Huff #3
Lies, Damned Lies, and Aviator Math
[First Battlefield Circulation Tour, Mid-March 210]
Station Ceileidh, handling traffic from Caledonia is at only partial capacity due to a major atmosphere leak, whether sabotage or natural causes is unknown. Repairs will take forever with bureaucratic environmental concerns, even though it’s empty space. We’re working around it, and at least it’s not direct from Earth.
My vertol companies all showed up understrength. I asked for multiple aviation brigades, but I’m getting understrength battalions, detachments, and too many hangar queens. I’m getting war reserve materiel that’s been condemned. Scrapyard worthy. I love how the zipper-suits lie about readiness.
Here’s an example of a typical conversation with them; I took copious notes.
The commander was a Command Colonel. He was very stiff as he reported, “Sir, we have twenty-seven Guardians, primary aircraft inventory.”
“That’s how many you brought?”
“No, sir, we brought fifteen to make twelve.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“We have twenty-four primary aircraft authorized. Those other three never leave the hangar, they’re ‘can’ birds.”
“Can…huh?”
“Cannibalized. Just parts and training benches for maintenance folks.”
“You have zombie aircraft?”
“Yes, sir, basically. That takes a full colonel to approve. And we don’t deploy with everything in the unit. We have other birds in phase depot maintenance, others have grounding maintenance problems, so we have to borrow from other units in the meantime.”
“Got it, I understand that part…”
“And we keep six back at home for training. Our full go-to-war requirement is eighteen and two spares.”
“But you brought fifteen?”
“That’s because we’re tasked for twelve.”
“Because you’re supposed to have fifteen on hand?”
“No, sir, fourteen to make twelve per the EXORD. That assumes one combat loss and a maintenance spare, but that’s rainbows and unicorns math. Hence, we bring fifteen.”
“Okay, how many are actually flyable?”
“Ten.”
“How many sorties are you generating per day?”
“Since we started losing maintainers to the super-clap, and last week, when three outright disappeared one night and all we found were wallets, jewelry, and a patch of skin? Six, maybe seven. We’re not even close to meeting tasking anymore. And let’s talk about attrition, sir. We’ve lost two in combat so far, another is down for over-G. The pilot threat-reacted to old-timey ChiTech XVI missiles so hard he broke the bird. We have two different versions of fire-control software, two whole different variants of aircraft, so I think your staff is only counting the ‘C’ models, not the ‘D’ models.”
I could feel my eyes crossing. I needed to shift topics.
“Tell me about the combat losses.” When I mentioned this, the young commander hardened and tightened up. Until now, he had been very twitchy and nervous. This topic changed his demeanor. I want to talk to him offline sometime, because, unlike most of his brethren, when he talked combat he had no fear, no doubt in his mind.
“Both were lost to mod’d guided antitank missiles with seeker heads reoptimized for vertols. We’ve also had close calls with aerial mines, classic man-portable missiles, small arms, dazzlers, rocket-propelled grenades. I’ve seen air cars and other vehicles turned into armed technicals. The only really ‘fancy’ stuff so far has been datalink hacking, and trying to home drones in on our comms transmissions. The drones have micro-EX in them, real nasty if they get through the armor on the engines. They only need one to mess up sensor pods. None of this stuff costs more than a few thousand, maybe low tens of thousands of creds. They lose plenty of troops to do it though. Still, if you think about the trade-off, they’re coming out millions of creds ahead of us.”
He gave me a moment to let that sink in and continued, “Here’s something else that’s getting us a little worried, sir: We have to loiter in the AO much longer than we like and switch to manual reversion for tasks way too often.”
“Why is that? More maintenance problems, or something else?”
“Well, the avionics guys aren’t sure, but assisted nav and coordinate-seeking systems are off just enough that it’s making ground coordination difficult, like the LZ isn’t quite where the computer thought it was. So you make more passes to sweep the area, which means longer threat exposure.”
The commander let that drop, and we switched to personnel problems. The replacements aren’t rotating in fast enough, and it takes the crews too long to get checked out for combat missions because of the multi-day mandatory cultural sensitivity, proper sexual conduct, and local acclimation training requirements. Why the hell have I never had Sandeep explain aviation math to me? Why hasn’t he taken it upon himself to do so? When was the air component going to fix this?
I thanked the Command Colonel for his time. “Sandeep, a word?”