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A fictional scenario.
“Medic! Medic!”
An attack by swarms of armed drones in the wee hours of a gloomy, wet morning had devastated the dispersed Army platoon. As he sprinted or crawled to scattered fighting positions, almost every soldier Lieutenant Cory Dixon encountered had been hit during the storm of air-burst shrapnel.
He located his unit’s sole medic, frantically twisting a tourniquet, trying to stem the red spurting from a machine gunner’s leg. Dixon dropped to a knee and locked eyes with the badly wounded soldier.
Not good. “Hang in there, ‘Bull’! Doc’s got a handle on it! You’ll be fine!” Dixon glanced at ‘Doc’ Nells, a tough, twenty-something Medical Specialist who had not only survived three nasty battles with a sophisticated, relentless enemy, but had saved the lives of countless grunts. Again, his hands and uniform were blood-soaked. Brownish dried smears across his cheeks and chin were cracking, testimony to how long Nells had been working in this Hell.
“El-tee, we gotta have air-evac ASAP,” Nells barked. “We got ten, twelve real bad ones.” Nells’ blood-shot eyes bored into the lieutenants’ a long moment, sending a clear message: These guys aren’t going to make it, if they don’t get to a field hospital.
Dixon nodded. “Already called for evac, Doc. But you know the deal.…”
Nells damn sure did. Several Blackhawk “Dustoff” helicopters and at least one Marine Osprey had been shot down, trying to reach several patrols cut off from the battalion. Without air superiority, no evacuation aircraft could survive the apparently inexhaustible horde of surface-to-air and shoulder-fired missiles Chinese ground forces launched.
“I’ll call it in again, Doc,” the young commander assured, slapping the corpsman on a shoulder.
No sense burdening him with more bad news. Nells had more than enough to handle, without stressing over yet another horrific truth: Intermittent, unreliable communications. Chinese cyber warriors had systematically disabled low-orbit Starlink comm satellites and jammed faint signals beamed to and from military satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Without reliable communications, higher headquarters’ command and control essentially were nonexistent. In short, pinned-down units were on their own.
But Dixon had one—and only one—option left. Hunched over, he zig-zagged back to what passed for his platoon’s command post, manned by a senior sergeant and a sole comm specialist.
“OK, ‘Sparks’, break out the Q-Pack,” Dixon ordered.
The senior non-commissioned officer shot Dixon a startled look. “Sir…are you sure? Our orders say never—never—take a chance on that system falling into enemy hands.” He searched the sky, certain the bad boys had eyes on the exposed post.
“No choice, Red. We gotta get these kids out of here, or they’ll die.” The sergeant grimaced, but nodded.
“We’re in contact with HQ, sir,” the comm soldier said, handing over what looked a high-tech cell phone. Dixon keyed the mic and muttered, “I hope this quantum-comm @!#% works!” Supposedly, the ultra-classified Q-Pack system operated at the quantum level, somehow sending and receiving un-jammable, undetectable signals.
Miraculously, a solid Q-Pack connection was confirmed, when an NCO answered Dixon’s call and handed the device to an Army lieutenant colonel. The platoon commander outlined his unit’s dire situation, concluding with the coup-de-grace: “Colonel, one of the seriously wounded is PFC Crocker.”
A long silence. “Lieutenant, what the hell is Crocker doing out there? He’s confined to headquarters! You know who that kid is?”
Dixon, a politics junkie, definitely did know. “The Senate Minority Leader’s eldest son. He begged to go on this patrol, and I needed a trained gunner…sir. Crocker said he was done driving a desk. He was hot for real action. We all—all of us, sir—expected this patrol to be a cakewalk. Just didn’t work out…”
“We gotta get that kid evacuated, Dix. Standby; I’ll get back to ya in a few.” The comm link dropped.
At headquarters, the colonel briefed his staff, then gave specific orders that sent officers and NCOs scrambling. His executive officer scanned an old-school, plastic-covered map. “Sir, do you really think we can pull this off? Medevac by drone has never been done under combat conditions.”
