Able Sentry

by John Schettler

  Kirov Saga:

  Able Sentry

  The War in 2025

  By

  John Schettler

  A publication of: The Writing Shop Press

  Able Sentry, Copyright©2020, John A. Schettler

  The Kirov Saga: Season One

  Kirov - Volume 1

  Cauldron of Fire - Volume 2

  Pacific Storm - Volume 3

  Men of War - Volume 4

  Nine Days Falling - Volume 5

  Fallen Angels - Volume 6

  Devil’s Garden - Volume 7

  Armageddon –Volume 8

  The Kirov Saga: Season Two ~ 1940-1941

  Altered States–Volume 9

  Darkest Hour–Volume 10

  Hinge of Fate –Volume 11

  Three Kings –Volume 12

  Grand Alliance –Volume 13

  Hammer of God –Volume 14

  Crescendo of Doom –Volume 15

  Paradox Hour –Volume 16

  The Kirov Saga: Season Three ~1942

  Doppelganger –Volume 17

  Nemesis –Volume 18

  Winter Storm –Volume 19

  Tide of Fortune –Volume 20

  Knight’s Move –Volume 21

  Turning Point –Volume 22

  Steel Reign –Volume 23

  Second Front –Volume 24

  The Kirov Saga: Season Four ~1943

  Tigers East – Volume 25

  Thor’s Anvil – Volume 26

  1943 – Volume 27

  Lions at Dawn – Volume 28

  Stormtide Rising – Volume 29

  Ironfall – Volume 30

  Nexus Deep – Volume 31

  Field of Glory – Volume 32

  The Kirov Saga: Season Five ~1944

  Prime Meridian – Volume 33

  Event Horizon – Volume 34

  Dragonfall – Volume 35

  1944 – Volume 36

  The Tempest – Volume 37

  Breakout – Volume 38

  Starfall – Volume 39

  Rhinelander – Volume 40

  WWIII ~ The Next War Segment:

  These volumes depict what would have happened to the ship and crew of Kirov if it had not shifted to the past in volume 1 of the series. It has two “Seasons,” with the first presenting in detail the war in 2021 that was the background to Season 1 of the series. In the course of that action, Kirov shifts to 2025, finding itself in the future of the time line they intervened in during WWII. Readers interested in WWIII action can therefore enter the series with Homecoming, and then return to book 1 if interested in the WWII interventions.

  Kirov Saga: Season Six ~ The Next War-2021

  Volume 1 – Homecoming

  Volume 2 – Kill-Chain

  Volume 3 – Twilight’s End

  Volume 4 – Resurgent

  Volume 5 – Deep Blue

  Volume 6 – Ice War

  Volume 7 – Eagle Rising

  Volume 8 – Tangent Fire

  Kirov Saga: Season Seven ~ The Next War-2025

  Volume 1– Condition Zebra

  Volume 2 – Able Sentry

  More to come!

  Kirov Saga:

  Able Sentry

  The Next War - 2025

  By

  John Schettler

  If you want peace, prepare for war….

  Kirov Saga

  Able Sentry

  By

  John Schettler

  Part I – Nanchang

  Part II – Gulf of Aden

  Part III – Talisman Sabre

  Part IV – The Best Laid Plans

  Part V – Chariots of Fire

  Part VI – Just Resolve

  Part VII – Sultan Apache

  Part VIII– Tobruk

  Part IX – Stormfront

  Part X – The Gambit

  Part XI – The Aberration

  Part XII – Sea Eagles

  Author’s Note:

  Dear Readers,

  On the 10th of January 2020, the first Chinese type 055 heavy destroyer was commissioned into the fleet as the Nanchang. Five others are already under construction so that the initial deployment can assign at least two to each of the three main fleets. This ship is China’s answer to the USN Ticonderoga Class cruiser, with 128 VLS cells that can carry an array of SAM and strike missiles. We have already seen them in battle, and also seen them sink. No ship is invulnerable in a fight at sea, not even our favorite battlecruiser in this series, the mighty Kirov.

