Date 02/26/2120.
Nord American Bravo Headquarters
- I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that we will eventually have to use low-altitude interception, - Greensberg did not let up, - At the same time, it is quite possible to arrange everything so that the new modification will continue to remain in the shadows. We will launch the missile together with the regular ones, which, of course, will miss. And this one will hit as if by accident. Only we need to use a single-block and set the detonation as far away as possible. The Arsenal will receive a scattered rain of fragments, but this will be no better for it than an artillery strike.
In response, Buquoi, like Greensberg, who was a three-star general of the coalition forces, repeated his arguments against using the new GBA sys.580 more than once. Lowndes, distracted by the heated debate, once again immersed himself in studying the graphical model - he chose a high resolution, allowing for near real-time observation.
There were two operational planning rooms on board each headquarters. The one that was higher in status was smaller in size. This lengthy briefing was taking place in it. In the middle of the compartment-room was a diamond-shaped table, at which twelve people could sit. As a rule, there were always fewer participants, as now - there were six in total.
The main location of US Army General Lowndes, the headquarters "North American Bravo", as its name suggested, was assigned to the North American continent. There was also "North American Alpha". For South America was "America Meridionalis". The others were called "Eurasia Alpha", "Eurasia Bravo" and "Australia". All six headquarters were located on huge flying superwings - gigantic machines with a span of one thousand two hundred feet.
Belonging to the west of the Eurasian continent "Eurasia Bravo", the sixth of this series took to the air already in the years of the Pre-War. As was the case with such grandiose projects, both constellations were engaged in construction, and not just one.
Four engines, each fifteen meters in diameter, threw out a hot wind behind them and in infrared observation devices shone like two pairs of unkind eyes - this is how the heat exchangers of the second circuit emitted.
The huge flying platforms carried, first of all, large headquarters computers - computers of the highest level in this entire communications and computing hierarchy. Of course, there were also powerful nodes of all types of communication, with the help of which the computers were reliably integrated into the network, which they controlled. There were living quarters, control posts that allowed individual systems like shuttles or hypersonic bombers to be controlled directly from the headquarters, but this was done very rarely and was only intended for certain emergency situations.
Service computers with all sorts of keys, ciphers and codes were also located on board the headquarters. The American Pentagon, for example, had long since ceased to be physically tied to that huge pentagonal building - now it flew. It was located primarily, although not constantly, above the Arctic - the safest sector. Only two headquarters could be in any sector of the globe at the same time - the giants flew from one end of the world to the other.
Once every couple of months, each headquarters refueled - a plane with fuel modules moored to one of the docks. The rest of the time, both docks of each giant were also not idle - every now and then someone arrived and left. Constant movement, especially in the air, plus anti-missile defense on the ground served as a defense that was hard to imagine better.
On the monitor spread out in front of Lowndes, a network of countless rear localization event points was woven.
- Expected result, - the voice of one of those present was heard, apparently commenting on what had just appeared on the diagram.
Lowndes pointed his finger at what related to the raid and it immediately became clear that the results were zero - from the text description that appeared in the window at the bottom left, it followed that the entire consolidated strike of more than a dozen missiles went nowhere, or rather, it was scattered into a rain of thousands and thousands of fragments, partly in the mesosphere, partly on the closer approaches to the arsenal. The raiders went back to the north. Fortunately, everyone remained unharmed, which could not be said about the attack aircraft of the air force as part of the national armed forces of the Russian Federation, who made the first move. Having carried out actions within the framework of the first point, they lost three aircraft.
Now, five of the main points of the schedule were shown as having taken place. It would be more correct to say that one of them, the fifth, had taken place only partially. All this related to the schedule in its minimalistic form - in this form it had only ten points.
It all began with a provocative, or, to put it more discreetly, an existing scheme, initiating activity of NaAmF. The result of this activity was quite predictably a series of routine conventional attacks on the bases from which the attack aircraft took off.
Due to the proximity of these bases to the missile launch site with its airborne air defense, represented by heavy loitering aircraft, the damage to the bases was zero. At the same time, the geographic area of the rear localization was outlined. It was outlined for the enemy. Here the schedule branched out, assuming non-zero damage. This event was numbered as 2b. The graph branched off into 2a and 2b respectively, but then it converged again at the third point, which corresponded to the start of F-158 raids on ground targets behind enemy lines.
Then there was another branch, but event 3b had already been swept aside - the result of the raid was undoubtedly successful. This is despite the fact that the AEX mod.116 shuttle, involved in the attack on the "grotesque" anti-missile terminal, was lost. In the end, that second-generation shuttle had almost exhausted its resource.
The fourth point was the conventional response to "@enemy" and it had already taken place - this was the exit of those very arsenals to the attack line.
If "@enemy" had escalated to the use of nuclear weapons, they would have immediately left and taken the entire process to the ninth point, but fortunately they were consistent. In the seventh year of the War, this was quite predictable.
