In 2008, bankrupt Washington Mutual’s $300 billion in assets sold for just $2 billion. But that was back in the day when other banks had money.
And no one on Earth was doing more to prepare for the Worst Case Scenario than Jackson. While Palin embraced denial, Jackson spent billions of his own money trying to relocate, shelter, and feed 100 million Democratic voters. Which made Cooper’s accusation of being money hungry intolerable.
“Dude, your wife’s been piggybacking on my trades since Halloween. She has made mad money. She even convinced your campaign treasurer to short sell, so who the fuck are you to bitch to me about money?”
That Cooper didn’t give a fuck was written all across his face.
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“You ungrateful fuck! How much did I make you? I helped you out-fundraise Obama and Hillary in 2011. Even your wife made millions off my plays.”
Cooper leaped out of his seat to get into Jackson’s face. They stood flaring nose to flaring nose.
“That has nothing to do with it!”
“Bullshit!” Jackson warned, resisting the urge to kick Cooper’s ass. The ingratitude was infuriating.
Jackson helped raise hundreds of millions in early, hard money donations for Democrats from the defense and aerospace industries by working with a new defense-funded think tank, the George Washington Institute. Several hundred retired generals and admirals formally founded the think tank right after the 2008 elections and several instantly became TV pundits, serving different networks, but all expressing their consensus opinions on foreign policy and national security. Their official mission was to design a next generation military that was not just unchallenged, but unchallenge-able by making it as capable and as invulnerable as possible. Their unofficial mission was to prevent any future Iraqs, which they regarded as a disaster for the military, the economy, and for America. They regarded the occupation of Iraq as the most expensive foreign policy blunder in American history.
They hit the political talk shows, wrote articles, gave speeches and interviews, and pushed their book, website, and video of their vision of a next-generation military. Showing worked better than telling. Facts tell, but stories sell. The illustrated book was okay, but the website and videos that compared their new military with the old one really brought the point home. Backed by a massive media campaign funded by the defense industry, the Institute was selling a compelling line of products. Which, apparently, is what it takes to sell taxpayers on trillions in new weapon systems.
The retired generals and the defense industry CEOs co-opted Jackson early because he had the most advanced ultracapacitors, organic solar, and amorphous metal factories. They literally could not make what they wanted without him.
Jackson’s slice of the pie was worth billions, so he convinced Democratic party leaders to publicly praise it. Daniel Cooper, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in particular, received thousands of maxed out campaign contributions worth millions from the defense industry, while millions more poured into the DNC, DSCC, and DCCC, which can receive unlimited soft money.
Unfortunately, this extensive public cheerleading by leading Democrats made Republicans reject it out-of-hand, like a father to a daughter’s prom date. Industry lobbyists tried to get the GOP back on board, but Palin refused to enrich the Democrat she rightly detested the most.
Defense giants had spent years on research and development, but could not translate them into actual contracts because the occupation of Iraq drained the DOD’s budget. So they spent the entire Bush term churning out products from the 80’s while researching new ones. Even the “cutting edge” $143 million F-22 Raptor Fighter, which cost $44,000 an hour to fly, was designed 26 years ago.
The think tank was presided by Major General Bob “Bulldog” Barker, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs that Rumsfeld drove out a month before 9/11. Bush tainted everything he touched, but one way or another, America would have a new president in 2009.
The generals wanted to influence policy because Iraq and Afghanistan proved that even the best military can lose if its commander-in-chief is an idiot. A superior strategy can defeat superior technology. A great military with a bad commander can lose to a bad military with a great commander. Good armies win battles, but good generals win wars. Tactics win battles, but strategy wins wars. And what America needed were strategic weapons. Constantinople survived centuries of Muslim attacks until the Turks defeated it with just 70 long range artillery pieces. Constantinople, the valuable gateway from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and where Europe meets Asia, is still part of Turkey several centuries later.
What could be a strategic weapon today?
The most radical change that the Institute advocated actually spent years on the DOD’s Militarily Critical Technologies List: amorphous metal. First discovered in the 1950s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s structural amorphous metals program has poured billions in university grants and company start-ups. Since 1998, companies like LiquidMetal used amorphous metal to make expensive golf clubs, tennis rackets, and knives that never needed sharpening.
The defense industry helped the Institute redesign the entire U.S. military using amorphous metal for every ship, vehicle, and aircraft because only through great economies of scale could they make it affordable.
Glass-metal was a natural for ship hulls because it’s very light, absorbed sound (when sandwiched between a foam layer), didn’t rust, resisted fire, was several times harder to puncture than conventional hulls, and had several times the structural integrity. They replaced diesel fuel with compressed hydrogen gas, which has twice the energy content of diesel, to further raise the thrust-to-weight ratio. Hydrogen gas is also lighter-than-air, so a ship full of it was literally lifted up a bit, rather than millions of gallons of diesel fuel that literally weighed a ship down.