  I have said earlier that this is a war I hope we never live to see, but the lessons of history are hard to overrule. Since the year 1500, in global situations where a rising power begins to challenge an existing great power, 75% of the time this rivalry has resulted in war. The rise of China is just the latest in a series of rivalries between great powers, but war between the US and China would be extremely costly to both, and to the world at large. This is why the fires of war haven’t kindled in our own history anywhere near as fast as I thought they might. The recent situation in the Middle East is a perfect example.

  Iran has mined and seized oil tankers, shot down an unmanned US aircraft, and attacked Saudi oil refineries with missiles and drones. We’ve assassinated their number two man in the power line, and they’ve hit a US operated base in Iraq with their ballistic missiles. Yet the fires of a wider war were still not kindled.

  I’ve led the last few volumes with the quote “if you want peace, prepare for war,” and that is what the US Navy is finally doing in regards to the dramatic expansion of China’s naval strength. We’re building ship killing missiles now, when for decades the primary strike missile on a Navy destroyer could only hit land targets. Last season, as I looked at a war breaking out in 2021, I did a hard count on just what the adversaries might bring to the fight in terms of naval weaponry. I was shocked to learn how few missiles are in the ready bin. To this day, the US has just under 100 LRASM’s in inventory, and the current procurement plan will only acquire another 210 by the year 2025, and they want to have about 450 MMT Tomahawks converted for use as anti-ship weapons by that year as well. They have finally realized that vessels like the Littoral Combat Ship need some teeth, and so another 190 Naval Strike Missiles (built by Norway) are on the list between now and 2025. To these, they want to add 775 Standard Missile-6, which is a dual use weapon, able to strike either aircraft or ships. Doing the math, the US Navy will possess 1725 missiles that can kill ships by 2025, and then we’ll have to add in the things in a typical carrier magazine.

  I have found the GBU-53 carried by the F-35 to be the go to first strike weapon. While it doesn’t actually end up killing a lot of ships, it pulls SAM’s from their VLS Bays and effectively renders formerly powerful warships impotent when they run dry. A mission kill in the heat of battle is as good as a kill. So with the GBU-53 and also the SLAM-ER, the US carriers also have a lot to add to that running total. After that, you get to the JSOW ordnance, and the new JSOW-ER will have a ship killing standoff range of 310 miles. The Navy has finally realized that ships carrying Harpoons with a 75 mile range are an anachronism from the 20th century, decades beyond their prime time.

  In a general war, however, consider how quickly those inventories of missiles would run down and be depleted. When ships mass in large task forces, as the Chinese have done in this series, they have tremendous defensive power combining the SAM’s from ten to twenty ships. To get through that and do any real harm, you need an attack that really saturates that defense. SM-6 will probably be used more as an air defense weapon than an anti-ship weapon, and the air force will own some of the 310 LRASM’s planned by 2025. So the US tally of 1725 ship killers for the Navy might really be more correctly measured at a little over 1000 by that year.

  There are
presently 67 active Arleigh Burke Class destroyers in the US Navy, with 82 planned. Do the math. Saving a few missiles for the cruisers, you could probably only mount 12 ship killing missiles on each US destroyer by the year 2025. You would bulk up on the ships assigned to critical theaters, leaving those in quiet sectors with little or no SSM capability. Once naval combat ensues on any scale remotely resembling what I depict here, those 1000 plus US missiles would be used up after just a few engagements. If used sparingly, they would simply be wasted. The only way you get hits is to overwhelm the SAM defense, and the type 055’s can carry 100 plus SAM’s. So the hard facts of logistics weigh in to declare that any “war” in the immediate future would of necessity have to be a very limited affair. The missile inventories on either side would simply run out in a matter of a few weeks. Then all you have left are dumb bombs and nukes, a sobering thought, as we saw in the 2021 conflict.

