by gerald hall
I am very worried about the vast amount of older military equipment that is being stored in desert depots like Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. If the Western Republic or one of our adversaries were to begin restoring some of that hardware to use, they could end up with three to seven times as many warplanes and armored vehicles as we do. While the materiel might be a generation or two older than what we can field, we could end up being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. The same thing goes for the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers currently at anchor at Bremerton, Washington and dozens of other warships at Pearl Harbor and several West Coast naval installations. If those ships are made operational, they could be decisive in this conflict.”
“Neil, what frightens me much more is if more of our modern or even relatively obsolescent military equipment that you mentioned earlier falls into the hands of the Pacific Caliphate of the Arab Brotherhood. The Caliphate is particularly frightening since they actually appear much more technically competent than the Islamists out of the Middle East. They could actually find a way to effectively turn those ships, tanks and aircraft against us. Are you recommending that we launch air strikes at Bremerton and Davis-Monthan to eliminate that threat?”
“No, Ma’am. I am simply warning you that it is possible that the Western Republic could substantially increase its military force if it chose to do so. But, if we launched preemptive strikes on those locations at this time, we could risk further alienating the population of the Western Republic against us.”
“I know. Eventually, we need to be able to have a reconciliation between the two halves of our nation.”
“I just hope that it isn’t too late for that. There are increasing numbers of Pacific Caliphate and Arab Brotherhood troops appearing in Latin America and along the Pacific seaboard from Alaska nearly all the way down to Vancouver. Who knows how much military hardware is being brought in with them.”
“I know that it is a given that the Islamists intend to invade the Western Republic. But do we have any idea as to when?” A clearly worried President Harper asked.
“Not yet, Ma’am. The Pacific Caliphate has been dealing with a nasty little insurgency of their own operating in the Australian Outback for over a year, we know. There was also an insurgency going in New Zealand against the jihadists for a while. But we haven’t had any new reports out of either country in a while. Those fights have had to have drained some resources from the Caliphate’s offensive against us. The intelligence report of the bioweapon having backfired on the Arab Brotherhood is likely the reason why their attempts in the Western hemisphere have stalled for the past few years as well. But you and I both know that this lull is not going to last forever.
There is also one other problem that we have to consider. We also do not have the resources necessary to replace more than a tiny percentage of the missiles or other state of the art weapons that we currently rely upon. We probably will not have those resources until we are a United States of America again either.”
“I understand. We will have to make do with what we have and severely ration our use of any equipment that we do not have the means of easily replacing. We will need to find inexpensive, low-tech solutions to replace our tech-tech ‘toys’ as much as possible. Fortunately, it has been helping us that our Congress has allocated some additional funding to the Defense Department recently. We have been able to do more training, reactivate some mothballed equipment and even have a handful of new aircraft constructed. That will certain go some ways towards meeting the shortfalls that you addressed.”
“You can actually thank the Martians for much of that, Ma’am. Every time that they send one of their ships here to pick up more supplies, they bring in one of their gravity drive shuttles for orbital transport support. It is a lot cheaper for us to let them lift up hardware to the space station and our lunar station than it would have been to rebuild the Kennedy Space Center and build more of the heavy lift rockets that we used to launch from there. That enabled Congress to shift around a little money to help our readiness issues.
You know that we are still producing and launching the occasional Leviathan heavy lift rocket since the attack on the Cape. Fortunately, Leviathans are launched from the ocean surface rather than requiring a concrete pad and are relatively simple to build in spite of their size. But otherwise, almost all of our space launches are of space planes flown from Goliath and Stratolaunch carrier aircraft in addition to the four Skylon single stage to orbit craft that the British brought over with them. The price tag for our use of the Martian shuttles is that we build two new large habitat modules and fill them with supplies for each mission going to the Hebes Chasma colony. This arrangement has saved us billions of dollars. I know that you have tried to plow as much of that savings as possible back into national defense.”
“I wish that we could build some of those gravity drive shuttles for ourselves. It would be a quantum leap for our ability to control space, not to mention move military forces anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice.” President Harper said as she briefly glanced towards the sky through the Oval Office window.
“Yes, Ma’am. Unfortunately, the Martians have steadfastly refused to share any of that technology. They won’t even let any of our people near their gravity drive ships at all to examine them. We have scientists and engineers at NASA attempting to discover how the technology works. But our people have made very little progress in their research though. The ‘brain drain’ from here to Mars over the past few years has not helped either.”
“In a way, I can’t blame the Martians for holding back information on their gravity drive systems. If that technology were to ever fall into the wrong hands, their entire world could be threatened. Their existence out there is still pretty tenuous even after what happened four years ago.”
