by Dale Brown
Ann rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Excuse me, sir, but what kind of question is that?”
“Don’t give me that ‘sir’ crap, Ann,” Phoenix said. “I didn’t pick you to lay the extreme protocol formality stuff on me when we’re in private—I know you’re not bred for it, which is why I chose you to run with me in a last-second primary and general election blitzkrieg campaign. We lucked out and won, in the narrowest of margins ever recorded.
“But sometimes I feel like I’m spinning my wheels,” Phoenix went on. “The economy is still in the tank and there seems to be no end in sight. I’ve cut the budget and tax rates down to bare bones, but it doesn’t seem to be affecting anything very much. At the same time, China and Russia are pushing forward with reclaiming old empires and challenging us everywhere.” He paused for a moment, his brow furrowing, lost in thought; then: “Ann, am I presiding over a failed republic? Is the United States . . . done?”
“Done? What do you mean?”
“I mean . . . I mean, we just lost an airplane over the South China Sea, and my most knowledgeable adviser tells me to ‘be careful’ in deploying search-and-rescue forces in the area,” Phoenix said. “Years ago, the United States moved where it wanted, when it wanted, and we never considered other nations’ concerns, especially in a crisis situation. Now, even with an absolutely critical and sensitive emergency event such as this, we seem to be hamstrung by caution. We’re afraid of offending China. Our own sailors are down, perhaps by hostile intent, but we’re still afraid of offending the People’s Republic of China. Why? Is this right? How did we get to this point?”
“First of all, Ken, Herbert is an academic and an administrator,” Ann said a bit testily, stepping back into the Situation Room with the president. “We hired him because he has an encyclopedic mind, speaks both Russian and Mandarin along with six other languages, and can organize everything from individuals to entire cabinet-level departments better than anyone we’ve ever seen. But he’s just a bureaucrat. He lacks vision. He needs guidance and direction.
“You, on the other hand, are a doer, a man with leadership qualities and a vision for the future,” Ann went on. “You decided that the best way to fix the economy was to cut taxes, cut the size of government, reorganize the military, and stimulate growth, reinvestment, and hiring by cutting rules and regulations that were squeezing businesses. You made a decision, charted a course, moved forward, and pushed your ideas through Congress in record time.
“But along with vision comes introspection and even a large measure of self-doubt, and sometimes that worries me more about you than anything else,” Ann said earnestly. “The presidents I’m most familiar with—Thorn, Martindale, and Gardner—may privately have had doubts, but they never expressed or showed them. You, on the other hand, wear them on your damned chest like a general’s ribbons.
“The people of this country, and of the entire world for that matter, don’t need or especially expect peace, prosperity, or comfort from their leaders, Ken. They need and expect leadership. They want our leaders to do something, take a stand, fight for what they believe in, and make arguments about why what they have planned is the right thing to do. So you keep on doing what you do best: lead. You focused in on exactly what the issue here is: search for and rescue our sailors and find out what happened. Kevich advises you to be careful and lectures you about China, but you keep returning to the matter at hand. You’re doing it right. Stop worrying.”
“A lot of people—a lot of nations—will get hurt if I screw up things with China,” Phoenix said. “The economy will really melt down if China decides it doesn’t want to invest in us anymore.”
“Let’s worry about that after we get our sailors back,” Ann said. “Besides, my economic advisers and the commentators I trust are telling me the economy is doing better than you think. If you want, let me worry about the critics of your economic plan. I listen to dozens of politicians whine and complain about austerity measures, but I also hear thousands of small businessmen cheering about lower taxes and freedom from Washington bureaucracy. Unfortunately, the politicians and the whiners are usually the ones who get the press.
