EPThttp://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=404598
Like all such war activities, the final stretch started as boring, straight, and level flight. Colonel Wu Taifu ordered his J-20s to run passive, their ESMs and EO suites sniffing the air like rabid bloodhounds. Ahead of the main formation, he spread his four recon planes out at five nautical-mile intervals, and had them alternately turn their LPIs on and off in every thirty seconds. Other fighters and bombers stayed silent, only exchanging unidirectional, millimeter-wave pencil-beams. The sky lit up on Taifu's datascreen; his aircraft had each become peer-to-peer nodes in a wireless data network, linked together with a common radar picture with the AESA-sweeping vanguard. As an added bonus, his crews could now chat through packet-linked-voice with little fear of the transmissions being intercepted. Taifu could sense the calm through the chatter and the dots on his screen; each squadron and flight straight and level as they approached the GPS release point designated in the ATO. 600 nautical miles to the launch point, speed 550 knots and holding; his regiment assessed civil aircraft chatter. No inkling of what was coming, but plenty of nervous talk about China and Japan: the Taiwan gambit had worked.
At 550 nautical miles out, two recon fighters peeled off, climbed 1000 meters, and split north and south until they were each twenty nautical miles from the main formation, acting as sentries for the regiment. Three minutes later, an Electronic Warfare Officer aboard one of the recon jets began chirping. "Picking up three - no, make that four - high-powered radar signals, relative bearing zero-three-eight, zero-one-seven, three-five-four, and three-five-one. Computer tells me they're magic carpets," he said, using the slang for an airborne S-band radar. "We'll hit max detection range in about five, maybe six minutes. What do you want us to do, boss?"
"They're probably AEW drones. Funny, the ATO only mentioned one being on airborne alert. Anyhow, they're not worth engaging on our way in, unless we want to tell the Raptors on CAP exactly where we are." Taifu slowed down his words, remembered half-awake classified lectures on detection ranges for specific aircraft models against anticipated enemy radars, then began to think out loud on while forgetting to turn off his mike, a bad habit that had nearly cost him his promotion to captain years ago. "We can probably slip through the radar net. But the bombers won't. On the flip side, they've got the fuel for a detour, but we don't." Then he formed an idea. "Captain Shu," he said, "how close are we to the Tokyo-Sydney flight corridor?"
Taifu heard Shu tapping on the flatscreen. "About three-hundred fifty nautical miles at relative bearing three-oh-two, sir."
"How close does that corridor run to Guam?"
"Very close - about fifty nautical miles, sir."
"Any other corridors around them?"
"Yes - Nagoya, Nagano, Niigata, and Yokohama feed into the Tokyo corridor, but Osaka has a separate track."
"Good, feed the route coordinates to everyone else." Taifu then pinged his lead recon EWO. "One last check - Darkstar One, would a beeline vector from here to those routes risk detection from the AEWs?"
"Nope."
"Alright, H-10s - you listening?" Taifu heard assorted grunts and acknowledgments from the bomber pilots. "Amendment to combat instructions. Bomber flights one and two - head for the Tokyo-Sydney corridor as fast as you can - get some slack on the clock. Then turn into the corridor, go to nine thousand meters of altitude and five-hundred-sixty knots airspeed, and bunch up into two close groupings of four aircraft each. You'll look exactly like a pair of 787s." He paused, waited for them to acknowledge receipt, then continued. "Bomber flight three, you do the same as one and two, but for Osaka-Sydney. Try to all hit your launch points around 1550 - work the math out yourselves on relative airspeed through the flight. Don't forget to blast your IFFs on a civilian frequency if questioned. When you get to the two-hundred-fifty-knot marker, drop to wavetop height, throttle up those burners, and execute your original attack pattern - don't wait for a regimental signal. Copy?"
Taifu heard muffled grunts of assent, then turned his attention to the fighters. "Alright, Flight Six - you guys escort bomber flights one and two and subordinate your command to the H-10 squadron leader. Be prepared to shoot your way in if you hit trouble, but remember that before the bombs start hitting, the Americans will probably only shoot you after a visual ID - so don't worry too hard about a BVR engagement. Once you hit the three-twenty-marker, detach and execute your original attack mission. Do you copy?" Multiple verbal nods answered.
Twelve bombers and four fighters rolled off to join dozens of passenger jets flying between the largest cities of Japan and Australia. Taifu now addressed the recon craft. "Okay, Darkstar Three, you follow the bomber group and be prepared to send a loud ping if they run into trouble, but otherwise keep your comms and sensors silent."
"Understood."
The orders complete, Taifu pursed his lips into a silent frown. He had just broken the laws of war. But there was no way around it, and at the end of the day, Taifu was willing to see his mission through, no matter the cost.
February 6th, 2023, 3:09PM UTC+8
BREAKING - United States reiterates commitment to US-Japan Security Treaty, urges China to back down from ultimatum
February 6th, 2023, 3:26PM UTC+8
BREAKING - China warns 'other actors' not to intervene
February 6th, 2023, 3:45PM UTC+8
BREAKING - CHINA DECLARES WAR ON JAPAN
The next forty minutes passed uneventfully, with nary a peep from his bomber grouping. Inwardly, Taifu breathed a sigh of relief. At least his war crime would not be punished today.
