Riding the Red Horse Read online

  Fletch wasn’t smiling when Hatton did turn to face him. But at least he didn’t look worried.

  “I don't like it, Fletch,” Hatton said to his flag captain. “They've let us get too close without responding. If we launch now, we'll catch their transports in blue water.”

  “Sure enough. There some reason you didn't give the go order about five minutes ago?” asked the captain.

  The admiral and his flag captain had been friends since before plebe summer ended. They’d been friends, really, even before they knew they were. Later on, when open friendship was possible, they’d become Academy legends for their role in a number of notorious pranks. Army never did figure out how they got the mule.

  Hatton motioned his friend to an alcove where they could speak in semi-privacy. “I'm worried about what I'm not seeing,” he said in a low voice. “No attack subs trying to punch us out. No missile tracks coming at us. Their two at-sea carriers are out of theater, way the hell up near Elmendorf. Do you really suppose they're going to let us sail right into the straits of Taiwan and cap their transports without saying boo?”

  Hanson leaned against a bulkhead and crossed his arms, looking thoughtful. “Not after what they did to Kadena,” the captain said.

  Hatton winced. The F-22 base on Okinawa, tasked with first response to a cross-straits invasion, had been taken out by a combined cyberattack and cruise-missile-delivered runway cutters in the first hours of the war. These specialized weapons blew their way under concrete and then displaced huge slabs of it with subsurface explosions. Afterward, the airfield had been dusted with the same sorts of minelets they'd used so liberally on Taiwan. Kadena would be out of action for days.

  “Not that I'm ungrateful,” Fletcher continued, “but what I can't figure is why the body count was so low.”

  Hatton snorted. “The Chinese have always had a tendency to treat war with other nations as a crude sort of diplomacy by rougher means. What they like to do is spend the minimum force required to spank the opponent and get him to the negotiating table on their terms. They could have tac-nuked Kadena to take it out permanently; this way, they're signalling the President that they don't want a general war.”

  Captain Hanson nodded slowly, “That makes sense. Not like they can't pound Kadena again if they need to. And it would explain why they haven't sicced ASATs on our surveillance birds, too.”

  “Right,” Hatton said. “They want us to see what's going on. Intimidate us. Still…something's not right, Fletch.”

  “There's something we're missing here." He frowned. “I'll be in Combat Air Control. I want to take another look at the sat imagery.”

  Hatton entered the CAC with his hand raised to forestall salutes and acknowledgments. He wasn't entirely sure the intel officer on duty would have noticed if he'd been announced by trumpets; she was peering that intently at the master plot screen. From behind, he watched her reach out and tap one ship icon, then another. A distance line and a number appeared between them.

  Good for you, girl, he thought, hiding a smile. I think you may have spotted part of what's bothering me. He cleared his throat. She spun around, half-startled.

  “Sir…” she began hesitantly, and stopped.

  “Out with it, Commander Weller,” he said, less gruffly than he might have.

  “That Red formation…” she said. “It looks odd to me. The collection of transports around the missile cruiser carrying the flag makes sense. But the escorts are deployed farther out than I'd expect. And farther from each other than I'd expect. Most of them are hull-down from the flag, sir.”

  “Analysis, Commander?” he ordered.

  “It doesn't look like poor stationkeeping to me, sir. See how regular the escort ring is? And they're all Luyang IIIs, the newest class. This is doctrine,” she said. “This is planning!”

  “Planning for what, Commander?”

  “I wish I knew, sir,” she said. “Whatever it is, it's something we don't understand. And we don't have a solid weapons inventory for Luyang IIIs yet. Some of what we have is guesswork.”

  Which is another piece of my worries, he thought. But he said only “What do we know?”

  She scratched her nose. “Um. Much like the upgraded Luyang II-class. Six HQ-12 anti-air missiles, that's an upgrade of the -9. Eight YJ85 anti-ship missiles. 100mm main gun. They replaced the Gatlings on the Luyang II with a laser point defense a lot like the LaWS on our Zumwalt-class boats.”

  “Output?”

  “The received wisdom is that it's about 70kw, maybe two miles of range." Her eyes and posture added an implied commentary…Don't lean on that too heavily.

  “That's not impressive,” Hatton commented.

