The Kidd Incident

27^th Fighter Squadron

FL 330,  Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)

Major Richard “Tex” Ewing wasn’t really sure how the war was going. He knew he and his pilots were tired. After a time, their focus tunneled down to just their mission and the members of their squadron. Everything else was tuned out, too much effort to do anything but sleep when they were not actively preparing for or flying a mission.

Moving the squadron to Korea from the Philippines helped. Unlike the open spaces of the South Pacific, the Korean peninsula was an ideal environment for tactical aircraft. They could get from their base in South Korea to the “front lines” in North Korea in just fifteen minutes.

What Ewing did know is that the Raptors of the 27th were going to get some action today. The Long Snap alert had only come an hour ago and his squadron had been fully fueled and armed, just waiting for the call.

“Eagle Lead, this is Sentry Seven, move north to cover the transports in grid three two four.”

Ewing gestured to his wingman who confirmed he had also heard the message from the AWACs controller. He could see a string of transport aircraft headed roughly southeast. He had no idea why they were so far behind enemy lines, but he knew they would be sitting ducks if any Chinese fighters showed up. The North Korean Air Force seemed to be pretty much done. The drubbing they had taken over the past two days seemed to have taken the wind out of their sails.

The Chinese, not so much. “Raid warning. Raid warning. Two hundred aircraft inbound. Say again, two zero zero aircraft. Composition of raid appears to be primarily tactical aircraft.”

As Ewing drifted north to cover the transports, he kept an eye on the oncoming Chinese fighters. Most likely, they were J-10’s, but they could also be the more formidable Su-30.

American fighter aircraft also began to scramble. This was going to be one of the biggest furballs since World War II.

None of this really registered to Ewing. What did register is a squadron of enemy planes which detached from the main group and vectored into where the transports were retreating. These were his responsibility.

Gesturing again to his wingman, he pointed down with two fingers and used a circling motion to show he wanted to attack. Again, his wingman acknowledged.

Maintaining his height advantage, Ewing locked into a course that would allow him to attack the oncoming Chinese fighters from the side. This not only gave him the best radar cross-section, but it also allowed for a follow-up attack using IR guided missiles if the initial attack using radar-guided missiles failed. As the squadron closed to within ten miles, there was no indication that the Chinese had detected them.

“Eagle Lead to all Eagles, ENGAGE.”

Unlike the F-35, the F-22 didn’t have the ability to work closely with other aircraft. What it did have was a very effective battle management system, designed to maximize it’s air to air superiority. While the F-22 only carried six AIM-120C missiles, it was able to deploy them much more effectively than in a “legacy” aircraft like the F-15. The combined effects of stealth, Low Probability of Intercept (LPI) radar and a computer-controlled targeting system made the plane deadly against “lesser” fighter aircraft.

“HIT! Hard kill! Getting radar from the bogeys, looks like Flankers.”

While the F-22 was formidable, it wasn’t perfect. The lead elements of the Chinese formation began to maneuver wildly. The extremely maneuverable Su-30 (NATO code name Flanker) was still slower and less maneuverable than a missile, but the missile burned all of it’s fuel at once. After the rocket burned out, a hard maneuvering fighter like the Su-30 or F-16 could exit the “kill envelope” and escape.

“Miss! We’ve got some leakers.”

Ewing advanced his throttles to the max and the afterburners lit off. The plane leaped forward and the rest of the squadron followed him down, advancing on the Chinese from behind.

“Tally!!! Visual on the bogey. Flanker at 12 o’clock low!”

It was Williams again. He had not taken the message to heart last time. “Dammit, Eagle four, break off. Just shoot and scoot. Do not get into a turning fight with that bastard!”

While the F-22 was an excellent dogfighter, it was completely unstoppable at Beyond Visual Range. The Americans had decided early in the war to simply “shoot and scoot” in order to remain out of visual range. There were less than one hundred and fifty F-22’s total in the USAF inventory. Getting one shot down would be even more serious than losing the pilot. The planes were literally irreplaceable.

“Scooter! Get your wingman the fuck out of there!”

“Roger that, Tex. Already on it.”

Too late. The Chinese Su-30 pilot was either very lucky or very good. Perhaps both.

“I’m hit! I’m hit! Mayday, mayday!”

“Williams, punch out! Punch out!”

