by Dale Brown
“Exactly.”
“Shit-hot!” Griffin exclaimed. “Everyone was starting to believe what the world press and the Russians were saying — that one of our guys attacked without provocation — and then when we heard that an Air Force general got canned for the attack, we thought maybe it was the truth. I knew the Russians were lying through their teeth. No surprise there, huh?” The pride was evident in Griffin’s face — he was beside himself with awe that Patrick McLanahan was sitting in front of him. “But I thought we were only supposed to be surveilling Turkmenistan, not patrolling with attack drones.”
“My rules of engagement were unclear on that point,” Patrick said uneasily, “so I erred on the side of caution and loaded my bombers up with SEAD weapons.”
“Good thing you did,” Griffin said. “So let me guess — your orders to Lackland were being cut the next day.”
“It didn’t take even that long,” Patrick admitted. “I was relieved of command before the last bomb fragments hit the ground.”
“All for doing what you were supposed to be doing — making sure the Russians weren’t trying to move against Turkmenistan’s new military forces before they could organize,” Griffin said disgustedly. “Now look at what’s happening out there: Russia is claiming that Turkmeni guerrillas are attacking their observer forces, and they’re flying so-called defensive-counterinsurgency missions against Turkmeni military forces. They’ve violated the United Nations cease-fire dozens of times in just the past few weeks, but no one is saying squat about it. Things are too hot for us to send recon aircraft like Rivet Joint and Joint STARS in to monitor their movements, so the Russians now have free rein.”
“I would like to keep a careful eye on the Russians and continue to report their movements to the Pentagon,” Patrick said.
“You’ve come to the right place, Patrick,” Griffin said proudly. “That’s what we do best. I believe we have the best and possibly the only remaining true brain trust in the intelligence field: Our guys stay here longer than in any other career field, and we maintain the only seriously long-term database of enemy threats in the world. Let’s talk about this unit, and maybe I’ll help talk you into staying — or it may convince you to take whatever might be waiting for you on the other side.”
“Fair enough.”
“The unit you’ll take command of, the Nine-sixty-sixth Information Warfare Wing, is one of several wings and centers managed by the commander of the Air Intelligence Agency, who as you know is Major General Gary Houser.” He noticed Patrick’s suddenly stony face. “You know him?”
“He was my first B-52G aircraft commander, almost twenty years ago.”
Griffin chuckled at that. “That’s funny. To listen to him, you’d think he was always an intel weenie — in fact, he trash-talks fliers, especially bomber guys, all the time. I knew he was a pilot, of course, but I didn’t know he flew B-52s. He sees the BUFF as another Cold War relic sucking money away from information warfare.” He looked carefully at Patrick again, then added, “So…maybe you’re here to check out General Houser and not just the Nine-sixty-sixth — decide whether you’re cut out to work for your old aircraft commander again?”
“Let’s not try to psychoanalyze this thing too much, okay, Tagger?”
“Yes, sir,” Griffin said, his eyes falling apologetically again. Patrick couldn’t help but like the colonel: he wasn’t afraid to express his feelings and thoughts, which made him a trustworthy person. Patrick felt very comfortable around him.
“Anyway, the Nine-sixty-sixth is probably the last vestige of the old Mighty Eighth — which, now that I think about it, might be another reason why you’re here: This is a good place to hide someone nowadays,” Griffin went on. “Like most of the Air Intelligence Agency, we’re a combination of many Air Force agencies. We were known as the Strike Information Center not long ago, and the Air Force Strategic Planning Agency before that, and we absorbed the Sixty-sixth Combat Support Group last year. When General Houser changed everything over to an ‘information warfare’ theme, the combined group became the Nine-sixty-sixth Information Warfare Wing. Our primary mission is to gather information vital to planning and directing strike missions by Eighth Air Force aircraft. Any country, any objective, any target, any weapon, any threat condition — the Nine-sixty-sixth’s job is to find a way to attack it.
