GOLAN: This is the Future of War (Future War)

by FX Holden

  Henderson waved a finger at Karl. “This is what he calls ‘coordinating our responses?’”

  Karl gave a shrug of resignation. “The situation Israel finds itself in, he probably figures a press announcement counts as coordination.”

  “Get him on the line.”

  Syrian Airspace, East of the Golan Heights, May 19

  “Kot leader, Control, acknowledged, I have two IAF Heron unmanned aircraft for you, targets marked, please confirm.”

  Lieutenant Yevgeny Bondarev, of the Russian 7th Air Group, had been circling his formation of four Su-57 Felon fighters a few miles inside Syrian airspace, behind the point on the map where the Israeli, Lebanese and Syrian borders met in the northern Golan Heights.

  He checked his tactical display, seeing the sector controller had called the new contacts as Israeli drones. Easy prey. Except that he’d already fallen for that trap before in Turkey, going after a couple of surveillance drones only to find they were flying under an umbrella of stealthy F-35 Panthers. That mistake had cost him an aircraft.

  Bondarev checked his targeting display. The two unarmed Israeli drones were just where he would expect them to be, one circling at about 20,000 feet over Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, the other over Lebanon’s eastern border with Syria, no doubt monitoring traffic on the Damascus to Beirut motorway. Both were inside Lebanese airspace. Bondarev checked quickly for civilian aircraft in the sector, but saw none on his display.

  Two sides could play the stealth game.

  “Targets confirmed, Control, Kot flight will prosecute, out.” He switched channels and called up his number four. “Kot four, the first two are yours, guns only please, take your targeting from the AWACS, radar off, save your missiles.”

  “Understood, Kot leader, four committing.” His number four didn’t sound disappointed. A kill was a kill, armed or unarmed. Bondarev watched as the aircraft peeled away, his eyes flicking from screen to screen in his cockpit, checking the flight instruments in his heads-up helmet-mounted display, checking the relative positions of his three remaining wingmen, checking the sky around him for the telltale exhaust signatures that might signal an aircraft nearby that his infrared detectors hadn’t picked up.

  Then the radio had exploded to life. “Kot four. Missile! Evading…”

  Just as he’d thought. His number four had been jumped! Bondarev’s eyes had desperately scanned the threat screen in front of him, but it remained stubbornly empty.

  “Hold station, Kot flight,” he ordered his other aircraft. “Eyes on sky and sensors.”

  Helplessly, he watched the icon for his number four spin as it plummeted toward the ground, maneuvering to avoid the missile fired at it from an unknown quarter. With relief Bondarev saw his man recover.

  “Kot four, rejoin. Disengage, repeat, disengage.”

  There was strength in numbers, and they would be safest against the enemy stealth fighters if they stayed inside Syrian airspace and let the Israelis come to them. It wasn’t worth losing a man just to claim a damn surveillance drone, that was for sure.

  “Kot four rejoining,” his pilot said, panting from the exertion of dodging the enemy missile.

  The Russian aircraft patrolling over Syria hadn’t been taken by surprise. They’d seen the Israeli buildup all through the evening in response to the cyber chaos on the ground below. The Beriev A100 AWACS through which Bondarev was receiving data and interception orders had been tracking no fewer than 175 separate aircraft in the air over Israel at one point, before about thirty split north and south, headed for tankers over either Turkey or Saudi Arabia, of that he’d been in no doubt. Added to the 175 the Beriev and Syrian ground radar could ‘see’, Bondarev knew there would be at least another 50 F-35 stealth fighters they could not.

  That much was confirmed moments later as all hell broke loose on the ground beneath them and flashes of white and red began lighting up the ground as the first wave of Israeli strikes rolled in. Soon the air was filled with tracer fire from 30mm anti-air cannons, the burst of fire and smoke that marked ground-to-air missile launches all along the two-hundred-mile border with Israel. Bondarev’s tactical screen had been showing two older Syrian S-300 radar systems active in his sector, and both of them stopped transmitting at the same time, disappearing from his screen.

  Stealth aircraft, taking down the air defenses with homing anti-radiation missiles, he guessed. Now comes the real harm.