So much thrust pushing so little weight enabled designers to scale up the “double-M” hulls already used in Navy surface-effect fast-attack boats. They sought to out-perform the Australia-based Austal trimaran littoral combat ship called the Independence. The Alabama-built, aluminum, tri-hulled, 418-foot warship had a sustainable speed of 45 knots (52 mph) and used steerable waterjets instead of propellers and rudders.
Using amorphous metal, Jackson had already built a double-M ship because if it can go twice as fast, it can delivery twice as much. Now the defense industry wanted to apply Jackson’s hulls to warships, and he wanted to fucking let them.
The more a ship sits in the water, the more it drags, so Jackson had his designers get it above water as much as possible like a surface-effects ship. The double-M provides a much smoother, faster ride at high speeds in rough seas over conventional hulls by spreading its weight over a wider area. The wider the ship, the more stable it becomes in rough seas and the harder to capsize.
Military analysts loved it because double-M hulls reduced the strength and length of a ship’s wake, which makes it safer since spy satellites don’t actually look for ships, but their wakes, which look like a long white scratch on the surface of a dark blue sea. Its wider design disperses the wake over more water, like the foam from waves, rather than an unnaturally long straight line.
If it can’t be seen, it can’t be killed.
The double-M hull channeled air into four arcs that provided lift and reduced draft. The more a ship can be lifted out of the water, the easier it becomes to increase its speed. In a virtuous cycle, faster speed gave the ship greater lift, and greater lift channeled more air, literally lifting the ship up, which increased its speed. The new lighter hull, with oversized hydrogen-fueled turbines, had a fraction of the draft of older designs, which enabled the new ships to operate far closer to shore and up rivers.
Given that Beijing sat along a river 60 miles from the ocean, which westerners a century before used to take the capital, this low-draft capability opened up new war scenarios. Or, in Beijing’s case, old war scenarios. Mimicking the radar signature of civilian ships, under cover of night and stormy wea
ther, battalions’ worth of armored vehicles could be quickly transported via low-draft cargo ships right to Beijing. Marines could now invade where they could not before, forcing the enemy to spread themselves thin defending greater terrain. Such an ability can not only win wars, but can prevent them.
Now that was a strategic weapon.
The Institute showed the Navy how it could have several times the combat presence at a fraction of the cost. The US Navy has 280 ships, but few are deployed at any given time, and most of the combat ships protect vulnerable aircraft carriers. The new ships could reach their patrol area in half the time and stay several times as long with limitless hydrogen fuel split from sea water. Without having to defend aircraft carriers, the Navy could cover several times the ocean with a fraction of its current inventory.
Anything that can be found can be killed. A smaller, faster, stealthier ship that left a smaller wake would be a bitch to find, even with radar and spy satellites.
Speed not only makes a ship harder to find, but also harder to kill. Supercavitating torpedoes, like the Russian VA-111 Shkval, are capable of 200 knots. With supercavitation, the torpedo actually glides through a thin air bubble and the water around it is literally vaporized to form small bubbles of gas to reduce drag. These monsters are 27 feet long, weigh almost 6000 pounds, can fit a nuclear warhead, and have a range of 7 kilometers. A suicide diesel sub could take out an entire aircraft carrier battle group with nuclear-tipped supercavitators.
But who wants to use a nuke and miss?
Supercavitating torpedoes have great speed, but they do not have great range. A fast ship could drop wide “torpedo nets” and attempt to out-distance it by running as fast as possible in the opposite direction. The faster the ship, the closer the sub would have to be before launching. Yet the closer the sub, the more likely it would be detected.
Speed gives the Navy a strategic advantage because enemies don’t go to war against forces they can’t defeat. The lower the enemy’s confidence of success, the less likely they would attack in the first place. Especially with micro-nukes. The new ships may not be able to outrun a faster torpedo, but they may be able to out-distance it. And that reduced the incentive to buy the expensive subs capable of actually launch supercavitators.
Maximizing the weight-to-thrust ratio meant huge turbine engines, which also generated a lot of electricity. And without having to worry about conserving fuel, they could generate as much electricity as they wanted. Which solved a problem that long vexed the Navy.
Enormous power requirements had long delayed the installation of electromagnetic railguns on US ships. The engines didn’t generate enough power and their batteries could not store enough electricity or release it fast enough. Even the railguns on the latest DD(X) destroyers could only shoot 60 miles, compared to railguns in the lab that could shoot nearly 1000 kilometers.
A low-draft ship with a 1000-km railgun was a strategic weapon since virtually everything on Earth is within its range. A fleet of railgun ships that can ride rivers hundreds of miles inland could project its power over virtually the entire planet.
And now they had enough juice to operate it.
They designed the entire ship around the railgun. They incorporated a network of Jackson’s best ultracapacitors because they could store far more electricity than industrial batteries and, more importantly, they could release that energy far faster.