  “No sir,” she said. “And to round it off, torpedo tubes. Phased-array radar nearly as good as ours.”

  A notion stirred in the back of Admiral Hatton's brain. There was something about that weapons mix...but before he could complete the thought, his personal communicator chimed. Hauling the Navy-modified smartphone out of a pocket, he thumbed ACCEPT and replied. “Yes?”

  But no human responded. Instead the icon for a flash-priority incoming from CDRUSPACOM glowed on the screen. Hatton's eyebrows went up as he thumbed the icon. “STAND BY” glowed on the screen, before being replaced by the image of Hatton's commanding officer. And Admiral Campitelli did not look like a happy man as he returned Hatton's salute.

  “Shit flows downstream, Admiral Hatton,” he began. “Are you ready to engage the invasion fleet? Because I've got orders to push you.”

  “My ships and men are ready to fight, sir,” Hatton replied. “But I don't like the smell of things, Admiral. Either the Chinese Navy has developed a case of galloping incompetence, or they're not scared of us. I do not think they're incompetent, and would very much like to know why they're not scared."

  “Yeah,” Campitelli said. “Me, too. You're not the only one who can read a threat board. And sending their carriers to cover Alaska?”

  “Oh, I have that part figured, sir,” Hatton said. “Sitting on the great-circle route from Elmendorf takes our other wing of F-22s out of play. To get here they'd have to engage those carriers or fly wide around them. Either way, the extra fuel expenditure would draw their useful time on target down to about zip before they bingo.”

  “So, they want Raptors off the board, but they're not scared of the F-35s,” Campitelli said. “Do you have any idea why?”

  “Nossir," Hatton replied. “I'd like to gather more intelligence before I go in. Since you rang, I'm guessing I'm not going to have that luxury.”

  “Ask me for anything but time, Augie," said Campitelli. “Washington has gone nuts. The President's civilian advisers thought the Reds would fold quietly if we waved a big enough stick at them. Now they're panicking - even they can figure out that as of now, the Chinese government has gone too far to back down without massive loss of face.”

  “Lovely,” Hatton said. “And we can't temporize without losing face, either.”

  “Nope,” Campitelli agreed. “You know our treaty obligations. Our credibility as an ally is at stake here; if we don't step up, half a dozen Asian nations are going to figure they'll have no better choice than accepting Chinese hegemony on the best terms they can dicker for. And that's the best case. In the most likely ones, the Japs don't roll over and that leads to a Sino-Japanese war down the road.”

  “That's above my pay grade, technically, but I get it. You need me to go in, hard and fast and on the record.”

  “The Commander-in-Chief so orders,” Campitelli said with grave formality. “Full commitment, now. We're out of time. The OPORD text is attached. You can guess most of it. No nukes, all necessary force short of attacking the Chinese mainland, et cetera.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hatton said grimly, and saluted. “I'll have fast movers on top of that fleet in ninety minutes.”

  “Best of luck, Augie,” Campitelli said, returning the salute. “Out.”

  1240 hours:

  From an F-35's c
ruising height at 20,000 feet the ocean looks like wrinkled blue tinfoil. There's no sign of life anywhere but your squadron-mates, and since their planes are designed to be low-observable, even that can be very scarce. On long missions, the feeling of isolation induced by radio discipline can become so oppressive that action comes as a relief.

  “Blazer to Boss: Red Squadron reporting visual contact. Tin can, eleven o'clock far. Clear radar. We are proceeding.”

  “Scythe: confirming tin can eleven o'clock far. Clear radar.”

  “Moondog: second tin can, two-thirty far.”

  “Boss to wing, you are weapons free. I say again, weapons free. Try to save yourselves for the big girls.”

  “Red squadron, roger.”

  “Blue squadron, roger.”

  “Blazer: tin can, visual contact. And another. Boss, we can see four of them from here. No sign of transports yet. No bandits.”

  “Are they rolling out the welcome mat, or what?”

  “Transport, twelve o'clock! No lock yet.”

  “Hey. What are those flashes from the tin cans?”

  “Blazer: cool off. We're stealthed, and radar's clear. They've got nothing in the air that can hit us at angels twenty.”

  Blazer's plane disintegrated less than three seconds later.

  “HOLY SHIT!”

  “What the fuck was that?”