  Air war fighting tactics in the modern age were relatively simple. You sent in your most sophisticated aircraft to knock out the enemy air defenses and take down its air patrols, preferably from long range. If you succeeded, then you sent in your older, slower, ground-pounding aircraft or cruise missiles to attack ground targets. But first, you had to account for the enemy’s defenses, on the ground and in the air.

  The aircraft that had just fired at his wingman knew there were Russian fighters over the border with Syria. Their mission now would be to find and kill them. Bondarev’s mission was to make them pay for trying.

  Simple, yes. For the strategist. Not for the pilot.

  “War is simple only for Generals, Yevgeny,” his grandfather, former General of the Russian Aerospace Command, Viktor Bondarev, had once told him. “For the common soldier, or pilot, it is a confusing, messy, bloody affair and your job is not to make sense of it. Your job is to fight it.”

  He had no doubt the fighting had well and truly begun tonight. Seconds later his number two, Lieutenant Tchakov, broke the silence.

  “Kot leader, Kot two. I am picking up search radar on my passive arrays. US type AN/APG-81. AI classification, F-35. Bearing 198 degrees, altitude 25,000, range 13 miles.”

  Bondarev felt a tightening in his chest. Panthers. As he’d expected. But they couldn’t see the Israeli fighters on radar yet, just the ghostly radiation from their radars as they searched for the Russian Felons. Bitter experience over Turkey had taught Bondarev that the Panthers were likely to find him before he could lock onto them. But he did not plan to wait for that moment. His number four was still making his way back to them. He couldn’t wait for that either.

  He contacted the other two pilots. “Kot two, Kot three, arm K-77 missiles, autonomous target-seeking mode, prepare to fire down the bearing to the radar contact.” Bondarev’s eyes flicked to his weapons display, checking his own K-77 missiles were armed and ready to fire down the bearing to the Israeli search radar, which had closed to within fifteen miles. He could wait no longer.

  “Kot flight, engage and hit the deck!” Bondarev told his pilots. “Missile one, launch.” Bondarev felt the supersonic air-to-air missile drop from his weapons bay and he hauled his machine around and pointed it for the nap of the earth. As he did so, he angled his machine so he hid his engine exhaust from the Israeli fighters, slightly increasing his radar cross-section but minimizing his infrared signature.

  Three K-77 missiles speared toward the source of the Israeli radar signature. They had no specific target, but had been fired at relatively short range, in ‘target-seeking mode’. They immediately switched on their own onboard radar and optical infrared seekers and began scanning the sky ahead of them for targets.

  They very quickly found the Israeli F-35 Panther of a rather self-confident Lieutenant Tal Goren, who had just minutes ago identified one of the Russian Felons on his optical Distributed Aperture System (DAS), apparently stalking an IDF drone. He had fired on it and watched with satisfaction as it spiraled to the earth and then disappeared from his radar. He was going to chalk that up as a kill and was looking for his next when Yevgeny Bondarev’s K-77 missile slammed into the nose of his Panther and detonated before his warning receiver even had time to chime in his ears. He died with a hungry smile on his face.

  Bondarev leveled out just above the ground and checked his situational display again. The Beriev was showing possible contacts in Syrian airspace, but very few on which it had a solid lock. That was to be expected.

  “Kot flight, join on me, maintain five
-mile separation, climb to 20,000.” All four aircraft fell into formation around him, giving the flight a thirty-mile span of sky they could monitor on passive optical and infrared sensors without giving away their positions. “Sector control, Kot leader, splash one Panther. Kot flight available for tasking.”

  “Kot leader, stand by.”

  Bondarev had learned in Turkey that war came at you fast, and disappeared just as quickly. Fifteen minutes ago he’d been circling over Syria. Five minutes ago they’d claimed their first Israeli fighter. Now, five minutes later, he was circling in apparently clear skies east of Lebanon again, his radar warning receiver silent, his tactical display showing no hostile aircraft in his sector. It was a situation that couldn’t last given what he was seeing up and down the border, he knew that.

  His radio crackled. “All aircraft in the sector, we are picking up multiple hostile fast movers launching from Israeli airfields, types F-16 and F-15 – expect also stealth aircraft. Sector control out.”