“About Russia and China: they’re going to do whatever they’re going to do, and there’s precious little we can do about that except keep the lines of communication as open as possible, hope for the best, and prepare for the worst,” Ann went on. “It so happens that their economies are on an upswing while ours is in the crapper. That is not going to last very long. Russia’s surging economy and foreign policy is based on energy exports and bullying their neighbors into not cooperating with the West—when oil is back to thirty dollars a barrel, Russia runs out of cash. China’s surging economy and seemingly stable government is based on cheap exports, a shadow currency and economy, and suppressing dissent. As soon as exports fall, the true market value of China’s currency is revealed, and the unemployed and poor agrarian segments of the population start to rise up against the government, China is on the skids.”
“You’re starting to sound like Herbert,” Phoenix said with a wry smile.
“I’m not an analyst, Ken,” Ann said. “But I agree with Herbert: unless there’s a loose cannon in Beijing or in the Chinese military, I don’t think China is a threat to us. I think Beijing will be perfectly happy to wait to see if we collapse on our own instead of choosing to take us on, especially at sea. They can afford to wait, even for fifty years. What’s fifty years to a country that’s been around for three thousand years?”
Phoenix thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I disagree, Ann,” he said. “I’ve felt for several years that something is stirring in Beijing and Moscow. The Chinese invasion of Somalia and the deployment of antiship ballistic missiles all over Southeast Asia confirmed it, and now this suspicious event over the South China Sea reinforces it. Beijing may not want to pick a fight, but I think they’d like to show the world that they are ready to take more of an active role in the world, including militarily. I think if they’re waiting for the collapse of the United States, they’d be happy to do whatever they could, short of all-out war, to hasten our demise.”
The vice president nodded noncommittally. “No argument from me, Ken,” she said. “I’m tired of being surprised by the Russians and Chinese. The Chinese invasion of Somalia, the antisatellite missile strikes from submerged subs, and the quick proliferation of DF-21D missiles all over the Pacific and Indian Oceans were all real eye-openers. We were caught completely flat-footed. Now we lose a surveillance plane near a Chinese carrier battle group, and again we’re hunting for answers. It’s not a happy place to be.” She looked at the president carefully. “What are you thinking about, Ken?” she asked.
“I’m thinking about breaking the damned bank and beefing up the military, especially the Navy and Air Force,” Phoenix said. “I can’t do anything about the economy more than what we’re doing already—doing everything we can to help businesses invest, government standing out of the way so businesses can grow. If we’re going to invest in anything in this era of reduced government and reduced taxes, it’s defense. I want to rebuild the military. I want to stop the reductions in military spending and show the world that even if the United States is back on its heels in its budget, we will still push ahead with a strong military force.”
“You know you’re going to get hammered in the press, Ken,” the vice president said. “You campaigned on an antispending platform and put together a massive austerity program, promising to balance the budget in eight years—then you want to propose spending more money on defense? That’s not going to fly.”
“Politically, it’ll be a train wreck,” Phoenix said. “But no one in the media is looking at what we’re looking at in China and Russia: they are surging, and we’re lagging. I’m tired of worrying about what we should be doing out there—I want to do something about it.”
“But face the facts, Ken—there’s no money. Zero,” Ann said. “Everyone knows there’s no money for new weapons
systems, aircraft carriers, next-generation bombers, or space. All that is out the window. Deal with it. We have Armstrong Space Station with antisatellite and antiballistic missile weapons installed, but everyone is thinking it’s a huge boondoggle and can’t wait for it to reenter and burn up in the atmosphere. No one on Main Street, and especially Congress, will give you money for a high-tech military that might take ten years to put together. No one believes that anymore.”
“I’m going to find a way to do it, Ann,” Phoenix said determinedly. “I don’t know how, but I’ll find it. A change in strategy, closing bases, reducing duplication, maybe even doing away with a branch of the service—I’m going to find a way to modernize our military without going back in debt to do it.”
“Doing away with a branch of the service?” Ann asked incredulously. “Where in the world did that come from, Ken?”
“I’ve thought about this for a long time, Ann,” Phoenix said. “Each branch of the service spends . . . what, a hundred fifty billion a year? The Navy maybe a little more? But if you combined the duplicated major budget categories of the two services that operate the most aircraft, maybe we could save as much as half that amount, or more.”
