Chapter 12: War Plans

New Pentagon, Military Headquarters
Denver, WestHem
Monday, September 18, 2147

The briefing was being held in the Situation Room in the basement of the New Pentagon, nicknamed the ‘Bunker’ because it was considered impregnable. Supposedly this was the most secure facility in the WestHem military, but Colonel Oliver Whitestone knew that to be ridiculous. Even if the material presented in the room was safe, it was prepared in other, less secure, rooms and those rooms and the people preparing the presentation could have been compromised. Still, he knew better than to make waves. He sat in his pre-ordained position behind General Wesley Morgan, the Adjutant to the Chief of Staff.

Morgan sat at his pre-ordained position to the right hand of General Wainwright Turner, the Chief of Staff. Giving the briefing was Brigadier Turner Hemsley, Director, Plans and Training, for the WestHem military. When Whitestone asked Morgan what Hemsley’s qualifications and training were for the critically important position, Morgan had answered, “His name.”

“Hemsley?”

“Turner! He’s General Turner’s second cousin. It’s a family name.” He shrugged. Some things you couldn’t change.

“Oh.”

Why this briefing was being held in a top security bunker was a mystery to Whitestone. As he looked around the room, he recognized every General and Admiral, and he knew who each of their corporate sponsors was. As soon as the meeting was finished, with the final warnings about secrecy, each officer would take his secure thumb drive back to his office, to be copied and delivered to those sponsors. Why they weren’t invited to begin with was beyond him.

With that he sat back and listened to the plans for Operation Martian Justice. He had been working with Major Norman Wilde, the disgraced architect of Martian Hammer, for almost a year, and now could almost predict the casualty counts from each element of Martian Justice. Whitestone knew exactly what Hemsley would say.

“We foresee Martian Justice being launched in the early spring of 2150. It will take that long just to rebuild the naval transports lost in Martian Hammer. Less time will be required to build the thousands of new and improved tanks and armored personnel carriers. These will be new designs capable of standing up to the weapons the Martian terrorists captured.”

Martian Hammer had launched with twenty-five Panama-class transports. Six were destroyed outright while being convoyed to Mars, and a seventh was damaged so badly that it had been destroyed prior to the retreat to Earth. That was bad enough, but WestHem had other Panamas that could be deployed. What WestHem didn’t have was strategic reserves of iron and other metals. Before the Revolution, the corporations that built the ships and tanks used metals mined on Mars. Now they had been forced to massively expand the asteroid mining operation centered on the major asteroid Ceres and nearby iron-nickel asteroids. Twenty percent of WestHem’s fleet had been shifted to protect the asteroid mining operations that shipped refined metals in giant freighters back to the orbital factories around Earth. It would take years to fully expand the orbital mining operations. In the meantime, WestHem was going to have to strip resources from other theaters.

Other laughably false statements concerned the new and improved designs being used for the new ships and armored vehicles. That was simply untrue. Maybe the Navy had new designs for the replacement Panamas, but the final design would be whatever Halcyon Industries decided they would build for the Navy. Halcyon had the contract for all WestHem navy support ships, much like Ares Incorporated had the contract for Owls and Seattles and Californias. For all he knew, Halcyon did have plans for new and improved Panamas, but they would never be built in time for Martian Justice.

Likewise, he knew about the plans for new and improved tanks and APCs. The reality was that Martian Justice would be using standard equipment from the reserves and the pre-positioning ships. The latest plans were for the ships to be brought back to Earth and the armored vehicles would be checked for problems, get the latest software, and have some additional armor bolted on. The additional armor had been tried before, in tests on Earth and on Ganymede; the results were less than impressive. It didn’t do much more than weigh down the already heavy vehicles; and modern antitank lasers burned through it without slowing down.

“During Martian Hammer, we sent a force of half a million Marines to Mars. That was an error in planning. We are going to need to send more, a lot more this time to take Mars back. The force then was twenty-five Panamas, three California groups, and four Owls. That was obviously inadequate. We are going to increase the Panamas from twenty-five to forty, add a fourth California group, and triple the number of Owls and Seattles. The final Marine count will be seven-hundred-and-fifty thousand, three-quarters of a million, and this time they will make it to Mars and not get killed during the transit.”