“We can tap in to any intelligence or imagery source in the world, but primarily we use overhead imagery produced by Air Force assets, combined with domestic satellite assets and augmented by HUMINT field reports,” Griffin went on. “We still do a fair amount of covert ops ourselves, but General Houser thinks that’s unnecessarily dangerous and doesn’t yield proportionally higher-quality data.”
“What do you think about that?” Patrick asked.
“Well, as a former ground-pounder, I believe you always need boots on the ground to do the job right — but I’ll also admit that I’m pretty old-school,” Griffin replied. “Give me a few good trained operatives, a parachute, and a pair of binoculars and drop me anywhere on the planet, and I’ll bring back information that no satellite can get you — and if you need the target blown up, I can pull that off, too. Ask your typical satellite to do that.” He looked at Patrick, then smiled. “And if you give me Hal Briggs and a few of his shooters that you spoke about a minute ago, I can probably blow up a lot more — like what went down in Libya recently? Or inside Turkmenistan…?”
Griffin punched in further instructions, and the satellite imagery shifted to a more desolate landscape. “I might as well tell you now, Patrick — the Nine-sixty-sixth had an ongoing covert reconnaissance operation against the Russians in Turkmenistan. Your…incident…near Mary forced us to pull out.”
“I don’t suppose anyone will ever blame the Russian army for causing the problems over there in Turkmenistan, will they?” Patrick asked sarcastically.
“Sorry, sir, I didn’t mean it was your fault…” Griffin said. “Anyway, we were running covert ops out of a small air base in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. We made contact with some members of the Turkmen army, made some payoffs, traded weapons and ammo for information, that sort of thing. We left several of our Turkmeni contacts behind, and we’d sure like to pull them out.
“The border crossing and highway into Mary is sealed up tight now, and the Russians have a pretty solid air-defense setup out there now — too hot even for normal Air Force special-ops planes or helos, let alone the normal modes of transportation the Nine-sixty-sixth uses. What might the Air Battle Force have that we could use?”
“Dave Luger can insert a Battle Force team in about thirty-six hours and get one, maybe two of your guys out,” Patrick said.
“Thirty-six-hours? That’s impossible.”
“But neither the Pentagon nor Central Intelligence would ever approve it. It would have to be someone pretty damned important.”
“Ever heard of General Jalaluddin Turabi?”
“Turabi?” Patrick exclaimed. “Chief of the Turkmen army? He’s your contact?”
“You tangled with him?”
“He saved our team in the first battle against the Russians in Turkmenistan. He’s a hero.”
“He’s a better spy and guerrilla than he ever was a general,” Griffin said. “He’s been out collecting information and harassing the Russians, and at the same time recruiting soldiers for his army, using Air Intelligence Agency dollars. But when you hit the Russian SA-12 site, he scattered. We gave him up for dead. He resurfaced recently, one or two steps ahead of the Russians. We’d sure love to yank him out.”
“Then let’s do it.”
“It won’t do us any good to go into Bukhara, Patrick. We still need to go another two hundred and fifty miles to—”
“I’m not talking about Bukhara, Tagger — I’m talking about Mary.”
“Mary?” Griffin exclaimed. “How can you do that? We can’t overfly Turkmenistan….”
“We’re prohibited from overflying Turkmenistan with combat aircraft,” Patr
ick corrected him. “Transport aircraft are still allowed by peacekeeping and observer forces.”
“The Russians will spot a transport plane anywhere within two hundred miles of Mary.”
“Not our transport plane, they won’t.”
Griffin opened his mouth as if he were going to say something, then stopped and smiled. “Okay, Patrick. What is it? What do you guys have that I don’t know about?”
“A little toy we’ve been working on for a few years — an old idea we’ve just modernized. We—” Patrick stopped himself. He still couldn’t stop thinking about the Air Battle Force as “his.” “I mean, the Air Battle Force can get you in anywhere you want to go.”
“I’ll start working on getting authorizations right away.”
“Dave Luger at Battle Mountain is in charge of surveillance and observer air operations over Turkmenistan — he’ll give you permission,” Patrick said.
“I’d have to join the team, of course,” Griffin added with a sly smile.
