PAGASA: This is the Future of War (Future War Book 6) by FX Holden

Author:FX Holden
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2021-11-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chinese military politics is a snake pit, Li Chen was thinking. She was standing in the office of the Commander of the PLA Navy air brigade based on Mischief and Fiery Cross reefs, trying to make clear to him that subordinating his brigade to her meant he would need to follow her orders for deploying his air assets. It seemed that simple reality was beyond his ability, or willingness, to understand.

“With respect, you are looking at this conflict wrongly, Comrade Commander. You see it as a game of pure numbers. I see it as a question of competing technologies. We are fighting unmanned stealth fighters with piloted aircraft two generations older,” Li Chen was explaining. “We cannot fight them on their own terms.”

“And what are ‘their terms’, Comrade Acting Commander?” Mischief Reef’s Lieutenant Commander asked. Li Chen had persuaded Rear Admiral Li Bing, Commander of Southern Fleet and her commanding officer aboard the Liaoning, to order the man opposite to subordinate himself and his aircraft to Li Chen until further notice. He was not happy about handing his baton to a junior officer and was not afraid to show it with his sarcastic emphasis on her rank.

“Patrolling stubbornly over Subi Reef and Pagasa, while American drones track and engage us from a hundred miles away, Comrade Commander,” she replied without rancor. “As you have been doing. It will only lead to further slaughter.”

“Then what do you propose?”

Li Chen had a map in front of her. “We pull our aircraft back. Cover Mischief Reef and Fiery Cross with continuous standing air patrols but do not engage American aircraft unless these bases are threatened.”

“That is the action of a coward!” he exclaimed, his eye muscle twitching with barely controlled anger. “You would be surrendering control of the air to our enemy. Our troops on Subi Reef would be unprotected.”

“For now, yes. Subi Reef is already out of commission. Our wounded have been evacuated and remaining troops are dug in. A response to the American aggression is being prepared by Southern Command Fleet Base. Until then, you will not deploy your fighters for anything other than combat air patrols to protect our airfields.”

“What kind of strategy is it, Comrade, that requires me to order my pilots to hide from their enemy and leave Subi Reef, our largest base in the Spratly Islands, unprotected?” he asked bitterly. “I will not comply with such defeatism.”

She could take his insolence no longer. To Li Chen, this balding, sweating officer with a paunch and a sneer represented all that was wrong with the PLA Naval Air Force. He made a virtue out of mindlessly following the doctrines he had been trained in twenty years earlier. Was unable to think an inch outside the box that was his comfort zone. And considered any new idea to be not just insubordinate, but dangerous.

“Commander, you are the kind of fool who would stand outside his house in a storm and wave his fist at the clouds, instead of moving his family to high ground.

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