Cyber Warfare and the New World Order

Maps and Schemes

Following the coup in Japan, the US Military quickly backed the coup leaders and helped the military seize control of the government and the country. The Chinese, of course, had their own response to the situation. The PLA had 35,000 soldiers in Japan, and those soldiers did their best to attack the government forces and try to hold on to the few military bases they operated on. The PLAAF also sent additional aircraft into the mix. After nearly three months of fighting, the US and the remaining JDF that supported the coup were able to push the PLA off the island. The US Navy put a lot of effort into preventing the PLAN from bringing in more reinforcements; the US lost a lot of ships attacking the remains of the PLAN, but after months of naval engagements, the US had defeated what was left of the Chinese navy and reasserted their dominance of the Pacific.

After the Chinese and Axis powers had been defeated in California and Alaska, General Gardner had been promoted again and given his fifth star. He had now been given overall command of all Allied forces in the Pacific. The last four months had been busy; the US had ferried over a million soldiers and supporting equipment to Japan. With the steady supply of Tritium4, the US had been cranking out F41s as fast as they could. The Air Force now had one 187 of them operating in Japan. They had quickly established air control over Japan and the East China Sea.

General Gardner’s forces in Japan had now reached 1,400,000 soldiers, and were still growing. There was still some resistance domestically from holdouts of the previous government, but they were being hunted down and dealt with. What Gardner wanted to focus on now was how best to invade China and bring a swift end to the war. He was concerned with the casualty numbers, and the last thing he wanted to do was lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Of the soldiers that he had in Japan, nearly 230,000 of them were equipped with the Raptor exoskeleton combat suits. He also had 12,000 of the new enhanced humanoid drones and 4,000 trained operators ready to use them.

Intelligence and surveillance of the major cities and probably landing zones of mainland China showed a massive increase in activity. The Chinese were building up their shoreline, and appeared to be turning their cities into fortresses. This was the exact fight General Gardner wanted to avoid. He grumbled to himself, “No one wants to fight in a city; it favors the defenders and it is a lot harder to root out the enemy. Unless I were willing to flatten all the buildings and kill the civilians in them, fighting in a city is going to cost us a lot of lives… I have to find a way to cut China up into manageable chunks.”

He opened a map on his tablet and began strategizing. Shanghai was the first region of concern that he identified; there were nearly eighteen million people living in that metropolis and surrounding area. Intelligence showed the PLA had moved nearly 600,000 soldiers into the area to defend it as well. His second goal was the port city of Qingdao and the rest of the peninsula. Next, he planned to liberate Taiwan. This would allow him to position aircraft, troops and supplies a lot closer to southern China. He also wanted to capture Tianjin, which would put his forces in striking distance of Beijing. The real question was — where should he attack first? Fighting was going to be heavy in all four areas; he needed to figure out where to use the Raptor soldiers and EHDs versus regular infantry wearing standard body armor.

It was still dicey providing air support to the infantry. The F41s could operate at a higher altitude and because of their speed and stealth, the enemy laser and Surface to Air Missile (SAM) batteries were useless against them. The F41s were attacking every laser battery they could find, but they were never going to get them all…the PLA had tens of thousands of SAMs, not to mention shoulder-fired missiles, which were also able to pack a punch. In either case, the invasion was going to be costly.

******

General Tyler Black walked into the operations center and went straight for the coffee stand. He had been awake for nearly twenty hours after visiting several of the battalions of newly-arrived soldiers. He had made it a point to spend at least three days a week touring the various battalions, talking to the soldiers, sergeants and junior officers to get a feel for the mood of the soldiers and their morale. He tried to offer words of encouragement and give them hope that the war was finally ending. He told them the President and General Gardner were in negotiations with the Chinese government, but if they did not surrender, he expected them to do their duty and bring this war to an end.

The war in Alaska had taken a lot from General Black. He had lost so many soldiers, and ultimately, they still lost. If it had not been for the Navy, they might still be fighting the Chinese there. He wanted payback for the invasion of America. He wanted payback for the Chinese providing all the weapons to the IR and starting this war. Too many young men and women had died. Too many more were still going to die if President Stein ordered them to invade.

As he stood there for a minute holding his coffee, he lifted it up to his nose and took a big sniff, letting the aroma fill his lungs before he took a long sip. In seconds, he felt the warmth of the liquid move down into his body; within minutes, he could already start to feel the caffeine slowly starting to kick in. Once he had his fix, he looked around to see if he could find General Gardner.