Patrick smiled and nodded. Yep, he thought, he definitely liked this guy. “That you’ll have to take up with General Houser,” Patrick said. “But I’m sure Dave Luger can put in a by-name request for you to be part of the team. You’ll have to undergo a few days of training with the Air Battle Force ground-operations team and their equipment. But I don’t think you’ll have any problem keeping up with the team — in fact, you might be teaching them a thing or two. And you’ll be working with Hal Briggs again.”
“Outstanding. I like going to school, especially for new stuff.” Griffin was so excited that he was literally stepping from foot to foot — the man could hardly wait to get started.
“Anyway, let me continue with my orientation before the boss shows up,” Griffin went on. “Our work product is called the Strike Assessment Catalog, or what we call ‘The List.’ ” Griffin went to his desk, punched in a few commands on a computer keyboard, and a blank line on a large plasma wall display appeared. “The List used to be just that — a list, a paper catalog — but of course we’ve computerized it. Pick a target. Any target.”
Patrick thought for a moment. “Pro Player Stadium — I hate the Miami Dolphins.”
Griffin shook his head and smiled. “Good thing you didn’t say the Dallas Cowboys or Houston Texans, or you’d have a fight on your hands. Unfortunately, we haven’t done any U.S. targets — and you’re the first guy to ever ask to see the lineup for a U.S. target. How about we take a look at the latest on what the Russians are doing in Turkmenistan?”
Griffin punched instructions into the computer, and soon some satellite photos appeared.
“The western outskirts of the city of Mary,” Patrick said. “I recognize that area well.”
“We have pretty decent coverage of this area right now, maybe one photo every couple hours, so we have a good database going,” Griffin said. He entered more instructions into the computer, and several blinking yellow circles appeared. “We can overlay synthetic-aperture radar images in with the visuals, and we see several newcomers to the area. We can digitally enhance and enlarge the picture”—the photo distorted for a moment, then sharpened to show an individual vehicle—“and here we have what looks like a Russian BTR scout vehicle, with a couple dismounts standing nearby. The other targets we identified are also scouts.”
“Driving right to the outskirts of Mary,” Patrick remarked. “They’re not even bothering to hide anymore.”
“We can have the computer select the best weapon to take them out, or we can select the weapon system and the computer will recommend the best plan of attack,” Griffin went on. “But the real value in our system is not picking targets but in identifying and risk-assessing the threats. Here, I’ll ask to overlay the most recent threat depictions for the area.” A few moments later, several large red circles appeared, along with lists of weapons on the side of the image. “The number-one threat in this particular area is from mobile antiaircraft systems — in this case it’s from known twenty-three-millimeter optronically guided weapons on the scouts themselves. But this outer dashed circle represents the threat from SA-14 man-portable antiaircraft missiles that are known to be carried aboard Russian scout platoons.”
“So a planner or even a politician can ask for information on a particular target,” Patrick said. “You start feeding all this information to the brass, and they decide if the cost, risk, and complexity are worth the desired result.”
“Exactly,” Griffin said. It was unusual, Griffin thought, to hear an Air Force general thinking of political realities when planning strike missions. This could be why, he thought, the guy was still being considered to be President Thorn’s first national security adviser. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, we don’t even get past the threat analysis — some assistant deputy secretary of one of the services wants to know how we can blow up a breeder reactor in China, and we just pull up the threat analysis. He’s all hot to trot when it comes to contemplating an attack, but they go away very quickly when they learn how many assets it takes to do it. Diplomatic initiatives start to look a whole lot more appealing.”
“Tell me more about the Air Intelligence Agency and Gary Houser,” Patrick said.
“Getting right down to the meat of the matter, eh?” Griffin asked, his ever-present smile and twinkling blue eyes reappearing. “Okay, here goes:
“Quite simply, the Air Intelligence Agency is one of the most far-reaching and, in my opinion, powerful commands in the entire American military. General Houser has his fingertips on every piece of intelligence data generated in the free world. He personally directs the activities of a score of satellites, dozens of aircraft, and thousands of analysts and operatives around the world. He is also the American military’s one and only ‘quintuple hat,’ at least as a deputy: As commander of AIA, he’s also a deputy commander of intelligence for Air Combat Command, Eighth Air Force, and U.S. Strategic Command, as well as a deputy director of the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency. He is definitely Mr. Intel in the Pentagon.
