by John Ringo
With those testimonials, and presentations on the cost difference and what it meant to production numbers, between his system, already up and running, and the systems being developed by the major corporations, behind schedule and over budget, he pigeonholed congressmen and senators night and day, to the point where those elected officials nearly had him arrested for harassment.
But his arguments finally started to sink in and, in a rare burst of logic. The Congress overrode the military procurement bureaucracy and ordered them to accept the Jacobs Industries Protean Manjack as it was.
The manjacks were heavy, bulky and awkward to carry in their large formed-plastic cases, but they might be the weapon that turned this tide. Each manjack consisted of an M-60F machine gun, the newest version of the venerable platoon automatic weapon that had first seen service in Vietnam, and a removable automated firing system. The firing system contained a mechanized tripod and a simple autotarget system. Place the weapon on a vector, let it “read” the area — get a laser picture of the zone of fire — and if the “picture” changed, if anything broke the continuously sweeping infrared lasers, it would fire down the broken vector. The weapon could be produced for one-third the cost and in a fifth of the time of the first “correct” version to be fielded. Already, in less than a year’s time, there were sufficient manjacks for all the forces and more were being installed in the fixed defenses.
Since the M-60F contained the latest in barrel technology, the barrels actively dissipated heat. Thus the weapons could continue to fire as long as the ammunition held out. To assist in that, each team had hooked the machine guns up to a “battlecase,” boxes preloaded at the factory with twenty-five-thousand rounds of 7.62mm ammunition. The boxes were backbreakingly heavy, one hundred rounds of M-60 ammunition weighs seven pounds, and awkward to maneuver into some of the manjack positions, but once in place they gave every team three times the throw weight of fire they could otherwise expect. In addition, the boxes could be ganged together, so that if one box ran dry, the weapon would be fed from a second. The joke went that if you used up two boxes, fifty thousand rounds of ammunition, you were officially having a bad hair day and could take the rest of the day off.
But the armor, the infantry, even the manjacks, were really only there to hold the Posleen in place.
To truly make the Posleen’s day miserable, and for the long-term defense of Richmond, over fifty percent of the construction equipment had been detailed to the Mosby and Libby Hill defenses.
The two hills towered over Richmond, dominating the landscape at least as much as the city skyline, and loomed doubly over the Schockoe Valley that separated them from the city. While the sides towards the James and Schockoe Bottom were extremely steep, far too steep for the quadrupedal Posleen to negotiate, the north and east sides were another matter. Among other things they had roads leading up to the numerous homes and monuments on the hills.
All of the roads were initially left in place, but demolition of the slopes began immediately. Where a slope was merely steep, it was made vertical by a combination of explosives and graders. The many abandoned buildings again went into the defenses, the rubble used to create hasty fighting positions for the cavalry troops detailed for security. The cavalry, in the meantime, began covering their front with antipersonnel mines, concertina barbed wire and “tanglefoot,” barbed wire stretched tight at knee level, designed to slow the advance of ground troops. Between the slopes and the obstacles, assaulting Posleen should be effectively stopped, sitting ducks for the heavily armed defenders. Their cavalry fighting vehicles were well back to avoid taking fire, but they were ready to go if ordered to sally. The line would be held by troops with rifles, grenades, machine guns and the ubiquitous manjacks.
The outer edges of the defense boasted a brigade of cavalry. Then in the next ring was the massed artillery of the infantry divisions. Over one hundred tubes of 155mm artillery were packed on the hills. In a few cases, the artillery was placed so as to cover straight open steep roads, such as Broad Street, which ran through downtown Richmond, through Schockoe Bottom, and up into the Montrose Heights area.
When, inevitably, the Posleen charged up that street, they would eventually be met by batteries A and B of the One Hundred Ninety-Third Artillery, firing 155mm canister rounds into them from revetments at point-blank. If they were able to overcome the defenses anyway, the road was mined to blow out a crater large enough to make the approach impenetrable.
In the inner ring were better than half of the infantry division’s mortar platoons, set up in their tracked vehicles. Since they were invisible to any reasonable angle of fire from the Posleen, the feeling was that they might as well stay in a mobile configuration in case they had to move off the hills for some reason. They were behind the artillery because mortars have no direct-fire capability. However, as John Keene had pointed out, mortars carry more explosive-weight-to-size than rifled artillery. Because the mortars were fired from smooth bores, they did not have to be able to withstand the rotational force placed on an artillery shell. A 120mm mortar round has the same explosive power as a 155mm artillery shell.
Mortars are a lot of bang for very little buck and there were over one hundred packed onto the hills. In addition, the mortar vehicles, unlike the unarmored mobile artillery vehicles, were designed for close defense. And the mortarmen who crewed those vehicles were trained and heavily armed for it; a mechanized mortar platoon had twice the throw weight of a mechanized line platoon, including just as many manjacks. If the Posleen penetrated the outer defenses, penetrated the cav and the depressed artillery’s point-blank fire, they would still have to penetrate the band of mortar infantrymen and women to take the command and supply facilities.
Libby Hill, Mosby Hill and Montrose Heights were a seething fortress of artillery, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the centaurs. Troops in the open are the artilleryman’s meat and drink.