Ann shook her head in wonderment. “We gotta sit down and talk this over sometime soon, Mr. President—maybe over a glass or two of Scotch,” she said. “I think I’m going to need a little alcohol to wrap my head around the monumental challenge of passing a bill through Congress that will pull the plug on the Navy or Air Force. Let’s find our sailors and find out what happened to our plane, and then we’ll work on doing away with a branch of the service. Good morning, Mr. President.” And she departed, shaking her head with a wry smile.
By the time the president made his way back to the Oval Office, Glenbrook and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Timothy Spellings, were waiting for him. Phoenix invited them in, and they sat at the meeting area with cups of coffee. Glenbrook opened a large wall-mounted computer monitor from inside its hidden compartment, and Spellings stood beside it, a wireless presentation remote control in his hand.
“Thanks for getting this information out here so fast, General,” the president said. “Please proceed.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” the tall, thin four-star general said. He activated the monitor, which showed a map of the North Pacific Ocean region. “This map shows the current deployment of carrier strike groups and Marine amphibious-ready groups in the Pacific, current as of last night—there was no time to bring this morning’s updates. As you can see, sir, there’s only one carrier group under way in the Seventh Fleet area of operations, the George Washington, and one amphibious warfare group, the Boxer, which are part of an exercise being conducted in northeastern Australia in the Coral Sea. Of the other four Pacific carriers, only one, the Reagan, is available—it is participating in fleet replacement carrier qualifications near San Diego, but it can be retasked fairly quickly. The others are undergoing planned maintenance or complex refueling overhaul. The Stennis will be available in about four months; the Carl Vinson in about a year, and the Lincoln in eighteen months.”
“Just two carriers immediately available to cover the entire Pacific?” the president asked, surprised.
“That’s been the pattern for the past few years, sir,” Glenbrook said. “And Seventh Fleet extends all the way into the Indian Ocean. With budget cutbacks, the carriers spend a lot less time on patrol. Generally, there is just one carrier strike group operating in Seventh and Fifth Fleet areas of responsibility at a time. Extended carrier and amphibious-ready group deployments in Second, Third, Fourth, and Sixth Fleets have all but gone away.”
“No wonder China seems to be more aggressive these days—our most potent weapons are all in home port,” Phoenix said. “How long would it take to get the two Pacific carrier groups into the South China Sea?”
“The George Washington can be on station in just a few days, sir,” Spellings replied. “The Reagan would take about ten days to arrive after wrapping up its carrier quals. Admiral Fowler wanted me to remind you, sir, that sending the Reagan unless it was absolutely necessary would delay working up replacement carrier crews, which would entail longer deployments for crews serving now.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, General,” the president said, “but I’m more concerned about our crewmembers lost in the ocean and finding out what happened to our reconnaissance aircraft. Better get the Washington moving up there to assist in the search-and-rescue operations, and warn the Reagan personnel that they might be needed. What else do we have?”
“Unfortunately the closest military units aren’t well suited to search and rescue, but we’ll have a presence and can keep an eye on things until surface units arrive,” Spellings went on, reading from a secure tablet computer. “The closest unit we have available is the attack submarine USS New Hampshire, on patrol in the southern South China Sea. It can be in the area in about four hours. We can send a Global Hawk from Okinawa and have it on station in about six hours.” The RQ-4 Global Hawk was a long-range, high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned surveillance aircraft that could send radar, electro-optical, and infrared sensor images via satellite to bases thousands of miles away. “We also have five long-range bombers and three aerial refueling tankers based at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam that are on thirty-minute alert. They can be over the area in three to four hours.”
“Bombers?” Kevich remarked. “Surely you’re not thinking of attacking anyone, General? With what are they armed?”
“Day-to-day normal alert: nothing more than chaff and flares for self-defense,” Spellings replied. “They have a variety of weapons available, but they are loaded only as the situation dictates. Their real value in this scenario would be as a rapid-reaction forward presence.”
