Fiction Week

By Major Ian T. Brown, USMC

25 March, 20XX
D-day, H-hour
01:00 am China Standard Time
Coastline of Eastern Theater Command

The soft nudge of the hull against sand was the only thing that made Sergeant Sammie Clegg certain that her squad had landed at the objective. She looked back at the shadows huddled in the small compartment behind her. They’d been there for six hours, not talking, barely moving. At any point during the ride in, she could have blinked their faces into the false illumination of her sub-derm, but that would have required a kick-start from the residual charge in her kinetic batteries. She wouldn’t waste those batteries when she’d have no opportunity to make the body movements that automatically replenished them. Instead, she periodically looked back in the darkness at the lumpy shapes swaddled in the unnatural slickness of their squid skin jumpsuits and hoped they didn’t share her nervousness.

When she looked back this time, however, she did blink, in the one-two-one sequence that switched her sub-derm from passive to active mode. Though the Futures Group guys always told her she was imagining it, she swore she felt a thrum in her skin as the sub-derm went active. Imaginary or not, suddenly she could see through the squid skin face-mask covering her eyes. Calming her mind, she sent out a single thought: squad, up and out.

Wordlessly, the twelve men and women behind her hit the release buttons next to their seats. She heard a few muffled clicks, then the walls and ceiling of the compartment unlocked and fell away, exposing the squad to the cold night air. Sammie and her squad hooked their legs over the sides and slid into the water. With six soldiers on each side and Sammie at the bow, her squad quickly pulled the drone boat out of the water and onto the beach. She reached inside and touched another button. More clicks followed, and the boat seemed to sag a little as, piece by piece, it efficiently disassembled itself. Soon, all that remained of their landing craft was a jumbled collection of panels lying in the sand.

Two of Sammie’s fire teams had already set up security in a rough semi-circle. As those teams kept their weapons pointed outward and scanned the tree line, the third team began methodically picking up panels and sliding them into the backpacks of the other two teams. When about a third of the panels were gone, Sammie heard—felt? Saw? God, it was weird what the squid skin and sub-derm did to your senses—her third fire team leader, Corporal Donnie Ramirez, flash third team complete, team two up.

Again, without a word spoken, Ramirez’s fire team replaced Corporal Grace Pasquale’s second fire team in the semi-circle, and Pasquale’s team fell back to grab more panels and slide them into more backpacks. Half a minute later, Corporal Mike Girard’s first fire team switched with Pasquale’s team and repeated the process with the last of the panels. Sammie reflected on the mechanics going on inside the backpacks each time one of her soldiers slid a panel in. Intellectually she understood it, but in practice it still amazed her. Each pack contained a two-way additive manufacturing or 3D printer, and each panel was made from a bizarre soup of synthetic compounds whose formal names she’d never learned. But the names were not as important as what the panels provided. They were her logistics train. The two-way 3D printers broke down the panels to their constituent compounds, and then reassembled them into whatever her squad needed: food, water, ammunition, first aid gear, even nano-drones. For their insertion, Sammie had instructed her squad to use the default setting, which gave each soldier a little of everything and stored the remaining goop in an unprocessed state to be reassembled based on future need.

Squad, bump to the tree line and set up security for comm and nav link-up, flashed Sammie. Her squad moved forward, and in seconds they were off the beach and into the forest beyond. Stopping, the fire teams formed a loose circle with her at the middle. Catching her breath, she deliberately opened and closed her eyes in a three-one-two sequence. This activated her sub-derm’s entangled particle communication and navigation linkages to her battalion command post thousands of miles away. Then, tensely, she waited.

Her tension came from the uncertainty that—despite the field exercises designed to build confidence in the sub-derm and other science experiments her squad wore—there hadn’t been time to test the equipment’s limits before the simmering tensions between China and Taiwan boiled over into the invasion of the latter by the former. China had, in recent years, emerged as the near-equal of the United States in its military capabilities, and in some respects had a clear edge. It was an open question whether this new gear, combined with an untried strategy, would close that gap.

But a few months ago, her battalion had been told that they would try. They, along with a Marine Corps infantry battalion, were the test-bed for some new ideas generated by the long-ignored Close Combat Lethality Task Force. Their commander then introduced a Colonel Ellis, head of some innovation department she’d never heard of. Ellis laid out what their battalion was about to do.

“We used to say that the American military could dominate any battlespace,” the colonel began. “Today we know that’s nonsense. China and half a dozen other competitors match us on some or all of those battlespaces. They have sought to become us, mirroring our weapons, our force structure, you name it. We could dump billions more into our defense budget and it’d buy us a few percentage points of superiority. Our competitors would then hack and steal it for a fraction of the cost and regain parity in a few months. We don’t have billions to dump, so we won’t. Instead, we have you.” The colonel scanned the audience to make sure he had their attention. He did; certainly he had Sammie’s.

“You and your brothers and sisters over in 1^st Battalion, 7^th Marines, will become our nation’s asymmetric advantage, and it won’t cost us billions. We’re past the time of buying our way to victory. Let China do that. We’ll do the last thing our adversaries expect: we’ll stop being us. We’re not buying crap that’s overpriced, which our adversaries can shut off with their keyboards for pennies on the dollar. Instead, we will train and equip you to hit our enemies where it hurts the most: in their minds. In their very souls. You’re not going after the enemy’s weapon systems, you’re going after the shooters. China has fracture lines—social, economic, environmental—like any other nation. We’ll rip those fractures open. And you’ll do one more thing our adversaries don’t expect: operate with minimal networking to higher. You will exercise mission command to a degree never before seen in American warfare. You won’t radiate on all spectrums across the battlefield. You’ll be silent, you’ll come at our enemies sideways, you’ll shred their fighting spirit without touching their bodies. I’ll show you how.”

It was a weird speech. Sammie wasn’t sure if she was supposed to cheer or clap. She did neither, and the rest of the audience shared her uncomfortable silence. So, she thought, we’ll kill their minds? And you’re not going to buy any gear to do this? Colonel Ellis, you’re insane.

She’d been wrong on the gear part. The day after the bizarre colonel had told them they’d be—what? Soul stealers?—the gear showed up. The backpack-sized 3D printers were definitely cool, and her jaw dropped when she watched Ellis shove a drab square panel into the backpack, which then spat out thirty rounds for their rail rifles, two tourniquets, a cloud of nano-drones, and a balanced meal’s worth of food cubes. The kinetic power system was neat, too. It was like wearing lightweight long underwear: you didn’t notice it, but it could power almost everything a soldier carried, including the voltage-hungry rail rifle and 3D printer.

What the kinetic batteries couldn’t power, the squid skin did, along with answering a question that had long bedeviled innovators: how can you communicate without emitting an electromagnetic beacon for any semi-capable adversary to find? When one think tank after another came up empty, someone finally did what humanity often does in seeking to solve unsolvable problems: shamelessly steal from nature.

The humble squid provided the answer. The skin cell structure of these creatures baffled and inspired scientists. Squid could camouflage themselves to match their environment, communicate in a rudimentary language by altering the colors of their skin, all without conscious thought. One military think tank sought an artificial version of this natural miracle, and finally cracked the code to provide Sammie’s battalion with a wearable uniform called—in line with the standard creativity the military exercised in naming things—“squid skin.” Worn like a one-piece flight suit, its artificial “cells” generated electricity from the sun, changed color (and infrared signature) to match its environment, and enabled non-electromagnetic communication.

The sub-derm controlled that communication. Communicating without talking was part of the tough problem that squid skin partially solved. Squid skin was the medium; the sub-dermal implant each soldier had buried in their brain generated the message. The sub-derm’s inner workings were a mystery to Sammie and her squad, but they got the basics: by developing the right mental focus, a soldier could form commands in their mind, which the sub-derm picked up and passed via entangled particle linkage to the squid skin. The squid skin instantly changed part of itself to form a color pattern that adjacent squid skins picked up, sent via their own entangled particle linkages to those soldiers’ brains, and then their sub-derms translated the pattern into a conscious thought. Voila: instant and silent communication. They called it “flashing,” as the messages suddenly appeared in their consciousness like a light switch turned on.

Ellis had told Sammie’s battalion that once researchers cracked the initial problem, they had a much easier time adapting the sub-derm/squid skin combination to do other things. They developed nano-drones that fed information to soldiers via color codes that the squid skins could pick up. They buried entangled particle linkages in the sub-derm allowing over-the-horizon information sharing between soldiers and higher headquarters, again by the simple act of focusing and thinking about the message. The researchers tied additional tangled particles to navigational base stations located far away from the battlefield, so soldiers could still find their way around even if an adversary destroyed local satellite coverage. And the whole sub-derm control routine was tied to a basic set of eye-blink sequences. You could shift among intra-squad communication, over-the-horizon updates, navigational fixes, and managing the power output of your squid skin and kinetic batteries, all in the literal blink of an eye.

The gear was good but as Colonel Ellis repeatedly emphasized, equipment wasn’t the end state. It was an enabler, to help position them where they could open the fight at the “moral level,” as Ellis called it. Once Sammie’s battalion mastered the equipment, they trained to their real purpose: sowing discord and mistrust inside an adversary’s organization. They were to turn enemy soldiers against each other; against their leaders; even against their loved ones. They would bypass the weapons and focus relentlessly on poisoning the minds and souls of the shooters.

Despite Col. Ellis’ ominous talk about Chinese capabilities, Sammie had considered her battalion’s preparations largely academic; and then China moved against Taiwan. That invasion, on its own, would have roused the United States to aid its long-time ally. But China meant to prevent American intervention, and so it combined its plunge into Taiwan with a debilitating cyber attack on America’s military. The military’s computers—from laptops to the Autonomic Logistics Information System that kept the F-35 flying—went down and didn’t come back up. China temporarily knocked out civilian power grids and communications networks to make a point, and when they came back online, every screen displayed a simple message: AMERICA—STAY HOME.

And America did, at least officially. Aside from her battalion’s special training, Sammie knew that the most contentious part of the plan to strike back at China was the official narrative that America couldn’t. Colonel Ellis claimed this wasn’t a hard sell; there was no denying that everything from photocopiers to F-35s had gone down. But, he insisted, America must play dead to make the Chinese government think its response would take weeks, if not months. The Defense Secretary agreed with Ellis. The Secretary sold the plan to the president, who ordered the other secretaries to harmonize their public pronouncements with the military’s message. The party line was that a state of war now existed between America and China; but Chinese treachery meant that America would not be coming for some time. Meanwhile, in secret, America—represented by Sammie’s battalion and 1/7—came.  

