Riding the Red Horse Read online

  Riding the Red Horse

  Volume I

  edited by Tom Kratman and Vox Day

  Published by Castalia House

  Kouvola, Finland

  www.castaliahouse.com

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.

  The stories in this collection are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

  Editor: Tom Kratman

  Co-Editor: Vox Day

  Cover Design: JartStar

  Cover Image: Jeremiah Humphries

  Version 001

  Copyright © 2014 by Vox Day

  All rights reserved

  The stories and articles contained herein have never been previously published unless otherwise noted. They are copyrighted as follows:

  SUCKER PUNCH by Eric S. Raymond. Copyright © 2014 by Eric S. Raymond.

  BATTLEFIELD LASERS by Eric S. Raymond. Copyright © 2014 by Eric S. Raymond.

  MURPHY'S LAW: THE TOP TEN BAD DECISIONS OF THE 20TH CENTURY by James F. Dunnigan was first published on Strategy Page. Copyright © 2014 by James F. Dunnigan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  RED WAVES IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA by James F. Dunnigan was first published on Strategy Page as “U.S. Navy Hurries Preparations For War With China” and “Rebuilding The Empire”. Copyright © 2013 by James F. Dunnigan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  UNDERSTANDING FOURTH GENERATION WAR by William S. Lind was first published in Military Review, September-October 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright © 2004 by William S. Lind.

  THIEVES IN THE NIGHT by Chris Kennedy. Copyright © 2014 by Chris Kennedy.

  THE HOT EQUATIONS: THERMODYNAMICS AND MILITARY SF by Ken Burnside. Copyright © 2014 by Ken Burnside.

  A PIECE OF CAKE by Christopher G. Nuttall. Copyright © 2014 by Christopher G. Nuttall.

  SHAKEDOWN CRUISE by Rolf Nelson. Copyright © 2014 by Rolf Nelson.

  THE LIMITS OF INTELLIGENCE by Harry Kitchener. Copyright © 2014 by Harry Kitchener.

  RED SPACE by Giuseppe Filotto. Copyright © 2014 by Giuseppe Filotto.

  SIMULATING THE ART OF WAR by Jerry Pournelle was first published in The General, Sept-Oct 1971. Copyright © 1971 by Jerry Pournelle. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  WAR CRIMES by Benjamin Cheah. Copyright © 2014 by Benjamin Cheah.

  WITHIN THIS HORIZON by Thomas Mays. Copyright © 2014 by Thomas Mays.

  THE GENERAL'S GUARD by Brad Torgersen. Copyright © 2014 by Brad Torgersen.

  THEY ALSO SERVE by Tedd Roberts. Copyright © 2014 by Tedd Roberts.

  TURNCOAT by Steve Rzasa. Copyright © 2014 by Steve Rzasa.

  GALZAR'S HALL by John F. Carr and Wolfgang Diehr. Copyright © 2014 by John F. Carr and Wolfgang Diehr.

  MAKE THE TIGERS FIGHT: SOVIET STRATEGY IN ASIA, 1925–1975 by James Perry. Copyright © 2014 by James Perry.

  A RELIABLE SOURCE by Vox Day. Copyright © 2014 by Vox Day.

  TELL IT TO THE DEAD by Steve Rzasa and Vox Day. Copyright © 2014 by Vox Day.

  HIS TRUTH GOES MARCHING ON by Jerry Pournelle was first published in Combat SF, ed. Gordon R. Dickson, 1975. Copyright © 1975 by Jerry Pournelle. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  For the troops. And for Major Donald B. Walton (1956-2014). Classmate and Comrade.

  For Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Summers, USMC (1919-1997).

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Sucker Punch

  Understanding 4th Generation War

  Thieves in the Night

  A Reliable Source

  Murphy's Law

  His Truth Goes Marching On

  The Hot Equations

  A Piece of Cake

  Shakedown Cruise

  Battlefield Lasers

  Tell it to the Dead

  The Limits of Intelligence

  Red Space

  Simulating the Art of War

  Galzar's Hall

  Red Waves in the South China Sea

  Within This Horizon

  War Crimes

  Make the Tigers Fight

  The General's Guard

  They Also Serve

  Learning to Ride the Red Horse: The Principles of War

  Turncoat

  Ark Royal

  The Theogony

  4th Generation Warfare Handbook

  Books by Contributors

  Castalia House

  Preface

  At an earlier time, a commander could be certain that a future war would resemble past and present ones. This enabled him to analyze appropriate tactics from past and present. The troop commander of today no longer has this possibility. He knows only that whoever fails to adapt the experiences of the last war will surely lose the next one.

  —General Franz Uhle-Wettler

  The nature of war has changed dramatically since the last major series of wars shook the world during the middle of the last century. The last seven decades have been one of the longest periods of peace in Man's history, if one focuses on the lack of direct military conflict between the modern Great Powers of Russia (formerly the U.S.S.R.), China, and the United States, and the former Great Powers of France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The currently dominant military power, the United States of America, has not engaged in a single declared war since the end of World War II, and aside from a few nervous decades of a Cold War now fading into distant memory, has not even been forced to face any credible rivals to its dominance, let alone existential threats.