  Two Blue Squadron planes blew up almost simultaneously.

  “Got lock on a transport, missile away!” a Red Squadron pilot yelled triumphantly. Then his plane blew up too.

  Later, much later, it would be learned that the radar stealthing on the destroyed F-35s had not failed them. Airplanes are harder to hide in optical and IR frequencies than from radar; they were acquired by wide-field optical sensors on the escorts, then ranged and tracked by lidar from stealth drones orbiting above the Chinese fleet. The nature of the weapons that had killed them became apparent much sooner than that, however.

  There was near-panic in the Ford's CAC. Commander Weller chewed on a knuckle. What could be invisibly smashing their planes out of the sky? No radar traces...then she saw a console light flash in the corner of her eye, and understood.

  “Admiral Hatton! Sir!” She was so frantic she very nearly tugged at his sleeve. “Tell the wing to bug out! They're shooting them down with megawatt lasers!”

  “Shit…" the admiral muttered, thunderstruck. “Air Boss! Tell them to break off. Scatter! Sauve qui peut!”

  Four more planes were smoked on the way out.

  1410 hours:

  Admiral Hatton relaxed, infinitesimally, as the first bird of the ravaged wing caught its arrestor wire. Another wing had been scrambled to Combat Air Patrol and was orbiting the strike group's perimeter. No enemy was in sight.

  On the CAC's main screen, the PLA Navy's invasion fleet crept inexorably toward Taiwan. Admiral Hatton beckoned Commander Weller.

  “To the main conference room,” he said. “Whistle up Captain Fletcher on your comm. And ping Admiral Campitelli with a teleconference request, flash urgent.”

  “STAND BY” was glowing on the conference room's main display when they arrived. Admiral Campitelli appeared on screen just as the three officers were seating themselves.

  “Sir,” Admiral Hatton said, “It is my duty to report that eight planes from the Ford have been destroyed by the PLA Navy. The wing got one target lock on a transport and launched on it, but sat surveillance does not suggest the ship was damaged.”

  Campitelli's mouth worked as though he were struggling to find words. “What—the hell—happened out there?” he finally demanded.

  “We got sucker-punched, sir,” Hatton said. “They lured us in and…I'll let Commander Weller tell it, sir. She figured it out.”

  “I'm still guessing about some of it, Admiral, sir,” Weller said. “But here's what I think I know. The Chinese have had a breakthrough. They've figured out how to ship-mount optical lasers with an output in the 1.5 megawatt range. That's what you need to ablate the alloy skin on an airframe. Above Mach 1 it doesn't take much ablation before the drag on the wound will induce a catastrophic failure.”

  “If they knew they could punch out incoming air, why interdict our Raptors?” Camptelli asked. “Hmm. Could it be the difference in operational ceiling?”

  Welller nodded. “I suspect so, sir,” she said. “That, or the longer range of the F-22's targeting radar, or both. Their tactics suggest their laser targeting is good against planes, but not so solid against higher-speed missiles.”

  “Our pilots reported seeing bright flashes from the tin cans,” Hatton said. “We think that was small fractions of the beam energy scattering off low-level atmospheric moisture. They hid the upgrade in plain sight—point defence turrets our intel people had rated for two orders of magnitude less power!”

  “We can't do that. Dammit!” Campitelli said. “How can the Chinese do it?”

  “We're not sure, Admiral,” said Weller. “They may have figured out how to make their lasers that much more more efficient. Or they brute-forced the problem by ganging a bunch of them together, like our LaWS, and installing a nuclear reactor just to power the things. Or maybe both.”

  Captain Fletcher spoke up. “To me, Admiral, the biggest mystery is how they got the waste heat outboard. Thermal leakage from the weapons should have slagged the ships they were mounted in. Instead, when we reviewed sat imagery from the engagement…the sea around those ships was boiling hot.”

  “'And whether pigs have wings,'” Campitelli quoted. He looked very shaken. “That's it, then. We've got no way to stop them. As I read the clock, the transports will make landfall within the hour.”

  At that moment one of the room's auxiliary displays lit up. It showed a pale, strained face against the background of the CAC. “Sir!” the officer blurted, “you need to see this! I'm throwing the feed from the satellite overwatch onto another of your screens.”

