Our Next Great War Read online

  Publisher's note

  Our Next Great War, is an action-packed story about the American military's involvement in the coming war between Russia and China. It is a revision and updating of an earlier Martin Archer book initially entitled War in the East.

  Fighting between China and Russia actually started in the early Putin years. But then it fizzled out because there was a change in the Chinese leadership and the new leaders decided to accept the United State's offer of a favorable trade relationship that would generate, via trade surpluses, many hundreds of billions of dollars each year for the Chinese leadership to spend as they saw fit. It was an ill-conceived American bribe that paid China to stay peaceful, and it worked.

  The Chinese accepted the American offer because it would bring in the money the Chinese needed to modernize their military and buy support from countries around the world, money that China would certainly not receive if it was embroiled in a war to reclaim its lost lands. In other words, China's leaders decided that recovering the lands China had earlier lost to Russia years earlier could wait.

  But now things have changed: China has a new paramount leader in Xi Jinping, Putin is beginning to side with Iran and is about to be dragged into a war with Turkey, the amount of money coming into China from its trade surplus with the United States is being reduced, and the Chinese army has been greatly strengthened.

  In other words, the time is ripe and China's waiting is almost over.

  This is an action-packed war novel about the involvement of American soldiers in the coming war between China and Russia.

  Our Next Great War

  An Action-packed war story

  Tensions were already high when Sergeant Willy Williams stood up and increased them even more by firing a round from his flare pistol. Then he dropped down instantly and hugged the ground as his flare flashed upward and lit the night above us with its distinctive click and pop.

  Everyone else, meaning me and the eight Russians troopers Willy and I were camping with, were already out of our little two-man tents with our weapons ready. We’d been out of them and flat on the ground with our weapons loaded ever since we first heard voices in the distance. Hopefully we’re in a circle and facing outward so we wouldn’t shoot each other if push comes to shove.

  There was a streak of light from our little camp as Willy’s flare went up—and it ended about two seconds later with a loud pop; and suddenly it was so bright around us that it was as if the sun had suddenly come out. Jesus, they’re all around us. We’re in the middle of a bunch of Chinese.

  The Chinese infantrymen streaming down the slope on both sides of us could see the streak of light as the flare went up. So they instantly knew exactly where we were even before the flare lit us up and let everyone see everyone else.

  “Hold your fire,” Lieutenant Lin Bao instantly shouted. “Don’t fire.”

  He was too late. The nervous Russians opened up on the suddenly visible Chinese and the Chinese instinctively began firing back. There was a lot of screaming and shouting that could barely be heard over the roar of the automatic rifles we were all carrying.

  The result was inevitable. The heavily outnumbered Russians were annihilated and the Chinese took heavy casualties, much of it as a result of their own friendly fire.

  I fired a few rounds at a couple of Chinese soldiers near me and heard the first few seconds of the firefight. Then a tremendous punch hit me in my left side.

  Chapter One

  The beginning of trouble.

  Putin has been overthrown and disappeared. It was inevitable once Russia and Iran lost the relatively short "Turkish War," that Putin had championed after the dictators of Russia and Iran joined into an alliance with Belarussia and some of the Islamic countries that used to be part of the old Soviet Union.

  The military forces of the resulting "Eastern Union" had invaded Turkey at the invitation of its former president, a meglomaniac named Erdogan. They did so because Erdogan had promised to join the Eastern Union if it helped return him and his Islamic extremists to power.

  Fortunately NATO, meaning the United States and Britain, came to the aid of Turkey and the "Turkish War" ended almost as quickly as it had begun. Russia's then-President, Vladimir Putin paid the price—he disappeared after several weeks of riots throughout Russia.

  Two weeks later the peace deal that ended the war fell apart—because the Eastern Union fell apart and Putin was removed by a military coup and replaced with one of Russia's generals. In other words, we had a peace treaty signed by a man who had disappeared on behalf of an entity that no longer existed.

  The collapse of Putin's efforts to establish an alliance that resembled the old Soviet Union had been predicted, but the speed at which it occured was totally unexpected. The military defeat of the Eastern Union in Turkey ended a political alliance already overburdened with corruption, the effects of declining oil prices, and a crony-based economic system that was unable to compete with western Europe, let alone with the United States and China.

  Whatever the cause of its collapse, the Moscow and Teheran-dominated Eastern Union had suddenly come apart at the seams when Putin "disappeared." Its sudden collapse caught everyone by surprise. One after another, over a period of little more than a couple of days, the non-Russian members of the Eastern Union's Moscow-based Central Committee flew back to their homelands and proclaimed themselves to be their country’s new president “until elections can be held.”

  The same thing had happened years earlier when the Soviet Union suddenly fell apart. Some people never learn; it was de javu all over again.

  In any event, less than a month after the shooting stopped, all of the Eastern Union’s nationalities and satellites were, at least on paper, once again free and independent states from Albania in the west to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the east. And Russia continued to occupy millions of square miles of land east of Lake Baikal which the Chinese thought belonged to them.

