The world's oceans are the world's highways for the transport of goods and the conduct of commerce. Continued mastery of undersea warfare is vital, because whoever controls the ocean's depths controls its surface, and thus protects much of the world. Seapower, strongly employed, is key to upholding peaceful societies everywhere.

But do America and our Allies take our free access through international waters too much for granted? Advanced submarine technology is proliferating among countries who haven't always been our friends. Nuclear weapons are also spreading at an alarming pace, with trans-national conspiracies, shrewdly hidden for years, only recently being unmasked. What mortal threats to freedom still remain hidden?

The enemy you don't see coming, because of your own blind spots and preconceived notions, is the one who'll get you every time -- and the enemy knows it too. The 9/11 Commission Report warned us all of “failures of imagination” and “unprepared mind-sets.” Beyond the global war on terror, what shape might the 21st century's almost inevitable, eventual major worldwide armed conflict take? When faced with so many dangerous future unknowns, the Navy wargames worst-case scenarios to learn everything it can. As a professional writer and seasoned risk analyst, my extreme action-adventure novels aim to do the same thing, based on a firm foundation of extensive and constant non-fiction research. Perhaps the only certainty is that heroic submariners and special operations forces will play a key role in deterring that Next Big War, or in winning it.
--JOE BUFF, 2006