Squatting amidst the trees, two thoughts suddenly flashed themselves into Sammie’s mind: comm established. Nav established. She relaxed a little, then flashed back: secure at objective Broncos. Moving to Colts. She waited the requisite ten seconds for any updates; when none came, she blinked one-one-two and then closed her eyes to verify that their position, validated via entangled particle from the ground station thousands of miles away, matched where they were supposed to be. The sub-derm did its work, stimulating her optic nerves to create a virtual map with their position highlighted on the insides of her eyelids. She steadied herself against the vertigo that always washed over her when the sub-derm hijacked her visual sense. Her squad was in place, with objective Colts highlighted a few miles away. She opened her eyes, flashed squad, move to Colts, and they went.

25 March
D-day, H+4
04:00 am China Standard Time
3 miles from the coast of Eastern Theater Command

            “Colts” was a logistics hub near the coast. It wasn’t large, nor did it house particularly critical supplies. But it did have what Sammie’s squad needed: PLA soldiers, and more importantly, their personal electronic devices or PEDs. Time for round one, she thought. She flashed, Girard, Pasquale, set security. Ramirez, PED seekers on Colts. Give me control when embedded.

            Her squad was in defilade behind a long, low hill near the base. First and second fire teams spread out on either side to control the avenues of approach. Near her, Ramirez took a knee and began blinking an eyeball sequence. His backpack hummed faintly as the 3D printer got to work. Two minutes later, a slot on top of his backpack opened, and a small, dark cloud wafted out like a puff of smoke. Ramirez’s face took on a look of intense concentration, and Sammie knew he was flashing the nano-drone swarm its target and desired flight pattern. The dark cloud rose, headed toward the PLA supply base, and then dispersed as each drone found a target and let air currents move it closer. This flavor of drone had passive sensors that locked on to the unique electromagnetic signature of PEDs and dropped entangled particles into their processors, which linked back to the squad for their hacking commands. Ramirez flashed her periodic updates on the percentage of drones that had landed on their targets until it reached one hundred. When that happened, he flashed, PED control to Clegg; the command repeated itself in a neutral tone inside her brain to tell her she now owned the drones.

            PEDs, deepfake routine. Adults only. Spread up one command level and two adjacent units. Her instructions delivered, Sammie flashed her squad to re-assemble for movement to their next objective. As they collapsed into a loose patrol column, she peeked over the low hill at the PLA base. Outwardly, nothing had changed. Soon, however, those PLA soldiers would have their lives turned upside down. She felt a twinge of regret that she couldn’t stick around to see it. Blinking her eyes, she activated the communication link to higher, and flashed, Colts complete. Moving to Eagles.

25 March
D-day, H+15
04:17 pm China Standard Time
10 miles from the coast of Eastern Theater Command

            Their route paralleled the highway leading to objective Colts, so Sammie had Girard throw up a surveillance swarm to watch the road for movement. Girard went through the same launch sequence Ramirez had a few hours ago, with one small difference. Part of the drone swarm would establish itself over the highway, soaking up ambient sounds to paint a sonar picture of the area. The rest of the swarm acted as repeaters, mirroring the color codes of the first swarm so that squid skins in Sammie’s squad could pick them up and translate the codes into a live feed through the squad-members’ sub-derms. Sammie had blinked her sub-derm setting to display the feed inside an eyelid when she closed it for longer than two seconds.

Thirty minutes ago, Girard had reported a military convoy coming south along the highway. It was a large convoy, which meant lots of PEDs, which meant lots of targets of opportunity. She’d flashed her squad to establish a hasty ambush site west of the road, then told her best marksman, Specialist Brady, to put a rail rifle round through a wheel of the lead vehicle at her command. When the lead vehicle drew in range, Sammie flashed Brady, and Brady fired. He made a beautiful shot, rupturing the tire without damaging the wheel. It looked like a normal blowout, leaving no evidence for anyone in the convoy to think otherwise.

            The PLA soldiers dismounted and began setting up security. Sammie could tell from their uniforms and equipment that these weren’t top-tier PLA – probably more used to suppressing domestic dissent than combat duty. But China was using everyone they had. Still, they set security in a respectable time as their recovery vehicle came forward to effect repairs. Yet Sammie wasn’t worried about their convoy security. She wasn’t going down there. Her drones were, however, and she flashed Pasquale to send up a cloud of PED seekers. Once the drones had embedded their particle payloads, she flashed a different order: PEDs, bank routine. Spread three command levels up. Fifteen percent increase with each level. Blinking over to her to communication link, she flashed the brevity code for a PED target of opportunity attack—Maker’s Mark—and went through a separate set of blinks to provide a navigational fix of the attack’s location to higher. Finally, Sammie signaled her squad to resume their route, leaving the PLA soldiers to mend their vehicle in unsuspecting peace.

26 March
D+1, H+23
00:04 am China Standard Time
20 miles from the coast of Eastern Theater Command

            Her squad was exhausted but in place. An hour after encountering the convoy, battalion headquarters flashed her an order to push to objective Eagles before 1:00 am local time. A storm cell had been building in the area all day, and would provide the perfect cover for what Sammie needed to do at Eagles anyway.

            The squid skin face-mask over her eyes provided a grayish near-infrared picture of the world around her from the ambient light hitting the squid skin’s artificial cells. She could see Pasquale and one other member of Pasquale’s fire team; the rest of her squad was dispersed beyond her line of sight along the forest’s tree line. Ramirez’s team had it the hardest, as the order to push to Eagles meant Ramirez’s crew had sprinted eleven miles to reach the reservoir control station three miles from here. The two fire teams that stayed with her had also needed to fight their way through thick overgrowth to find the ranger station—and its cellular link—which was a mile off from where pre-mission intelligence said it should be. Still, they’d done it. Black clouds boiled overhead, and a flash of lightning temporarily dimmed the infrared picture. Perfect timing, she thought with satisfaction.

            Sammie had already used a PED seeker to embed a delayed hostile media routine in the tablet she’d found at the ranger station. Now, she flashed the rest of the orders: teams one and two, incendiary swarms, all stores. Incendiary rail rounds, hold ten for self-defense only. Fire at will. Team three, waterworks routine. Then she blinked to tell her backpack to use whatever it had left inside to crank out incendiary drones. The pack hummed for ten minutes before flashing that it was ready. She responded, launch incendiaries, heading 130, 2 miles, 1 meter dispersion. The swarm puffed out of her pack and headed east. She’d left the launch distances and dispersal plans to each squad member’s discretion. That way, no one examining the pattern of fires that was about to break out would think they were anything but accidents of nature. Battalion’s order to get her squad here before the storm meant they now had the ideal cover story: Chinese responders would assume the fires came from lightning strikes and investigate the cause no further.

            At two miles, Sammie knew she wouldn’t see her drones’ impact and subsequent conflagration, so she didn’t bother looking. She set about following the second part of her own order. Adjusting a setting on her rail rifle, she put it to her shoulder and fired. The only sound she heard was the faint thrumming of the electromagnetic rails inside her weapon as they energized and spat the rifle’s rounds into the forest. She swept the weapon back and forth, each bullet blossoming into incandescent flame as it hit a tree or shrub or dead growth on the forest floor. Once she was down to ten rounds, she lifted her finger off the trigger and took a moment to admire the myriad small fires burning in front of her. As she did so, she felt the first strong breath of wind from the storm overhead. Good, she thought. The winds would fan her fires, push them into each other, then drive them roaring through the old, dry forest. The same would happen with the hundreds of other fires her squad had set. With some regret, Sammie flashed her teams to fall back to rally point Patriots. There, they’d hole up until extraction, letting China reap the harvest her squad had sown. Just like that, only a day after landing, their war was over. Meanwhile, once they hunkered down, she’d pop some aspirin. Her head was throbbing.

She turned to look at Pasquale. Then everything went black.

15 April

3:45 pm Eastern Standard Time

Walter Reed Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland

            Colonel Ellis visited her the day after she woke up. He felt she deserved to hear, from him, what her squad had accomplished along with the rest of the special battalions. The war had lasted through D+12. By then the PLA occupation force in Taiwan, and Chinese society itself, was in such turmoil it had lost the will to resist. The special battalions had done what Ellis said they would: ripped the heart and soul out of their adversary.

The deepfake attack had crippled supply movements in Sammie’s sector, with the added bonus of jumping to a mobile anti-ship ballistic missile unit nearby. Once her squad’s PED seekers embedded their entangled particles in the PLA’s devices, and Sammie uploaded the deepfake algorithm, the quantum hacking AI inside had gotten to work. First, the AI burrowed through all the photographs, social media applications, and emails on each device to build a picture of the individual’s network of family and friends. Based on that data set, the AI figured out which were the soldier’s civilian friends, fellow servicemembers, children, and lovers. The AI placed children and minors off-limits. The rest were fair game.

Reading calendars to calculate when significant others would have been out of town, the AI generated fake pictures with fake people in compromising positions at fake events and spread them around social media under fake accounts. It pulled photos of wives and best friends, used its video deepfake algorithm to mesh them over adult film stars, and sent them across hacked text threads where husbands were sure to stumble on them. The AI built troll accounts to share, forward, and otherwise amplify every message exchange and video. Forty-eight hours after Sammie embedded the routine, Ellis told her, PLA provost marshals were dispatched to quell a rash of violence across the supply unit.

“We tracked five murders, three dozen aggravated assaults, and countless acts of vandalism that those logisticians inflicted on each other before the provost marshals got things under control,” Ellis said. “It took the unit commander only a few hours to suspect that bogus messages and pictures were floating around. But once your brain sees your wife and best friend in flagrante delicto, you can’t unsee it, even if intellectually you know it’s fake. At the ballistic missile unit, the AI didn’t even fake anything. It came across an actual affair between the executive officer and the commanding officer’s husband. All it did was put some damning pictures in front of the CO, and her rage did the rest. She murdered her XO and husband before killing herself. Boom, chain of command wiped out, and we paralyzed a key piece of China’s local A2/AD system.”

Ellis said the bank AI routine proved equally effective. The convoy Sammie had ambushed were grunts heading to embark for Taipei and replace another battalion. Second-tier troops, trained to suppress domestic dissent, not really well suited for occupation duty. The grunts arrived in Taipei to find their personal bank accounts empty. The accounts of enlisted soldiers, anyway. Their officers, on the other hand, were unexpectedly richer. The battalion commander reported the anomaly to regiment, where the colonel and other senior staff members were inexplicably richer too. Sammie knew from their pre-mission briefings that the PLA had experienced a rash of scandals in the last year, with high-ranking leaders embezzling money and using it to pay for wild booze-and-sex parties. The AI routine waited until PLA officers started sending internal emails raising questions about the mysterious account transfers. Then the AI leaked those emails to the public, generated accusations on social media accounts, and ghostwrote articles on legitimate news sites alleging that the generals were up to their old tricks.