  But Man is nothing if not resourceful. The overwhelming military superiority that led to the Pax Americana, combined with the ruthlessness of the total war waged by the Western democracies on the citizenries of its enemies as well as their militaries and infrastructures, created the incentive for the development of a new form of warfare, one in which the line between soldier and civilian is not so much blurred as entirely erased.

  What is described, and feared around the world, as “terrorism” is actually nothing more than an acceptance of an asynchronous distribution of wealth, technology, and military power combined with a dynamic adaptation of the antithesis of what historian Victor Davis Hanson describes as “the Western way of war”.

  In Carnage and Culture, Hanson writes: “Western warring is often an extension of the idea of state politics, rather than a mere effort to obtain territory, personal status, wealth, or revenge…. The idea of annihilation, of head-to-head battle that destroys the enemy, seems a particularly Western concept largely unfamiliar to the ritualistic fighting and emphasis on deception and attrition found outside Europe.”

  But in the 21st Century, war is no longer a state monopoly. Deception and attrition are now the order of the day. The very success of the Western way of war has led to its increasing irrelevance with regards to ongoing conflicts; how can the enemy state be defeated when it has already been destroyed, not only as a coherent military force but as a government entity as well? The number of failed states is on the rise, from Somalia to Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq. Western military interventions have slaughtered enemy troops, and toppled governments, and removed brutal dictator
s from power, but they have not brought peace in their wake. The Western way of war depends upon extermination, but it is irrelevant when there is nothing to exterminate but phantoms and shadows who are replaced as rapidly as they are eliminated.

  This martial transformation from the Western way of war to a neo-Eastern way of war is, like most historical changes in the art of war, the result of technological advancement. The Internet and social media now give even the smallest military commander a global voice that exceeds that of the most powerful Roman emperor. Both recruitment and command-and-control now reach across continents and into the very deepest corners of the darkest imaginations. Advanced weaponry is readily available, inexpensively acquired, and will soon be manufactured by anyone with a computer and a 3D printer who wishes to produce it. Aerial surveillance capabilities superior to any available to the state militaries during World War II are now accessible to private individuals. Propaganda penetrates every border and prevents even the most powerful states from defining the martial narrative for their people.

  In Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley observed that the power of the central state is inversely related to the amount of military power available to individuals. After a century in which the technological pendulum swung far towards the advantage of the state, it is apparent that the pendulum is swinging back towards the individual again, and swinging back rapidly.

  It is not only technological changes with military applications that have had the effect of reducing state military power. Cheap international travel, diversity regulations, multiculturalism, mass immigration, open borders, and generous welfare systems have resulted in heterogeneous populations of multiple and divided loyalties. Militants from nations as far apart as Germany and Malaysia have been seen fighting in Syria, while jihadists raised in Minneapolis have been killed in action in Somalia and Kenya. Carpet bombing is not much of an option when the enemy is as likely to be found in Dearborn or Paris or Tower Hamlets as Baghdad or Abbottabad or Sana'a. Naval supremacy means little in an era of free trade when the enemy owns no ships, and even air supremacy is of dubious value when the enemy refuses to line up in red-coated ranks on the battlefield to be mowed down from above.

  In the 21st Century, the very concept of the battlefield is outmoded. The battlefield is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The enemy is simultaneously everyone and no one. And war remains eternal.

  When He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, “Come.” And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from the earth, and that men would slay one another; and a great sword was given to him.

  —Revelation 6:3-4

  Insofar as we know, the End of Days are not upon us. But the end of the Pax Americana is rapidly approaching and it is readily apparent to every well-informed observer that War is preparing to mount his steed, and he will soon be once more riding that terrible red horse over the nations of men.

  The stories and essays in this collection, the first in what will be an annual military science fiction anthology series, are intended to explore the vital question that presently plagues the finest military minds on the planet. What is 21st Century war and how is it most effectively waged? Whatever armed force of the future can answer that question will become the most viable candidate to succeed the United States of America as Man's foremost military power.

  Vox Day

  Geneva, Switzerland

  December 7, 2014

  Editor's Introduction to:

  SUCKER PUNCH

  by Eric S. Raymond

  If you use a smartphone, if you browse online, if you’ve ever drawn money from an ATM, or if you’re a tanker, mechanized infantryman, Paladin gun bunny, or LAV crewman, you’ve probably used code written by Eric S. Raymond, popularly known as ESR. He even played a minor part in designing the Internet. I’m not sure of everything he’s done; I may have the clearance but I don’t have the need to know.

  Eric’s something of a polymath, being a hacker demigod, a martial artist, a musician with multiple recording credits, a libertarian who isn’t a nut about it, a New York Times bestselling author, and a military history buff who goes past buffing all the way to insight. He is one of the founders of the open source software movement, and on occasion, has even been known to commit wargaming.

