This story plays fast and loose with Ancient History and Linguistics; be warned.
The highest cost of losing a war is the rage of your children.
Editing magic performed by KJ24 and Shyqash, plus contributions by the regular gang of brigands and neer-do-wells.
There is a bit of mangling of the Iliad going on. I apologize to Homer and the countless singers before him who carried the Iliad down through the dark centuries until the Greeks figured out how writing works.
*****
Note: One of History's Lessons
In the last 75 years of military history, airpower had been a decisive factor in every major conflict, save one. Most Americans would think the one exception was US involvement in Vietnam and they'd be wrong: right country - wrong time. Indochina's War of Independence against France was the exception. There, the French Air Force was simply inadequate to the task.
Yes, the United States and its allies eventually lost the struggle in Vietnam. But it was their airpower that kept the conflict running as long as it did. For the most part, the Allied and Communist military hardware on the ground were equivalent. While the Allies had superior quantities of supplies, the Communists countered that with numbers...and therein lies the rub.
Airpower allowed the Allies to smash large North Vietnamese formations south of the Demilitarized Zone and thus prevented the numerical advantage from coming into play. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong made one serious stab at a conventional militarily challenge to the Allies - the Tet Offensive - and after initial successes, they were crushed.
With the NVA unable to flex their superior numbers, the Allies were able to innovate helicopter-borne counter-insurgency operations. The North Vietnam's Army (NVA) was forced to operate in smaller units, so the Allies were able to engage them in troop numbers that helicopters could support. The air forces didn't deliver ultimate victory, but air power alone had never been able to do so on land. It was only when the US lost faith in achieving any positive outcome in Viet Nam and pulled out, that the North was finally able to overrun the South 20 months later. But every major power today understands the lesson.
End of Note
(Big Trouble in Little China)
The military importance of airpower was now haunting the leadership of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). Their problem wasn't aircraft. Most of their air fleet consisted of the most advanced models produced during the last two decades. The problem was that 80% of their pilots were dead, or dying. Their ground crews were in the same peril. Even shanghaiing commercial pilots couldn't meet the projected pilot shortfall.
Classic PLA defense doctrine was to soak up an enemy (Russian) attack and bog down the aggressor with semi-guerilla warfare (classic small unit tactics backed up with larger, light infantry formations). Then, when the invaders were over-extended and exhausted, the armored / mechanized / motorized forces would counter-attack and destroy their foes. This last bit required air superiority through attrition.
The twin enemies of this strategy were the price of technology and the Chinese economic priorities. With the rising cost of the high-tech equipment and a central government focus on developing the overall economy, the Chinese went for an ever smaller counter attack striking force, thus skewing the burden of depth of support far in favor of their relatively static militia/police units.
So now, while the PLA / PLAAF's main divisions, brigades and Air Wings were some of the best equipped on the planet, the economic necessities had also meant the militia was financially neglected...remaining little more than early Cold War Era non-mechanized infantry formations. To compensate, the Chinese had placed greater and greater emphasis on the deployment capabilities of their scarcer, technologically advanced formations.
When the Anthrax outbreak started, the strike force personnel were the first personnel 'vaccinated'. Now those men and women were coughing out the last days and hours of their lives. Unfortunately, you couldn't simply put a few commercial truck drivers in a T-99 Main Battle Tank and expect them to be anything more than a rolling coffin. The same went for a commercial airline pilot and a Chengdu J-10 multi-role fighter. The best you could hope for was for him/her to make successful takeoffs and landings.
A further critical factor was that the Khanate's first strike had also targeted key defense industries. The damage hadn't been irreparable. Most military production would be
only
a month to six weeks behind schedule. But there would be a gap.
It was just becoming clear that roughly 80% of their highly-trained, frontline combatants were going to die anyway. Their Reserves were looking at 30~40% attrition due to the illness as well. In the short term (three months), they would be fighting with whatever they started with. Within the very short term (one week), they were going to have a bunch of high-priced equipment and no one trained to use it. With chilling practicality, the Chinese leaders decided to throw their dying troopers into one immediate, massive counter-offensive against the Khanate.
Just as Temujin predicted they would. Things were playing out according to plan.
Note: World Events Summary
Round #1 had seen the Khanate unite several countries under one - their - banner. Earth & Sky soldiers had rolled across the Chinese border as their Air Force and Missile Regiments had used precision strikes to hammer Chinese bases, sever their transportation network and crippled their civilian infrastructure.