“Half the grunts flat-out mutinied,” stated Ellis. “They were sent right back to China under guard and locked in the brig. The local PLA commander made the mistake of sending the other half, enraged as they were, on a presence patrol downtown. Some kids threw bottles at them. The patrol responded by shooting every person they saw on the street and burning down half the buildings on the block for good measure. The AI routine self-activated some of the PLA soldiers’ phones, got good video, then blasted it out across every Taiwanese feed it could find. The other half of that PLA battalion then got sent home under guard too, and forty-eight hours after you implanted the routine, PLA soldiers couldn’t patrol the capital in anything less than battalion strength. That’s one hell of a manpower commitment, and it still couldn’t quell all local resistance.”

Ellis talked about the fire. She’d understood why her squad had ignited it: to tie up first responders and military resources that China might otherwise direct to Taiwan. Her mission planners had picked that specific forest because it was not well-maintained, having lots of old growth to provide kindling. Climate change made that summer historically dry. The fire also reinforced a narrative. Those living near the forest had long complained that the Party did not sufficiently manage the forest to reduce the fire risk. This included simmering resentment at the local Party apparatus’ neglect in keeping the nearby reservoir full to fight a fire if one ever broke out. Sammie’s fire touched on the first fear. Ramirez’s sabotage of the reservoir—dumping its contents down the spillway in the opposite direction of the fire—touched on the second, and made the Party appear not only neglectful but incompetent.

“But forest conditions were even worse than we thought. It burned uncontrolled for three days. The helicopters the PLA normally used for firefighting were national guard assets sent to Taiwan as part of the occupation. By the time the Party sent them back, the fire wiped five towns off the map and displaced 100,000 people. Emergency supplies came in a trickle, because the military trucks intended for disaster relief were also in Taiwan. The locals rioted and overwhelmed law enforcement. Our AI routines picked up the details and ghostwrote stories about the incompetent government response, how PLA generals were stealing money from their own soldiers while their homeland burned, and the like. When you were extracted, that entire province was in open revolt and regular units were already being pulled from Taiwan to suppress it.” Ellis paused and gripped her arm. “Your actions, combined with those of the rest of your battalion and 1/7, won us the war,” he said earnestly. “Collectively, you unhinged China’s military and government. And we lost so few, but …” He trailed off.

“But the sub-derms,” she whispered.

“I am truly sorry. The sub-derms … we just didn’t have the long-term data, and we knew a war was coming …” Ellis sighed and avoided her gaze. “The doctors here told me Pasquale may never wake up. They can probably restore the sight in Ramirez’ left eye but the right … and you’ll have the seizures—”

“Forever,” she replied. Ellis nodded slowly and looked back at her. He opened his mouth and closed it again. He looked like he wanted to say more, but the seconds of silence stretched to a minute and no other words came. After a moment he simply nodded to her, dropped his eyes to the floor, and left the room.

Her head throbbed.

Major Ian T. Brown is a Marine Corps CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter pilot. He is currently the operations officer at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at Marine Corps University in Quantico, VA. The views expressed here are presented in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect those of the Marine Corps, Defense Department, or U.S. Government.

Featured Image: “Sketch Soldier” by Mark Kolobaev via Artstation

Fiction Week

By Evan D’Alessandro

The sea was bright in the Strait of Hormuz as the tanker cut a broad swath though the deep blue water. Not a cotton ball of a cloud dotted the sky, not that it would have mattered to the radars that had been bolted onto the tanker’s superstructure a month prior in Djibouti. An anthill of men and women had descended onto the tanker for two days, installing equipment and tuning it for its lethal purpose.

Onboard a pair of MRZR vehicles, ladened down with the many dishes of the LMADIS anti-drone jamming system and the newly attached lasers were lashed to the foredeck, while two JLTV-AA vehicles with the guns and missiles of their anti-air turrets sat close by. Fat cables with thick rubber coatings to prevent seawater corrosion snaked back aft to connect with the newly bolted on radars. An intermodal-shipping container, painted with its dull green anti-corrosion paint waited silently with its SeaRAM missiles, sitting atop in poised patience. Most importantly were four containerized drone swarms perched at the edges of the ship in their hives, silently daring any Iranian to be foolish enough to attempt an attack.

With the war with China driving markets onto a knife’s edge, it was only by stringent measures that the world economy had not plunged to its death like Icarus.  Integral to preventing the long fall was keeping the oil flowing. Combat and convoying was consuming every warship available, so now the Marine SHEILD teams were needed to pick up the slack. The SHEILD (Ship Held, Embarked, Integrated Logistics Defense) team was a concept developed mere months before the war had started, after a series of public wargames had embarrassed the Navy by showing that America couldn’t protect its critical commercial shipping using ships alone. The idea had been to take a platoon of Marines, and equip them to protect a large ship from missile and drone attacks. Now this idea would be tested for real.

The SHEILD team had embarked on the rusting tanker in the pre-dawn glow before the tanker slipped its line. The Marines were still tying down their vehicles and installing the chaff dispensers when the ship had begun vibrating as the waves hit its bow, the rising sun cutting long shadows across the deck. The Lieutenant had not been happy that they had not managed to secure a helicopter with its APKWS anti-swarm system, designed explicitly for killing Iranian fast attack boats.  Resources were stretched thin, and the SHEILD concept could theoretically work without it. It would have to work without it.

As they headed for deeper water, their two anti-sub, anti-mine Sea Hunter unmanned surface vehicles ran back and forth in front of the tanker, not unlike small children during a warm days recess. At this range one could make out the large, 8-rotored drones held on each of the Sea Hunters back decks, ready to deploy a radar dummy that looked like the tanker should they come under missile attack. The tanker itself held four more of the large octocopters, plus several jamming pods. Theoretically a JLTV-AA could provide point defense with its gun but the software upgrade allowing for it had been bogged down in development hell for months.

One hundred miles up in low earth orbit, the tiny, boxy, CubeSat-like surveillance satellites silently watched as the Iranians slipped their berths all along the coast, leaving with pale white wakes. They continued to impartially monitor the area, their number allowing almost near real-time satellite imagery to the tanker below.

The Lieutenant had seen the imagery and had a sense of the potential battlefield. He was thinking about it as he looked at the ship through his VR goggles, sizing up the old tanker. With bleary eyes, he pulled the goggles off and took another sip of coffee. It had been four hours since he had been awoken and he was on his third cup of coffee. He scraped the powdered creamer off the side of the chipped cup.  The tanker’s company emblem that decorated the cup was faded from years of use. “Forget that oil out there,” he thought to himself as gazed into his coffee cup and the caffeine started to hit him, “coffee is the real black gold.” After a moment more of quiet contemplation, he turned and with a cool voice ordered the ship to general quarters.

General quarters was maintained as the day wore on, the sea breeze, and golden sun, long forgotten in the tanker’s bridge. When the Sea Hunters had found a contact and ran it off, it only made the Lieutenant more nervous. Satellite imagery was confirming different movements in the area. There were several other tankers nearby, some making a run for ports before the Iranians decided to attack, some with SHEILD teams on them waiting for the inevitable. Iranian speedboats had darted back to their rocky alcoves and within an hour of leaving, reared their heads in another political threat to shake up Washington in a political power game, the Lieutenant thought. He had been ready to stand down the team, but then the Iranians had slipped berth again probably having finished refueling after their stunt earlier in the morning, and the satellites said there were more than he wanted coming toward him.

The missile alarm suddenly blared, though it was no surprise as the satellites had seen the shore-based anti-ship missile (ASM) launchers being set up days before. The tanker and the SHEILD team on board had been moving with four of their drone decoys up, and two recharging at a time. Within seconds the airwaves were filled with a thick snowfall of noise as the Lieutenant ordered the jamming pods turned on. With his next breath he ordered the other two drone decoys aloft, and they began to detach from their recharging stations and lumber skyward, adding to the cacophony.

The Lieutenant watched with an internal pride as his Marines prepared for combat. One corporal was getting the newest satellite data, with the projected positions of the Iranian boats: straight on a collision course toward him and his crew. The Lieutenant began to coolly gather his information and prepared to send it up the chain of command. As he looked out on the ocean, he toggled his VR goggles to “hostile” making the Iranian light orange outlines turn a blood red. They were now at war in this part of the Strait, even if the politicians hadn’t officially declared it.  The software marked the change to ‘Hostile’ and shunted the message, popping up on the tablet of the communications sergeant. The Lieutenant preempted the question the sergeant was about to ask, and confirmed the change in hostilities that everyone onboard already knew. The sergeant signed her name, pressed confirm and in a millisecond the message was encrypted, bounced up to a satellite, then to another one, and then back down into Washington where it was decrypted. The president, seeing the changes on the Situation Map, sucked in air though clenched teeth, as more and more reports came in from the tankers in the Strait. Today was not going to be a good day.

The Iranian anti-ship missiles themselves cared little for what was going on in Washington and closed on the tanker with vicious ferocity, having left their ground-based launchers for the freedom of the sky, roaring over the head of the boats far below with a shriek. They came over the horizon only to be confronted with four contacts, unable to tell the octocopter drone decoys apart from the real target. The missiles, unsure of which to target, deliberated for a moment and split off in their different directions. The ECM managed to clear out some more of the missiles, the computer noting better than expected results and sending off the data to be analyzed by AI later. The bright, burning plume of chaff claimed another, leaving two missiles for the containerized SeaRAM. The SeaRAM waited patiently for the missiles to come into range, before letting its own missiles slip loose like over-eager dogs of war. The first of the SeaRAM missiles claimed one Iranian missile with a magnificent blast and a loud fiery bloom. The second SeaRAM claimed its victim too close for comfort, with chunks of red hot missile debris impacting the water meters from the tanker in white, fountain-like plumes of mist.

With the most immediate threats over, the Lieutenant watched as the Iranian fast attack boats came in next. Almost soundlessly the drone containers on the tanker deck began spewing drones like an agitated wasps’ nest.  A cold, angry, buzz permeated the air as quadcopters rose into the air, swirling into a fierce cloud. Far away, the Iranian boats were launching their own drones, and both swarms rose upward and began to slip over the waves into a clash of swarms.

The drones skimmed over the wave tops, flitting from crest to crest. The Lieutenant selected the ‘Defense’ command on his goggles, drawing a line on the VR map that his drones would hold to prevent the Iranian drones from getting to his tanker. He then zoomed in on his own onrushing swarm to inspect it; in front were the Charlies fitted with a downward and upward facing fragmentation mine. The mines themselves ended up doing very little in combat, as the enemy’s drones steered well clear, wary of the large area of effect that could bring down several drones at once. But that was the point.  The Charlies would funnel enemy drones into the waiting arms of the Alphas. In addition to the small plastic explosive charge every drone carried for a final suicidal rush,  Alphas were fitted with a small gun, to take on other drones. The gun was fixed to a small servo below the bottom of the craft, but for the most part the drone had to turn its whole body to lay its gun onto the target. It was the Alphas who would be there to shred the drones dodging the Charlies. The least important in the air-to-air swarm warfare were the Bravos, whose  bodies contained extra plastic explosive designed to be used against larger targets. But in a pinch a Bravo would bring another drone to a fiery death by sacrificing itself. The Bravos sat patiently in their containers on the tanker, looking out onto the cloudless sky from within their metal confinement, as the rest of their compatriots were already flung into the battle.

