Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (45 page)

“General Shannon, it is good of you to come down. I would have been glad to pick you up this morning.”

V. R. waved his hand. “No, I wanted to walk and soak up the old Maxwell aura. What a great place this is.”

Carr went immediately to the point. “General Shannon—”

“Just call me V. R., that’s what everyone does. I’m retired now, and there’s no point in standing on ceremony.”

Clearly uncomfortable with the idea, Carr went on. “Well, then, V. R., I want to level with you. You know your views on the conduct of the war in Iraq are not very popular in the Air Force. We get a good cross section of opinion through here, but we haven’t invited anyone like you or General O’Malley to come in. The brass would frown on it. We know you have what headquarters considers to be really radical ideas, and we’d like to learn what they are. There are about fifteen of us. Would you be comfortable in just talking off the cuff about the war?”

Shannon nodded his head. “Yes, but you know you have to look at the war in context. I’ll ramble on, taking in lots of different things—the economy, the media. You can sort it out among yourselves.”

“I see you didn’t bring any briefcase, so I guess you don’t need a PowerPoint setup or anything?”

“No—all I’ll need is a bottle of water, an attentive audience, and when I’m done, lots of good questions.”

Carr led him down the hall to a small conference room where fifteen officers, mostly lieutenant colonels, but with some majors and colonels as well, were gathered. As they went in, Carr flicked on a sign that said “Top Secret” and closed the door.

After the introductions, Carr said, “General Shannon, this room is secure. No one is taking notes, there aren’t any recording devices, and you can be as frank as you wish to be. There will be no attribution in articles, no quotes that might embarrass you. We just want to know what you and, as far as you feel comfortable in telling, General O’Malley think about the war in Iraq.”

Shannon hesitated for a moment, then decided to be utterly frank.

“Let me tell you first that whatever I say has to be taken with a grain of salt, because, frankly, I think both General O’Malley—Steve—and I are probably nuts. I
hope
we are nuts and that we are dead wrong, because if we are not nuts, if we are right, the United States is not just in desperate trouble, it has already lost the fight. And not just the United States, the Western world, too.

“And there is a basis for me thinking I am nuts. I have an irreconcilable hatred of Muslim fanatics because my wife was on Pan Am Flight 103—the 747 that was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland.”

There was a shocked silence. A few of the men had known of this, most had not. It put things in perspective.

“Since then, the more I’ve learned about Muslim fanaticism, the more my hatred has increased. Steve’s case is different. His hatred is based on his absolute certainty that Muslim fanatics are going to do exactly what they’ve said they are going to do: disrupt the Western economy and eventually establish Muslim control of the world.

“Now, with this in mind, let me talk first about the Iraq war. We went in for all the right reasons, but we went in with the wrong intelligence and the wrong methods. We made exactly the same mistake that McNamara and his Whiz Kids made in the Vietnam War. We had no idea of the psychology of the enemy, and worse, far worse, we imputed to the enemy a psychology and values similar to our own.

“It was wrong in Vietnam, but there was an escape clause there.
When the Vietnamese defeated us, we could leave and not worry about them following us. Sure, they would expand into Laos and Cambodia, and they would overrun South Vietnam, and they would even duke it up with China. But there was no clear and present danger to the United States. There is no escape clause in the war in Iraq, or for that matter in the war on terror.

“Our knowledge of the enemy psychology was so faulty that there were idiots who spoke of ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the Iraqis, just as others had spoken in the same stupid fashion about the Vietnamese.

“But it was worse, far worse, with the Iraqis, whom we made our substitute enemy in the war on terror. I believe that Saddam Hussein was helping terrorists, but that was not his main goal. His main goal was maintaining his image as the man who had defied the United States and lived to tell about it. With immense oil wealth at his disposal, he felt comfortable that he had bribed enough people in France, Germany, and Russia so that the UN would never allow the United States to take action. And he devalued the United States as well; he believed firmly that the American public, instructed by the media, could not take the casualties he thought he could inflict upon us.