While there were heavy defenses along the north and east, the west side of the city was virtually undefended; only scattered cavalry units were there as sentries. The defense plan depended on the Posleen turning towards the east and Schockoe Bottom. Barriers were being erected along the I-95/U.S. 1 corridor, designed to physically and visually distract the Posleen away from the westerly route. And when the Posleen approached, all of the roads to the west would be cratered by the heavy charges being emplaced. General Keeton was prepared to move the Seventy-Fifth Armored up in defense if small numbers moved in that direction, otherwise — if the Posleen did turn westward en masse — the “good” plan would have to be scrapped.
The alternative plan was to use the Libby Hill defenses to create a curtain barrage along the Posleen axis of assault. While the barrage would kill many Posleen, it would not be nearly as effective as the slaughter possible in the fire-trap. Deception and luring plans, some of them wild, others reasonable, were being designed to draw the Posleen in the more favorable direction.
For the inevitable moment when the north or west flank was turned, the Corps had worked out precise and simple retreat routes to the south side of the James. The heavy road infrastructure and plethora of bridges helped. Each unit had a designated route which was color-coded; city road crews had worked through the night putting up the new signs.
As the primary defense points came on-line, the freed construction crews hurried to the south side of the James and began construction of fighting positions designed to maintain a permanent assault on Posleen in the Richmond area. Craters and trenches began sprouting throughout the south Richmond area as many of the people in the refugee enclaves came forward to help.
Ramps and scaffolds began to sprout behind the south floodwall for direct fire from infantry and even tanks. At the same time pits for mortars and larger positions for artillery began to form throughout the city, wherever there was any sort of angle of fire. In many cases abandoned buildings were demolished to both improve angle of fire and donate their material for the defenses.
There were three tiers of
defense, and every one had written its signature on the skyline of the city. As Keene had said, the city was writing a new chapter in her history. But she was also getting a facelift.
“I can’t believe it is going as well as it is,” said the corps commander.
“Well,” said Colonel Abrahamson, scratching his head before redonning his Kevlar. “I don’t know exactly how to put this. It’s complex but not complicated. Every individual action either is something the military has trained for or is being done by civilians who are experienced and highly motivated. With the exception of my battalion’s job, it should be a simple, set-piece siege. It’s the poor bastards in Tenth Corps I feel sorry for, sir.”
“Yes, I would have liked a little longer to prepare, you’re never prepared enough. But this is effectively a World War I scenario. Easier really, there’s no artillery for us to worry about. But General Simosin’s divisions are about to get hit by a blitzkrieg, and they have no time to prepare.”
“The President shouldn’t have ordered them so far forward, General,” the cavalry commander commented in a voice so neutral it was gray.
The corps commander nodded his head. It was the first overt comment he had heard in the negative about the President’s decision. “Possibly. I suppose ordering them to defend before Alexandria made sense, some sense, but he should not have ordered them to set up almost on the Posleen’s door.” He shook his head again. “God save their poor brave souls.”
CHAPTER 46
Near Dale City, VA, United States of America, Sol III
1258 EDT October 10th, 2004 ad
It started with a crackle of manjacks. The observation post was a regulation one-hundred meters out from the company and in view of the Second platoon but, being barely in view and after the stresses of the night with multiple moves and digging in not once but a total of four times, as the division moved again and again and the battalion adjusted lines, reassigned areas of responsibility, moved the company forward and back, the two-man team had fallen asleep. They awoke to the rattling burp from the manjack set up beside their foxhole and the cracking whistle of railgun rounds in return.
In his foxhole, Captain Brantley dropped the half-eaten remains of a hotdog loaded with chili, onions and relish, and rotated his shoulders. To the captain’s amazement the first sergeant had made it back. And although he had not found an open restaurant, he had found enough supplies and cookware to feed the entire company on hotdogs, hamburgers and a really horrible concoction of canned baked beans and chili. After nearly two days on MREs, the troops consumed it so fast that the first sergeant’s party had to make seconds and even thirds in the ten-gallon pots hung over sooty fires.
The commander had been a history major in college. To him, the scene was reminiscent of the Union and Confederate Armies in the War Years. The same scene was replicated over and over in the woods and fields around his position. The soldiers digging their foxholes had turned up Civil War era “Minié” balls as they dug and the ghosts in their tattered gray and blue seemed to hover around them, urging them into battle. He heard them now, rattling their ramrods and whispering in his ear of the terrible sights to come and he wrapped the whispers around himself like armor.
He looked at his thin line of troops — the few in view in the thick pine scrub — and knew despair. What the situation called for was defense in depth, pillboxes and wire, trenches and no-man’s-land. What it had was a thin screen of infantry, dug-in deep, with a few mines and claymores out front, hoping against hope for the strength to stop a force a hundred times their size.
The one bright spot was artillery support. With the shift in emphasis from human-human to human-Posleen combat, the Army had radically changed its approach to artillery equipment. Although the bulk of the Army would remain mechanized infantry, the lack of counterbattery ability — the ability of one artillery unit to fire on another — by the Posleen meant that the division and corps artillery did not need to be armored. Thus the M-222 “Reaver” was born.