“Tagged that fucker!!” The Chinese pilot had not survived the engagement but had achieved a good trade. One Su-30 or even ten to get one F-22 was a good trade for the Chinese. This was, in the end, the Achilles heel of the F-22. The program had been canceled before the full order had been built. The result was a very powerful weapon that the USAF just didn’t have enough of.

“‘Chute! I see a good ‘chute!”

“Sentry Seven, this is Thrasher Flight, we are buster. Exfil in ten mikes. Please relay our thanks to the guardian angels up there.”

142nd Fighter Wing, Oregon National Guard

Phúc Yên Air Base, Vietnam

Major Tinney had been keeping a close eye on the operations shack. He definitely HAD NOT been sulking around as his crew chief had suggested. Definitely not. Nope, he was, uh, keeping tabs on the situation.

Because he had been “keeping tabs on the situation,” he was there when the sergeant manning the satellite communications station stiffened and muttered a soft but clear “oh shit.”

“What do you have there sergeant?”

The sergeant turned to see who was speaking. Recognizing the Major, he answered with an intense, tight smile. “Just got the go-order for Long Snap.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah.”

Major Tinney controlled himself with some effort. There were over a hundred planes sitting out on the ramps and in their revetments just waiting for that order. This is why they had flown out from Brunei. “OK, get the wing moving and pass the word to the other units.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Marine F-35B’s took off first. They had relatively short legs and would need to tank before the mission began. The normal runway takeoff meant they could fly with a heavier load, but they still didn’t have the legs of an F-35A. With their external FAST packs, the F-15’s would be able to complete the entire mission without refueling.

The Avengers went next. Their long sleek shapes looked sinister as they made their way down the taxiway and onto the main runway. Jet engined with twin tails forming a “V” shape, they looked like something a kid would draw when imagining what a future combat aircraft might look like.

Tinney performed a quick walk around his aircraft. He knew that the ground crew had already checked the aircraft, but it never paid to be sloppy about procedure, especially when flying into combat.

“Good hunting sir.”

While the Air Force did not officially condone superstition, pilots the world over firmly believed in luck or whatever it was that kept them alive. Tinney’s crew chief ALWAYS said the same thing before a mission. And Tinney ALWAYS answered the same way. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

As the wing of F-15’s from the Oregon National Guard got into the air, their tactical net came online. Pulling data from orbiting AWACs and other sensor platforms, he could “see” the tactical picture for the entire theater.

It was impressive.

Several hundred Chinese tactical aircraft were currently headed up into North Korea. The Long Snap plan had depended on this occurring so it wasn’t a surprise, but it was still impressive seeing how many aircraft the Chinese could muster when they put their minds to it.

“Redhawk Lead to all Redhawks. Let’s make a spectacle of ourselves. Turn to heading zero two five, ascend to angels thirty.” As the wing turned towards the nearest Chinese fighter base, they ascended to thirty thousand feet where they had a huge energy advantage over any aircraft coming up to meet them. Of course, they were also visible to pretty much every radar in southern China, but that was the idea.

“Sentry Four to Redhawk Lead. Raid warning. Raid warning. We have tactical aircraft rotating from your primary.”

“Acknowledged Sentry Four. We have them also.”

It was tactical doctrine for the USAF to avoid overly long missile shots against fighter aircraft. At least, that had been the tactical doctrine until this war had started. Overall, the kill ratio for these long shots was not good and it wasn’t usually worth the expenditure. Getting a lock on a small target like a fighter aircraft required a very precise radar picture which usually gave the game away. The enemy could tell they were being targeted way before the missiles arrived. While dodging a missile wasn’t something any pilot did for fun, the longer the shot, the more time the target had to maneuver into a position the missile could not reach.

The F-35 combined with the AIM-120D changed all this. Using the AIM-120D, a “missile truck” like the F-15 could fire a large number of missiles from relatively long ranges (over 100 miles in some cases) WITHOUT achieving radar lock. The missile would then fly to the known location of the target without activating its primary radar seeker head. The F-35 could scout ahead and provide targeting information to the missile while in flight. In this case, the F-35s were about fifty miles ahead of the F-15s and had a VERY precise picture of where the Chinese fighters were. Unlike the very unstealthy F-15’s flying behind them, the F-35’s were pretty much invisible to the tactical radars fitted to the Chinese aircraft. The USA had been very active in taking down any of the “Anti-Stealth” radar systems operating in theater and their size meant they weren’t very portable, nor could they be mounted on an aircraft.