“Saber-rattling, General?” Kevich intoned. “I thought we were all beyond that.”
“The Chinese have been saber-rattling with their new aircraft carrier all over the South China Sea for months,” Glenbrook pointed out. “They’ve harassed every military or military-related vessel that cruises within two hundred miles of their shoreline.”
“I don’t think that’s a good reason to elevate tensions in the area by sending in bombers,” Kevich said. “Armed or not, the bombers are a clear provocation. I would be against sending in the aircraft carriers except if they would participate in the search, rescue, and recovery.”
“All the bombers have excellent radar, and the B-52s and B-1 bombers have low-light TV and infrared sensors that can transmit images back here to us,” Spellings said. “They wouldn’t be there just to saber-rattle, Mr. Secretary.”
“Have Pacific Command send a warning notice to Guam, advising the bomber wing of the situation and to stand by in case they’re needed,” the president said. “But for now, we’ll keep them away from the South China Sea. So, how do we proceed with the other assets we have on hand, General?”
“Until the George Washington arrives, the surface search-and-rescue task force will be led by the high-endurance Coast Guard cutter Mohawk, based in Seattle but on a joint search-and-rescue drill with Taiwanese coast guard vessels in the northern South China Sea near Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan,” Spellings went on. “It has a helicopter and an unmanned tilt-rotor aircraft embarked. They can be in the area in about eight hours.”
“A Coast Guard cutter? That’s the best we have?”
“For a search-and-rescue mission at sea, they’re the experts, sir,” Spellings said. “We’re lucky to have one so close. We could see if there are any commercial vessels in the area, but I don’t have direct access to that information. Besides, the Poseidon carried classified equipment and documents, so I think we’d want to keep all civilians and foreigners away, not just the Chinese.”
“I’m thinking about the worst-case scenario—our ships tangling with that Chinese aircraft carrier or its escorts,” the president said. He thought for a moment; then: “Get the cutter moving to the crash site as well, but find
out if there are any Taiwanese, Japanese, or Filipino navy vessels available to assist. Get the sub moving and the Global Hawk airborne, General.”
“Yes, sir.” Spellings picked up a telephone to issue the orders.
Turning to his national security adviser, the president said, “Bill, I want a detailed analysis of the transmissions—and lack thereof—from that P-8 as soon as possible. The sudden loss of communications indicates some sort of electromagnetic interference—jamming. I want to know if any other ships or aircraft in the area were affected. I also want to know if we have any information that the Chinese are working on any sort of electromagnetic weapons that could have been used on the P-8. I know we’ll know more once we recover evidence from the crash site, but I want a list of questions that need to be answered as this thing moves forward.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” He moved toward another telephone to issue orders, but instead pulled out a vibrating cell phone, looked at the display, and punched in unlock codes for the secure line. “Glenbrook, secure,” he spoke. He listened for a few moments. He said, “I’ll pass the word. We’ll need an order of battle assembled as soon as possible,” then hung up.
“What is it, Bill?” Phoenix asked.
“Radio transmissions picked up by commercial vessels in the South China Sea, sir,” Glenbrook replied. “Helicopters from the Chinese carrier are headed north toward the suspected crash site, and the carrier itself is also heading north. It appears the Chinese navy is ordering other ships and aircraft out of the area and setting up a search at the crash site.”
BATTLE STAFF ROOM, FIRST EXPEDITIONARY BOMB WING, ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, GUAM
A SHORT TIME LATER
The other staff members were already in the Battle Staff Room when Colonel Warner “Cutlass” Cuthbert entered. “Room, ten-hut,” someone in the darkness ordered.
“Take seats,” Cuthbert said immediately. “We will suspend military formalities, here and everywhere else on base until the situation is back to normal.” He looked at the others seated at the conference table. Three were in green Nomex flight suits; the rest were in desert-gray battle dress uniforms. “Looks like we might have ourselves our first real-world operation, boys and girls. Captain, please proceed.”