The fifth point was to reduce the Military Process of rear localization to confrontation with the very conventional response of the enemy, that is, with arsenals. This point was considered as partially realized. By increasing the resolution, the diagram of the Military Process could be transformed into a lower-level one - this is how Lowndes read it. With this higher resolution of the diagram, it became clear that point number five was in development, which implied, among other things, another F-158 raid.
The resolution could be increased even more - information flowed into the staff computers like a river, but in relation to actions like rear localization or generally ordinary events for large fronts, a person was not able to analyze something based only on this visualization provided.
Computers not only corrected the initial battle model, but also did forecasting. At higher levels than this elementary one, difficult for a person to perceive, visualization was, along with traditional maps, a completely effective tool for "non-machine", that is, human analysis and decision-making.
And now there was a discussion about the possibility of using sys.580. The first modifications of this anti-missile were similar to sys.520, but later the developers succumbed to the temptation to acquire an anti-missile capable of shooting down air targets in addition to everything else.
Initially, both sys.520 and sys.580 could shoot down a hypersonic drone with a fairly good probability, about 75 percent, provided that the meeting point with the target was on the far edge of the green zone, at a distance of one thousand eight hundred kilometers.
Of course, this was not the primary purpose of these anti-missiles, but they could do it. At the same time, the radar or radars that would need to guide the anti-missiles had to be much closer to the target's trajectory - there were restrictions on the radio horizon, but this limitation was not the only one.
If the hypersonic target was flying below 40 kilometers, then even the most precise target designation would not help - the second stage of the anti-missile, flying at suborbital speeds, was not able to maneuver and adjust its flight properly in the conditions of a denser atmosphere. Even to intercept at altitudes near that critically low level, the missile, its second stage had to return to the atmosphere in a special way, at an acute angle, reducing its speed. It was possible to do it differently, directing this same second stage in the opposite direction at a large angle, arranging a semblance of a ballistic strike. In either of these two cases, this was not quite the intended use of very expensive anti-missiles. In the case of an even greater deviation from the original purpose, with purely theoretical strikes on ground targets, the deviations would be kilometers. The same accuracy would be in an attempt to shoot down an aircraft flying in the troposphere.
Aviation could be hit if the warhead was nuclear, but such tactics looked rather dubious - here and the cost of anti-missiles and the inconsistency of the optical guidance capabilities from orbit.
In general, the prospect of teaching anti-missiles to shoot down conventional aviation looked like idle theorizing - the impulses of dreamers were quickly cooled first of all by the cost of the anti-missile, but there was also a large aviation, including arsenals. In this case, the ratio of the cost of the striking weapons and the target did not block the possibility of developing this direction.
The terminals were also armed with short-range anti-missiles, but their range did not much exceed the radii of anti-aircraft systems and no one tried to involve these types of weapons in such non-standard tasks.
And so, in 2117, the first test firing at a stratospheric-tropospheric air target was carried out. The prospect of intercepting conventional aircraft was not seriously considered - all attention was focused on countering large aircraft - from time to time they managed to conduct their raids, plunging the coasts of Europe or South America into chaos and confusion.
It was possible to target such a large target at the final section of the trajectory without the use of radar - via a visual channel. Observation points could be located both in orbit and on board the warhead itself.
The warhead, specialized for the task, was conventional. The second stage had aerodynamics that differed from other modifications - it was a hypersonic glider with more developed surfaces and stabilization in the form of petals opening in the rear, as if braking, in fact providing stability.
The device approached the target at a speed of about three thousand meters per second, and several kilometers before the meeting point, the main block was detonated and a large air target was hit by several dozen hard-alloy darts, each containing about a kilogram of explosives. There were also smaller elements in the form of rods and balls.
Another modification attacked, approaching at an even lower speed - less than two thousand meters per second. This one was guided visually, using an optical system protected by thick quartz glass, which was almost a cylinder.
Such a warhead could precisely knock out a certain element or fragment of the superwing. Preference was given to the engines and the part where the ammunition was located. The explosive charge, in addition to the high-explosive effect, scattered a cone of rods and hard-alloy balls.
The successful defeat of at least one arsenal would lead the entire local Military Process straight to the eighth point.
The sixth implied only the build-up of counteraction to the response "@enemy", that is, more and more new raids as part of the hunt for arsenals. In general, the raids were characterized by the plan itself as counteraction of a demonstrative nature. The counteraction was not demonstrative, implying the use of heavier weapons, the involvement of full-fledged air combat aviation, hypersonic vehicles, and, in a radical version, the involvement of the new GBA sys.580.
As for the new sys.580, from a purely technical point of view, it was the most optimal option. The high cost of the modified anti-missile was more than covered by the damage it inflicted on the enemy, disabling or even destroying the superwing-arsenal.
However, the technical criterion was not the only thing that influenced decision-making. The "arsenal killers" brought in and loaded into the terminals were a secret even for the officers who carried out the firing - on the monitors of their posts, these positions, containers of such missiles, were designated as "gray boxes" in which anything could be contained, for example, research missiles that participated in interceptions along with conventional ones, but went along different trajectories and executed modified interception algorithms. There could have been so-called emergency reserve missiles.