High above, two F-15E Strike Eagles had made the trip at full afterburner, departing from their faux CAP zone to cover the convoy. Beneath their wings, long, white stubby pods glinted in the sun, as out of them fell drone after drone in a steely rain. Their arms folded in to maximize their downward velocity they gained speed with a certainty only gravity permits. An experienced observer would note that the drones were a mix of stock Charlies and Air Force Bravos with a shorter range and more explosives, but at the speed they were falling they soon became nothing more than a blur. The two F-15s turned, heading back to base; their payload accelerating downward toward the Iranians below.

The American drone swarm met the Iranian drone swarm head on, tiny quadcopter blades breaking into glittering shards of metal as the brutal melee began. With the algorithms controlling each swarm, every move was fully thought out, having been tested time after time, in billions of simulations using the most expensive AI the country could afford. Money might not be able to buy love, but it could buy CPU cycles. To the humans watching the clash there was nothing magnificent about it. If one was in line of sight, the melee resembled a blender of metal, all the AI-controlled intricacies lost to the human eye. But the American swarm from the tanker was serving its purpose, as the F-15s’ swarm fell increasingly downward.

While the drone melee continued far in front of the Iranian fast boats, 100 meters above the boats the air-dropped drones deployed their stubby wings and rotors as they hit the Iranian’s anti-drone jamming. Almost all of drones stopped and whirled, switching on their cameras, as below on the Iranian boats alarms stared to go off. The few drones that had been overwhelmed by the Iranian’s EW continued downward, miniature limbs undeployed, tiny geysers of water marking their deaths in the warm blue sea. Their remaining companions spent fractions of a second processing. Their tiny microchips whizzed as their detection software looked at the boats below, speeding towards the tanker, waiting with their missiles until they were sure they would kill it.

From their overlook of the boats, the air-dropped drones flashed their lights at one another in a final unjammable communication to each other and broke off in ones, twos, threes, and fours, and dove on the boats. The Charlies hit seconds before the Bravos, using their mines to clear the smaller boats of personnel, leaving them dead in the water. The Bravos came in a second behind. While the explosive each Bravo contained was generally not enough to destroy the boats entirely, it was enough to disable weaponry and critical systems, or, in some cases to set off munitions in a chain reaction. Knowing where to strike was important, as each boat’s digital blueprints had been easily stolen by a hacker, allowing hundreds of thousands of computer simulations to predetermine the best way to destroy, cripple, and maim Iran’s fleet of small craft. Unceremoniously the drones dove like a hungry wolf pack on unguarded sheep.

The Lieutenant watched from the bridge through his VR headset, filtering out the swarm-on-swarm melee in time to watch as the Air-Force Bravos engulfed the Iranian boats and encased them in sparks of flame. In the panic, what Iranian boats hadn’t been disabled, destroyed, or swept of sailors,  fired what few missiles were still usable, and then turned tail and went for home. None were stupid enough to want to try to close to gun range with the rotor-whirling melee in front of them. The missiles were smaller than the shore based ones that had passed the dronefight earlier and had signaled the start of the attack; they plunged toward the tanker. The ECM, chaff, and drone decoys managed to pull most of them off, leaving two to the SeaRAMs. Once again its missiles leapt forth to intercept their Iranian counterparts. The Lieutenant watched for a brief moment as the first pair collided and then a heart-stopping moment later as the second one missed.  Unburdened by concerns of mortality the SeaRAM threw out another missile, hoping to intercept the incoming ASM before it plowed into the tanker, which would set it alight like an oversized Zippo. Inside the Lieutenant’s goggles, the missiles track converged towards the tanker and he screamed out the order to brace. The two missiles collided with a roar that caused those onboard the tanker to duck. Shards of metal cartwheeled across the deck, one smashing into the carriage of a JLTV, ripping a tire to ribbons, and immobilizing it, while a second piece went careening into a bridge window sending glass flying across the deck and into an unlucky Private who let out a high-pitched scream. The tanker now bore scars where the paint and rust had been striped off by shrapnel, revealing long silver marks, but no fireball came to immolate those onboard. The Lieutenant screamed for the corpsman as his mind turned back to the battle unfolding before him.

The Iranian drones sensed they were outmatched at this point. With their number dwindling, the algorithm decided to make a break for the tanker. The Iranian drones blinked at one another furiously, and switched to a more aggressive stance designed to allow some of their kin to slip through towards the tanker. The losses would be heavy, but they had a chance to strike the ship. A warning popped up in the Lieutenant’s goggles, as some of the Iranian swarm began to break through. They were several hundred meters out from the tanker when they began dropping like oversized metallic flies as the LMADIS’s jamming overwhelmed them. The Lieutenant watched as the young Marine in front of him began slewing the LMADIS’s laser back and forth with his controller. Trained by years of video games, the young man began to place shot after shot into the oncoming drones, cutting them down to size. The Lieutenant entered the action too, selecting his containers and issuing the command.

Like a hive of bees that has just realized a bear is coming to rip apart their home, the Lieutenant ordered the Bravos, still inside the containers, to intercept the incoming swarm. Unlike their Air Force equivalents that had shattered the Iranian fast boats minutes ago, the Marine versions had less explosives to weigh them down, making them more nimble and maneuverable, and most importantly, better able to intercept incoming drones. At four drones a second, the containers began flinging them aloft like clay pigeons. In the salty air they dipped, stabilized, and turned on a suicide run toward the oncoming swarm.

At close range an explosion is a truly terrifying thing, doubly so when it is the product of two drones closing in on one another at high speed, resulting in a bright fireball that sends razor blades of metal flying haphazardly. From where the Lieutenant watched though his VR headset the last ditch defense of the tanker by his Bravos looked like so many children’s sparklers fizzling out on the Fourth of July across the wavetops. Judging by the reported number of drone casualties, his Bravos had overwhelmed the enemy. The last of his Bravos kicked aloft by the launcher were treated to a beautifully cloudless sky. Their tiny brains processed the incoming information: the area around the tanker was cleared of hostiles, and they began to skip across the water toward the retreating Iranians. The Bravos would chase the retreating Iranian boats to the limit of their range before returning with the rest of the swarm to the tanker and to their hives, to recharge and prepare for the next attack.

The Lieutenant joined in the small cheer that filled the bridge, before it dissipated into the warm sea air.  As the drones began to come in from the brutal melee, and drip back into their hives, far off on the horizon he could see dark, angry smoke, clawing its way toward the sky violently. He and his team had been fortunate. Fate had not been so kind to others like him.

The president looked up from the video sent from the Lieutenant’s VR goggles to the report on the old oak desk in front of him, and he once again sucked air in through clenched teeth. 12 tankers attacked, two lost, three damaged. Some of the tension was lost as he looked at the Iranian’s losses. They had been steep, if not in men, then in material. A large chunk of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Navy would need to be repaired, though the three-letter agencies were still collecting intelligence on that. The Iranians had underestimated the SHEILD teams, but they had not proved to be the aegis he had wished, but nothing ever did. He turned toward the rest of the group in the room, “All right ladies and gentlemen, time to get on the news and keep the oil prices steady.” Men and women walked out with purpose, some to waiting cars to the big news studios, others to dark back rooms where humans and bots would start to influence public perception on social media. As the room emptied out, the president sighed and stared at the picture in the Lieutenant’s file. The uniform sharply defined intelligent eyes and roughcast face. It had been a long time since he had been in the same place. He rubbed his arm where the piece of shrapnel had cut through years ago, severing muscle and smashing bone. It had always hurt on cold days.

Far across the warm blue of the Persian Gulf, the Lieutenant looked at the satellite imagery of the Iranians redeploying ASMs and aircraft to attack once again. “What are Washington and the president going to do about this mess?” he said to the vast expanse of ocean in front of him. He shuddered and let his musings be taken by the breeze. He absentmindedly looked down at his left hand, where a tiny dot of red had grown unnoticed. With a slight shake in his hand from the adrenaline he reached down and plucked out a metal sliver and held it up against the blue sky, a drop of red falling from it and splattering on the floor below. It would not be the last drop of blood shed that day.

Evan D’Alessandro is a student at Luther College studying Environmental Science, Data Science, and International Studies. He enjoys military history, science fiction, and wargaming. He hopes to study and develop wargames for the military and policymakers in the future. He can be contacted at evan.dalessandro@gmail.com.

Featured Image: “Battle Quad” by David Knapp via Artstation

Fiction Week

By Griffin Cannon

Moderator: Admiral Gaumon, I can’t thank you enough for speaking with us on this anniversary of the second Battle of the Philippine Sea. It goes without saying this is an emotional day for all Americans and I can only imagine how difficult today is for you.

RADM Gaumon (ret.): Thank you, Steve. I know all Americans have heard some version of this story or another but there is a lot to tell. Many brave men and women fought and died on this day and I just hope their stories are not soon forgotten. This is about remembering them, the sacrifices they made, and, to be quite honest, what we did to fail them. I can’t say I’m glad to be telling that story, but for whatever reason I’m still around to tell it and I think that’s important to do.

Moderator: And sir, we thank you for that. Today I’d like to talk about why the war started. You have a fascinating perspective on the events that led up to the war that I think our listeners would appreciate hearing. Most Americans know the names: Stennis and Roosevelt but I must say I’m consistently surprised with how few know the name Ma Su-Wei, let alone know anything about her.

RADM Gaumon: It’s interesting you say that because even over at Indo-Pacific Command very few of us were tracking the Taiwanese elections that year. We of course took note when the PLAN started playing with their naval parade schedule but frankly PLA posturing before Taiwanese elections was nothing new.

Moderator: What about the disinformation campaign? What about the deepfakes going around?

RADM Gaumon: I don’t want to say we had no idea what was going on. Without getting into specifics, those of us high up on the operational side, as well of course as those in Washington, knew pretty early on that the Ministry of State Security was very interested in the election but again, nothing new there. I mean it provided more fodder for people in and out of government to talk about how “‘the cyber’ was going to change democracy as we knew it” but it looked manageable. Information operations and shows of force were nothing out of the ordinary. They were posturing, and we reminded them we were in the neighborhood.

Moderator: You mean the Roosevelt taking up station in the Philippine Sea?

RADM Gaumon: More or less. We put more bombers out at Anderson, put out Rapid Raptor elements at Kadena and Misawa, just generally trying to remind the PLA that we weren’t messing around.

Moderator: And did that work?