  In fact, the same old bungling and corrupt bureaucrats and oligarchs were still in power in Moscow and they still didn’t have a clue as to what to do to make their country successful.

  ******

  Militarily things were really a mess. The Eastern Union’s large and technologically obsolete military was quickly divided up among its former members. There was no rhyme or reason to the division. Each of the Eastern Union's former states ended up with whatever military equipment was in its territory when the Eastern Union fell apart.

  The result in Russia was inevitable: Russia was once again a repressive state with a much weakened military and a slowly collapsing economy lorded over by a handful of generals and oligarchs and run by a corrupt bureaucracy.

  Even worse, Russia was now totally cut off from its vast eastern territories bordering China and North Korea, the entire eastern half of the country. In a way I was responsible for Russia being cut off from them. I was the NATO commander who ordered the destruction of the bridges over the rivers in the middle of Russia when the war started.

  I had done it, effectively cut Russia in two, so the Eastern Union armies wouldn’t be able to get reinforcements from the east as the Russians did many years ago to help Moscow win World War Two.

  Being cut off from its huge and under-populated eastern provinces was significant for Russia. It meant that if a war started with China, the Russian military would have to fight it with the troops and equipment it had on hand in the east and whatever it could be airlifted in by the decaying remains of its battered air force.

  Russia’s only alternative would be to use ships and send its reinforcements and supplies all the way around the world to the Port of Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. That was a very real possibility since Vladivostok was served by Russia’s single east to
west transportation system, the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the poorly maintained service road and power lines that ran along its right of way.

  Much of the Trans-Siberian transportation and service corridor remained intact further to the east because NATO had only destroyed the railroad and road bridges in the middle of Russia around Lake Baikal. We did not hit those that were further to the east.

  That the bridges were still up in the eastern half of Russia was significant. It meant that Russian military supplies and reinforcements could still arrive by sea at the far-eastern Russian port of Vladivostok and be sent westward to confront the Chinese via the railroad or the grandly-named two-lane service road that ran alongside it, the Trans-Siberian Highway.

  Unfortunately, both the Trans-Siberian Railroad tracks and the service roads that ran next to them were mostly built close to the Chinese border. It meant that if there was a war with China the railroad and its service roads were virtually certain to be cut by the Chinese before meaningful amounts of armor, heavy equipment, and supplies could reach Vladivostok by sea in time to be carried westward into the interior where the fighting would occur.

  Once the Chinese army's inevitable cutting of the Trans-Siberian railroad corridor happened, the entire eastern half of Russia, everything east and north of Lake Baikal, would be totally cut off from Moscow and on its own except for what could be brought in by air. That was the crux of the problem—if there was a war with China, the Russians would have to fight with whatever weapons and supplies they had on hand with no hope of getting significant amounts of reinforcements and supplies.

  The summer of 2003 was the last time the Chinese invaded Russia. It was an attempt to retake the land China claimed that Russia had illegally seized in the disputed Ussuri River basin. Putin's Russians fought them off by moving some of Russia's somewhat modern military equipment and more than a dozen additional army divisions and a number of naval infantry brigades eastward across Russia on the Trans-Siberian railroad.

  Now, thanks to the trillions of dollars provided to China by America's import purchases of necessities such as baby toys and cheap clothing, the Chinese aspirations and abilities were significantly greater than they were in 2003. At the same time, because of the recent fighting in Turkey, Russia’s ability to counter the Chinese was significantly weaker. And because NATO took out so many of the bridges in the middle of Russia during the recent war, Moscow could no longer send reinforcements and supplies to the eastern half of Russia by road and rail.

  In other words, Moscow can now only send reinforcements to the eastern half of Russia by air or by sea to Vladivostok. Even worse for Russia, there wasn't much to send because a lot of its obsolete and poorly maintained military equipment was lost in the recent war.

  There was, however, one ray of hope. The dozen or more additional Russian divisions sent east in 2003 to fight the Chinese were still there with all their equipment, and so was the Russian naval infantry, the Russian Marines, which the Russian navy had stationed at Vladivostok; they were there because that’s where NATO's German and American teams of airborne engineers had stranded them a few months earlier by blowing up so many of the Trans-Siberian railroad bridges in central Russia near Lake Baikal.

  Russia’s basic problem was simple. Another war with the Chinese was coming and this time it was not going to be a mini-war fought over a relatively small amount of land in the Ussuri River basin.

  At least everyone thinks it’s coming; the Chinese have got to be looking at the lands they claim in eastern Russia as low lying fruit with not much in the way of a Russian army or air force to defend them.

  ******

  The collapse of the Eastern Union and the fall of Putin should have been the end of Russia as a military problem for the United States. But the American Secretary of State, fifty-six year old former senator Loretta Sanders of California, a statuesque woman with great personal ambitions, had quickly flown to Moscow and negotiated a "Peace Treaty" with Putin before he fell.