  It seemed the Israelis were either impatient, or overconfident. The Israeli Air Force could field F-35 fighters, 4th-generation F-15E strike fighters, F-15 multirole fighters and a large force of older but recently upgraded F-16C/D fighters. Against this, for border patrol duties Russia was standing two squadrons of Su-57 Felons and four of unmanned Okhotnik strike fighters. In reserve deeper inside Syria were two squadrons each of 4th-generation Mig-29 and Sukhoi-30 fighter aircraft. In crude terms, it meant the Israeli force of up to 300 fighters outnumbered the Russians more than two to one. They were not odds Bondarev had enjoyed thinking about and they apparently gave the Israeli mission planners confidence.

  But Israel had never faced a modern air opponent like Russia, equipped with stealth fighters, sophisticated early warning aircraft, supported by satellite and ground radar data, and fresh from battle in the skies over Turkey. Israeli pilots were used to being able to roam with near impunity over the skies of Lebanon, or strike targets near the border with Syria without being challenged.

  Bondarev watched as the newly revitalized city of Damascus slid below his wing, lights still burning brightly even though he could see streams of tracer fire from anti-air fire lacing the sky and the occasional flash of a missile launch. As though to underscore the wrongness of the sight, there was a massive explosion on the outskirts of the city and half of the lights went out immediately. Israel was paying Syria back for the attack on its infrastructure by targeting the Syrian power grid.

  “Kot flight, echelon left, begin scan and track pilots,” he said, ordering his pilots to begin actively scanning the skies with their phased-array radars. They no longer had the luxury of total stealth if the enemy was hitting targets below them.

  “Good call, Comrade Captain,” Rap replied. He was one of many younger pilots who still enjoyed using the old Communist habit of calling fellow officers ‘tovarisch’ or comrade. In fact, it had never died out. Bondarev still referred to his grandfather as ‘Comrade General’.

  Immediately, the four Felon fighters began scanning the air and ground around them, and Bondarev’s situational display lit up with potential targets as they synchronized data with each other. The Beriev was already tracking a large number of Israeli fighters, mostly 4th-generation F-16s or F-15s, moving out from their bases across Israel.

  The fact Bondarev could see the Israeli F-16s and F-15s moving toward him did not reassure him. He did not fear them, or their missiles. He had faced upgraded Turkish F-16s in the north and found his Felon could almost always see and engage them long before it was seen by them. The problem was those bloody Panthers, and he was painfully aware that for every F-35 Panther Russia had destroyed over Turkey, it had lost three Felons. His own Felon had been one of them, and his leg still ached at night from hitting the ground after he ejected.

  On his tac screen he watched as unmanned Russian Okhotnik fighters swept in beneath him and began engaging the Israeli 4th-generation aircraft at long range. He saw a blizzard of 16 missiles spray across the border and at least six Israeli aircraft icons wink out before the small, stealthy Okhotniks turned back into Syria, unscathed.

  “Kot leader, Kot three, I have two targets on infrared. Bearing zero niner three, altitude 5,000, range 20 klicks. Refining. Synchronizing.”

  Instantly, the targets picked up by his wingman were shared with the other three Felons. At that range, and visible only on passive sensors, Bondarev’s combat AI was not able to classify the targets. Bondarev didn’t want to waste missiles on unmanned or lightly armed drones. But as his pilot worked the target, sending a tight beam of high-frequency radar energy down its bearing, the targets sprung into clarity.

  “Kot flight, Panthers low to starboard. Take your targeting from Kot three, home on data. Engage!”

  Four missiles dropped from the Felon flight’s weapons bays, tipped toward the ground and accelerated toward their targets at more than twice the speed of sound. The Israeli pilots had detected the targeting radar of Bondarev’s pilot, and reacted immediately. Two missiles fired from the Panthers down low speared up toward him. He would either have to maneuver to break their radar lock, or stay on the target and take his chances.

  Bondarev decided neither was a good option. He took over the targeting, locking up the two Panthers below with his own radar. “Kot three, I have a lock. Evade, evade, evade.”

  The Russian missiles switched from taking their targets from his number three to taking their targets from him. No doubt with relief, his pilot rolled his Felon onto its back and began diving toward the earth, forcing the rising enemy missiles to radically adjust their flight paths to try to intercept him as he fired decoy after decoy into the air behind him.

  But now the Panthers could see Bondarev too.