General Black spotted him talking to one of the Air Force generals and began to walk towards him. He had just finished up his conversation when he saw him approaching. Gardner and then extended his hand, “General Black, it’s good to see you. We have lots to discuss,” he said.

They walked down the hallway towards General Gardner’s office, which sat just off of the operations center. Gardner liked to be near the heart of the war, which these days meant being near the operations center, which was filled with TV monitors of drone feeds, headcams and an endless feed of data from all sorts of sensors and maps.

As they sat down to talk, General Black was the first to speak. “The troops are in high spirits. They are eager to get this fight going, if that is what it’s going to come down to.”

General Gardner smiled for a second as he replied, “That’s good to hear, Tyler.” His face then reverted into a stone-cold, serious expression. “I just got done talking with the President and the National Security Council about twenty minutes ago. We’ve been given the order. We are to begin preparations to invade.”

He paused for a minute to let his long-time friend collect his thoughts before he continued, “The President has given me some leeway in when we can begin the operation, but he wants it to begin within the month. We can pick the date, time and location, but he wants us to move forward with the four-pronged approach we briefed him on.” General Gardner was somber. This was a big decision. They were about to commit millions of soldiers to one last major campaign of the war.

The two generals had known each other on and off again for the last fifteen years, but had really become close over these past five months. When General Gardner was given his fifth star, he immediately requested General Black to be his field commander. General Gardner knew that he was not going to be able to be at the front leading his soldiers as much as he wanted to, and he needed someone he could trust to be in that position for him. He had seen how Black had fought tooth and nail against the Chinese, and he admired that. He had finally found someone as aggressive as he was.

General Black took a deep breath in and then puffed it out as if he were blowing out an imaginary candle. “This is going to be a tough one, Gary. Have you already determined which front we will hit first and what troops we are going to use?”

“Yes. We are going to go after Shanghai. Using the Raptor troops, I want them to hit Nantong first, then cross the Yangtze River and capture Changzhou. I want that area completely sealed off. Then I want to use our airborne and heliborne troops to hit Shaoxing and drive towards Hangzhou on foot with the Wolverines. They need to move fast and secure the docks and the airports. Once the docks are secured, you need to get reinforcements into those guys quick and firm up their position. We are not going to attack Shanghai right away. I want to get the area completely surrounded and cut off from further supply,” Gary explained as he showed Tyler the plan on his tablet map. He went over the numbers of troops, timeline for reinforcements, number of aircraft assigned for ground support as well as helicopters and Razorbacks available. He also went over the direct fire support the Navy would be providing with their battleships.

General Black leaned back in his chair. “That is going to be a tall order, Gary.”. He knew there were a lot of concerns. They still did not have nearly as many Raptor suit troopers as they wanted, and wouldn’t for nearly a year. The private sector was cranking them out as fast as they could, but they could only produce so many a month. Presently, they were manufacturing 150,000 a month.

Gardner nodded, aware of the difficulties. “I’m going to have the Air Force start hitting the rail and road systems in the area tonight. They are also going to start going after the pre-identified targets we went over last week. We will let the Air Force and the Navy pound them for the next three days, then they will shift to our second objective, Taiwan. After the third day of them hammering Taiwan, they will shift their focus back to Shanghai and we will invade. This will hopefully throw them off a bit.”

“When do we hit the other objectives?” asked Black, knowing those attacks would come sooner rather than later. The goal was to overwhelm the PLA by hitting them at multiple points, forcing them to have to pick which front was going to be the priority.

“This is the tough part — hitting the next objectives is going to place an enormous strain on the Navy and our sealift capability. We will hit Taiwan within the next four months, using regular infantry. All of the Raptor troops are going to be needed in Shanghai. They are already going to be heavily outnumbered. As to the other objectives…I am not sure just yet. I want to hit Tianjin with the EHDs. We are going to be seriously outnumbered in that invasion, and I think the drones are going to be our best bet. We will follow them up with regular infantry once they have established a beachhead.”

Standing up and stretching his back, General Black looked his friend in the eye and said, “I know that you’ve done everything you could to prepare for this moment. Now it’s time to put the plan into motion and let the rest of us execute it. We will see it through to victory and bring this terrible war to an end.”

He left General Gardner’s office and began to marshal several the operations officers and senior NCOs around him to get things started. From that moment on, the operations center was beehive of activity as the greatest military invasion in history began.