This week's post is the second of five parts of a fictional
narrative tracing out a scenario of American imperial defeat and collapse. As
already mentioned, this is scenario rather than prophecy—an outline of what could
happen rather than a prediction of what will happen, and thus an exploration of
some of the major vulnerabilities in America’s faltering empire. It may also be
worth saying that no real aircraft carriers were harmed in the making of this
narrative.
*********
The missiles and fighter-bombers launched from the fleet
were the second wave of the American assault, not the first. Attack helicopters
from Kenyan bases took off a few minutes later, but went in ahead to target
Tanzania’s air defenses. Their timing
was precise; by the time the first US jets crossed into Tanzanian airspace, the
four military radar stations that anchored the northern end of Tanzania’s air
defense system were smoking rubble. Real-time satellite images brought news of
the successful strike to Admiral Deckmann and his staff aboard the USS George
Washington, and to President Weed and his advisers in the situation room in the
White House.
Those images were on the screens when the whole US military
satellite system suddenly went dark.
In US bases around the world, baffled technicians tried to
reconnect with the satellite network, only to find that there was no network
with which to reconnect. NORAD reported
that all the satellites were still in their orbits and showed every sign of still
being operational, but none would respond to signals from ground stations or
send data back down. Analysis quickly ruled out a technical failure, which left
only one option; the president’s national security adviser glanced up from a
hurriedly compiled briefing paper outlining that one option, to find the
Secretary of Defense regarding her with a level gaze. She turned away sharply
and snapped an order to one of her aides.
Analysts long before the war had noted China’s intense
interest in antisatellite technology.
After the war was over, however, it turned out that what took out the US
satellite system was not advanced technology but old-fashioned espionage. Chinese agents more than a decade earlier had
managed to infiltrate the National Reconnaissance Office, the branch of the US
intelligence community that managed the nation’s spy satellites, and data
obtained by those agents enabled Chinese computer scientists to hack into the
electronic system that controlled US military satellites in orbit and shut the
whole network down, robbing US units around the world of their communications
and reconnaissance capabilities. Within
minutes, cyberwarfare teams were at work, but it took them most of a day to get
a first trickle of data coming in, and more than a week to get all the
satellites fully operational again—and that was time the US invasion force no
longer had.
The Chinese technicians who had slipped into Tanzania in the
months before the war had strict orders that no action was to be taken under
any circumstances until the US began active hostilities. The terse radio
message announcing the destruction of the northern radar stations removed that
factor. The crews knew that they might
only have minutes before American bombs began falling on them. Their mission was precisely defined by the
logic of “use it or lose it,” and so everything that had arrived in the
shipping containers went into the air in well under ten minutes.
Survivors’ accounts of what happened aboard the naval task
force over the next hour are confused and in places contradictory, but
apparently shipboard radars detected nearly a thousand targets suddenly
airborne on the southwestern horizon. At least half of those were false echoes,
electronic decoys produced by Chinese “spoofing” technology, and many of the
remainder were physical decoys meant to draw fire away from the supersonic
cruise missiles that constituted the real attack. Even by the most conservative estimates,
though, there were at least 200 of the latter.
The task force had some of the best antimissile defenses in the world,
but naval strategists had determined decades beforehand that a sufficiently
massive attack could be sure of getting through.
Those cold mathematics worked themselves out in a chaos of
explosions, burning fuel, floating debris, and dead and dying sailors and
soldiers. Of forty-one ships in the task
force, three made it safely to harbor in Mombasa, and eight more—including one
of the troopships—were able, despite damage, to fight their way to the Kenyan
coast and get surviving crews and passengers ashore. The others were left shattered and burning,
or went to the bottom. The fate of the
three carriers was typical: the John F. Kennedy took three cruise missiles in
close succession and sank with nearly all hands; the Ronald Reagan was hit by
two, caught fire, and was abandoned by its crew; the George Washington was hit
astern by one, staggered in toward the coast despite crippling damage to its
steering systems, and ran onto a sandbar near the Kenyan shore. A Japanese news photographer on assignment
snapped a picture of the abandoned ship—broken, ghostlike, the deck tilted
nearly into the surf on one side—and that photograph, splashed over the media
worldwide in the following days, became for many people the definitive image of
the East African War.
* * *
Long before the George Washington reached its final resting
place in the sands off Kilindini, US forces on the scene were doing their best
to respond. The loss of satellite
intelligence did not prevent the launching points for the cruise missile attack
from being spotted from the air by drones, and US fighters hurtled south to
hammer them; only the orders that scattered each of the Chinese crews the
moment their last cruise missile went up kept them from suffering horrific
casualties, and as it was, more than a thousand Tanzanian civilians were
killed. More than half the planes on the
three carriers had taken off before the carriers were put out of action, furthermore,
and those that made it safely to Kenyan territory were refueled and put to use
immediately, carrying out punishing strikes against Tanzanian military and
political targets.
Back in Washington DC, President Weed ordered a media
blackout on the disaster. His press
secretary announced merely that the task force had been attacked by missiles,
and that details would be coming later.