“Over the years various intelligence and electronic-warfare units were shut down or consolidated, mostly because of budget cuts but also to minimize redundancy and enhance security, and Air Intelligence Agency — when it was known as the Air Force Electronic Security Agency — gained most of them. AIA controls almost all of the Air Force’s intelligence-gathering operations, but it also controls areas such as MIJL — meaconing, interception, jamming, and intrusion of enemy electronic signals — electronic counterintelligence, decoy deployment, and spycraft. Now, instead of just intercepting enemy transmissions, AIA has the capability to manipulate transmissions — change them, scramble them, or move them, in order to confuse the enemy. When computers came to the forefront, AIA began doing to computer data what we did with the electromagnetic spectrum — intercept and analyze, then manipulate and distort, while protecting and securing our own data. Other units and services started doing the same thing, but AIA had been doing it for a decade before anyone else.
“At first AIA’s work product was so timely and valuable that it began serving customers in other numbered air forces, not just the Mighty Eighth. Then it eventually replaced Air Combat Command’s intelligence stuff, and finally its information was being shared with planners in other commands. AIA has become so powerful and far-reaching that its mission has even supplanted Eighth Air Force’s mission, and it gets a lot of funding that normally goes to many other branches, command, and agencies.
“My predictions are that General Houser will easily win his third star, become commander of Eighth Air Force, and begin the transformation to an intelligence-gathering combat command. General Houser insists that Eighth Air Force will eventually become the information-warfare command and that bombers will be all but obsolete.”
“Not in my lifetime, I hope,” Patrick said.
“It’s already happening, Patrick,” Griffin said. “It won’t be long before the number of LDHDs — low-density, high-demand aircraft like spy p
lanes, radar planes, jammers, dedicated anti-air-defense attack weapons, and data-manipulation platforms — will exceed the number of strike aircraft in the inventory.
“But I think General Houser is shooting higher: If General Samson gets selected as the Air Force chief of staff, he’ll see to it that Gary Houser gets his fourth star and becomes the first commander of the new U.S. Information Warfare Command, a major unified command on a par or maybe even surpassing the theater commands in importance, tasking, and funding. It will probably combine all the intelligence-gathering assets of Strategic Command, the Air Force, the Navy, and perhaps even the National Security Agency and Strategic Reconnaissance Office into one supercommand.
“That could change the entire face of warfare as we know it. General Houser says that it takes the Air Force twenty-four hours to blow up an intercontinental-ballistic-missile launch site or a bomber base in Russia — but soon his information warriors can put that same site out of commission in twenty-four minutes by jamming, spoofing, interfering, reprogramming it, giving it a computer virus, or shutting down its power by computer command.”
“I don’t know how it’s done,” Patrick said, “but if you guys have progressed to the point where you can hack into a computer that controls a power grid or networks air-defense sites together and shuts them down with the push of a button, it would be an incredibly powerful weapon. Maybe it will replace bombers someday — but I wouldn’t recommend replacing the bomber fleet with computers or aircrews with hackers.”
“This is the new Eighth Air Force, Patrick,” Griffin said. “The bombers in Eighth Air Force are still dedicated to the nuclear mission, but I think they’ll soon shift to Twelfth Air Force along with all the other nonnuclear attack units.
“Even Strategic Command is supporting planning and targeting for nonnuclear conflicts, using all their staff and computers that were originally dedicated to planning World War III against Russia and China to plan missions in every area in the world where any level of conflict could break out. Nuclear warfighting is all but dead. You have to speak in terms of ‘network-centric warfare’ and ‘low-density conflict.’ Your Air Battle Force sounds like the kind of thing Houser wants to transform Eighth Air Force into, but he wants the shooters to support intel, not the other way around.”