum. So that’s in the 1990s; it’s pre-Vladimir Putin. Everybody agreed and then what happens?
In 2014, Vladimir Putin invades Eastern Ukraine, takes the Donbas, and puts the “Little Green Men” in there to do fighting for him. That was the Wagner group. This is a big deal because we have a G7 today, because as a result of that 2014 invasion by Putin, along with our partners in that organization, we kicked the Russians out. It used to be the G8. There were some sanctions and then a very harshly worded letter from the Obama administration. And that was it. And that was the wrong thing to do. We did basically to the Russians exactly what the Republic of France, fascist Italy, and the United Kingdom did to Hitler in the in the Sudetenland situation. We just gave him what he wanted. And that was a big mistake for the United States.
As far as our role in the world, when it comes to Ukraine, we’re doing the right thing now, but we’re not doing it fast enough. We should all want that war to be over and the only way to have that war be over quickly and to take Putin off the table as a threat is to defeat him as solidly as possible, to convince him this was a big mistake and he should never do it again. We should not be agreeing to let him keep territories already. If we don’t give the Ukrainians what they need, and as much as they need as quickly as possible, this war will drag out.
Here’s the other thing. Even though … we’re learning a lot by watching Ukraine use our weapons, … China wanting us to weaken ourselves by staying there as long as possible is not a good thing.
I think the natural state of mankind is chaos. It is only through encouragement of order and a set of international norms that the world does not slip into chaos. We have a very loud segment of our country that wants the United States to be isolationist. Well, that’s unfortunately not possible. With great power comes great responsibility. If we don’t take that role of trying to assure democracy and security around the world, we will suffer the consequences when someone else, like the Chinese, takes that role. The Chinese have invested tremendously, particularly in their navy, and we have fallen behind with our Navy.
Another good thing for the United States that’s come out of the war in Ukraine is that we’ve seen what a paper tiger Russia’s military is. I mean, Russia really is a “gas station” with nukes. That’s an old term that was used to describe them. I think it was John McCain who coined that but it’s true. So our focus now as we do our military planning can be more on China.
Most Americans don’t realize the extent to which China is committed to becoming a world superpower. If we do not wake up and don’t double down and really commit to our national security efforts vis-à-vis China, we’re going to find ourselves left in the dust.
Two favorite things that I’ve been able to do as an author: doing what I did in Afghanistan, and flying an F-18 Hornet with the Blue Angels was absolutely fantastic. Probably one of the things I’m most proud of, though, is that shortly after 9/11 happened, I was invited to become part of a government program called the Analytic Red Cell unit.
The United States government realized that the attack on 9/11 was successful because the American government was not creative enough. So they said, let’s bring creative people from outside D.C. into D.C., and let’s work with them and see where they think terrorists or rogue nations or enemies of the United States might hit America, and how they might do it.
There were people like me, Michael Bay, the director of the “Transformers” movies, who also did the Benghazi movie [“13 Hours”]. We were asked to help the U.S. government and its various intelligence agencies, the Defense Department, think outside the box. Anything that we discussed in there remains a secret to this day. I’m not allowed to talk about it and I’m not allowed to put it in any of my books.
Internationally, I think the greatest threat to America in the world is the Chinese Communist Party. So I’d be a fly on the wall there, see what their plans are, with their military pushing into space.
America has represented to my family, and millions of other families, opportunity and security to be an individual. America means to me that I have the freedom to pursue what I want to pursue, that I can make decisions for myself and my family, and that I will be allowed to make those decisions.
When Ronald Reagan gave his first inaugural address, he said that one of the reasons that America is so great is because we did something no other nation in the history of the world had ever done. And that is, we unleashed the creative genius of the individual.
When I think about the resources America had, you know who had more natural resources available to them and more manpower? The Roman Empire. The Roman Empire did not see the incredible leaps that we saw within 200 years of our founding. The difference is that we protected private property and the individual rights of our citizens to a degree that had never been done before. We empowered individuals to pursue their dreams.
My grandfather was the first in our family to be born in America. So I take pride in saying that I’m a third-generation American. In America, it’s not about where you’re from or what you look like. It’s what you believe. You can be black, you can be brown, you can be white, none of that matters. To be an American means to hold a certain set of ideas as core to who you are.
I joke that he gets to do the things that my wife says I cannot. If I ever say that around my wife, she says, “Well, I let you go to Afghanistan,” which is true. Scot Harvath is my alter ego, the same way I think James Bond was for Ian Fleming, and Jack Ryan was for Tom Clancy. Scot and I are most similar in our belief that you should always do the right thing no matter what it costs you.
There are days where it’s very, very difficult. The most important ingredient to making a living as a writer is discipline. Creativity is important too, but nothing happens without discipline.
Before being a writer, I had a travel show. It started in the late 1990s and ran into the 2000s. It was called “Traveling Lite.” I was the producer, writer, and host, and I showed young people how to travel Europe inexpensively. I loved it. I thought travel made me a better American—seeing my country from abroad, seeing other countries, and realizing how good I had it as an American citizen. So I created a TV show to encourage people to travel because I did not want younger people to wait until they were retired to do it.
I love Greece. I love Switzerland. Having lived in Paris a couple of different times, I am a huge Francophile, so I love France; and being of Scandinavian descent, I love traveling to Sweden and Norway as well.
Stoicism has made me a better father, a better husband, a better business person, a better friend, a better boss and employer, and just an all-around better human being, so I’m a big fan of stoicism. When General Mattis went to Iraq, he took the “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius with him. I love how much I’ve been able to learn from Ryan Holiday, and particularly the book “The Obstacle Is the Way.”