The officers could also assume that the inactive gray positions could contain prototypes. In that case, they would not have been mistaken. Indeed, new modifications were constantly appearing. But they could not know what kind of anti-missile or modification it was.
It was not surprising that the "arsenal killers", kept secret even from their officers directly involved in the launches, were to become a perfect and very discouraging surprise for the enemy.
Moreover, the demoralizing effect was not the point - once having decided on a massive raid on another coast, the "@enemy" were to completely predictably fall into a trap hidden in terminals that had previously not threatened large aircraft.
Having fallen into this trap once, the enemy would undoubtedly adjust the further tactics of using flying arsenals. There was something to adjust there - it was enough to conduct preliminary work to counteract optical reconnaissance satellites, in the ideal case for "@enemy" by completely blocking them with laser illumination. Then the ability to guide missiles would be blocked in the same way.
Coming to the conclusion that guidance is carried out using visual target designation was not only possible, but inevitable.
Thus, the effectiveness of this "ace in the hole" was one-time. This gave rise to a heated discussion about the use of new anti-missiles in the current rear localization.
Of course, after emerging from the shadow of secrecy, anti-missiles did not become useless - the task of completely blocking the orbital optical component, even over a separate sector, was no simpler than completely blocking all radar facilities in a separate theater of military operations. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of the first use, according to all calculations, should have been significantly higher. It was not surprising that it would have been wiser to save such a first appearance of new weapons for the case when the "@enemy" would undertake a large-scale raid on the American coasts - the most desirable target for them, on which they could throw not two arsenals, but much more impressive forces.
In total, the "@enemy" had fifteen super-heavy platforms against twenty-two for the Western Bloc, although the combined payload of the Asian carriers was one and a half times greater than the Western flotilla - inspired by their ancient traditions and historical examples, the "@enemy" decided not to be modest and to aim for the construction of real monsters with a wingspan of one thousand six hundred feet. They succeeded.
In general, the question of using sys.580 was just a detail of the Military Process of rear localization. The seventh point of the process model branched the scenario into two pairs of adjacent variants:
7a - the object, i.e. the arsenal or arsenals, is hit as part of demonstrative counteraction,
7b - the object is not hit as part of demonstrative counteraction,
7u - the enemy escalates as part of demonstrative counteraction,
7w - the enemy does not escalate as part of demonstrative counteraction.
The adjacency of the variants consisted in the fact that 7a coexisted with either 7u or 7w. The same applied to 7b - it had its own 7u and 7w.
In simpler terms, the enemy's escalation as part of a demonstrative counteraction looked like "@enemy", being angry that their arsenals were being shelled by raiders with enviable persistence and that the strikes that the arsenals themselves were delivering were not producing results, decided to escalate this entire local Military Process and increase pressure on the Western Bloc's defense, most likely using traditional ballistics.
The eighth point as an intermediate result of the entire localization had "five plus one" options:
8a - A full strike on the counteraction object using hypersonic weapons, gliding orbital blocks, albeit not particularly effective in the conditions of anti-missile defense, represented not only by that "grotesque" terminal that was destroyed, as well as the use of sys.580 in a radical version.
8b - A successful strike on frontline air defense as part of a demonstrative counteraction using B-1001.
8c - Successful reflection and devaluation of enemy attacks without damaging countermeasures - this was possible thanks to the powerful protection and defense of the missile launch site. To put it simply, the arsenals would be allowed to waste their ammunition and get out of there.
8d - the rear localization area suffers damage. Breakthrough of air and missile defense. De-escalation as a result. Having inflicted confirmed damage to a super-protected sector or even a "Kepler-West" rocket launch site, @enemy's generals would be satisfied with the awards and promotions guaranteed in such a case, without even thinking about consolidating the success with further escalation - this was fraught with an imbalance in the global Military Process and they could not help but understand this. The fact that they would reason and act exactly like this was suggested by all the experience of the War and even the Pre-War. Whatever you say, the protracted nature of the global confrontation had its advantages. 8e - Large losses of their attacking forces, raiders, stormtroopers and other forces. De-escalation as a result. In this case, the initiative for de-escalation was with the Western Bloc. The Military Process would be de-escalated by suspending attacks on arsenals, which for some time would be battered by their shooting against the impenetrable wall of defense. The outcome, like 8d, is negative.
But the most unfavorable was that very "plus one", that is, 8de, which was a combination of options 8d and 8e with questioning the assertion about the impenetrability of their defense.
All this together, all the options of the eighth point together with the influence of the previous points, led the events to two versions of the ninth point - in one option, the localization scenario converged, that is, the global Military Process after the localization events did not undergo structural changes relative to the state at the time of the start of localization, only its intensity changed - it decreased. This was point 9a.
Option 9b, which was highly undesirable, assumed a divergence of the global Military Process scenario, which could be a consequence of both the enemy's excessive activity and successes and the consequence of excessive damage that the enemy could suffer. Thus, it was necessary not only to repel the enemy's attacks as effectively as possible, but also to restrain oneself.