“The problem was that in attacking Iraq we had one chance at victory, and that chance was in making an initial attack so devastating that it would terrify the entire Muslim world, and force the passive Muslim population, through sheer fear, to take control of the terrorists and free us of the problem. Steve used to call it ‘shock and awe’ and you no doubt have heard the term.

“Such a devastating attack would have killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, maybe more, and would have brought us censure from around the world. You can imagine what the French and the German governments would have said, not all of it just because many of their officials were on Saddam’s payroll.

“Further, we would have had to give the impression that we were perhaps irrational, and ready to unleash a similar, perhaps even more ferocious attack on any Muslim nation that opposed us. And we would have had to sustain this impression for years.”

Shannon paused to assess how his words were going over. Not well, apparently; some looked interested, but most looked appalled. He decided to press on.

“I’ve said before that O’Malley and I are probably nuts. And others have said that it would be salutary for a superpower to occasionally appear irrational, so that lesser powers would not be inclined to tweak its nose on all occasions, for fear of an irrational reaction.

“Here is what O’Malley and I believe was our only hope. We could have avoided the war in Iraq entirely if we had reacted properly and angrily after the terrible attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Within a week of that date we should have detonated nonnuclear weapons over the capital of every Muslim nation, and over every Muslim holy site—Mecca, Medina, all of them. And we should have issued an edict to the Muslim world: ‘Stop terrorism in the next thirty days, or the next series of explosions will not be over your cities, but on them. The explosions will not be nonnuclear: they will be nuclear. It is for you to decide your fate.’ ”

Most of the expressions around the room registered horror; a few showed agreement.

Shannon went on. “Then we should have added this proviso to the Arab governments: ‘If you stop the terrorists, the United States will begin the biggest economic development program in history for Muslim nations, and will bring them from their abject poverty into the family of nations.’

“If we had the brains and the balls to have done this, the Muslim world would have collapsed into a jelly of acquiescence. Muslim leaders would have cut off funds to the terrorists, and would have rounded them up and killed them for us. The whole global war on terror would have been over. And you wouldn’t have to be listening to an old bore like me.

“And instead of reacting with anger and an obvious desire for revenge, what did we do? We went through a maudlin period of self-congratulations over our ability to endure tragedy, and through a tedious effort to prove our humanity by insisting we would punish only the guilty, by insisting that there be no racial profiling, and in general by demonstrating all the good traits of a democracy which the enemy—and the fanatical Muslims are our enemy—intends to destroy.”

Obviously concerned that the discussion was getting more radical than he intended, Carr spoke up. “But we are in Iraq now, General Shannon. How are we going to get out?”

“Sadly, we are going to get out as we got out of Vietnam—dishonorably, shabbily, and at great cost to the people we were honestly trying to help. We’ll have political reasons to find some palpably unbelievable way to leave the country with a counterfeit semblance of what the perpetrators will call ‘honor,’ and I use quotation marks. Iraq will be submerged in violence, subverted by Iran and Syria, and a clerical state will emerge, one that will foster terrorism again to an unimaginable degree. And we will do this in the name of politics. In effect we will have congressmen selling the soul of the United States in order to win their next election.”

Carr asked, “Do you see any way out for us that is not a humiliating defeat?”

Shannon shook his head. “Sadly, no. Despite the bravery and the brilliance of our fighting personnel, Congress will cut the legs out from under them and either cut off funding or demand a prescribed withdrawal date, or both. The question now is not what do we do after Iraq. The question is what do we do after the Muslims carry out their announced intentions and detonate nuclear weapons in our cities.”

“Do you believe it will come to that?”

“Absolutely, the minute they are capable of setting off nuclear weapons they will do it. This seems self-evident, even discounting the fact that I may be a nut. They have been far more forthcoming in their pronouncements than Hitler ever was in
Mein Kampf.
We didn’t believe him because almost no one read his book, and he was regarded as a passing irritant on the international scene. Even those who saw Hitler as a threat thought he could be bought off—given little countries, some colonies, let him terrorize the Jews, and everything would be OK. But the Muslims have been much more straightforward, much more consistent. Their goal is to convert or kill all of us, and establish a worldwide Muslim caliphate with all the misery and poverty that entails.