“I have to agree, Ma’am. But we aren’t the only ones who were doing trade with the Martians. The Israelis and Persians were also manufacturing dual-purpose habitat and cargo modules for the Mars Colony, at least until they were finally overrun by the Arab Brotherhood a short while ago. Even Japan has produced two as well. In return, all three nations have received slots for some of their people to come live at Hebes Chasma. I believe that all three nations have also sent thousands of frozen embryos as well as a means of keeping their peoples’ genetic heritages alive also. ”
“That actually made a lot of sense, Neil. Those nations couldn’t afford to send a lot of adults or even children up to Mars. There just isn’t enough habitat space or lift capacity for those nations to send more than a handful of people each flight to Mars right now. But for the same space that one passenger takes up, I would imagine that they could send up more than a thousand unborn children. All each of these children would need to be brought into the new world is to be implanted in a willing mother’s womb when the time is right.”
Neil quickly nodded his head in agreement before he spoke again.
“Things are not looking all that good for any of those three nations now. You already know about the heavy combat operations being launched against Persia after the destruction of Israel. We expect that the Arab Brotherhood will implement the same genocidal campaign against Persia as they did with Israel.
The Caliphate has taken a different approach by simply deciding to starve the Japanese out. The Caliphate has interdicted all sea and conventional air routes in and out of Japan. The only way to and from Japan right now is basically straight up and down. Which is why the Japanese are so heavily invested in supporting the colony on Mars. The Martian gravity shuttles are the only way out of Japan now.
Now, I do have a bit of good news on the home front. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is now at full capacity. The additional production from the oil shale fields in the Great Plains and the oil sand fields in Canada has made a huge difference. The Keystone pipeline that we finally got completed and reopened has been working at nearly full capacity getting the oil down to our Gulf Coast refineries. This progress has been in spite of sporadic attempts by
the insurgents to sabotage the pipeline. We are also continuing to produce significant amounts of oil and gas from the fracking operations in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
All of this has clearly helped our economy quite a bit. We have had a substantial drop in unemployment with falling energy prices. At the same time, tax revenues have gone up as well. We have been able to pay down several billion dollars of the National Debt this fiscal year. This has led to a small reduction in the amount of interest that we have had to pay as a result. But all of our agencies, including the Pentagon, are operating on a shoestring still.”
“It would be nice if the Western Republic would actually pay some of its share of the National Debt. Instead, they are continuing to borrow scores of billions of dollars annually from investors and foreign interests to keep their welfare state afloat. I still refuse to force the working people here in the Alliance help subsidize West Coast’s fiscal irresponsibility. We have made the sacrifices necessary to give our fiscal house in order, starting with a mandated balanced budget. But our counterparts on the West Coast seem to be utterly oblivious to the dangers, both inside and outside of their borders.” President Harper said angrily.
“I know. I do have some information on another subject that you will be interested in. The new report from NASA on what happened on Mars almost four years ago just came out.”
“Well, what did the scientists have to say?”
“Quite a bit, actually. The team that we sent to Mars to investigate this ‘Third Event’ got back to Earth about six months ago. It took them this long just to analyze all of the data that they collected.
While on Mars, they took extensive readings on the Martian magnetosphere as well as core samples and a close examination of the site that appeared to be the focus of the phenomenon. Their conclusion was that somehow the energy of the coronal mass ejection had been focused upon a single spot that was about ten meters in diameter. This was the energy of more than fifty thousand megatons of explosive power. If whatever force had not managed to direct that power into that precise point, the energy would have struck the entire Martian surface that had been facing the Sun at the time with fatal results for all of the people at Hebes Chasma.
The concentrated energy beam, as NASA’s best scientists explained, drilled right through the planet’s crust and deep into the Martian planetary core. That much energy poured into the heart of Mars somehow restarted the geodynamo of the Martian planetary core that had run out of energy millions of years ago. A few moments later, the newly resurgent planetary magnetosphere began to deflect the rest of the CME as well as the other cosmic radiation that had been bombarding the Martian surface for more than a billion years.
The temperatures on the Martian surface have been steadily rising as a result of the numerous volcanos that have erupted after the Third Event. This, in turn, has started to melt some of the subsurface ice. The combination of released water vapor and volcanic gases have already started a significant increase in atmospheric pressure, though not nearly enough yet to make the surface habitable.
Our scientists had to work fast before the area was contaminated as a result of the ice asteroids that have started to bombard the Martian surface. The Martians had sent out a series of nuclear-powered drone spacecraft years earlier that had been altering the paths of every icy asteroid that they could find. The redirected asteroids were vaporizing and releasing all of their water into the planet’s atmosphere, either during reentry or upon impact with the surface.
The Martians are obviously using the ice from the asteroids to replenish the water that had been lost since the earlier collapse of Mars’ magnetosphere. I know that it is hard to believe, but the Martians are already starting the process of terraforming Mars. In some of the deep valleys on Mars, liquid water is starting to collect. The atmosphere is rapidly thickening in those same valleys at the same time. The Martians are planting a considerable amount of vegetation to take the existing surplus of carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere, fix the carbon through photosynthesis into hydrocarbons and free the oxygen for breathing. We have recently learned that the Martians are also searching for more sources of Nitrogen to add to the atmospheric mix.
