The War Planners by Andrew Watts Read Free Book Online Page A

no.  We are not here to plan our nation’s defense.  Some of you might have good ideas about this and could even be considered experts...but that isn’t why you are here.  We want you to play the bad guy.  If we brought you in to this project to also plan the defense, you’d be thinking of problems at the same time you would be thinking of solutions and you wouldn’t be as good at creating attack plans.  At least that’s what our psychologists have told us.”  She gave a nod to the grey-haired man in the second row who nodded back.  Apparently, he was a psychologist.
    She clicked on the remote and the screen changed to a black map of the United States with a bunch of different sized blue dots scattered throughout.
    “Anyone know what this is?” she asked.
    “Those look like where our bases are.”  Bill responded.
    “That’s right.”  She clicked on the button again and 2-D images of ships, tanks, soldiers, and aircraft popped up next to each of the bases with numbers next to them.  “And what’s this?”
    “That’s our order of battle.”  Someone said from the back.
    “Correct.” Lena said.  “Does everyone know what that means?”
    There were a lot of heads shaking no.  “An order of battle is essentially how many of each type of weapon or fighting asset that we have.  Let’s look at a few statistics.”
    She clicked again and a grid popped up.

    “What are your takeaways here?” Lena asked.
    David watched from the back of the class.  He remained quiet, never one to like speaking up in a classroom setting.
    A young man in jeans sitting in the front row said, “It looks to me like we’d kick China’s butt in a fight because our air superiority would probably blow everything else up before it could do any damage.”
    Lena said, “Okay.  Now let’s look at a different set of numbers.”

    “Thoughts?” Lena asked.
    Someone whistled.  David knew it was a mismatch.  Everyone knew how big China was.  But if it really came to a land war...those numbers were a bit scary.
    Natesh said, “That’s a lot of manpower.  And a lot of production capability when compared to the U.S.”
    One of the uniformed military officers said, “Okay Lena, this is great.  But it’s not like we’re talking about China who can drive right over and attack us in hand-to-hand combat.  That’s just not the way warfare works.  The militaries would clash and I know for a fact that we have a pretty serious technological advantage over most of the Chinese platforms.”
    “So if China was to attack us, do you think that our military would be able to hold them off?”
    The man shifted in his seat and said, “I mean...I would guess...yeah.  I think so, probably.”
    Lena said, “Okay.  We as a group are going to get very smart very quickly on some of the data that might help us answer this question.  Many of you are asking yourselves right now, can China beat us?  But we don’t want you to think of it like that.  We want you to think of it like this.  How can China beat us?  Assume that they can.  Uncover the path they must take.  Only then can we really prepare our defense.  It is thinking like this that kept us safe from another 9/11 for so many years.  Now, you each shall get familiar with China’s capabilities and use your collective expertise to identify America’s weaknesses. There will be a different set of experts that will create the defensive response plan based on our learnings.  That will be weeks after we are finished, and most of you will not be involved.  For us, these next few weeks are about figuring out the most effective strategies and tactics that China could use to make war on the U.S.  Does that make sense?”
    “Yes ma’am.” said Bill.
    Lena continued, “After September 11th, we created a Red Cell designed to prevent another major terrorist attack.  Typically, the opposing force in a military exercise is red and the allied force is blue.  A Cell, for those of