Introduction
“Damn it!” Hidden behind an armoured vehicle, and looking down at the private’s blood-soaked body, Corporal Kohler began to breathe heavily as bullets whistled past his head. It was the sixth man he had lost this week. As he looked at the court house located in the Poto Poto neighbourhood, he could hear the hum of a distant helicopter, which was soon to land in an adjacent field to the Congolese national civil aviation authority. As the smoke from the flare bellowed into the air, his comrades shouted: “prepare to board the aircraft before we are overrun!” As he ran towards the helicopter he was shot in the head by a sniper. Taking off his headset, Kohler let out a sigh of relief and regained his composure. “OK, this is really getting realistic now… I mean, I am supposed to be dead, right?”
Kohler had already seen active duty in Brazzaville and he had been advising Paris and Berlin on its military Virtual Reality (VR) programme – called ‘Project Adelphi’ – since the late 2020s. Project Adelphi was initially set up to enhance cyber defences, but by the late 2020s the project had moved on to a second phase of development that assisted operation commanders with the use of VR technology. The VR system would receive live situation feeds from troops based in Brazzaville, and the information was converted into realistic pre-deployment training scenarios for troops. In a sense, the Europeans were fighting a real and virtual war at the same time.
“It’s getting better”, he said, “but it gets dark much earlier in Brazzaville and there is some- thing not quite right about the red hue used for the evacuation flares.”
The reality was that the Europeans needed all of the technological help they could get. Europe’s forces had been fighting the militias of the Congolese Party of Labour (CPL) and their allies on the streets of Brazzaville since 2028, but without making any headway – they were winning the virtual war, but losing the real one. War erupted in Congo in 2027 following the death of President Denis Sassou Nguesso in late 2026. Although Nguesso had likely died from natural causes, CPL supporters cried foul play and propagandists hit the government-run Radiodiffusion Télévision Congo to blast opposition forces for poisoning him. They even blamed ‘foreign imperialist powers’ for conspiring to overturn socialism.
The mind-boggling dimension to the war, however, was that despite the Europeans’ technological superiority they were still hemmed in in Brazzaville and had not ventured outside of the security parameter set up around the Eurocorps headquarters at Maya Maya airport. Pointe-Noire and the rest of the country was still in CPL hands. While it is true that the CPL utilised guerrilla tactics, it was as if the militias were always one step ahead of European forces on intelligence. So, for example, when intelligence assessments showed that CPL militias were planning to attack the World Health Organisation office on Avenue du Général De Gaulle, the attack would take place at the Palaisdes Congrès on Boulevard des Armées instead. For all of the advances embodied by Project Adelphi, European soldiers were still coming home in body bags at an alarming rate and this had badly affected morale. Many European troops half-joked that a trip to Brazzaville was a ‘one way ticket’.
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The summer of 2030 was the bloodiest phase of the conflict for the Europeans – since their deployment in 2028 Eurocorps had lost 400 troops. It was a brave political decision by European leaders to deploy Operation Vanguard to protect their oil interests in Congo, the operation began as a genuine peace-keeping deployment 100 to separate the CPL and opposition Pan-African Union for Social Democracy (UPADS) militias. The death of President Nguesso was the trigger for the conflict, but the reality was that his death exposed deeper problems such as years 75 of poverty and inequality and the huge loss of oil revenues given chronically low crude prices throughout the 2020s – Congo relied on oil for 50% of its GDP.
Early in 2030, the fighting intensified as the UPADS called for the exiled Mireille Lissouba – who had replaced her late father as the head of the party – to return as the rightful leader of Congo. The CPL was also rejuvenated as 25 it acquired ever more sophisticated weaponry that docked in Pointe-Noire. Additionally, the Chinese government announced a new round of debt relief for the country, which alleviated the financial strains. Many had thought that the Chinese would intervene militarily themselves, and they had every reason to given their close relationship with the CPL. The 2026 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) had stressed the importance of Congo to the Belt and Road Initiative, and it was no secret that Beijing wanted to invest in port infrastructure in Pointe-Noire – there were even reports that China wanted to build its first Atlantic Ocean naval base there. Yet, the Chinese resisted the temptation to directly intervene.
Approximately 1,200 Eurocorps troops were deployed to Brazzaville, and in 2030 they were still locked down in the capital. CPL forces had cut off the two major roads (the RN1 and RN2) into the capital and Maya Maya airport was the only safe logistical spot for the Europeans. Eurocorps patrols would leave the safe zone near the airport for regular reconnaissance trips, but it was still too risky to venture too far. The population density of Brazzaville did not help. The 1.7 million residents living in the city accounted for more than a quarter of Congo’s total population, and sanitary conditions and the built environment of densely packed houses made the combat zone rather inhospitable.
However, 2 years after the initial deployment European forces were still on the back foot and Project Adelphi was not helping with military intelligence gathering. For example, in the spring of 2030 it was made known to Eurocorps that CPL forces had taken up command posts in Brazzaville’s 9 major hospitals. Yet when European forces decided to storm the Hôpital d’Instruction des armées de Brazzaville, CPL snipers picked off troops from high rise buildings on Avenue de l’Amitié. Eurocorps forces believed that recently installed CCTV cameras were feeding information to CPL forces, but most were taken out and still CPL forces were one step ahead. What is more, when Eurocorps attempted to run public communication campaigns through text and internet messages frequent communication blackouts would occur at the same time. Such blackouts would never occur when the CPL were running their own public strategic communication campaigns.
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By mid-2031 the game was up for European forces. After three years of combat in Brazzaville, and following the loss of over 520 soldiers (among them Corporal Kohler), Eurocorps governments were calling time on Operation Vanguard. This decision was not taken lightly, but a major media report by Le Monde and the Süddeutsche Zeitung gave no option. The special report stated that European forces were being outwitted in Brazzaville by a smartphone app called ‘Clé’. This was hardly news, as recovered smartphones had revealed that Clé was used as the primary communication tool between CPL forces. European intelligence also knew that CPL fighters used Elikia and Moke smart-phones, which were produced by the Congolese tech-firm VMK – the company shipped generic phones in from Shenzhen, China, before stamping them with ‘Made in Congo’.
This was not the real story, though, as it was revealed that Clé was not just a messaging app – it was actually used as a geolocation tracker of all European troops based in Brazzaville. No wonder CPL forces could target European troops so easily and deceive them so readily in Brazzaville’s labyrinthine streets. All of the communications and sensor technologies used by Eurocorps forces – from smart watches to satellite communications – were being used by CPL militias to pick off European troops. Clearly, VMK did not possess the technological know-how to make this work and the Le Monde and Süddeutsche Zeitung report revealed two further pieces of earth shattering news.
First, according to reliable sources Clé was connected to a mainframe system colloquially called ‘Écluse’. It was not clear how Écluse functioned but the theory was that it was a supercomputer system that combined geolocation tracking data with other information stolen from European forces. The report went on, secondly, to reveal that Project Adelphi’s VR scenarios had also been hacked by a foreign intelligence service. As Adelphi was using real-time battle information to help European forces gain more situational awareness of the conflict in Brazzaville, it was simultaneously being hacked to reveal European tactics and strategic assessments. The more and more Europeans learned about the war through Adelphi, the more and more Écluse would relay the information to CPL handsets via the Clé app. Beijing had denied any role, but it did not matter: Europe had lost both its virtual and real wars.
Chaillot Paper, EU Institute for Security Studies, No. 161
Daniel Fiott 