RADM Gaumon: I mean, you have to understand that this was kind of how the game was played before. If they start feeling too comfortable they get ideas, so it was our job to remind them that nothing would be easy, nothing would be quick. It’s not that we thought they’d take the first shot they had, just that if they kept getting easy shots, they might take one eventually. To your question, I don’t think the Chinese really wanted to do anything, not if they didn’t have to. It wasn’t until that diver got himself captured scouting Quemoy that things really started to heat up.

Moderator: Li Zhanyong, you mean.

RADM Gaumon: Yeah, Li fucking Zhanyong.

Moderator: That’s what got your attention?

RADM Gaumon: The cycle that kicked off caught our attention, yes. At one point after things got really heated but before the shooting started I got a reservist flown out to me on the T.R. to track things. I had China guys, but there’s a difference between an O-4 you send through language school and a War College professor who’s been looking at these things for two decades. Turns out the “confession” video they got out of him only happened because some intel officer posted to Quemoy had a sister who’d married a guy working the defense portfolio for Ma’s campaign staff. He figured he helps the campaign and boom he’s got a brother-in-law high up in the Ministry of National Defense. Crazy, right?

Moderator: And that led to the independence speech?

RADM Gaumon: Yeah. It took about a week of back and forth after Ma’s campaign leaked the video, but the electorate was already pretty pissed at the heavy-handed information operations the Ministry of State Security and Strategic Support Force were running. Then you see a video of a prisoner talking as if your entire country is one big petulant child. The guy is sitting in a prison cell in Taipei for christ’s sake and is here he is talking like he owns the place! It’s not like a lot of the island didn’t already support de jure independence, this asshole just gave them a little push. The next day we get Ma saying “The destiny of Taiwan lies elsewhere” to cheering crowds and Beijing starts playing hardball.

Moderator: You don’t think Ma realized how seriously the PRC would take comments like that?

RADM Gaumon: I… I think the risk was a calculated one to be sure, she wasn’t stupid. Taiwan has had the PRC messing in its affairs for a long time. Yeah this was a big step, but they’d let the election get this far without shooting any missiles into the strait, we’d just done our first port call in decades in Tsoying a year earlier, and the Chinese were still reeling from the construction bubble collapse of 2021. But if there’s a time to take a risk like that, especially in such a tight election, it was then.

Moderator: And they killed her for it.

RADM Gaumon: And didn’t really try to hide it either. I think that’s what made it so galling for the Taiwanese. They knew enough to know they depended on the PRC economically and that wasn’t going to change. The thing with conscription though is that almost everyone has some sense of the military score and frankly it was up in the air at that point, at least when it came to an amphibious invasion. It was a gamble for the PLA to try to cross the strait in force and the ROC knew it. So yeah, the protests went off, Ma’s running mate Wu Yu-Chen got the presidency, and then shit really hit the fan.

Moderator: On inauguration day.

RADM Gaumon: We all knew something was coming. We saw missile units moving around and figured the PLA Rocket Force might put a couple more missiles into the strait to send a message coupled with large scale cyber intrusions. Maybe they’d blow up a few targets on Quemoy to soothe their pride? We figured it would be a military demonstration, nothing more. The ROC was already about as ready as it could get short of full mobilization. The fleet was scattered, the air force was already sending out detachments to operate from civilian airports and the highway strips that were being prepped. They almost decided not to do a public inauguration on security grounds, but I suppose there’s only so much a nation’s pride can take. They were done with the PRC pushing them around, Hong Kong had convinced them “one country, two systems” was bullshit and that was that.

Apparently, the call for independence was in Wu’s speech for that day but of course he never got around to making it. Looking back at it, the strike was surprisingly unambitious. I mean it sounds pretty absurd to call more than 600 warheads landing across an entire country in under an hour “unambitious,” but it was pretty straightforward. Missiles, aircraft, one big massed strike followed by heavy air raids, it was big, simple, and got the job done.

Even the cyber-attacks were functional, not stunning. The power grid in Taipei was only down for an hour or so and the air defense communications network was down for less than ten minutes. Of course, that was 10 of the 15 minutes it took for the initial wave of ballistic missiles to hit their targets so it’s not as if their attacks didn’t have an impact, but it certainly wasn’t any “cyber Pearl Harbor” or anything like that.

Really the damage on that first day was done by the PLARF. We all knew they had plenty of short ranged ballistic missiles pointed at Taiwan, but we’d hoped they’d have to use so many to get through the Patriot batteries around the high value targets that there would be fewer to go around the rest of the country. Instead they practically shut down the PAC-3 batteries, knock out the radars with medium-range missiles and they get off two full, practically unimpeded short-range missile salvoes… It’s not that the PLA owned the skies after that. Between the fighters the ROCAF could get up and their medium range air defense systems the Taiwanese were able to shoot down a solid hundred PLAAF aircraft on that first day. That said, those first two salvos ripped the heart out of the Taiwanese Air Force.

Moderator: What do you mean by that? They were still fighting well into the war, weren’t they?

RADM Gaumon: Well, yes and no. There were just so many targets that got hit that first day, mostly the same types of things we went for in Desert Storm actually. Air search radars, runways, and above all command and control. You know people always make a big deal about the fact the top five people in the Taiwanese line of succession were killed in the first hour, and don’t get me wrong that was huge. Frankly though, the mid-grade officers, the regional command posts, those were the targets that put PLA in a situation that would just keep getting easier and easier, in the air at least. When we started giving the Taiwanese a hand we frequently struggled to find anyone to pass the information to. They talked a big game before the war about their defense infrastructure functioning without a head, and that was probably true with regards to Taipei. The regional and local commands though, losing those was huge. They had one functioning regional headquarters on the second day of war and to make it even worse, those they lost weren’t simply questions of blown out antenna and comms lines, they were lost with all hands, blown up or buried alive. That was decades of military experience, training, and education, gone in an hour. It’s not that others didn’t step up after that first day, but those early losses showed for the rest of the conflict.

Moderator: And then came the amphibious assault?

RADM Gaumon: They built up to it but yes. They had plenty of shaping to do before the surge across the strait, but the proper crossing followed pretty soon after the initial salvos. Between the air raids, the mop-up missile strikes and the handful of special operations attacks, life was hell for the ROC as they watched shipping concentrate at Xiamen and Fuzhou. They knew it was coming, they just couldn’t do much but put their subs in the way and hope they got shots off.

The coastal missile batteries were even worse off. They had been dodging air raids for the first few days and while most of them were still intact, the PLAAF owned the skies. With the area air defenses going down to the constant raids and the fighters on the run, the Chinese could keep UAVs up over the coast pretty regularly. The missile batteries that stayed got hit, and those that headed north where the attacks were a little lighter took themselves right out of the fight. Then, the day before the cross-strait invasion kicked off, the PLAN managed to land a brigade of marines at Hualien and seize the airbase there and that was about it for the ROCAF.

Moderator: Well, until the F-35 sale went through in the Senate right?

RADM Gaumon: Ok, so I’m retired right? There are things no one in government is going to acknowledge that I can, and this is one of them. From the moment the first F-35B touched down on Taiwanese soil, the air war was an American affair. The American people weren’t ready to go to war over Taiwan but the President, the House, the Senate, State, DoD, literally no one was willing to let Taiwan go without bloodying the PRC’s nose. We were obligated by law to ensure Taiwan could defend itself, right? “Defense articles?” “Defense services?” I hear people talking about “the rogue admirals” as if it was us that started this damn war! We followed the law as our commander in chief understood it and as senior lawmakers understood it! I won’t name names but I had people on the Hill literally read me the text of the Taiwan Relations Act over the phone “to make sure we are all on the same page here.” People who, I might add, I see on the news today talking about this “rogue admiral” bullshit!

Moderator: Would you say you feel betrayed?

RADM Gaumon: I’d say I… You know what, I think I’m done talking about the domestic scene. I keep going and I’ll end up saying something I’ll regret.

Moderator: I… Ok sure, let’s turn back to Taiwan then. What did you mean a second ago about the air war being an American affair?

RADM Gaumon: Thank you. Well… as I was saying earlier, the ROCAF was kind of in shambles at that point. Half the major bases in the south had been hit so hard and so frequently that for all intents and purposes they no longer existed. The cream of the air force had been trapped by cratered runways at Hualien when the mainland’s marines took that base and the remaining fighters were dispersed at a mix of airfields and runway strips in the north of the country. The real issue though… actually let me take that back. Everything was an issue. Leadership was hectic to say the least, fuel and ammunition were haphazard, you’re outnumbered by an order of magnitude, not a pretty picture right? What we really brought into the fight, without fighting of course, was coordination and a common operating picture. Even before the first batch of F-35s came over our E-2s were basically running the air battle. The Taiwanese had had all of their Hawkeyes at Hualien when it went down so pretty quickly the coordination role fell to us. We never shot at the Chinese mind you, but the Taiwanese went from maybe 20 minutes of warning before a raid to two hours and with a proper AWACS, their air-to-air losses fell off pretty quickly as well.

It got even easier when the 35s got there because they could shoot without ever going active and we could get the missile to terminal homing with only the E-2 radiating. Not only did this keep the 35s hidden but it meant the poor J-10 or J-11 pilots didn’t know they were targeted until they were practically dead. And that’s not even the craziest stuff we were doing back then. With the 35s you could get places you could never get an F-16 or a Mirage. There were a couple times where we’d sneak the Taiwanese pilots around the PLAAF Combat Air Patrols to the tankers or AEW birds. There was this one time we forced an entire brigade of J-10s to ditch in the strait after the 35s we were directing killed the primary and secondary tanker groups that were supposed to get them home.

Honestly it was kind of a thrill. No one and I mean no one knew what a proper, modern, no-holds-barred war would look like and here it was, right in front of us and we were at the center of it. Sure, the 35s we gave to the ROCAF had Taiwanese pilots in them but pretty quickly people learned that you either listen to the American E-2 or you eat a PL-15 before your second combat sortie. They needed us, but there was respect there too. The ROCAF started calling our AEW guys the “Talking Tigers” a few days in and our guys loved it. I think we had just got in patches with the new tiger logo for VAW 115 the morning the PLA snapped. Crazy thing is, that afternoon as I was swimming for the nearest life raft a little clump of the damn things came up right in front of me. Fucking poetic right?

Moderator: It sounds like you were really making headaches for the PRC in those days.

RADM Gaumon: That’s a bit of an understatement. Neither us nor the PRC wanted a full-on war, but it got pretty bad. Our electronic warfare people barely slept for those weeks as they went toe-to-toe with the PLA every single day. The things I was just telling you, getting the tankers and all that? Those were our good days. There were a couple times where things got so bad, whether it was EW, cyber, or whatever that we had to switch on the cruisers’ radars to have any idea what was happening in the air.