The battalion commander took a swig of bitter coffee, before answering. “I’m not sending another rotorcraft crew into that firestorm. With a couple of stealthy F-35s flying cover, that drone just might get in without being nailed. And, if that kid dies out there in the mud…. Old Senator Crocker will burn the Pentagon to the ground.”
“Didn’t Crocker lead the charge to gut our military medical budget?” the exec asked.
“Right. Time and again. He’s the fool who froze military medical funding at 2019 levels. With inflation running ten percent per year, our generals warned that all the services could expect fifty-five percent casualty rates in a near-peer war. ‘Course, the politicos blew us off, choosing to divert funds to their favorite pork projects and voter bases.
“So here we are: Drastically short of experienced trauma surgeons and battlefield medics. Half the air-evacuation resources required to ensure we can transport wounded to rear-echelon care within the ‘Golden Hour’. And grossly insufficient numbers of fighters to guarantee air superiority.” The colonel was more frustrated than his executive officer had ever seen him.
A PFC hunkered over a computer waved the exec over. “The ‘Mule’s’ ready to launch, sir. Two F-35s were scrambled and are orbiting the field.”
“Launch the drone now!” the commander barked. “Make sure those fighter jocks understand this is a no-failure rescue mission, too!”
Mere minutes later, Lt. Dixon saw two F-35s streak over his dug-in platoon, bank hard and fling high-explosive cluster bomblets toward a tree line, where Dixon had spotted hundreds of Chinese soldiers forming for the attack that would overrun his platoon. Detonations of the softball-size munitions set off several secondary blasts, prompting a cheer from exhausted American troops.
Dixon finally saw the ‘Mule’ skim treetops, flare and settle twenty feet from his post, its four rotors kicking up a burst of dust. As the cloud cleared, Dixon saw a door and ramp automatically deploy from the SUV-size quadrotor.
“Get Crocker into that rig ASAP. Go! Go! Go!” he yelled. Two soldiers and “Doc” Nells grabbed a stretcher bearing the strapped-down, wounded soldier and ran to the drone. Ducking under still-turning rotors, they shoved the wounded troop inside, flipped a lever beside the narrow cargo bay doorway and ran back to their holes. The drone’s ramp and door were still retracting, when the craft lifted off, pivoted and accelerated back along the same track it had followed inbound. It had been on the ground less than 30 seconds.
The twin F-35s reappeared and fired a flock of air-to-ground missiles at what was left of Chinese combatants, keeping their heads down, while the evac-‘Mule’ departed at top speed.
Suddenly, a shoulder-fired missile shot up from the enemy tree line and homed on the ‘Mule’. Sensors automatically detected the threat, dispensed flares and chaff to divert the missile, and the drone snapped into evasive maneuvers. The enemy missile jinked, but didn’t take the bait, blowing through a cloud of chaff. The drone flipped inverted and dived. As it rolled out at tree-top level, the missile’s proximity-fused warhead detonated. The drone staggered, correcting for the loss of an entire rotor arm, but couldn’t stay airborne.
Dixon watched in horror as the ‘Mule’ carrying his wounded soldier banked steeply, disappeared into a thick canopy and exploded.
At headquarters, officers and NCOs watched a large screen displaying a quantum-comm video stream from the drone as the rotorcraft sliced into a sea of green. A bright flash and the screen blinked to black.
The commander’s shoulders sagged, and his head drooped. Dirty words erupted across the center as disbelief turned to stunned anger.
Slowly turning to his executive officer, the colonel shook his head. “Damned fools in Washington…! They killed that Crocker kid. His dad could have prevented this. But watch; warfighters will take the hit. Senators never, ever admit fault!”
Strange comments at such a time, the exec thought. But absolutely true. Envisioning a shocked Senator Crocker being informed that his son would be coming home in a stainless-steel coffin, the exec couldn’t prevent a macabre, mean thought from careening across his consciousness: Karma.
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