Modified from a South African mobile artillery piece, the Reaver was a six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle mounting a 155mm howitzer. It had the speed to keep up with mechanized forces and the ammunition capacity to support them effectively.
Three full batteries of these artillery behemoths were in places to support the division and the resultant firepower exceeded the artillery of three divisions of the latter twentieth century. The Posleen might succeed in overrunning them, but they should take massive casualties in the process.
The captain had previously ensured that he was authenticated on the automated central firing network, so he calmly picked up the microphone and called in his first ever real-world call for fire.
“Central, Central, this is Echo-Three-Five, fire mission, over.”
He paused and waited a moment for a response. Usually, the newly fielded Central Artificial Intelligence Targeting Artillery Fire Remote Command and Control System, or Central for short (the military, for once, had universally decided not to use the acronym), came back practically before you could unkey the microphone. In this case it seemed to either not receive the call or be overloaded.
“Central, Central, this is Echo-Three-Five. Fire mission, over.”
“Echo-Three-Five, this is Central, call fire.”
Better. “Central, Central, fire concentration, Echo-Two, say again, Echo-Two.”
There was another pause. Fire was building on the line, but these Posleen seemed to be the equivalent of scouts and there had yet to be a call for a medic. He waited a moment longer then called again.
“Central, Central, this is Echo-Three-Five. Say status fire mission, over.”
“Echo-Three-Five, no fire mission in status, over.”
“What?!” he shouted and stared at the radio in his foxhole. His RTO looked around, puzzled.
“What’s wrong, sir?”
“The—” He realized a need to maintain a calm demeanor. Even if the one ace he thought he had in a hole was starting to look like a deuce. “I’m having a little trouble with the artillery net, I keep getting stepped on.” It was a bald-faced lie, but better than the truth.
He had used Central several times in Exercise Without Troops, map exercises and field problems and it had never shown a bit of problem, once you got used to the syntax. The system had been designed by the Advanced Technology Research Board, a board formed in reaction to the “GalTech” group, and was the brainchild of the former Ground Forces High Commander.
As a concept it was deceptively simple; rather than having fallible humans make numerous transmissions in the call for fire chain, let computers do the work. Practically “off-the-shelf” voice-recognition software would “recognize” calls for fire, given by authenticated individuals and in the proper form, register them and pass them to a central computer. The computer would determine priorities, make the fire calculations and both send out fire commands and update the units calling for fire on the status of their request.
Combined with the Inter Vehicle Information System and the Ground Tactical Positioning System, it would eliminate “blue on blue” or “friendly” fire and distribute the available fire more equitably and efficiently. As a salve to the technological nay-sayers, there were both system overrides that commanders could invoke and real human beings in the chain. And it was just about time to invoke one.
He poked his head up to get a look at the situation and called again. “Central, Central, this is Echo-Three-Five. Final protective fire, I say again, final protective fire. Command override, priority one. Over.”
Nothing.
“Sir?” said his RTO, as the first medic cry came from Second platoon, “where’s the artillery?” One of the medics in the next foxhole crawled out towards the line, just as a centaur group broke through the firelanes and into view. Shotgun rounds flailed the foxholes, momentarily suppressing the company’s fire and smashing the luckless medic into red paste. Captain Brantley dropped back into the foxhole just as the radio crackled back into life.<
br />
“Echo-Three-Five, authenticate Whiskey-Tango.”
I already did that! The captain dug into his rucksack and dragged out his ANCD. “Victor! Over!”
“Say, again, syntax not recognized, over.”
“Central, this is Echo-Three-Five, authentication Victor, over.” He ground his teeth, seemingly drawing patience out of the air.
“Echo-Three-Five, say again full callsign, over.”
“Juliet-Mike-Echo-Three-Five,” he said, very slowly and carefully.
“Juliet-Mike-Echo-Three-Five, welcome to the net, say request, over.”
“Central, this is Echo-Three-Five, fire mission, over.”
“Echo-Three-Five, call fire, over.”
“Central, this is Echo-Three-Five, fire mission, concentration Echo…” He popped his head up and took a quick look towards the front. The Posleen had begun to thicken, their fire beating down the company’s with the exception of the manjacks. As he watched, a God King plasma cannon removed one of those, reducing the fire pressure. A lane was being cleared through the minefield by the simple expedient of pushing the Posleen normals through it. He saw two blown up in the brief span he was up but there were thousands behind them, a mass of yellow centaurs so great they were pushing down the trees, turning the forest into a plain.
“Fire mission, concentration Echo-One. Final Protective Fire, priority one. Say again, FPF, Echo-One, Priority One, over.”
There was a brief pause and panic set in as he feared he would have to start over from the beginning. There was no time.
“Echo-Three-Five, this is Central. FPF on the way. Splash in two-five seconds. One hundred rounds.”
Captain Brantley switched to the platoon local net. “All Echo units, all Echo units, final protective fire, One-Five-Five close. Twenty seconds! Incoming!” He clamped his hands over his ears, hunkered down and smiled at the RTO. “Here it comes! Better late than never!”
