Major Masoud taps his screen, and the almost-live feed of Mars behind him is replaced with a graphic of a tactical plot.
“In Phase One, the Joint Task Group will engage the Lankies above Mars and destroy them. For that purpose, we are taking along almost the entire remaining stock of Orion missiles. They will be towed by the support ships and fired at maximum range. The target data will come from NACS Cincinnati, which will remain on station throughout and update targeting solutions. The Lankies have been able to sneak up on us many times. This time we are doing the sneaking up, and this time they won’t be able to disappear in the black unseen.”
From the SRA troops in front of me, I hear the muted computer-translated Russian coming through the earpieces of the translator units the fleet has provided our new allies. I know that Dmitry doesn’t really need one, but he is wearing an earpiece anyway and follows the major’s briefing with a serious face. Just a minute into the briefing, the major has already checked off several objectives that are so great in their scope as military achievements that I feel stunned at the magnitude of the task ahead of us.
“Once the Orion salvo has destroyed the bulk of the Lanky fleet, two battleships, Arkhangelsk and Agincourt, will advance and engage any surviving seed ships in close combat.”
Behind the major, the display shows a bunch of little starship icons firing a few dozen missiles at the orange lozenge shapes representing Lanky seed ships. Most of the orange icons blink out of existence when the Orion volley arrives. Then two of the friendly icons, one blue and one green, close the distance and wipe the few remaining orange icons from the map.
“Phase Two is where the SOCOM teams come in, so pay close attention,” Major Masoud continues with a wry little smile. “The cruisers will advance behind the battleships and deploy their embarked SOCOM pathfinder teams via bio-pod to the designated landing zones on the surface of Mars. There are eight landing zones, each color-coded to the task force assigned to assault it. Our landing zone, as you may be able to guess, is Red Beach. You will land, deploy, secure the perimeter, and then get to work feeding targeting data to the cruisers overhead. You will prepare the landing zone for the follow-up forces by directing orbital bombardment and close-air support.”
This part of the plan is the most conventional thing I’ve heard so far. It’s what we are trained to do, of course, and exactly the sort of mission we’ve been craving. But the preconditions for us to even launch down to the landing zone are insanely ambitious considering our military prowess against the Lankies up to this point.
“In Phase Three, the carriers and their escorts will advance. The cruisers will make holes in the Lanky minefields and then resupply their magazines on the fly from the munition ships. The carriers will then launch their infantry contingents. Each landing zone has one carrier task force assigned to it. The assault will land in two waves—one in Phase Three, one in Phase Four. Each wave will land a full regiment into each landing zone, for a total commitment of four divisions of infantry.”
“Whoa,” I say involuntarily, and most of the troops in the room echo that sentiment in some form. We have never landed four divisions of troops in a single operation—the entire Spaceborne Infantry arm only had three divisions at full strength before the Lankies cut us down to size. In just two waves, we will land over twenty thousand combat troops on the surface. In the Earth-based wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, twenty thousand troops were a nonremarkable concentration of force on the strategic scale of their respective conflicts. For the space-based colonial infantry engagements we’re geared and trained to fight, four divisions are an overwhelming logistical and tactical challenge to move and coordinate.
“Phase Four will be the landing of the second wave, securing of the landing beaches and their expansion, and the rescue of the surviving personnel on Mars from their holdout shelters. Once the survivors are evacuated and the beaches secured, we move on to Phase Five, which will be the expansion and linking of the invasion beaches.
“Finally, in Phase Six we will mop up the remaining Lanky resistance and eliminate their strongholds and infrastructure via aerial and orbital bombardment. Once the mop-up is complete, we will evacuate the bulk of our combat forces and leave the remaining cleanup business to an orbital garrison force.”
Everything I just heard is so bold in scope that it ought to be ludicrous. But nobody around me is laughing or even chuckling. All the troops are listening to Major Masoud’s briefing with dead-serious faces.
“In a moment, I will go over Phase Two in detail because that is our main bread and butter,” Major Masoud says. “Questions or comments so far?”
For a moment, nobody says anything. Then Dmitry clears his throat, and every pair of eyes in the room looks at him.
“Is grand plan,” he says. “Plan that great, can only be two outcomes. Will be best success in all of history, or complete disaster.”
Major Masoud looks at the SRA sergeant for a few seconds and then nods. “I agree, Senior Sergeant. We will succeed completely, or fail completely. I don’t have to tell any of you what is going to happen if we limp home defeated, with a few broken ships and a handful of troops. So let’s go through the briefing for Phase Two and do our part to make sure that it does not come to that.”
The in-depth briefing for Phase Two lasts another hour and a half. Not only is this operation by far the boldest we’ve ever planned, but even the SOCOM tasks are completely out of the ordinary. Because we didn’t have the time to integrate all the communications networks between the two alliances, we will have integrated units from top to bottom. Each task force has a mix of SRA and NAC ships, each infantry brigade has both NAC and SRA regiments in it, and our SOCOM teams are dropping with mixed personnel as well. For us, that means our two SI Force Recon teams will be joined by an SRA team, and I am dropping into battle teamed up with Dmitry. Our job is to direct the close-air support and orbital strikes, and having a combat controller from each alliance in the same landing zone means that we’ll be able to talk to whatever unit is overhead, whether it’s an SRA or an NAC bird. We are taking decades of established doctrines and habits, and we are throwing them right out the window, winging it as we go.