And then of course there was the fun little ambiguity of whether a particular aircraft was American or Taiwanese. We were never really willing to transmit and let them know, better to make their lives a little harder. For a while it wasn’t a huge issue. If it was flying over Taiwan or over the strait it belonged to the Republic of China. If it wasn’t it was probably American. Once we started operating around the island though, we needed fighters to escort our E-2s and tankers which complicated things somewhat, and then it got even worse when the F-35s arrived.

Not only were they hard to see, but now both us and Taiwan had the same platform in the sky and as we had to get more and more creative with routes for our Taiwanese friends we started bringing US and Taiwanese platforms closer and closer together. At first, they just stopped shooting at anything they weren’t sure of. Then they started shooting at everything.

Moderator: You’re talking about Lieutenant Commander Hodges?

RADM Gaumon: There were a couple close calls we didn’t let get out to the press before Commander Hodges went down. A well-flown 35 is pretty hard to shoot at, let alone hit. There were a couple times we only realized they’d been trying to target one of ours when an NSA memo came in a day or two later on PLAAF chatter about some low observable target they’d tried to prosecute at such and such location. As time went on though they got better at getting vectors from the long wavelength radars to pilots and we started losing a few of our ROC flyers here and there and then Hodges got hit.

Honestly, I was surprised him going down didn’t do more. Those that already believed we needed to push back against the Chinese were further convinced. Those that bought the PRC’s line that this was an internal matter didn’t really change their minds after Hodges was shot down. The key was the posturing that followed the shootdown.

Moderator: You really think there was still a chance of peace until that point?

RADM Gaumon: You see the CCP had been feeding their people a narrative of Japanese and Western meddling and interference for a long time, the “century of humiliation” they called it. A lot of people don’t realize this but “losing” Taiwan to the Dutch and then to the Japanese is part of the same humiliation narrative as the opium wars and the Japanese invasion. So not only is Taiwan an ideological threat, you know, a genuinely Chinese democracy and all that, but it’s one of their last badges of shame. They couldn’t back down on Taiwan, they needed to win that one. As long as everything we did was plausibly deniable though, as long as they could still get Taiwan at the end of the day, they’d rather deal with our shenanigans than to push back and risk us getting involved in a proper war.

For our part, the fact we didn’t go to war when they first crossed the strait meant we were never going to and they should have recognized that. You can talk all you want about “cyberwar” and “greyzone conflict” and don’t get me wrong, those of us on the operational side stayed busy in those days, but no one who fought in the Westpac would confuse those things with real war. It was for the PRC and ROC, but not us, not yet. All we were doing was poking, prolonging the inevitable. The PLA would have taken the island eventually and we would have let them. Despite our best efforts and all our spectacular little successes, it was just a question of time as long as the U.S. stayed out. After they shot down an American pilot though, we couldn’t look weak. We had to do something, even if it was only moving a few ships and bombers around.

Moderator: If you’ll excuse me saying so, “a few ships and bombers” seems like something of an understatement.

RADM Gaumon: *Chuckles* I suppose it is. Believe it or not we really did try to calibrate it to be meaningful without being too threatening. Going from one carrier strike group to two, six new fighter squadrons around Japan, two bomber squadrons to Darwin and Guam, a few more patriot batteries here and there, in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t a huge increase in forces. Well, at least it didn’t seem so to us.

You know there’s a tough balance with situations like these. On the one hand the more you have forward, the more visible you are, the more vulnerable you are if or, in our case when, the other guy decides it’s time to go. On the other hand, you want to make things messy for the other guy, even if you can’t actually shoot at him. You also want to show your allies that you are there, and they can depend on you and that you’re in this together. In our case it was more a question of continuing the support we’d been providing so far but you shouldn’t underestimate what it meant to Taiwan that we were there at all. Sure, they were pissed at us for leaving them to fight it alone but after the first few days the fact that we were there, that we wanted to help even though we couldn’t do much, it kept a lot of people going.

We got the balance wrong though. We thought they knew we didn’t want to fight over this. There was no way we were going to stop making speeches at the U.N. and putting sanctions on the PRC for this massive, aggressive attack, but that was going to be it. Well, that and those of us over at TF 70 were going to continue making their lives hell for as long as we could. But they’d win. They’d fight through that mess they were getting themselves into in Taichung City, take Taipei, and then the great Chinese nation would be rejuvenated or whatever. They got their island back, their “China Dream,” and we got to show the world we didn’t do nothing. Everyone wins! Well, no one loses too much at least.

Moderator: So why didn’t that happen? Why did they attack?

RADM Gaumon: Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed? I mean part of it was obviously political. Despite the best efforts of the PRC, the Chinese people were getting pissed, not just at Taiwan but at us for helping them. Say what you want about communism and Mao and the party and all that, China is a nation-state and the nation had its pride wounded. You have to understand this is the middle kingdom we’re talking about here, this is the center of the world, right? Not only had their lost province given them an embarrassing bloody nose but the Americans were helping them do it while having the audacity to deny any “military involvement.”

What pushed them over the edge though was the surge after Hodges. We had spent so much time talking about “A2/AD” and all the nasty new technologies that would expand the damn “bubble” that we forgot why they started doing this stuff in the first place. From the beginning it was always about stopping us from building the forces in-theater to win. Sure, we weren’t shooting at them yet but what about when we had the rest of our Air Force scattered across the First Island Chain? What about when two carriers turned into five? Taiwan had eaten up so much of the PLA’s resources they were simply too stretched out, too vulnerable to do anything else.

Their army was consumed by the absolute slog that was Taichung City, their air force still hadn’t really knocked out the ROCAF thanks to us, and a few lucky missile shots into the strait meant they were struggling to ship over enough to keep their forces in the southern half of the island fighting, let alone bring over anyone new. Think about what happened when our subs actually did start sinking things in the strait. What if they’d been supported by functioning air bases at Okinawa, by two, three carriers in the Philippine Sea? China was more stretched out, more vulnerable than it had been in decades and it didn’t take much to push them over the edge. They were scared and saw what they were afraid to see.

We never thought what we were bringing in would be enough to win a war and it wasn’t. The Chinese though, to them it looked like it might be enough to push them off Taiwan or worse, especially if we could get in one solid first strike. And after that? They saw how busy Norfolk and Bremerton and San Diego and Pearl had gotten. They noticed when large parts of 6^th and 5^th Fleets started pulling off station and heading east. We knew we were just being careful, but you think they were ever going to believe that? They just had too much they didn’t know, too much they couldn’t control, and it seemed to be getting worse every day. They decided to take the initiative back.

Moderator: And that was that?

RADM Gaumon: And that was that…

Moderator: The Stennis, the Roosevelt…

RADM Gaumon: And most of their escorts, and the Blue Ridge, and the Tripoli, and the Bataan, and the New Orleans, and too many sailors and marines to name. *Pauses* There are no words for a day like that.

Moderator: What was your immediate reaction?

RADM Gaumon: My immediate reaction?! My immediate reaction involved the worst hour of my entire life and a hell of a lot of swimming!

Moderator: I’m sorry, I… I meant after you were picked up by the Lake Champlain, when you saw what had happened, when you talked with Admiral Kourosi at INDOPACOM, when you talked with the President. What was the immediate reaction?

RADM Gaumon: Well, the president wouldn’t talk to us, at least not right away. His daughter was an officer on the Stennis you know. Apparently, he got the casualty report and just kind of walked into the residence and didn’t come out. It was two days before anyone besides NSC staffers and his chief of staff heard from him again. By that time Congress had declared war, OPLAN Delta had been disseminated, and things had begun in earnest.

Griffin Cannon is an aspiring navalist and a recent graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s Security Studies program. He is currently interning with the National Defense University’s Eisenhower School for the fall semester. You can find him on Twitter at @RowRowRow7.

Featured Image: “USS Destroyer” by David Oakes via Artstation

Fiction Week

By David Alman

June 21, 2029
Qinche, Beijing

Wang Peng was nervous. As a watch supervisor for the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, he had been hand-picked to oversee and coordinate the first overt act of the conflict with America. Wang Peng was normally a confident man. His career had seen him command missile batteries, work on the development of the newest hypersonic glide vehicles and penetration aids, and serve multiple tours developing plans and policy for the PLA. He believed in his mission – to defend China against foreign encroachment and ensure China was respected on the world stage – and had faith that technological and doctrinal advances made the Rocket Force a potent instrument of power.

Three years ago, he would have been confident. His mission was to deny America the ability to project power into the First Island Chain. To do this, the Rocket Force had two principal targets: naval vessels and aerial-refueling tankers. Anti-ship ballistic missiles and long-range cruise missiles had already pushed the U.S. Navy far out into the Marianas Islands and limited their strike capacity by forcing them to swap cruise missiles for surface-to-air missiles to defend themselves. The U.S. Navy had done the rest by procuring short-ranged strike fighters that were all but useless in a contested environment. The tanker problem had originally been easier – just strike the handful of bases capable of handling America’s tankers, destroy the fuel farms, and attempt to kill the aircraft themselves. By killing the tanker force, the strategic bombers based in the continental U.S. would be mission-killed without needing to strike the American homeland or intercept them en-route. Much to Wang Peng’s dismay, however, intelligence had monitored a shift in American war plans that threatened to undermine much of the Rocket Force’s potency.  

Wang Peng looked over the watch floor to a new set of computer terminals and a joint team of Army, Navy, and Air Force personnel. He cursed the amount of time it had taken to get the equipment installed – he was sure American watchstanders didn’t have to deal with the amount of bureaucracy and the slow speed that came with buying anything after the anti-corruption reforms. The terminals were plugged in to a supercomputer, requisitioned from academia, with the sole objective of trying to find America’s seaplane tanker force.

Fifty Miles East of Guam

Lieutenant Commander Jessica Morello was living her dream. She sat in the left seat of the aircraft, a 200,000-pound machine gently rolling with the waves. The seas were calm, with a slight swell from a westardly wind. She had the window and hatch above her head open, headset wrapped around her neck, and a tablet on her knee. She was snacking on a protein bar and chatting with her co-pilot, Air Force Captain John Marks, waiting for contact with the tender. The joint Navy-Air Force crew reflected the joint nature of the program. The Navy was, in a repeat of the original Seaplane Striking Force debate, unwilling to divert funds from the carrier force. As a result, the Air Force funded the majority of the bill and provided most of the pilots. The Navy’s contribution came from a few pilots and the tender operation.

Captain Marks was shaking his head laughing at Morello’s explanation of her callsign, “SLAM.”

Morello had previously explained, “It’s actually an acronym that stands for ‘Super Lost Above Miramar,’ before I got into the program I was on a training mission out of Lemoore and accidentally rejoined on the wrong lead – so while the rest of the squadron flew off, I was following a Marine back to Miramar and didn’t realize it until we were calling approach. It’s hard to come back from that one, so I was renamed the next week.” Marks was still laughing when the tablet on Morello’s knee lit up, “Neptune to Penguin – coming up now, five-hundred yards out.”