  Though not by any means new to writing, Eric’s short story, “Sucker Punch”, is his first foray into “fiction”. I put fiction in scare quotes, however, because I fully expect to see something similar appear in the headlines the day after tomorrow. What he is describing, or something very like it, is likely to happen one day, and sooner than you think.

  SUCKER PUNCH

  by Eric S. Raymond

  USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), June 19th, 2037, 1100 hours:

  It was roughly the tenth hour of what was almost immediately dubbed the Taiwan Straits Action, and the Red Chinese third wave—the one that would swamp Taiwan—was nearing an unopposed landing.

  The first wave had begun with a barrage of cruise missiles, overwhelming Taiwan's air-defense capability. It initiated with air-launched anti-radar missiles, continued with sea- and sub-launched missiles converging from all directions, and culminated with heavy ground-based missiles fired from as far away as Szechuan and Yunnan.

  The missiles cratered runways, scattered small anti-materiel and smaller anti-personnel minelets along taxiways, tore into hardened aircraft shelters, incinerated barracks (often with their occupants still inside) and blasted headquarters to ruins.

  The targeting was deadly accurate. Taiwanese counterintelligence had been outplayed; between the resentments of the small minority of Formosan indigenes against the Han incomers, the relative ease of infiltration from the mainland, bribery, and a handful of ideological traitors, the Reds had had little trouble developing networks of agents in place.

  Hard on the heels of the missile barrage came attack aircraft to finish what the missiles had started. They pounded brutally on airports and airfields outside the littoral zone bounded by the Gaoping and and Zengwun rivers. There, west of the central mountains, in the area centered on the port city of Kaohsiung, was where the second wave would land.

  That second wave put boots on the ground. Three innocuous-looking civilian freighters had docked a day before at Kaohsiung, each with a different non-Chinese registry. At the appointed time, out of them boiled a total of around seven thousand PLA marines. These elite troops seized intact the port facilities outside the devastated naval-base portion of Zuoying. Airborne and Special Operations forces began dropping around the edges of their perimeter, taking airfields and bridges. The largest single deployment was a reinforced regiment dropped as a blocking force at the town of Chishang, to interdict the east coast highway from Taipei.

  The third wave of the invasion, a huge flotilla of troop transports, container ships, breakbulks, and escort warships, had launched from Qanzhou and Xiamen at about hour five and was already a scant four hours from an uncontested landing in the PLA's lodgment area. There was very little doubt that the transport fleet contained sufficient regular line troops and supplies to ensure a swift and final conquest of Taiwan.

  There had been no declaration of war. Pressed on this point, Chinese diplomats blandly parried that they were merely subduing a rebellious province, not invading a sovereign nation. Initial surprise had been near total, but other than the ruse de guerre that landed the Marines the mainlanders made no attempt to conceal what they were doing from satellite surveillance. The People's Liberation Army struck Taiwan brutally, obviously, overwhelmingly, like the hammer of an angry god.

  Roughly four hundred miles NNE of Taipei in the Combat Direction Center of the USS Ford, Admiral Augustus Hatton was wondering when the other shoe was going to drop. And forcing himself not to pace the deck, because a worried-looking commander makes for a nervous crew.

  The CDC of an aircraft carrier, in the middle of a carrier strike group, is a hell of a place for the man in charge of i
t all to feel uneasy. CSGs are the most complex, sophisticated, and expensive collections of war machines ever fielded, with all but one tasked to protect the flattop at the center so it can dominate the surrounding seas with airpower.

  Hatton stopped for a moment in front of a monitor carrying a satellite view of the smoldering ruins of the Republic of China Navy, sunk at anchor or by cruise missiles reconfigured as destructors. One of the ships (Hatton couldn’t see any identifying markings but made it as a former Kidd-class), had tried to break out into open sea. A cruise missile reconfigured as a mine had broken the ship’s keel, split it in two, and let inrushing sea water capsize it before the crew had a chance.

  Hatton shook his head. He’d worked with the Taiwanese over the years, trained them, knew them, and liked them. He’d gone bar-hopping with ROC Navy officers as an ensign. He was pretty sure his roster of friends had dropped precipitously in the last ten hours.

  “Bastards!” he muttered savagely.

  “Worse than Pearl Harbor was for us,” came a soft southern drawl from Hatton’s left and behind him. “We had another fleet—good part of one, anyway—and were building more, fast, already. This was it for them. The only surface fleet of account that Taiwan has left is us. If they have us, I mean.”

  Hatton didn’t have to turn around. He recognized the voice of Fletcher Hanson, the captain of the Ford. Indeed, the admiral really didn’t want to turn around. With just the voice, it was easier to see in his mind’s eye the younger Hanson, a brand new plebe in a Dixie cup who, despite Hatton’s best Second Class efforts, had never lost his nerve or his smile.