That night, meeting with his advisers and the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, he reviewed what was known about the fate of the task force,
frowned, and muttered an expletive.
“They bloodied our nose, no question,” he said. “If we cave in, though,
we’re screwed. We’ve got to reinforce
the troops in Kenya and proceed with the operation. I want a plan on my desk
first thing tomorrow.”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that year was Admiral
Roland Waite, a patrician New Englander with Navy ties going back to an
ancestor who sailed with John Paul Jones. “You’ll have it, sir,” he said. “If I may suggest, though—”
The president motioned for him to continue.
“A plan for extracting our forces, sir. Just in case.”
“We can’t.” The
president all at once looked older than his sixty years. “If we cave in, we’re screwed. The whole
country is screwed.”
The plan was on the president’s desk at 6 am: a sketchy but
viable draft of an airlift operation, using most of the Pentagon’s available
air transport capacity to get troops and supplies from Europe and the Persian
Gulf to Kenya in a hurry. By the time it
reached the Oval Office, though, the unfolding situation had already rendered
it hopelessly obsolete.
* * *
The planes took off from airbases in Central Asia as soon as
word came that the enemy satellite network was disabled. A flurry of secret diplomacy in the months
before the war had cleared flight paths through Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and
Iran, and positioned tankers for in-flight refueling in the latter country;
Iranian civilians waved and cheered as the planes roared by, guessing their
destination. As ships burned and sank
off the Kenyan coast, six Chinese fighter wings were on their way to Tanzania,
with more to follow.
Their route was not quite direct, since Tanzania was under
heavy air attack by the Americans and thus could provide no safe
airfields. Instead, an airbase in the
Chinese client state of South Sudan served as a final staging area. More shipping containers had ended up there,
and some of the tight-lipped young men as well.
Fresh pilots climbed aboard the fighters, fuel tanks were topped up,
aircrews loaded and armed weapons, and the first wave of the air counterattack
hurtled southeast into Kenyan airspace. American radar crews on the ground
misidentified them at first as friendly craft, delaying an effective response
for a few minutes. The moment the
newcomers began attack runs on one of the American airbases, though, that
mistake was cleared up, and US fighters already in the air pounced on the
Chinese fighters while those on the ground roared up to join the fight.
An hour into the air battle, the American commanders on the
scene and in the Persian Gulf were clear on three things. The first was that
the planes and their pilots were Chinese, even though every plane had had the
red star of the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force carefully painted over with
the green roundel and white torch of the Tanzanian Air Force. The second was that, at least at the moment,
the Chinese had the advantage of numbers.
That was less of a problem than it might have been, since the US had
plenty of fighter wings available to join the conflict, and four more were
already being shifted to Persian Gulf airfields within striking distance of the
combat zone.
The third realization, though, was the troubling one: the
Chinese pilots were at least as good as their American counterparts, and their
planes were better. Both US fighter
wings in Kenya flew the F-35 Lightning II, the much ballyhooed Joint Strike
Fighter, which had been designed to fill every possible fighter role in the
NATO air services. That overambitious goal meant that too many compromises had
been packed into one airframe, and the result was a plane that was not well
suited to any of its assigned missions.
The Chinese J-20s had no such drawbacks; faster and more heavily armed
than the F-35s, they had a single role as a long-range air superiority fighter
and they carried it out with aplomb. By
the end of the first day, though both sides had been bloodied, US losses were
nearly half again those of the Chinese force.
News of the arrival of the Chinese fighters forced the plans
for resupplying the four US divisions in Kenya by air into indefinite
hold. “Until we have air superiority
back,” the Secretary of Defense explained to Weed and the other members of the
team, “there are hard limits to what we can do. Even if we send them with
fighter cover, the big transports are sitting ducks for their air-to-air
missiles.”
The president nodded. “How soon can we expect to retake
control of the air?”
“Within a week, if everything goes well. I’ve got four fighter wings on the way in
tomorrow, and four more following them in two days.”
“What about the airbases in South Sudan?” the president’s
national security adviser asked. “Those
should get hit, hard.”
“That would mean,” the Secretary said, picking his words
carefully, “widening the war to include another Chinese ally. Maybe more than one, if the other African
countries in their camp get involved.”
“They’re already in,” President Weed growled. “Diego
Garcia’s in range; I want a B-52 strike on the South Sudan bases as soon as
possible.”
* * *
Two days later, a mob sacked the US Embassy in South
Sudan. The staff barely escaped by
helicopter from the roof. The B-52 raids
the night before had cratered one of the two Chinese airbases, but also
flattened two nearby villages and killed several hundred people. Across Africa, Chinese allies took turns
denouncing America’s actions in East Africa and threatening war against Kenya,
while the few remaining American allies lay low.
The denunciations were for show. The real decision had been made more than
three months earlier, as Tanzanian and Chinese diplomats made secret visits to
half a dozen Chinese-allied nations in Africa, explaining what America was
about to do and why it mattered. The
prospect of a Chinese military response made a difference this time; so did
China’s offer to cover the costs of the plan being proposed; so did the cold
awareness, inescapable as one head of state after another stared at maps and
briefing papers, that if the Americans overwhelmed Tanzania, any of China’s
other African allies might be next. One
after another, they signed onto the plan, and began an indirect process of
troop movements.