  Sanders initially claimed to have gone to Russia to smoke a "peace pipe" with Putin as part of her claim to be part American Indian. A recent DNA test had exposed the falsity of the claim she had used repeatedly over the years to claim a minority preference in jobs and opportunities. But the President kept her on because his term was almost up and it did not seem to matter to media who loved her for her speeches in support of their liberal fantasies.

  In any event, as most Peace treaties usually did, it included a mutual defense clause wherein Russia and the United States agreed to come to the aid of the other in the event of an attack, and also lot of nuclear disarmament promises neither side had the slightest intention of keeping. Then the Senate hurriedly ratified it in late night vote in exchange for the withdrawal by the President of several of his Supreme Court nominees.

  “A reasonable price to pay,” exulted the Secretary of State at the time.

  Secretary Sanders saw her efforts to obtain an agreement to begin nuclear disarmament talks and re-establish peaceful relations between Russia and the United States as her crowning achievement. It would be the basis for her presidential campaign when the current President’s second term ended. She would not be the first American Indian president as her supporters had hoped, but being president was enough because of all the good things she promised to do.

  The mere thought of Loretta Sanders being the president outraged my old army buddy, and now Secretary of Defense, Bill Hammond. Bill would never say it publically, of course, but he particularly did not like Sanders because she had gotten ahead by falsely claiming to be a minority, a Native American, and applying for minority preferences.

  Bill was sensitive about such things because he was Black and had to work his ass off, in addition to risking getting it shot off, to get to where he was. What particularly outraged him was that he had applied for a scholarship at the same school she did and was left on a waiting list, and then not admitted, because their were more-qualified minorities ahead of him. She was one of them.

  "And besides that, she's as uncaring as a stone and terminally naive. Just the thought of that woman being the president is enough to make a grown man cry."

  Our country's Vice President, Daniel E. "Danny" Sullivan, a former army helicopter pilot, was thought likely to be Sander’s opponent in the primaries. At least that’s what the media pundits were now saying. Sullivan split with the President and signaled his opposition to the new treaty by refusing the entreaties of the White House to speak out in support of it.

  The United States had another problem, and it was a big one: Most of our NATO allies, except Britain, were refusing to sign on to Secretary Sanders’s new treaty. As a result, only the United States and Britain were committed to helping the peace-loving Russian communist crooks and thieves in the event the peace-loving Chinese communist crooks and thieves send the Chinese army to retake the lands Russia seized years ago with various one-sided “treaties” when the Chinese were weak and distracted by internal strife.

  All in all, the treaty could best be described as a dog's breakfast; but it certainly ended up changing a lot of lives.

  ******

  Our new treaty with Russia, and its rapid ratification by the Senate, created a great deal of political stress and even a brief flurry of impeachment talk by a couple of publicity seeking congressmen. It all started when I was dumb enough to allow a CBS news reporter to interview me when I was visiting Campbell Barracks, the Heidleberg headquarters of the American Forces in Europe.

  I was there to see how the repairs were going. As everyone now knows, Campbell Barracks was the American army’s peacetime headquarters in Europe. It got heavily damaged when Russia dropped an entire airborne division on it and another on NATO's Brussels headquarters. That was at the very beginning of the war that started when Russia and Iran launched a surprise attack on Turkey, a member of NATO.

  The Russians hit the two virtually empty headquarters in the mistaken belief that one or the other of them would be NATO's primar
y headquarters during the war just as generations of NATO commanders had specified in their plans. The Russians had hit them both with a massive airborne assaults to begin the war. In effect, they had sacrificed two entire airborne divisions in the belief it would cause such confusion in NATO's war-fighting abilities that they would win the war and have control of Turkey before NATO could get organized to stop them.

  It did not work. I may be dumb, but I wasn't that dumb. The first thing I did after getting the NATO command and learning about the iminent attack, was activate a secret and much smaller war-fighting headquarters—the one that was ready and waiting because it had already been organized and equipped by the obscure detachment in France that I had been commanding for a number of years.

  Everyone thought the little "supply detachment" I commanded was an obscure non-NATO backwater in France that dealt with "used military equipment for Africa." They were wrong. That was our cover and had been for many years and several wars.

  What had long ago become known to the men and women assigned to it as "The Detachment" had gone "active" a couple of days before I surprised everyone by being jumped from being an unknown brigadier waiting for retirement in what appeared to be a meaningless post unrelated to NATO. It was the second time that a commander of The Detachment had been deep dipped to take over NATO when a shooting war threatened.

  My appointment was not a surprise, however, to Bill Hammond, the Chairman of America's Joint Chiefs. The Detachment's real job had been to identify the gaps in NATO's readiness to fight and be ready on a moment's notice to fill or offset as many of them as possible. Providing an instantly up and running alternative headquarters for NATO was only one of the many surprises it was tasked to deliver.

  Even so, the fact that I was actually promoted and given the NATO command surprised me, and it sure as hell surprised the Russians and Iranians who, after all those years of spying at NATO's Brussels headquarters and at the Pentagon, started a war and then discovered they had no idea about some of America's plans and capabilities.