For Australia, it's the unthinkable that must be thought about: a future when China and the US go to war, Indonesia becomes a failed state, and the nation's sea lanes are cut off by Beijing's powerful navy.

The good news is that these World War III scenarios are only the plot to a new techno-thriller novel Ghost Fleet.

The bad news is that the authors of the book aren't sci-fi authors by trade but leading US defence strategists, who are using the novel as a way to reach new audiences with a warning about the complex realities of a great power conflict in the future.

Peter W. Singer works at the non-partisan New America Foundation in Washington. Co-author August Cole, an international security expert at the Atlantic Council, broke the news of Chinese hackers accessing plans for the Joint Strike Fighter, the same advanced jet that Australia is buying.

Many scenes in the book are not so much science fiction as science fact put in a fictional context. Much of the technology in the story exists, or is under development, as hundreds of end notes in the book prove.

Ghost Fleet is already helping to shape debate, according to Singer, who says he has been asked to brief the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of the Navy and Congress on book's key lessons.

The hidden risks of military technology are evident early in the book when a Joint Strike Fighter is shot down by a drone-launched missile. The anti-missile technology on board the JSF, sabotaged by replacement parts, turns the plane's missile-evasion system into a missile-attraction system.

Singer says the book explores the kind of "yin and yang of technology" that is often overlooked in the way people discuss it.

"We're seeing this incredible array of sci-fi-like technology that is game changing," he says, comparable to the effect the introduction of tanks or planes had on the warfare. "But then in turn, they're also bringing in new science fiction-like questions."

An example from the book: At the start of the war, US satellites needed to see what is happening at sea are shot down by China, rendering the US and its allies blind in the Pacific and unable to use missile systems.

It's this question of the real-world effectiveness of technology that is at the heart of the book. For the military of the future to be effective, it will need to find the right mix, Singer says.

"[The military] that is able to figure it out and … that can weave together the old and new, not just old and new technology but old and new thinking, they will be the ones that win," he says.

But the high expectations for the latest military hardware may be only one factor in the conflict. Another "major problem" in a war between great powers would be communication. Battlefield secrets are much more difficult to keep in part because of the instant communication made possible online. At the same time false information is everywhere.

As a navy pilot in Ghost Fleet observes, one of the hardest parts of the war would be "filtering out useful data from the flow that gushed over them as if from a fire hose".

Singer calls this the "flip side" of the communication revolution of recent decades.

In this climate, Singer says, it's a bit like the motto of the old paranormal sci-fi show The X-Files: "The Truth is out there."

Yes, he says. But there is an added catch: "[The truth] is now harder to find."

Having the best, state-of-the-art communications is worthless if it delivers crystal-clear misinformation and enemy propaganda.

All of which suggests that over-reliance on the promise of technology could put an army, or even a society, at as much of a disadvantage as an under-reliance on technology.

In the book, it's not only the global positioning system that is destroyed. Months after the war begins, self-cleaning toilets and smart fridges in American homes have been disabled from afar.

One subplot in the book's kaleidoscopic account of war is the insurgency in Hawaii against Chinese occupation, by the "North Shore Mujahideen" - a nod to the real-world prowess of Afghan guerrillas.

Insurgencies such as the wars in Afghanistan and until recently in Iraq have come to define the notion of warfare for Western democracies, and have influenced the direction of technology to counter roadside bombs and snipers.

The thrust of Ghost Fleet, though, is that a large strategic war is determined not just by arms and tactics but by economics, industry, technological edge and effective civilian and military management - the things that mattered in the two world wars and Cold War that followed.

For this reason, the notion of controlling your own country's supply chain emerges as something of an undercurrent in Ghost Fleet. One of the most telling episodes in the book comes at a Walmart shareholders' meeting, when mum and dad investors override the chief executive's pleas to reject the retailer's participation in a national war effort. The institutional investors felt it would hurt Walmart's profits.

The scene underscores an inherent tension between globalised business and national security, one that has largely been forgotten since the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, when the idea of a world war became unrealistic and unthinkable.

But Ghost Fleet is a reminder that some Cold War thinking may about to be revived as both China and Russia assert themselves in their regions and the world. All of which leads to the big question: if the book's aim is to be "useful fiction", does it suggest a US-China war is actually inevitable?

"No," Singer says. "It's not inevitable but what was once thinkable and had once become unthinkable is once again thinkable." It's this hard reality that gives Ghost Fleet its edge.

Follow FairfaxForeign on Twitter

Follow FairfaxForeign on Facebook