Morello snapped at Marks, “Let’s get it started up.” The two officers opened their checklists and started to bring engine #2, previously off to conserve fuel, online. As the engine came alive, Marks scanned the engine instruments to ensure the engine was operating smoothly while Morello looked around at the water outside the aircraft.

The headset cracked to life, “This is Neptune, we’re at your five o’clock on the surface.” Morello kicked the left rudder pedal and leaned forward in her seat, straining to look back. As she did, the water rudder on the aircraft opened up to slowly turn it left. She advanced the right throttle to speed up the turn. Marks, responsible for the radio responded, “Copy, we’re turning.”

As they passed through forty-dive degrees of turning, Morello called out that she had the tender. Another forty-five degrees and Marks could see it too. There, sitting proudly on the surface, was how it all came together for the seaplane tanker force. The black hull of the USS Georgia looked menacing compared to the blue sky and white clouds around them. The Georgia had started life as a ballistic missile submarine ready to rain nuclear death upon America’s enemies. But, she had evolved. First, into a guided missile submarine carrying 154 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles and then into her current form as a seaplane tender. Darwin would have been proud.

As a seaplane tender, Georgia had seen her missile tubes replaced by fuel storage. The space taken up by the 24 Trident Tubes turned 154 Tomahawk tubes was immense. In tanker configuration, Georgia carried approximately 1.5 million pounds of fuel, enough to fill ten B-2 stealth bombers to max fuel capacity. The concept was relatively simple and took inspiration from both the Nazi German milch-cow U-boats and the Navy’s own Seaplane Strike Force experiments in the 1950s.

American planners had identified that the critical vulnerability in Global Strike Command’s ability to project power was tanker bases. Flying from CONUS, the B-52s, B-1s, B-2s, and eventually B-21s would be required to tank multiple times both before and after striking targets anywhere near the Chinese coast. The planes could take a Northern route – topping off over the West Coast and Alaska, but closer to Japan things got trickier. If the Japanese were in the fight, it worked out well – it was unlikely that China would strike Japan and, if they did, there were numerous airfields to disperse to. The problem was if the Japanese – or other American allies – were out of the fight. This was the worrisome scenario for American planners.

The U.S. controlled bases – namely Hawaii, Midway, Wake, and Guam plus the Marshalls and Palau – were small enough in number to be extremely vulnerable to a first strike. And, since adversaries had likely learned from Japan’s failure to destroy Pearl Harbor’s fuel farm at the start of World War II, it was all the more likely that Guam’s fuel farm would be clobbered in any opening blow. Without these bases and their fuel supplies, American bombers wouldn’t be able to reach their targets without a prohibitive amount of tanker support.

Enter the seaplane tanker force. In a modern revival of the P6M Seamaster, the Air Force had funded a rapid design effort to build the seaplanes and given money to the Navy to fund the conversion of the Georgia and a few other littoral combat ships to act as tenders. The Georgia and a few Independence-class littoral combat ships acted as tenders: packed with fuel and, in the LCS’ case, supplies. The seaplanes would operate from Apra Harbor during peacetime and scattered throughout the ocean during wartime. They could get fuel from either of their tender options and conduct maintenance back at Apra or from the surface tenders. While plans called for three squadrons of 15 planes each – enough to ensure that around 20 were operational at any given time, the contractor had only been able to construct 20 planes total by 2029. Technical issues had delayed the first test flight and the first three vehicles were at Patuxent River for test and evaluation. Two others had been written off after severe structural damage – one after bumping into a tender and the other after a hard landing in rough weather – leaving only fifteen aircraft operational in the Pacific. It was the price of doing seaplane business after half a century without it.

“Penguin to Neptune, we’re coming up on your port side,” Marks said into the radio. The reply came back quickly, “Roger Penguin, sending the guide line out now.”

The seaplane pilots could see activity on the sub’s conning tower as the crew launched a quadcopter carrying the guide line. The guide line was the first step in the refueling process. After it was secured, then the fuel line could be sent over on the same path. The pilots, with their aircraft perpendicular to the submarine, could see the drone fly toward them and over them to the fuel receiver on top of the wing. The drone landed in a recessed section of the wing with guide wire attached, its job complete for now. With the guide wire secured, the submarine raised a tall mast from the conning tower. This mast, attached to the guide wire, would be used to send over the fuel line.

Marks was looking at Morrelo who in turn was mesmerized by the whole process. “Enjoying the show?” he asked sarcastically. She responded, “Yeah it’s all pretty amazing – I don’t know how well it would ever work in bad weather though.” That was the big problem, and the reason for the two seaplane write-offs earlier in the program. While the seaplane was designed to operate in up to 8-foot seas, it required a certain amount of finesse to avoid damage.

With the fuel line attached, the transfer process could begin. With the limited pumping capability of the submarine and the flexible fuel line, only around 3,000 pounds could be transferred every minute. For the seaplane, requiring 60,000 pounds to top off to its full load of 100,000 pounds, it would be a 20 minute transfer operation. With luck, it was all the time Wang Peng and his strike force would need.

Qiche, Beijing

 “Sir, we have the target,” said the watchstander, a junior PLAN officer.

In order for Georgia to surface so close to the seaplane, engineers had installed a low-tech active sonar in the hull of the seaplane. It was not just meant to signal its position, but it also helped the seaplane explore if there were any underwater obstacles in front of it if operating in shallow water. Upon landing in the designated rendezvous area, it sent out three quick pings to help the submarine locate the aircraft. While everyone realized there was a risk in doing this, the idea was that no enemy assets would be anywhere close by. After all, Georgia was in the area and ultra-quiet. It would be able to hear any enemy sub-surface threat well before it became a problem.

What the American planners did not fully comprehend, however, was just how advanced China’s undersea surveillance network was. Over the previous decade, ultra-quiet wave-riding and battery assisted unmanned underwater vehicles had travelled at slow speeds all over the Pacific to lay sound, pressure, and magnetic sensors. Networked together, they formed an extremely capable observation network. While America’s submarines remained particularly elusive, the network helped to track the carrier battle groups, surface vessels, and, in this case, an actively pinging seaplane.

The supercomputer had gone to work immediately after hearing the signals. Using the principle of time-distance-of-arrival, combined with previous benchmarking studies, it was able to recommend a narrow search ellipse with a major axis of just ten miles and a minor axis of a mile (more precise on one axis due to the layout of the sensor network). Immediately after this information was available, Wang Peng’s team tasked one of the many ocean surveillance satellites – part of a robust constellation designed to fix America’s carrier strike groups – to look in the area. Seconds later, the machine learning algorithm had identified the aircraft and submarine on the surface of the water and generated target coordinates for other weapon systems.

The 2,000 mile range from Fujian – on the coast of China – to Guam was much too far for cruise missiles or strike aircraft to travel in the approximately 30 minute window the sub and aircraft were together. But, the Chinese had made great progress on their hypersonic weapons programs. The WU-14, a hypersonic glide vehicle boosted by a DF-17 or other ballistic missile, was capable at travelling at over 4,500 miles per hour. That allowed it to travel the distance required in twenty-seven minutes, just fast enough to strike the refueling operation.

Wang Peng took a deep breath, looked back at the watchstander and said, with some sense of remorse, “Execute now, option A – inform command we found the tanker.”

Andersen AFB, Guam

 For Captain Lindsey Harrison, Guam was her dream assignment. She had the chance to explore the history of the island and the Japanese invasion during World War II, snorkel dive in Apra Harbor, and get plenty of beach time to relax and enjoy the Pacific Ocean. On duty, she was a section supervisor for Guam’s integrated air defense system. Linked in with other national assets, she was in command of the island’s air defenses and air defense plan. It was a tense time – leadership had previously ordered them to a higher alert level, requiring more of the defense systems to be up and operational at any given time and giving the crews less time to relax. Everyone was tired.

Captain Harrison was scrolling through Twitter on her unclassified computer, thinking about when she might get over to visit Japan and try Jiro’s sushi restaurant, when her phone – the red phone used for drills or something far more deadly – rang.

“Captain Harrison – flash message just in – Chinese forces are moving to launch posture, sound the alert, get the aircraft on standby. Not a drill.”

She immediately turned to her team and ordered them into action. The first priority was flushing the aircraft from the base, especially the stealth bombers. The second priority was ensuring all air defense equipment was fully operational. The warning message was sent over to the aircrews, most on fifteen minute standby but some – including the B-2 crews – on five minute standby. They immediately raced to start their aircraft and get them in the air.

All over Guam, but particularly on the western side of the island, weapons crews pulled camouflage netting off of their equipment and powered them on. The island’s defense was a combination of radars, missiles, hypervelocity guns, one prototype laser, and multiple jammers and decoys. The United States, anticipating that China would understand the air defense layout, also possessed a few tricks up its sleeve offshore.

Three minutes after the initial alert order, Captain Harrison received another phone call, “Multiple launches on the mainland. Comms are being jammed. You’re weapons free on any Chinese assets heading your way. Good luck.” Captain Harrison’s face was drained of color as she relayed the information.

Five minutes after the initial alert order, Captain Harrison verified that all the air defenses were online and slaved to the central air defense system. Simultaneously, Spirit 01 – one of four B-2s forward deployed to the island – was taking off with its cargo of long-range missiles and headed for the holding stack offshore.

A minute later, just as Spirit 02 was beginning its takeoff roll, she received another phone call – this time from the anti-submarine warfare cell stationed on the island, “Harrison, be advised we have heavy acoustic activity consistent with missile launches fifteen miles east of the island – we’re moving to prosecute but you’ll have inbounds.”

Fifteen miles west of the island, three improved Song-class submarines – ultra quiet diesel electric submarines – were launching the last of their thirty cruise missiles. It was not the largest strike package ever assembled, nor was it required to succeed, but it would certainly cause problems for the American air defenses. The thirty missiles were split into two groups: ten were tasked towards the airfield and its runway and taxiways; the other twenty were going after the command post and search radars.

As an SH-60, redirected from a training mission, raced towards the spot where the Songs had fired, they saw multiple cylindrical shapes pass under them – the cruise missiles – and reported it in. A search radar picked up the missiles shortly after they crossed the horizon at approximately eight miles. With the missiles travelling at just over 500 miles per hour, the air defenses had one minute.

While most of the air defenses on Guam were oriented towards the west, the prototype laser battery had an unrestricted arc to the east. Two batteries of Rolling Airframe Missiles were the first to engage. Their coordinated fires sent twenty-two missiles at twenty-two targets. With limited ammunition, they could not afford to shoot twice at each as doctrine had previously called for. There were other layers to deal with the leakers.

