Europa Strike(64)
“No, no!” Corporal Lucky Leckie said, laughing as the others groaned or shook their heads. “It’s the way to model all of the different U.S. armed forces! It’s called the snake model. You ever hear about it?”
“Leckie,” Gunnery Sergeant Pope said, shaking his head. “If this is another one of your scams, s’welp me—”
“No! Honest to God, Gunny! It’s like this, see? You’ve got a snake in your AO, right?”
“What kind of snake, Lucky?” Sergeant Dave Coughlin asked.
“Hell, how should I know, Sarge? It’s just a snake, ’kay?”
“Is it poisonous?” Corporal Lissa Cartwright wanted to know.
“I don’t know! Okay, it’s poisonous! And it’s in the Area of Operations. So who ya gonna send?”
“The Marines!” several of the men sitting in the squad bay growled in chorus. First Section, Second Platoon had gathered there in the large storage compartment volunteered by the civilians at the base to serve as the Marine squad bay and muster area, to pull routine suit and weapons checks. As they worked, Lucky regaled them with his story.
“No,” Lucky replied. “First you send in your Airborne. Now Airborne comes down in the AO, lands smack on top of the snake and kills it. Then they find out that this is the wrong AO and they just killed the wrong snake.
“Then you got your armor. They come in, run over the snake, and kill it. Then they go out looking for more snakes, and run out of gas.
“Army Aviation comes in, using a GPS grid to plot the snake’s position down to one half of one centimeter. They can’t find the snake, and fly back to base for a cool drink and a manicure.”
That brought some booming laughs. The Marines had a poor opinion of the air-ground coordination employed by the other services.
“Okay,” Lucky went on. “Then you have your Army Ranger. He plays with the snake…then eats it!
“Field artillery masses ten thousand mobile artillery units, launches an all-out TOT barrage with rockets and HE with three FA brigades in support and kills the snake…and several hundred civilians, with massive collateral damage. The mission is declared a success, and all participants, including mechanics, clerks, and cooks, are awarded the Silver Star.”
That brought more hoots and guffaws. Artillery support, long considered an absolute necessity for any battlefield evolution, was fast becoming a dinosaur. You had to mass far too many units to be truly mobile and effective—and counterbattery fire would savage any concentration of guns that stayed put for more than one shot’s worth. “Smart” FA, employing laser-guided munitions, allowed pinpoint accuracy if you had a spotter team near the target or in orbit, but if you didn’t, the barrage was likely to be about as surgically precise as a small nuke.
“Combat engineers! They come in and study the damned snake! They prepare an in-depth, five-series field manual on employing countermobility assets to kill the snake that’s about as obtuse as a doctrinal thesis. Then they complain that the maneuver forces don’t understand how to properly conduct countersnake operations by the book!”
“Combat controllers!” someone in the room shouted, getting into the spirit of things. “They come in and guide the snake elsewhere!”
“Yeah,” Lissa added, laughing. “And Pararescue. They wound the snake on the first pass, then paraglide in and do their damnedest to save its miserable life!”
“Navy SEALs!” Lucky shouted. “They swim in at night, march fifty kilometers inland, take an uncomfortable position which they hold for twenty-four hours just to keep themselves from falling asleep, ambush the snake, expend all of their ammunition, including three cases of grenades, and call in naval gunfire support…miss the snake, whereupon the snake bites the SEAL and dies of lead poisoning!”
“Yeah!” Pope added, “Or else the snake gets away, and the SEALs blame the mission failure on poor intel!”
“Hey!” QM1 Mike Hastings growled from a far corner of the compartment. He was one of the SEALs who’d made it down to Europa’s surface, and he didn’t sound pleased at having his team included in Leckie’s rundown. “I’ll stuff that damned snake up your ass, Jarhead!”
“Easy, Squid! Easy!” Pope said. “Nothing personal!”
“Air Force!” Lucky called. “We all hate the Air Force, right? The Air Force pilot comes in, misidentifies the snake as a late-model Chinese KQ-190 advanced high-altitude interceptor, and engages with smart missiles. He can’t tell whether he killed the snake or not, but he goes back to base for a cold one, while the crew chief paints a cool-looking snake silhouette on his airplane.”