As far as Whitestone was concerned, that simply gave the Martians more targets to blow up. The Martians had captured ten Owls and managed to partially crew four of them in time to use during the transit. With that limited Navy they had cost WestHem almost a quarter of the transports and a fifth of the Marines. The price paid was a single Owl, and she had gone down fighting. Now the Martians had their remaining nine Owls fully manned and trained. By the time Martian Justice was launched, the Martians were going to think they were in stealth-ship heaven, and probably wishing they had more nuclear torpedoes. The only thing that Hemsley said that gave him any hope was the date. The launch of the task force was timed to occur during a least-time transit. Martian Hammer had occurred when Mars and Earth had been almost as far apart in their orbits as possible. Transit time would be just over two months, limiting the time for the Martians to attack and minimizing the time the Marines would be crammed into their landing ships.

“One important factor during Martian Hammer was the difficulty our Marines had when they landed on the planet. They had trained and spent the transit time at a standard 1G gravitational field. Mars has a gravity slightly over a third of that. Thousands of our Marines were injured just getting out of the transports and onto the Martian surface. We intend to begin low-G training and lower the artificial gravity on the transports to Martian levels.”

That part actually made sense to Whitestone. Wilde had told him that just walking down the ramps to the Martian surface was dangerous and amounted to a controlled fall. Doing it under mortar fire had cost several thousand Marine lives and twice that in injuries, most of which had to be treated on the surface after the Martian air force began shooting down medical transports. He just wondered how the Navy would manage to fuck it up. From what he had heard, the Navy didn’t have a facility where three-quarters of a million Marines could be trained in low-G maneuvers.

Then the briefing went totally off the rails. Wilde had told him what would happen, but Whitestone had been hoping that sanity would make an appearance. Even Major Wilde couldn’t have predicted what was being proposed.

“A major problem in the last invasion was the mixed messaging and strategic changes in the operational plan. The plan was developed from the standard doctrine to be used in the event we would be attacking a foreign enemy, EastHem, and totally failed to recognize that we weren’t fighting a conventional enemy. We were fighting against our own people, and the operational plans didn’t match that reality. Attacking an EastHem enclave, we would take down the satellite and reconnaissance network, interdict the rail and transport system, and then apply overwhelming force in a timely manner.”

“Obviously, this cannot be how we treat our own citizens, prisoners of vicious communist terrorists. Destroying the Martian satellite and rail infrastructure will impact their way of life and take years to rebuild after we take back Mars. During Martian Hammer Generals Wrath and Browning were allowed to come up with plans that didn’t take the status of our captured citizens into consideration. Then those plans, sometimes only minutes from being executed, would have to be changed by order from headquarters on Earth. During Operation Martian Justice, a team of advisers from the Executive Council will be part of the command staff. When we launch forces against the Martian terrorists, our Marines and sailors will know that their actions follow the best possible planning.”

Whitestone tried to keep the shock off his face and wondered how many of his compatriots were trying to do the same. The Executive Council, or more specifically, their corporate owners, had decided they were the experts in military and naval operations. They would issue the orders to Admiral Bosworth, the admiral selected to lead Martian Justice. His job, and Norman Wilde’s job, had just become an order of magnitude harder.

WestHem Military Intelligence Headquarters
Denver, WestHem
Tuesday, September 19, 2147

“Tell me that Hemsley was joking,” said Norman Wilde.

Whitestone gave him a bleak look and shook his head. “Sorry. I asked the same question to General Morgan yesterday afternoon. He was halfway to a record-breaking drunk at the time. He had a hard time believing it, too. We got the details late in the day and he immediately declared it was 1700 somewhere.”

“That bad?”

“Worse. The names of the Executive Council advisers were made known. All three are bought and paid for by the three biggest conglomerates on Mars. As in, their government paychecks are subsidized in full by their corporations. There’s Borden Fuller from AgriCorp, a guy named Weston Smith from MarsTrans, and a woman named Shelley Turner. She’s from InfoGroup and is Wainwright Turner’s niece and Turner Hemsley’s cousin. She’s the boss.”