At two hundred nautical miles out, the J-20 fighter squadrons engaged afterburners and started climbing to off-axis launch points. Meanwhile, hundreds of nautical miles away, the H-10s broke their groupings and dove to sea level until they neared the two-hundred-nautical-mile marker, then throttled up the engines to full afterburner and pitched noses up to twenty degrees, holding position at 0.8Gs. Ready signals began zipping into Taifu's headset from his J-20 weapon systems officers, petering out after around thirty seconds. The colonel checked his watch. It was 1548 - 3:48PM in Beijing; 1:48PM in Guam; 2:48AM in Washington. Colonel Wu Taifu took a deep breath.
"River Snake is a go."
Immediately, Taifu felt Captain Shu slap a button attached to the back of Taifu's seat, then heard the weapon bay doors open. His own fighter and those around him began ripple-releasing eight 100kg smart bombs at one-per-second. Across the ocean, each H-10 bomber fired six CJ-10As from rotary launchers, silvery missiles that fanned out at wavetop height into an inverted V shape, the jaws of which would soon snap shut on Guam. Lastly, each J-20 flight leader popped a single decoy dispenser after rolling a few degrees to the right. Doors closed, the fighters and bombers barrel-rolled through a tight Immelman turn to escape, presenting any missiles launched from Guam with a difficult supersonic tail-chase. As soon as they crossed the sound barrier, forty-eight white-knuckled pilots pulled throttles back to military power to close the afterburners and lower the radar signature, then vectored to home plate.
The nine decoy dispensers fell fifteen hundred meters and dropped three aluminum petals apiece, each of which then broke into forty-eight radar-reflecting decoys. This, plus the chaff packed throughout the canister, screened the attacking bombs, missiles, and retreating regiment. Nearly two hundred eighty glide bombs and seventy-two CJ-10A missiles were now a little over ten minutes from impact.
On Guam, it was a beautiful, clear, Monday. Four Engagement Control Station vans housing three MIM-104 PAC-4 Patriot teams were all that remained between Taifu and his mission. The Patriot teams napped at their desks, enjoying the light sea breeze; they were recovering from staying up all night to watch Super Bowl LVII live.
Station watch fell to the youngest member of Team Two, Lieutenant Rod Myles, and a particulary grouchy and hungover captain who had just lost a Super Bowl bet. The live broadcast had started at three in the morning, local time; most of the other men snored in their standard-issue padded chairs. A message buzzered in from Base HQ, pinged on the control computer's desktop. Myles clicked it. "Uh... captain, you better take a look at this. Says here that China just wardec'd Japan."
The captain lifted his neck from the back of a chair; his voice was incredulous. "What?"
"Uh. Yeah, uhm. China just declared war on Japan - does that mean they're at war with us now, too?"
The captain jerked his body and scooted over, leaning so close Myles could smell the Sam Adams still on his breath. "Holy shit. Holy fuckin' shit, yeah, we're definitely at war." The captain pointed at a bolded sentence three paragraphs down. "Says here we are to treat all incoming UIDs as hostile - wait a sec, what about those three UID'd airliners you picked up twenty minutes ago?"
Myles froze. "I... lemme see..." He began asking the computer questions to which his gut already knew the answers.
Track 6717 POSI/VELO/HEAD
- UNKNOWN -
Track 6720 POSI/VELO/HEAD
- UNKNOWN -
Track 6726 POSI/VELO/HEAD
- UNKNOWN -
Lieutenant Myles and the captain looked at each other, faces blanched. Normally, both would be thinking about a negative mark on a performance review for losing track of three targets, but now, peacetime worries were the last of their concerns. From somewhere very close, a klaxon began to blare.
Myles dashed over to the fire control radar, now outlined in stark red hash marks. What he saw first confounded, and then horrified him – thirty-six radar symbols bloomed across the screen in a broad arc from northwest to due north, then, from each symbol, a cloud expanded with numbers too large to count – all inbound for Guam.
Some blips began heading directly for Andersen AFB. Others went for Guam International Airport, and a third set streaked towards the Apra Naval Complex. The lieutenant's stomach flip-flopped as he realized the enormity of what was happening. “This is a stealth attack – and those incomings are probably bombs.”
Thirty-six of the symbols briefly vanished as the J-20 weapons bay doors closed, then reappeared as a faint, rapidly retreating group of blips. Finally, they winked out one-by-one off the screen; over seventy more blips replaced them, streaking in at low altitude in a broad swathe and covering a full sixty degrees of the compass on either side of due north. "And they brought cruise missiles too. Oh fuck me."
