Riding the Red Horse (3 page)

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

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

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

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

Blazer's plane disintegrated less than three seconds later.

“
HOLY SHIT!
”

“What the fuck was that?”

Two Blue Squadron planes blew up almost simultaneously.

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

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

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

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

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

Four more planes were smoked on the way out.

1410 hours:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a long, long silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I don’t think they’re either objective enough, or bright enough, to figure that out, so it looks we’re going to have to do it on our own.

Rather than commenting on the specifics of the war with Iraq, I thought it might be a good time to lay out a framework for understanding that and other conflicts. I call this framework the Four Generations of Modern War. I developed the framework of the first three generations during the 1980s, when I was laboring to introduce maneuver warfare to the U.S. Marine Corps.
^[1]
The Marines kept asking, “What will the Fourth Generation be like?” The result was an article I co-authored for the Marine Corps Gazette in 1989 entitled “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation.”
^[2]
Our troops reportedly found copies of the article in the caves at Tora Bora, the al-Qaeda hideout in Afghanistan.

Modern Warfare

The Four Generations began with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the treaty that ended the Thirty Years’ War. With that treaty, the state established a monopoly on war. Previously, many different entities had fought wars—families, tribes, religions, cities, business enterprises—using many different means, not just armies and navies. Now, state militaries find it difficult to imagine war in any way other than fighting state armed forces similar to themselves, even though two of those means, bribery and assassination, are again in vogue.

The First Generation

The First Generation of Modern War, war of line-and-column tactics, where battles were formal and the battlefield was orderly, ran roughly from 1648 to 1860. The relevance of the First Generation springs from the fact that the battlefield of order created a military culture of order. Most of the things that distinguish military from civilian—uniforms, saluting, careful gradations of rank—were products of the First Generation and were intended to reinforce the culture of order. The problem is that, around the middle of the 19th century, the battlefield of order began to break down.

Mass armies, soldiers who actually wanted to fight (an 18th-century soldier’s main objective was to desert), rifled muskets, then breechloaders and machine guns, made the old line-and-column tactics at first obsolete, then suicidal.

The problem since then has been a growing contradiction between military culture and the increasing disorderliness of the battlefield. The culture of order that was once consistent with the environment in which it operated has become more and more at odds with it.

The Second Generation

Second Generation War was one answer to the contradiction between the culture of order and the military environment. Developed by the French Army during and after World War I, Second Generation war sought a solution in mass firepower, most of which was indirect artillery fire. The goal was attrition, and the doctrine was summed up by the French as “the artillery conquers, the infantry occupies.” Centrally controlled firepower was carefully synchronized, using detailed, specific plans and orders, for the infantry, tanks, and artillery in a “conducted battle” where the commander was, in effect, the conductor of an orchestra.

Second Generation war came as a great relief to soldiers, or at least their officers, because it preserved the culture of order. The focus was inward, on rules, processes, and procedures. Obedience was more important than initiative. In fact, initiative was not wanted because it endangered synchronization. Discipline was top-down and imposed.

Second Generation war is relevant today because the U.S. Army and USMC learned Second Generation war from the French during and after World War I, and it remains the American way of war, as we are seeing in Afghanistan and Iraq. To Americans, war means “putting steel on target.”

Aviation has replaced artillery as the source of most firepower, but otherwise (and despite the USMC’s formal doctrine, which is Third Generation maneuver warfare), the U.S. military today is as French as white wine and cheese. At the USMC desert warfare training center in California, the only thing missing is the tricolor and a picture of General Maurice Gamelin in the headquarters. The same is true at the Army’s Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where one instructor began his class by saying, “I don’t know why I have to teach you all this old French crap, but I do.”