“So far they have tried to do everything they have promised us, from the World Trade Center on. And we can expect smaller actions, bombs in schools, in malls, all the things going on every day in Israel.

“The question is: what will we do when this happens. Will we have the guts then to take what the world would call irrational actions, and use nuclear weapons against Muslim states? Or will we slowly trade our civilization for theirs, just as they promise and predict?”

There was a general silence. One major said, “General Shannon, I hope you are nuts. If you are not, life is not going to be worth living for my kids.”

Realizing he had to change the thrust of the discussion, Carr said, “General Shannon, you don’t have to tell us anything you think is secret or proprietary, but it is generally known that your company is concentrating on building a manned hypersonic aircraft that you believe might be an effective tool to quell terrorism at its source. What can you tell us about it?”

Shannon flushed. He knew this was coming. There was no way to avoid it,
Aviation Week
had been monitoring RoboPlanes for years, and it was rare when the government could keep a secret, much less a private company that had to purchase materials and supplies from vendors who were under no obligation to keep what they were selling secret. It was easy enough to infer what RoboPlanes’s goals were, just from the amount of titanium purchased and the kind of software suppliers it was using.

“I’ll tell you what I can. But let me put it in context. As you know as well as anyone, hypersonic flight has been around for years, and manned hypersonic aircraft were planned as long ago as the 1930s, with the Sänger experiments. The Air Force’s own late, lamented Dyna-Soar project was designed to maneuver in orbit, and would still be in use today if we had not been so stupid as to cancel it. But hypersonic projects are like all air and space projects today, caught up in a welter of budgetary, programming, and media hurdles that attenuate the programs endlessly.

“And let’s not forget the hobby-shop factor. Programs become careers for officers and civilian engineers alike, and they want constantly to improve them, so that the original idea gets enhanced and more capabilities get added—but the program gets more expensive and more stretched out. I won’t mention any programs by name, but you could pick any program from any service, throw in the Coast Guard if you want to, and you’ll find the same factors.

“That’s why people like Burt Rutan and Paul MacCready and RoboPlanes’s own Bob Rodriquez are so valuable today. It would insult them to use a cliché like ‘thinking outside the box.’ They are thinking outside the universe to get where they are going. They’ve managed to break free from the congressional staffer who wants jobs
in his boss’s home district, and the media mogul who wants a sensational story filled with bad news, and the bureaucrat who wants to be in on everything but doesn’t want to be responsible for anything. They make things happen.

“Then there is the sheer factor of size. Once a company gets to a certain size, it is inevitably bound up with its own procedures, mores, politics.

“All of the above is just a prelude to tell you why we are risking all of our collective fortunes on an exceedingly long shot—a successful Hypersonic Cruiser. And I’ll tell you where we are today, confident that you will keep it to yourself. I got an update from Bob Rodriquez, our genius in residence, just before I came up here. Incidentally, for you who don’t know him, Bob had a tremendously important effect on the development of precision guided munitions, on the adoption of GPS, on the AWACS, on UAVs, and on a dozen other projects.

“Here’s what Rodriquez told me, and you can take it to the bank. The construction of the air vehicle is complete. We could have one of the big rollout ceremonies if we wanted to, or do it like the Navy does when it launches a ship, bring in the bigwigs, crack a bottle of champagne over it, all the rest. But we aren’t going to do that. Not our style.

“Bob has vacillated on the next point, mostly due to my own uncertainty. I was slated to fly the Hypersonic Cruiser from the start, but for a while, I chickened out, wondering if it was a calculated risk or a certain suicide. Bob was forced to have a fallback position, and built in an autonomous flight capability, making it a UHV, an unmanned hypersonic vehicle. But I’ve changed my mind, I’m going to fly the aircraft, come what may, and Steve O’Malley is going to be my backup. We’ve got a complete simulator set up for training, of course. So Bob is pressing ahead with a manned design.