Next, the frontier offensive units had been obliterated, the cities bypassed and the Khanate
Tumens
had sped forward to the geographic junctures between what the Khanate wanted and from whence the PLA had to come. In the last phase of Round #1, the Khanate prepped for the inevitable PLA / PLAAF counter-strike.
Round #2 had now begun:
Step One
: Declare to the World that the Khanate was a nuclear power. As history would later reveal, this was a lie, but no one had any way of initially knowing that. Hell, the Khanate hadn't even existed 72 hours ago. Satellite imagery did show the Khanate had medium-range strategic missiles capable of hitting any location in the People's Republic. In Beijing, a nuclear response was taken off the table.
Step Two
: Initiate the largest air-battle in the history of Asia. Not just planes either. Both sides flew fleets of UCAV's at one another. It wasn't really even a battle between China and just the Khanate. Virtually all of the UAV technology the Khanate was using was Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese in origin, plus some US-Russian-shared technology thrown into the mix.
When the South Korean design team saw the footage of their bleeding-edge dogfighting UCAVs shooting down their PRC opponents, they were thrilled (their design rocked!), shocked (what was their 'baby' doing dominating Chinese airspace?) and anxious (members of South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration - DAPA - were rushing over to chat with them).
Similar things were happening in Japan, Taiwan, Russia and the United States. The Communist Party leadership in Beijing were beginning to seriously consider the possibility that everyone was out to get them. Of course, all the Ambassadors in Beijing were bobbing their heads with the utmost respect while swearing on the lives of their first born sons that their nations had nothing to do with any of this.
These foreign diplomats promised to look into these egregious breaches of their scientific integrity and were saying how sorry they were that the PLA and PLAAF were getting ass-raped for the World's viewing pleasure. No, they couldn't stop the Khanate posting such things to the internet - something to do with freedom. Paranoia had been creeping into the Potentates' thoughts since the Pakistan/Aksai Chan incident.
As they watched their very expensive jets and UCAV's being obliterated, distrust of the global community became the 800 pound gorilla in the room. To add habaneros to the open wounds, the United States and the United Kingdom began dropping hints that they had some sort of highly personal communication conduit with the Khanate's secretive and unresponsive leadership. Yes Virginia Wolfe, the Western World was out to get the People's Republic.
'Great Mao's Ghost', all that claptrap their grandfathers had babbled on about (1) the Korea War, (2) the Sino-Soviet grudge match, (3) the Sino-Vietnamese conflict and (4) the persistent support for the renegade province of Formosa all being a continuous effort by the liberal democracies and post-colonial imperialist to contain Chinese communism, didn't sound so crazy anymore.
Step Three
: Plaster all those PLA ground units that had started moving toward them when the air war began and the Chinese envisioned they would control the skies. The T-99 was a great tank. It also blew up rather spectacularly when it was stuck on a rail car (you don't drive your tanks halfway across China - it kills the treads).
As Craig Kilborn put into his late night repertoire:
"What do you call a Khanate UCAV driver who isn't an ace yet? Late for work."
"What's the difference between me coming off a weekend long Las Vegas bender and a Khanate pilot? Not a damn thing. We've both been up for three days straight, yet everyone expects us to work tonight."
Some PLA generals decided to make an all-out charge at the
Tumens
. Genghis's boys and girls were having none of that. They weren't using their Russian-built Khanate tanks to kill Chinese-built PLA tanks. No, their tanks were sneaking around and picking off the Chinese anti-air vehicles.
The Chinese tanks and APCs engaged the dismounted Khanate infantry who, as Aksai Chin had shown, possessed some of the latest anti-tank weaponry. In the few cases where the PLA threw caution to the wind, they did some damage to the Khanate by sheer weight of numbers. For the rest, it was death by airpower.
With their anti-air shield gone, the battle became little more than a grisly, real-life FPS game. It wasn't '
THE END
'. China still had over 2,000,000 troops to call upon versus the roughly 200,000 the Khanate could currently muster. The PLA's new dilemma was how to transport these mostly truck-bound troops anywhere near the front lines without seeing them also exterminated from the air.
After the
Tumens
gobbled up the majority of the PLA's available mobile forces, they resumed their advance toward the provincial boundaries of Xinjiang and Nin Mongol. There was little left to slow them down. The Chinese still held most of the urban centers in Xinjiang and Nei Mongol, yet they were isolated. And Khanate follow-up forces (the national armies they'd 'inherited') were putting the disease-riddled major municipalities under siege.
