INVASION by Harry Eric

Author:Harry, Eric [Harry, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780786756100
Publisher: Argo-Navis
Published: 2015-01-20T08:00:00+00:00

7

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

November 8 // 1930 Local Time

President Baker tossed newspapers and magazines onto the long conference table one at a time, allowing the slaps of paper to speak for themselves. The New York Times, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek all had articles criticizing the army’s tactic of choice, which was bunkering.

“I’ve got a prime-time news conference in an hour and a half,” Baker said, “where I’m gonna be asked fifty times by fifty people in fifty different ways why we chose to re-fight World War I in the Twenty-First Century.” There were stern looks from the ground pounders, none sterner than on the face of U.S. Army General Adam Cotler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Baker picked up Time magazine. Its cover juxtaposed black-and-white pictures of haggard doughboys in trenches with similar color images from the Savannah River. “It’s a legitimate question,” the president opined. “One that I’m beginning to ask myself after none of the three successive lines we have prepared have succeeded in stopping the Chinese for even one week. Have you read in here, General Cotler, what your now retired predecessor wrote?” Baker thumbed for the page.

“I’ve had a long talk with him about it, sir,” Cotler replied. “Yes, sir, I’ve read it.”

Baker read an excerpt nonetheless. “‘The principal strength of static defenses is their ability to bring intense firepower across their front from covered positions. Their principal drawback is that, once breached, the immobile defenders are unable to reorient themselves to repel attacks against their flanks. You cannot pick up and move a trench or a concrete bunker.’ ” Baker looked up at Cotler. “That sounds like pretty levelheaded commentary to me. I’m going to be asked by a rabid White House press corps why, after half a century of planning for mobile warfare, America has chosen to return to the trenches of Verdun? What would your answer be, General?”

Cotler squared his jaw either in anger or grim determination, or perhaps both. “Military technology swings the advantage, Mr. President, from the offense to the defense and back again. We are now squarely in a defensive phase of the technological cycle both on land and in the air. All-threat weapons give crews attached to infantry squads—both Chinese and American—the capability of blindly firing a missile into the air and killing a tank over the horizon up to twelve miles away, or—by raising the weapon’s elevation and spinning a dial—killing a supersonic jet fighter at sixty thousand feet, all with the same missile. They have virtually cleared the battlefield of armored vehicles and close air support. What’s left is infantry and artillery.

“Modern artillery, Mr. President,” Cotler continued, “is devastating when employed against unprotected infantry. A single 155 mm self-propelled Howitzer can fire twelve rounds,” he held up his forearm at a 45-degree angle—fingers extended straight like a gun barrel—steadily lowering its angle to the table in a dozen jerky motions, “depressing the elevation to time it so that all twelve rounds land on target simultaneously.

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