  This is one reason why I jumped to the alternate Meridian in 2025 to look at a world where conventional weapons inventories are well stocked on both sides. Here the navies on each side are much better armed, though after 90 days, with engagements in the Pacific, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Arabian Sea already fought, weapons inventories are starting to wear down on both sides.

  The glaring deficiencies of the Royal Navy, for example, have been clearly spotlighted. Their lack of standoff strike capability for their new carriers, and the inability of the Sea Ceptor to catch and kill high supersonic or hypersonic targets has caused them a lot of grief, and forced them to begin retrofitting frigates and destroyers with US missiles. And this is an alternate order of battle for the Royal Navy where I almost doubled their ship count by holding on to a few legacy Type 42’s, adding several older carriers and giving them more destroyers and frigates.

  In our world, how long would the six existing Daring Class destroyers survive in any really intense naval conflict involving the Royal Navy? Once the most powerful navy on earth, the Royal Navy now sees 68% of the few ships it still has idled in port, unfit for service because of budget cuts, staffing issues, and even lack of adequate fuel supplies. It’s a sad end for the fleet that once showed its flag in every sea on the planet.

  Keep in mind the fact that China has built new ships in numbers equal to the entire existing Royal Navy, and they have done so every ten years. This is a stubborn, sobering fact, yet we have also seen both the strengths and weaknesses of China’s new navy. Like the Royal Navy, they have no credible strike capability in their few carriers, and must therefore rely on land based air power that forces them to operate in littoral seas. When they try to get into the Deep Blue, they get hammered, as we have seen in the Pacific, and in Admiral Sun Wei’s slow retreat from the Indian Ocean, to the Arabian Sea, to the Gulf of Oman.

  I’ve determined that China is simply unable to adequately defend or control its maritime lines of communication, even if their “String of Pearls” gives them all the new overseas bases I have added here in the 2025-2026 timeframe. With a single Carrier Strike Group, the US Navy can interdict and cut those sea lanes any time it chooses, and the “Malacca Dilemma” is one the Chinese have been unable to resolve.

  Therein lies the one sobering fact that will probably compel China to forsake anything resembling a general war like this in the near future. They will remain strong rivals, but not real adversaries, because they simply aren’t ready to take on the most experienced and well equipped navy on earth, the USN, and they know it. The Chinese Navy, in spite of its size, is still a force that might only be able to control its littoral seas, the East and South China Seas. But brothers, they are building at a pace we haven’t seen since the great naval arms races before WWII. What will they be floating by 2040 or 2050?

  Here I’ve taken a look at their future navy when 25 Type 055’s and six carriers started this war in 2025. 90 days later, they have lost two carriers, and ten Type 055’s, with other destroyer losses amounting to a third of their standing fleet in that ship category. That would probably be enough to end any general war like this, but for the sake of this story, we’ll soldier on here to the bitter end and see what happens.

  In our world, Nanchang is the only Type 055 now in active service but many more are coming, and we will see whether they can truly make a difference. The US classes that ship type as a cruiser, as it displaces 13,000 tons. By contrast, the aging Ticonderoga Class cruisers weigh in at 9,600 tons, and they are going to diminish in number in the years ahead. Unlike this alternate history, there is no large surface combatant in the works to replace any of them. 27 were built, with five of those already scrapped. The Navy wants to try and upgrade 11 of those that remain, retiring the rest by 2028. So while China will have at least 25 Type 055’s by that year, the USN will see its existing cruiser force cut in half, and the Chinese Navy will outnumber them in the cruiser category by more than two to one.

  One thing to bear in mind here is that the Burkes are still very potent ships in the US destroyer fleet. With 96 VLS cells, they can pack more missile power than any Chinese ship except the Type 055, which has 128 VLS cells. The next best Chinese ship is the Type 052D Class destroyer with only 64 VLS cells, and 24 more for their close in defense HQ-10 missile. As we have seen, it’s the HQ-9 that does the real defensive work at sea, and here the Type 052D cannot come close to matching up with a Burke Class destroyer for air defense. That said, until the Burke gets its SSM teeth replaced, the Type 052D is the better ship for anti-surface warfare. China built 20 Type 052D’s since the first was launched in 2014.