We have also observed with the Webb Space Telescope several other large asteroids heading towards Mars. As you know, with the assistance of the Martians and the polymaths, we were finally able to launch the Webb into orbit several years ago. It has been providing us with fantastic information on our solar system and many others, far exceeding even the old Hubble Space Telescope. Anyway, based on NASA’s analysis, these newly discovered objects approaching Mars are Class-M or largely metallic asteroids. We believe that the Martian probes are responsible for changing the trajectories of these as well.”
“These metallic asteroids are not going to strike Mars, are they?” The President asked.
“No, Ma’am. Our people at NASA believe, based on the trajectories of these particular asteroids that the latter are going to be placed in Martian orbit to literally become additional moons. We also believe that the Martians intend to both mine these artificial moons for their mineral wealth and turn them into orbital habitats at the same time.”
“Those Martians have a very ambitious agenda, don’t they?” President Harper asked.
“Yes, Ma’am. They certainly do. The polymaths on Mars are now driving that entire agenda, it seems. The polymaths from the East Coast of the Alliance have also apparently all moved to Mars now. The amazing part is that these people continue to come up with answers to questions that we haven’t even started to ask ourselves.”
“There is just one thing that your report from NASA still hasn’t explained.”
“What’s that, Ma’am?”
“Who or what caused the Third Event to happen in the first place?”
“That was one question that the scientists have yet to figure out. Trust me, Ma’am. I’m sure that they are not the only ones who want to know either. But pretty much all of them believe that whoever it was lives on Mars now.”
“I guess that it was hoping too much to want for another one of those miraculous ‘events’ to happen back on Earth to help us fix this messed up world before it is too late. I suppose that I can still continue to pray for our people anyway.” President Harper sadly replied as she walked over and looked out the window to view the White House grounds before asking another question.
“How is it that we and the rest of the West have found ourselves so badly outnumbered by the Caliphate and its allies? We should have been able to stop the Caliphate and the Arab Brotherhood in both Europe and Asia.”
“To start with, the Pacific Caliphate survived the nuclear autumn in far better shape than most of the rest of the world. Indonesia was the most heavily populated Muslim country in the world even before the nuclear autumn. Because of its near-equatorial location, it suffered relatively little from the effects of the temperature drop. They were able to feed and house a far greater percentage of their population as a result. Their neighbors to the north were hit hard by the combination of nuclear fallout and drastically reduced crop yields.
So while the rest of Asia lost over a billion lives during the nuclear autumn, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the rest of the Muslim-majority Western Pacific nations lost only a few percentage points from their populations. Their business sectors took a big hit, just like everyone else. But once the skies started clearing up, their cities quickly got back to business. The Caliphate also had access to the oil fields of Java to fuel their economic recovery. The rest of the world was still trying to clean up the ashes of most of their urban areas that we decimated from the civil unrest that occurred.”
President Harper knew that the term ‘civil unrest’ was just a euphemism for outright large scale rioting, looting and arson that destroyed many cities in both the US and elsewhere in the world. Not even the Chinese were able to escape from the wanton violence that erupted after all of the world’s economies and temperatures crashed over a
period of just a few weeks. The citizens of the massive Chinese cities starved while their counterparts in the country froze to death instead.
The National Security Advisor continued. “The leaders in Indonesia definitely had their shit ready with their political and military amalgamation. They also had enough state of the art weapons and trained troops to easily overwhelm their neighbors. That netted the leaders of the Pacific Caliphate with even more weapons. It was just a matter of training more personnel to use them.
The Arab Brotherhood had already established a foothold in Europe with the mass immigration of Muslims from North Africa and people who claimed to be refugees from the conflict with ISIS. During the nuclear autumn, both Muslim and non-Muslim alike in Europe were badly hit during the depopulation of the nuclear autumn. The Arab Brotherhood shrewdly rushed even more Muslim immigrants from the Middle East into Europe just as the temperatures began to recover. These new migrants completely overwhelmed the ethnic Europeans in mainland Europe, including western Russia.”
So as everyone else got weaker, the Caliphate and the Arab Brotherhood both got stronger with more weapons and even more people as they steadily absorbed their neighbors, especially the neighbors with significant Muslim populations. Of course, they had a great recruiting pitch, ‘join us or die.’
It was only natural that the Caliphate would establish a marriage of convenience with their co-religionists from the Middle East, Africa, Western Asia and Europe. They don’t necessarily share the same goals or even believe in exactly the same strain of Islam. But they are currently willing to work together.”
“Is there a chance that they will turn on each other because of these internal differences before they can attack us directly?” The President asked.