As news media flashed word of the South Sudan riots around
the world, accordingly, the ambassador from Tanzania presented himself at the
Kenyan presidential palace to deliver a note.
Despite the studied courtesies with which it was delivered, the note was
blunt. Since Kenya had allowed a hostile power to use its territory and
airspace to attack Tanzania, it stated, the Tanzanian government was declaring
war on Kenya—and over the next few hours, six other African nations did the
same.
Three hours before dawn the next morning, an artillery
bombardment silenced the animal and bird sounds of the coastal forest on the
Tanzania-Kenya border, some fifty miles south of Mombasa. Tanzanian troops surged over the border at
first light, backed by the first contingents from the other members of the
Chinese-supported coalition and by a wave of Chinese ground-attack
aircraft. By day’s end, forward scouts
riding the armed light trucks that African armies call “technicals” were
halfway to Mombasa, Kenya’s second city and largest port.
That night, Kenyan and American military officials held a
hastily called meeting in Nairobi, chaired by the Kenyan president. The
original American plan of action was fit only for the shredders, everyone
recognized that, and the issue at stake now was not the liberation of Tanzania
but the survival of the US-friendly Kenyan government. The next morning, after hurried consultations
with Washington via the secure diplomatic line from the US embassy, the four
American divisions left their bases and headed toward Mombasa, running up
against Coalition forces two days later.
Under normal circumstances, the US forces would likely have
seized the advantage and the victory, but these were not normal
circumstances. The air war continued,
but the Chinese edge was widening; the US air bases in Kenya had been bombed
repeatedly, and efforts to resupply them by air even at a minimal level were
running into increasingly fierce Chinese fighter attacks. Furthemore, the four US divisions had only
part of their normal equipment—the rest was at the bottom of the Indian
Ocean—and the troops they were facing included seasoned veterans of some of
Africa’s most bitter wars.
The major issue, however, was air superiority. The US military had made air superiority so
central to its military doctrine, and had achieved it so consistently in past
campaigns, that nobody had any clear idea how to fight and win a battle without
it. Generals who were used to aerial
reconnaissance and lieutenants who were used to being able to call in air
strikes were both left floundering when these and many other mainstays of the
American way of combat were no longer available. As the Chinese pressed their control of the
air further and ferried in more ground-attack aircraft, US forces had to face
the unfamiliar threat of air strikes, and US generals had to cope with the fact
that it was their movements that were being spotted from the air. Finally,
there was the impact on morale: troops who had been taught nearly from their
first days in boot camp that air superiority guaranteed victory were unprepared
to fight against an enemy that had taken air superiority away from them.
Which of the many factors decided the Battle of Mombasa
remains an issue for military historians. Still, the results were not in
doubt. After a week of hard fighting,
Coalition forces took Mombasa and began to advance up the main highway toward
Nairobi, while the battered US divisions and their Kenyan allies retreated
before them. The Kenyan president fled
to Kisumu, in the far west of the country, with his mistress and his cabinet.
Jets still screamed south from US bases in the Persian Gulf to tangle with
Chinese fighters based in half a dozen African countries, and land-based cruise
missiles and B-52s from Diego Garcia pounded anything that looked vaguely like
a military target, but it was hard for anyone to miss the fact that the US was
losing the war.
****************
End of the World of the Week #43
Speaking of cod theories involving lots of ice—the theme of
last week’s failed apocalypse—any collection of predicted cataclysms that never
quite managed to happen would be incomplete without a reference to the
inimitable Hans Hörbiger and
his Welteislehre or World Ice Theory. Hörbiger was a brilliant Austrian engineer whose
mechanical inventions made him a well-earned fortune, but like many another
engineer, his ability to figure out ingenious mechanical devices did not
translate into a capacity for critical analysis of his own scientific theories.
The World Ice Theory is among the more complex of
alternative cosmologies, and no attempt will be made here to summarize it in
any detail. The important thing to have in mind, for our purposes, is that
space is full of ice. The Milky Way isn’t a galaxy full of stars, it’s a vast
cloud of chunks of ice, and they’re all spiralling slowly inwards...toward us.
The Moon is one of the blocks of ice. It’s not the first
Moon the Earth has had, either. Every so often the Earth’s gravity captures a
big chunk of ice, which then proceeds to spiral inwards until it finally
disintegrates and bombards the Earth with ice-meteors, causing vast destruction
followed by equally vast floods. That’s what killed the dinosaurs, and the most
recent moon of ice broke up recently enough that myths and legends are full of
garbled references to the cataclysm. What’s more, the current Moon is very
close, and someday soon it will break up in its turn, obliterating our
civilization.
Hörbiger’s
theory first saw print in his book Glazial-Cosmogonie in
1913, and between the two world wars it was extremely popular. It still retains
a following today, even though astronauts have been on the Moon and found that
it was a ball of rock, not ice.
—for more failed end time prophecies, see my book Apocalypse
Not