  In this volume, by chance or fate, we will spend some time aboard Nanchang, the first of what will probably be many more in its class. In Condition Zebra, that ship led the contingent composed of ships stationed at Aden and Djibouti, joined by others from the Med and East African ports. It was one of the first attacked by the Roosevelt strike group, with one frigate damaged and the rest depleted of SAM’s to a point where Admiral Sun Wei ordered them back to Aden.

  So that is where we will begin, because by the end of Condition Zebra, the Chinese forces at Aden are now cut off from the main fleet, which has consolidated in the Gulf of Oman. The Aden group has to be dealt with, and as Roosevelt has bigger fish to fry, the job goes to Admiral Wells and the Royal Navy. The opening here presents Operation Talisman Sabre, taken from a real biennial training exercise conducted by the Australians and US Navy units. Here it becomes the operational name for Admiral Wells’ mission to clear the Gulf of Aden, destroy the Chinese naval assets there, and occupy both Aden and Djibouti, China’s twin bases in the region to control access to the Red Sea through the Strait of Bab-el Mandeb.

  Those waters see nearly 4.8 million barrels of oil pass through each day in our time, and likely more by the year 2025-2026 when this war is fought. Another 5.5 million barrels pass the Suez Canal each day. So the Allies simply must operate to clear both those chokepoints, and control the Red Sea as a prerequisite to larger operations aimed at the other two great maritime oil transit chokepoints, the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca. 19 million barrels of oil exit the Persian Gulf each day, and of that 16 million barrels flow east to the Strait of Malacca. Again, those numbers will increase by 2026. In effect, those chokepoints are the heart of China’s lifeline, which is why their navy exerts so much effort in this war to control and defend them.

  In Able Sentry, the beleaguered Admiral Wells gets a shot at evening the score against the Chinese Navy, and we’ll will also see another group of lost heroes, Brigadier Kinlan and company, prominently featured in plans that will take them back to hauntingly familiar ground.

  P.S.

  The land action in these volumes is simulated using custom scenarios I design in TOAW-IV, on scales ranging from 250 meters to 5 kilometers per hex. All the naval and air action is simulated in scenarios I build using Command Modern Operations, software that is also used by the US military and defense establishment. Both are available from Matrix Games. You can easily find all the places mentioned in the naval and lan
d action on Google Maps.

  - John Schettler

  Part I

  Nanchang

  “Nobody lives forever… My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue.”

  ― James Crumley

  Chapter 1

  Admiral Sun Wei knew in his heart that he had been defeated. After the beating he had delivered to the Royal Navy, he had every confidence in this operation. Yet as soon as the American carrier came on the scene, everything changed. Yes, he thought, I had every confidence, and that amounted to overconfidence, perhaps even hubris on my part. We mustered the fleet, collecting squadrons and flotillas from the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea, and all mostly armed with the YJ-18, the deadly missile that we used to savage the British fleet. But we needed something more.

  I failed to perceive just how effective the American carrier can be at range. They can standoff over 400 miles from us, and still deliver missiles and those strings of bombs. It would not be so if we were able to find and target their F-35’s, but with no carrier here, and no J-31’s to cover and support the fleet, I was reduced to using land based J-20’s on long range recon flights just to locate the enemy. When I finally found him, I saw he was outside the range of all our YJ-18’s. Only our YJ-100 could range out far enough to engage, and we did not have them in sufficient numbers to generate enough mass and saturation in the attack to break through their defense.

  They knew this…. Yes, they knew we would have limited means of delivering any offensive punch beyond 300 miles, and therefore, that is where they stayed. I turned and attempted to close the range, our ships racing through the swells at 30 knots or better. All they did was turn and lead us deeper into the Indian Ocean, and at 35 knots, their carrier was faster than the swiftest of my destroyers. We could not catch them, or ever bring our YJ-18’s into combat range.