Which helps fire a railgun more than once.
Now, unlike “strategic” nukes, this was a strategic weapon: a small, fast ship that could approach any coast in bad nighttime weather without detection, quickly fire GPS-guided shells, then disappear. The mere existence of such a ghost ship virtually negated conventional nation-against-nation warfare. One ship could decimate Iran with impunity or could have wiped out Saddam Hussein’s invading force into Kuwait in 1990.
A strategic weapon does not just win battles. It wins wars.
And, hopefully, prevents them.
This new railgun ship could strike dozens of long-distance targets an hour – more than an entire aircraft carrier battle group. Even more impressive, those shells could be target-optimized – meaning anti-personnel shells hit troops, penetrators hit bunkers, buildings and armored vehicles, while others shed thousands of tiny munitions over convoys, military bases, and runways. Matching the munition to the target meant destroying it on the first try. Target-optimized warheads were a force multiplier.
But if the new ships can hit something one thousand kilometers away, then what use are aircraft carriers? $30 billion aircraft carrier battle groups exist to deliver several tons of explosives several hundred miles away. Something that a $1 billion railgun ship can do far better, cheaper, easier, faster, and safer, while putting 6000 fewer troops in harm’s way.
Carriers are so vulnerable that they need two dozen vessels and fifty aircraft just for protection. As Warren Buffet put it, price is what you pay, while value is what you get. A carrier’s value can be measured by the damage it can inflict, which hasn’t improved in decades, while its vulnerability increases every time another two-bit country deploys anti-ship missiles, supercavitating torpedoes, and their own satellites. 99% of a carrier group’s cost is defense-related, including over half of its aircraft. While the Chinese may be tempted to deploy a micro-nuke on a $30 billion battle group, it becomes harder to justify releasing a nuke on one of many railgun ships. The Navy only deploys 3-4 carrier groups at a time, so destroying one makes a huge difference. Destroying one railgun ship makes little sense when there are a hundred others to take its place.
Whereas a stealthy railgun ship can approach an enemy coast in bad nighttime weather, an aircraft carrier must stay far away to avoid detection and destruction, rendering it relatively useless. Carriers are simply too vulnerable and not very capable.
Railgun ships made aircraft carriers obsolete.
But that’s not all they did. Defense industry experts designed it not just around the railgun, but also around a speed-of-light free-electron laser weapon. The Army and Air Force had been improving them for years, but lasers, like railguns, require huge amounts of juice. Batteries can neither store that much electricity, nor release it quickly enough.
But Jackson’s latest ultracapacitors could.
The defense industry knew that they would not get any new orders until they made a compelling case. A super-fast railgun ship was compelling, but a super-fast ship with both a railgun and a speed-of-light laser really captured the imagination. And made for great animated battle scenes to wow the public. They had to generate and store huge amounts of electricity anyways. Adding a laser weapon in the design phase added little to the ship’s cost.
A laser can fry anything within its line of sight. Not just aircraft, torpedoes, and fast-attack boats, but anti-ship missiles or uranium rods dropped from orbit. Speed-of-light means not just a faster defense, but a more accurate one. Lasers make a missile attack so unlikely to succeed that no enemy would probably try, unless at very close range like in a foreign port.
Traveling at the speed of light means there is no need to lead the target because time-to-target is virtually instantaneous. That also makes it impossible to evade. It eliminates the influence of gravity and wind which can throw solid projectiles off target, which makes lasers ideal for killing over long distances, especially since laser beams don’t generate light or sound to betray their position. A stealth ship during a rainy night could laser-fry an enemy coast with virtual impunity.
The downside is it requires line-of-sight, which limits its usefulness on a ship, although they installed it on the highest possible point. An enemy bomber flying near the surface water must “pop up” briefly to get a radar lock on the American ship. If the Americans know where he is coming from, the laser could melt him during that brief pop up. Another interesting application was using the laser to boil the water around a mine or in front of an incoming torpedo.
The problem with lasers is that they waste a lot of energy as heat, which
requires power-intensive cooling equipment since simple air cooling would leave too much time between shot cycles. Jackson, however, solved this problem with second-generation superconductors that don’t require super cooling.
To maximize profit while minimizing taxpayer costs, the defense industry wanted to standardize the entire Navy on as few hulls as possible, like automakers producing several cars from the same chassis. Defense lobbyists were trying to sell Congress on using just four hulls to serve almost all of the Navy’s needs.
For example, Jackson had just started producing a 200 meter long Roll On, Roll Off cargo ship that could double as an amphibious assault vessel. At 60 knots, twice the speed meant half the time to close with an enemy coast. Its cargo bay opened a ramp out of which hundreds of small, fast, amorphous metal hovercraft could assault an enemy coastline. Just one cargo ship would be more effective than an entire Marine Expeditionary Unit.
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