  On another auxiliary display, a satellite view of the Chinese fleet appeared. It took a moment for Hatton's eyes to register that the sea under the transport group didn't look right. It was bulging. Terribly, silently, slowly, the ocean was heaving itself towards the sky, carrying the transports with it like so many swirling wood-chips.

  “Seabed nuclear detonation…” somebody whispered. “Cut Admiral Campitelli in on that feed now!” rasped Hatton. All four watched in horror as the crown of the bulge broke, upending ships and breaking them in pieces as casually as if they were matchsticks. Nor would there be any escape for the escort ring; they'd swamp in the outwash of radioactive water within minutes.

  The Taiwanese, it seemed, had their own sucker punch waiting.

  “Perfect conditions for it...” Weller was mumbling. “Shallow seabed; some of the blast energy reflected back up when the rock vaporized. Probably lower-yield than it looked like. Warhead on an AUV running low and slow. Tracked on the noise concentration from the transport engines. Yeah...not hard to duplicate, actually.”

  There was a long, long silence.

  Hatton stirred. “Taiwan is safe. But our world just ended.”

  “How do you mean that?” Captain Fletcher asked, though something weary in his voice suggested he was already beginning to understand.

  “All of this!” Hatton half-shouted, waving his arm at the ship around him. “It's done. Over. Now that we know the Red Chinese can build sky-sweeping lasers, we'll figure it out too. Then everybody will. Who'll build these huge expensive flattops when any navy can turn the air into a death zone?”

  “Expeditionary warfare.” said Weller, a two-word obituary.

  “Yeah, that's done too,” Hatton said. “Covert military sea-lift will survive, but overt invasion forces? No, Commander Weller, you've got that right. The Taiwanese just showed the way. They'll be blown out of the water, literally.”

  “Oh, crap, the bubbleheads just won…” Fletcher observed.

  “Yes, I'm very much afraid they have,” Admiral Campitelli put in from thousands of miles away. “Sub
marines are the only branch of the service the lasers can't touch.”

  “Branch of the service?” Hatton said. “Oh, no. Oh, no, Admiral, with all due respect, you are thinking too much like a sailor. Ask yourself what happens when megawatt skysweepers are deployed on land…

  Editor's Introduction to:

  UNDERSTANDING 4TH GENERATION WAR

  by William S. Lind

  Bill Lind has his friends and his enemies, his fans and his foes. That’s what comes with being someone who rocks the boat. An acolyte of the late Colonel John Boyd, Bill is the author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook, along with more articles, columns, and papers than I can fit here, writing for the Marine Corps Gazette, Defense and the National Interest, and The American Conservative. He was also part of Colorado Senator Gary Hart’s military reform movement.

  You can agree with Bill’s conceptual framework or disagree. Me, I disagree with some points and positions, while agreeing with others. I probably agree more than I disagree. That’s just me, though, and men of good conscience can, after all, differ. There’s one thing, though, that I don’t think you can disagree with: brothers, sisters, the bloody boat needs rocking!

  Bill’s contribution here is “Understanding 4th Generation War”, a brief tour of the technological, technical, tactical and attitudinal changes in warfare from the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia to the current day. It’s worth reading in its own right and should spark in you the desire to read his On War as well as the upcoming 4th Generation Warfare Handbook, co-written with Marine Lieutenant Colonel Gregory A. Thiele, both coming to you from Castalia House.

  As for 4GW, itself, can we beat it? Bill doesn’t really directly get into that with the present piece, but, yes, we can. The problem is that the only way to beat it that we already know how to do involves things that bring to mind Lidice, Magdeburg, Carthage and Corinth. 4GW presents problems to us that would not have troubled a Caesar, a Scipio, or a Genghis Khan for a moment. Now we can become the civilization of a Caesar or a Scipio, the blood is in our veins and the memes in our hearts and minds. However, for anyone who prefers to live in a civilization that is not maintained by building mountains of skulls—presuming that’s possible, which is an open question at this point—we really ought to be concerned with meeting and defeating 4GW through means other than sheer genocide. I’d suggest, too, that the people with the greatest interest in our finding a way to defeat 4GW short of genocide should be, in fact, the practitioners of 4GW, the very people whose entire gene pools we may have to extinguish if we don’t find that solution.