The American missiles met the Chinese missiles four miles offshore and destroyed ten of them. Next up came the Army Avenger missile battery with its Sidewinders. The Avenger team quickly fired off its eight missiles which met the Chinese at two miles offshore. Another five went down. It was now the laser’s turn. It killed three before having to cycle its chemical cartridges. By that time, the missiles had crossed ashore. After completing its fifteen second cycling procedure, the laser managed to shoot down another two before the missiles were outside the firing envelope. The airfield would have to deal with ten.

Fortunately for Spirit 04, the missile that would have detonated right above it had been destroyed by a Sidewinder. Unfortunately for Captain Harrison, two missiles targeting her command post had made it through. The CRAM terminal defense gun took out one, but the other slammed into the bunker and detonated, wiping out Harrison and her team. The other eight missiles lost five of their number to CRAMs around base, but one managed to detonate above a taxiway – causing an enormous explosion to rip through the base as a fully loaded KC-135 tanker blew up, taking with it two more 135s and forcing Spirit 04’s crew, just getting airborne, to fight to make sure their plane wasn’t toppled over into the ground. The other two both impacted the primary search radar for the base, taking it offline.

Immediately after the main search radar went offline, another team brought the backup radar to life. The situation was bad, but not awful. All four B-2s were in the air, three B-52s were taxiing to the runway accompanied by ten F-15s, and seven KC-135s were minutes away from takeoff. Additionally, the air defenses had worked relatively well given the direction of the attack – most were oriented to the west toward China.

The next wave came from an unexpected source. 100 miles north-west of Guam, a Chinese-flagged container ship revealed itself to be carrying a deadly cargo. Instead of electronics, its containers carried cruise missiles. The 800-foot long vessel launched 200 missiles in the span of four minutes, a mix of cluster, high-explosive, and anti-radiation weapons targeted at the airfield and its defenses. Its mission complete, the container ship turned west for the long, slow, and dangerous journey home.

The Chinese expected that at least 100 of the missiles would get through given the volume in such a short time period. They had not counted on the USS Lyndon B. Johnson to be offshore. In what was a remarkable intelligence failure for the Chinese, the naval intelligence unit that tracked America’s warships had failed to relay the importance of the Zumwalt-class destroyer’s rotating patrols off Guam. It was something that everyone apparently knew, but in reality nobody put the pieces together. The U.S. Navy had found a mission for the three Zumwalt class ships:  island defense. The vessels were capable of carrying three-hundred and twenty Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles (ESSM) for missile defense. And, because they were stealthy, China had difficulty tracking the Zumwalts. It was likely for this reason that the intelligence was not relayed – China had not identified just how omnipresent at least one vessel of the class was off Guam.

The Johnson, twenty miles offshore, was trailing an aerostat two-hundred feet in the air. The aerostat was equipped with the latest electro-optical and infrared cameras to provide a passive early warning capability to the ship. A sensor operator on the ship was first alerted to a possible threat by a sharp ping in his ears. He looked toward the screen where the camera had auto-tracked one of the missiles and immediately shouted at the air warfare coordinator to go active.

Johnson’s air defenses sprang to life, powered by its SPY radar. The radar immediately picked up the missiles and automatically prioritized their engagement. The Johnson was still on a, “shoot twice, look once,” doctrine, so 200 ESSMs targeted 100 of the inbound Chinese cruise missiles. They downed 80. After Johnson went active, 15 of the Chinese missiles, coded for anti-radiation engagements, turned towards the Johnson. Johnson fired 30 missiles at these before engaging with its onboard laser and close-in point defense guns. Johnson killed the final missile just fifty yards away – debris still splattered against the ship, causing minor casualties, and one lucky piece of shrapnel cut the aerostat wire, sending it off into the sky.

Guam’s air defenses dealt handily with the remaining 70 cruise missiles – just three got through only to detonate above empty aircraft revetments. By the time the cruise missiles were detonating over empty concrete, the last of the F-15s were getting airborne. Then, the hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) arrived. Skipping along the upper edge of the atmosphere at 4,500 miles per hour, the HGVs began their terminal dive towards Andersen Air Base. Here, the hypervelocity gun weapon systems on the island went into action. There were 20 inbound targets and five guns on the island. Each gun began to pump out rounds, auto-calculating the point to aim based on the missile trajectory. The laser also joined in, immediately downing one inbound. Unfortunately for the air defenses, the glide vehicles began to deploy their penetration aids, greatly complicating the air defense picture. The air defenses were only able to down four HGVs in total, leaving 16 to strike the base.

Seven of the remainder obliterated the fuel farms on the south-west and north-west sides of the base, sending large mushroom clouds into the sky as the fuel detonated. The other nine weapons delivered the coup-de-grace. Chevron Five, the first KC-135 to roll down the runway, was just passing abort speed when the runway fifty yards in front of them disintegrated as the hypersonic vehicle slammed into the concrete and exploded its payload. With no time and no options, the KC-135s front gear collapsed as the plane passed over the hole. The plane’s nose slammed into the ground and skidded – generating a shower of sparks and causing massive structural damage to the aircraft. The crew frantically climbed out through the cockpit windows and dropped down to the ground via ropes before sprinting away. Thirty seconds later, the tanker exploded and engulfed the runway in flames. The other eight weapons hit the two runways, putting an additional five holes into the already-maimed runway and three into the previously undamaged one. Andersen was shut down, trapping the six remaining KC-135s and eliminating – for the time being – America’s primary Pacific airstrip.

Fifty miles East of Guam

Fifteen minutes and 45,000 pounds of fuel into the transfer process, Morello received an emergency disconnect warning from the Georgia. Her sonar team had picked up a submerged contact closing on them, likely one of the Song class submarines leaving its launch area. It was a fortuitous contact. By the time the five HGVs arrived at the Georgia’s position and dispensed their cluster munitions over five football fields of ocean, the Georgia was a quarter mile away and two-hundred feet underwater.

With 85,000 pounds of fuel onboard, the seaplane accelerated slowly. Once it reached an appropriate speed the seaplane rose up onto the step, the notched section of the fuselage that helped the aircraft break free from the ocean. At 150 knots, the seaplane lifted off the ocean into ground effect. Morello pushed the nose down to keep it there – the interaction of the wings with the ocean gave the vehicle more lift – and let the plane accelerate to 170 knots before pulling back on the yoke and accelerating into a climb.

“Penguin 2 is airborne,” Morello radioed into the mic. She was overjoyed at the response, “Howdy skipper, seven of nine are up over here. Heading north to the rendezvous point.” The seaplanes at Apra Harbor had emerged unscathed and were beginning to take to the air. With ten seaplanes airborne, they had nearly a million pounds of gasoline to offload to other aircraft.

Qinche, Beijing

Wang Peng’s staff was pleased, but he was not. Crippling Guam was an accomplishment – something that they had trained for and executed flawlessly. The Zumwalt class’s presence had been an unwelcome surprise, but the runways and fuel farms were both out of action. Wang Peng was angry about the Georgia. Post-strike reconnaissance did not show a huge oil slick, evidence of a successful hit. Instead, the sea was calm and undisturbed, meaning that their weapons had hit empty ocean.

Not killing the Georgia meant that there was a sizeable amount of fuel still roaming the ocean ready to fill up bombers on their way to target Chinese forces. The invasion fleet was putting to sea under cover of darkness and it was likely that they would be met by a barrage of missiles from Air Force bombers, not to mention the American Navy and its submarines. Each missile that made it through could kill hundreds of Chinese soldiers before they ever got ashore on Taiwan.

Wang Peng’s team was now playing a waiting game. Every satellite pass they would check the status of the Andersen’s runways along with alternate runways on Saipan, Tinian, and throughout the Pacific. Once the Americans were close to repairing them or had diverted to a different field, Wang Peng would order another strike to keep the bases suppressed. He couldn’t help but feel bad that the American engineer teams were working so hard only to eventually have their handiwork destroyed just as they approached completion. In the meantime, he would keep an eye out for the Georgia or any of the surface tenders, the converted littoral combat ships.

It was interesting, he thought, that they were ordered specifically to avoid targeting any of America’s powerful surface combatants or aircraft carriers. Leadership had explained that any graphic loss of life or destruction of American assets could bolster public resolve and result in a larger American response. Of course, there were exceptions – for example, Wang Peng’s team was ordered to bracket any American carrier group that approached strike range to signal Chinese capabilities. But, by limiting their strikes to air bases and minimizing casualties, they hoped that the American public would not accept a drawn-out conflict. After all, did the average American even know where Taiwan was?

200 miles east of Taiwan

Spirit Flight, the four refugee stealth bombers from Guam, headed east toward Guam. They were low on fuel. After orbiting in their holding pattern, the Air Operations Center (AOC) had ordered them to unleash their long-range anti-ship missiles (LRASMs) on a group of Chinese minesweepers and destroyers in the Strait. A continuous barrage of Chinese missiles was clobbering the Taiwanese. The Taiwanese wanted to keep their limited set of anti-ship cruise missiles hidden for now, so the Air Force would need to help blunt the initial wave of ships.

After firing off their weapons, the B-2s needed to top off on fuel. The holding pattern and strike mission cost about 4,000 miles of the B-2’s 6,000-mile range. They needed at least 3,000 more miles to make it to their alternate landing site in Australia. The pilots nervously eyed the fuel tanks as they flew east at four hundred knots. The Pacific’s size was unforgiving.

Moving west to meet them were the eight seaplanes, KBY-10 Catalina IIs, led by Morello. She had left two behind around Guam to help top off the fighters. The B-2 pilots were relieved to get their final vector to the Catalina IIs and moved to their pre-contact refueling points. Each B-2 would take 100,000 pounds total from two tankers, giving the stealth bombers the extra 4,000 mile range to reach Australia with a healthy margin. After refueling, the Catalina IIs would be running low on fuel but had planned for just that eventuality. Steaming west to meet them was one of the Independence-class tenders with two million pounds of fuel onboard.

Once done refueling the B-2s, Morello ordered her aircraft to put down on the water 100 miles away next to the tender. The calm seas made landing easy. Eight seaplanes crowded around the tender, pulling up two at a time to take on fuel. The tender used its crane to hoist one of the aircraft out of the water onto its large repair deck to run routine maintenance. They didn’t know when they’d next get the chance. With the more powerful pumps on the surface ship, each seaplane was totally refueled within twenty minutes. After two hours, the eight seaplanes were again in the air ready to support the next wave of inbound bombers. The seaplane tanker force was working.

David Alman serves in the Air National Guard. In his civilian career, he is an aerospace engineer and management consultant. David is interested in the interaction of technology and strategy, innovation, and national economic power. David holds a BS and MS, both in aerospace engineering, from the Georgia Institute of Technology and is a licensed pilot. The opinions expressed here are solely his own and do not express the views or opinions of his employers.

Featured Image: “Sea Plane 001” by Adrian Bush via Artstation