The CJ-10A missiles - each of which had sacrificed over half its range to carry a heavier warhead at a higher terminal velocity - headed for their GPS designated targets - C3 centers, maintenance facilities, runways, munitions storage and the massive underground fuel storage tanks - at nearly three times the speed of sound. Most carried a half-ton of high explosives, enough to flatten any building in an eighty-meter radius or slice a smaller naval vessel in half. Others were loaded with tandem charges to shatter concrete runways or collapse command bunkers. A final few would scatter forth hundreds of delayed-fuse submunitions over damaged runways, roads, and buildings - each submunition an anti-vehicle or anti-personnel mine on a proximity fuse or timed to go off minutes, hours, or even days after the attack, in order to hamper the progress of repair crews.
The smaller 100 kg hitters had an even more interesting task. As they approached their GPS-designated search box, their electro-optical seekers scanned the tarmac for targets, selecting high-value shapes like B-2As, F-22As, and F-35s over lesser value targets like F/A-18s and B-52s. They would not make and lock-in their aim-point selection until the final few seconds of flight. If they couldn't find a parked aircraft target, they headed for a building.
Some two-hundred-eighty smart bombs and seventy-two cruise missiles were incoming, screened by over four hundred ballistically, and in radar-signature, near-identical, decoys.
Lieutenant Myles decided he was most definitely not having a good day. From somewhere behind him, the captain was screaming curses at the rest of the crew, rousing them from a drunken stupor. The lieutenant's voice finally unfroze and ordered the battery “weapons free” to engage as many incomings as possible. The Patriot launchers had up to forty-eight ready shots loaded, but with two-hundred-eighty bombs, seventy-two missiles, and four-hundred-thirty-two decoys incoming, his, and the Patriot systems’ tasks, were impossible. The Patriot missiles scanned ahead and each detected and reported a plethora of returns using its ‘Track-Via-Missile’, but could not figure out which was a bomb and which was a decoy. After all rounds fired, about two-hundred-twenty bombs and all the cruise missiles were still inbound, and the Patriot locker sat empty.
At Andersen AFB, two B-2s and twenty-four F-22As had just returned from a 10:00AM strike on the Farallon de Medinilla Island bombing range. Ground crews were in the middle of refuelling, repairing and re-arming for the next mission at 4:00PM. Each aircraft sat in the open and several dozen electro-optical seekers found them in their designated kill box.
The ground crew watched, horrified, as the smart bombs aimed near vertically into the centroid of each aircraft, striking with ballet-like precision; the entire tarmac area instantly erupted in choreographed fountains of orange-white hellfire, enhanced by sympathetic explosions of avgas, tanker trucks and weapon carriages. None of the ground crew made it out alive. The remaining bombs and CJ-10As slammed into other parked airplanes, fuel bunkers, and C3 buildings, killing most of the wing commanders, their pilots, and their staff.
At Guam International, it was much the same. Passengers in the civilian terminal watched, struck still with awe, as a gaggle of bombs dove into distant munitions storage sheds, setting off a daisy-chain of flashes along the horizon. Then, their attention was diverted by several tandem-charged CJ-10As beelining towards four concrete hangars on the far side of the main runway; the four hangars collapsed, crushing two more B-2 bombers and a squadron of AEW drones beneath tons of rubble. Finally, the entire terminal building shook and filled with flying glass, as a squat brick box with AT&T logos across the street was hit; nine out of nine Trans-Pacific fiber-optic repeaters were in the basement. Communications to Washington instantly went dead.
The Apra Harbor Naval Complex was assigned a few dozen missiles as well. HUMINT earlier that morning identified two nuclear submarines, a destroyer, and two frigates alongside the piers. Each received a direct hit; the destroyer and submarines began to sink; the frigates simply broke in two. Several other rounds turned the massive avgas and fuel oil offloading facilities into a trio of matching two-hundred-meter-wide funeral pyres. One last cruise missile knifed straight into a trio of balloon-shaped, pressurized tanks by the main natural-gas-fired power plant, setting off a hundred-meter-wide fireball and leveling every building in an eight-hundred-meter radius, which included the plant, a nearby natgas desalinization plant, and the island's final fuel storage facility.
Taifu noted his watch. It was 3:59 PM. The entire process, start to finish, had taken just over ten minutes. Taifu's bombers found the rest of the regiment, and at 4:11PM, he sent a pair of J-20R reconnaissance fighters over Guam from southeast to northwest, with cameras and synthetic aperture radars at max power for a damage assessment. The cameras were hampered by massive quantities of burning fuel and aluminium ash in the air, but the radars peered through and got the detail of the shapes on the ground. Taifu flipped through the pictures on the flight home. He'd met all his attack objectives, and then some. Sixty-five percent of the 5th-gen aircraft were inoperable or destroyed. All of the runways were cut into at least three pieces. Seventy percent of the support facilities were in flames, including all three of the main POL depots, and over ninety percent of all C3 and comms buildings were hit.
Colonel Wu Taifu fired a burst transmission towards a comms satellite, listened to the replies from other strike forces trickle in. All across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Americans were getting hit - hard. Behind him, Captain Shu made a joke - McDonald's for lunch, sushi for dinner - but now it was the Taifu's turn to brood, a vague sense of nausea nibbling away at his neck. He ordered his regiment to climb to cruise altitude, maintain the datanet and recon sentries, and prepare for contact en route to home base.
War had begun.
Read part 25 here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=408029