  “Splash one!” Rap called as their missiles speared into one of the Panthers. The second managed to get a new missile away in the direction of Bondarev before it too was…

  “Splash two!” Rap called again.

  But Yevgeny Bondarev wasn’t listening. At the first sound of the missile launch tone inside his helmet, he had pushed his throttle forward, rolled his Felon onto a wingtip and begun steering toward the missile evasion cue in his heads-up helmet display. He grunted with the effort, his flight suit inflating as it tried to keep the blood from flowing out of his head and into his boots from the brutal gravitational forces he was subjecting himself to. Spiraling downward, he desperately tried to keep the steering cue inside the circle on his visor that his AI calculated might, could – no, bloody well should – keep him safe.

  His world went black-tinged grey, his head lolled helplessly on his shoulders, his hand dropped from the flight stick…

  The moment it did, the Felon’s AI took over. Ignoring the plight of its pilot, it pulled the aircraft into an even tighter turn as the Israeli missile screamed past its wing and detonated in a cloud of decoy chaff. At the same time, it scanned for new threats, found none, and leveled the Felon out, jinking the nose gently down to force blood back to its pilot’s head as it increased the percentage of pure oxygen flowing to his mask. Bondarev had never fully lost consciousness, and he came around slowly, taking the flight stick again and guiding his machine back up to join the others at altitude.

  He checked his ordnance level. Two missiles fired, four remaining. Plus cannons, of course. Swiping across the weapons stores on the other aircraft in his flight he saw a similar picture, with the exception of his number four, who had expended one fewer missile. Good. All of his pilots alive, his aircraft still in the fight and still able to bite. Three enemy Panthers down.

  “Kot leader, Sector control, four Israeli F-15s moving toward your sector. Bearing two ten two degrees, altitude 30,000, range forty miles. Pushing targeting to you. Commit.”

  Four new red icons appeared on Bondarev’s screen. Pulling a lungful of oxygen through his mask, he dialed back the oxygen level and focused on the intercept. “Sector control, Kot leader. Targets received, Kot flight vectoring for intercept.”

  �
��Let’s get some, Kot pilots!” Rap called. The kid was irrepressible, but had grown into a reliable hand after a few harsh lessons over Turkey. Bondarev let him have his moment.

  As Bondarev laid a waypoint on his screen for his pilots to follow, he zoomed his screen out and momentarily stared, stunned, at what it was telling him. There were at least seventy Israeli aircraft being tracked over Israel and Syria. He could see only thirty Russian aircraft, manned and unmanned, opposing them. Most of the Syrian ground air defense systems were down, though a few of the more sophisticated S-400 Growler radars in central Syria were still operational. For now. They had the ability to jam and decoy attacking missiles and had apparently survived the first wave of the Israeli assault.

  He almost wished they hadn’t. They were showing him an Israeli air assault that was beyond anything he’d seen in his lifetime.

  He choked down his shock, his dismay and, yes, his fear. Focus, Yevgeny. Working the target that was the four Israeli F-15i Strike Eagle fighters, he allocated a total of eight missiles across the flight to them. He and his pilots were only six miles from optimal launch range for the K-77M, which Yevgeny and his pilots had learned with pride was a bloody good missile indeed. The F-15 pilots had only minutes to live, but were already as good as dead. Why was Israel being so reckless?

  Focus, Yevgeny. Your job is not to make sense of the war. Your job is to fight it.

  All Domain Attack: Silicon

  10 miles south-east of US demarcation line, Mediterranean Sea

  “Focus, Ehud, there has to be a way.”

  Aboard the Israeli Navy Dolphin III class submarine, Gal, the atmosphere was getting thick in several senses. For the last twelve hours, they had been unable to contact their fleet base in Eilat. They had tried the tethered sensor buoy several hours earlier, and successfully sent a status report by encrypted burst transmission, and received only a brief confirmation before they had to dive again. Heavy civilian shipping over their position south of Rhodes had forced them deeper, to a depth that exceeded the reach of the tether cable. So for their last check-in, they’d been forced to burn a buoy, sending it to the surface untethered, which meant they could get a message out but not receive. The buoy presumably sent its message, then flooded its tanks and sank to the bottom of the Med. They had no way of knowing.