All of this meant that the F-35s were effectively invisible to the Chinese pilots and their controllers on the ground. This is not a recipe for success. For the Chinese, that is.

“Redhawk lead to all Redhawks. Launch on command. Shoot, shoot, shoot!”

On command, all thirty surviving F-15’s of the 142nd launched eight AIM-120D missiles each. The high altitude of the F-15’s also had the advantage of adding energy to the flight path of the missiles as they flew down to the Chinese jets sill coming up from their bases.

“That’s it gentlemen, RTB.”

Tinney was about to become the least glamorous ace in USAF history and the first since Vietnam.

VMFA-121 (The Green Knights)

Angels 30, People’s Republic of China, 50 miles north of Vietnamese Border

Captain Charles whistled to himself. Almost one hundred Chinese aircraft were coming up to meet the F-15’s of the Oregon National Guard. None of them seemed aware of the Marine F-35 squadron, which was a VERY GOOD THING by his estimation.

Another VERY GOOD THING was the two hundred plus AIM-120D’s currently inbound. Unlike his previous aircraft, the Harrier, the F-35 had a massive amount of automation to make things like targeting 100 aircraft with 200 missiles possible. The squadron of F-35s also talked to each other so that each aircraft was automatically assigned a subset of enemy aircraft to target.

Passing over the Chinese fighters, he caught a glimpse of a few of them, thousands of feet below. As expected, they appeared to be J-10s which were basically the Chinese version of the F-16. They even looked similar. A multi-role aircraft, they were the most common tactical aircraft in the Chinese inventory. Similar to the F-16, they were relatively cheap and very flexible.

Unfortunately for the Chinese pilots, they were simply unprepared for the lethality that stealth brought to the modern battlefield. Derided by the Russians and Chinese publically, stealth had completely changed air combat forever. It was no longer sufficient to be fast or have a high turn rate. If you could not detect your enemy, you could not predict where the missiles would come from and you couldn’t target the opposing planes. All of these factors meant that stealth aircraft like the F-35 or F-22 are utterly dominant in the skies.

“Romeo, Romeo, pick your targets and engage.”

As the automated systems in the Marine’s F-35B aircraft sorted out the Chinese aircraft and the incoming American missiles, they automatically handed off targeting to the members of the squadron.

“Hit! Hit! That’s a hard kill!”

The incoming wave of missiles decimated the Chinese fighters. With little or no warning, they were unable to maneuver or deploy countermeasures. For many of them, their first warning was the impact of the missile. The LPI radar on the F-35B was not something that the J-10 was designed to fight against and they had no way to detect or defend themselves against the threat. The small missiles had not lit off their radars until the last seconds and the antiquated radar in the J-10 was not up to the task of detecting such small objects.

“Holy Crap, Kit Kat! There are less than twenty left!”

“Romeo Flight, pair up. Get the stragglers. Do not, repeat, DO NOT ENGAGE in a turning fight. Shoot and scoot or so help me I will fucking bust your ass down to PFC!”

The one thing they did not want to do is to get into a turning fight with the very nimble J-10. Even though the F-35B was a capable dog-fighter you did not engage in a fight where your enemy had a chance. At Beyond Visual Range (BVR) the F-35B was simply untouchable. To date, the Chinese had bagged several F-35’s and each time it had been in a short-range fight where the Chinese pilot could see the F-35 visually. While American pilots had not engaged a “get on his six” dogfight since Vietnam, short-range missiles were still very deadly, even to stealth aircraft.

In pairs, the F-35B’s dove down and flipped 180 degrees, effectively reversing their course and approaching the Chinese aircraft from the rear.

“Hit!! Hard kill!!”

Over the next ten minutes, the twelve Marine F-35B’s scored an additional ten kills. The opening minutes of the “Great Chinese Turkey Shoot” was going well for the Americans.

Of course, all of this was just a diversion. The real attack was coming from the Avengers. They had been loaded to their limits with JDAM precision strike munitions. Each JDAM had been precisely targeted on key PLAAF infrastructure. Not every bomb hit their mark, but enough did to completely destroy the majority of hangars, machine shops and other infrastructure that the Chinese used to maintain their air force in southern China. Of the five bases targeted, three were damaged to the extent that their aircraft were diverted to other fields and the remainder were severely degraded. The Avengers then moved on to fulfill their primary role in the attack.