The situation with the aircraft wasn’t any better. They had more tanks than Kestrels, and you couldn’t patrol an entire massive metropolitan area and its environs, much less project force, with only a handful of helicopters. There were no fighter jets stationed at the airport, either, not any more. None. Any that landed were just there to refuel.
The young Colonel had yet to rule the city, much less tame it, no matter what the reports said about who held what ground. It was a festering wound that continued to fester. After two years of command. His predecessor had fared no better. Not that things were going well in the war anywhere, it seemed to have devolved into a war of attrition, but worries like that were above Cooper’s pay grade. He was not, however, ignorant of the fact that while the other side had less armor and vehicles and planes and bombs and drones and satellites… they had far more bodies in the fight. And in a war of attrition, numbers mattered.
After Block’s untimely demise Parker had been picked for the command, the Major was convinced, for no other reason than because, in addition to being politically reliable, everybody liked him. His men liked him, as much as any soldiers liked their commanding officer, and the brass at HQ liked him. Which was fine, as long as he could do the job.
To be fair, they didn’t have enough men and machines to physically command a piece of earth the size of which they’d been charged with “governing” or “pacifying” or any one of a dozen other euphemisms. It just wasn’t possible. The city itself was 140 square miles of destroyed buildings, empty homes, and vacant land being reclaimed by Mother Nature, and the “Zone of Conflict”, the contested surrounding urban and suburban areas, tripled that. Once you added in all the outlying cities and suburbs and rural farmland, Parker was tasked with controlling nearly twenty-five hundred square miles. An area more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Forget men and machines, Parker never had the fuel reserves to be able to consistently patrol such a space, so he’d concentrated his efforts on the city and the surrounding ‘burbs, which was where most of the trouble occurred anyway.
There were always ways to project force and influence beyond your number… but Parker seemed unable to do anything but respond to the guerillas’ actions. That was a dead-end street—you didn’t win a war by playing defense. He’d said as much to the Colonel, in a polite, non-insubordinate way, but nothing had changed. His predecessor, General Block, had attempted to keep the populace cowed with immediate reprisals against the citizenry whenever there was a guerrilla attack. Parker was no fan of mass jailings, much less the torture or mass executions Block was famous for, and had stopped most of those upon assuming command. Cooper thought that made him appear weak, and had said as much as politely as he could, but Parker was quick to point out the guerrilla attacks had not increased under his “kinder, gentler” hand. They also hadn’t decreased, Cooper was quick to point out.
They still, technically, controlled the city and the surrounding suburbs, but the bragging rights cost them dearly; ten men dead, on average, each and every month, for the past few years. One, two, four at a time, in shitty little actions in a horrific war nobody—well, almost nobody—had seen coming. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d been hitting back at the guerrillas just as hard, but he’d seen the numbers. The real numbers, not the ones they gave to the state media. For every guerrilla or suspected guerrilla they’d captured or killed in the past year, they’d lost ten soldiers. That wasn’t just unacceptable, it was unsustainable, and Parker knew it. Everyone knew it. The problem was no one seemed to know how to turn the situation around. And most of the brass didn’t seem to care, about the numbers or the city itself, because the casualty numbers coming out of the region paled in comparison to the real conflict areas.
At the start of the war federal agents were arresting and interrogating a lot of “collaborators”, trying to uncover the locations of terrorist cells, with very little success. While Parker was no fan of torture, at his S2’s insistence he had finally decided to revisit some of those techniques and do some enhanced interrogations on the few captured guerrillas they had, and their suspected civilian confederates, but so far they hadn’t gotten any actionable intelligence. Cooper knew it was only a matter of time, though.
“I don’t know how you do it, Coop.” The Colonel leaned over the freshly brewed pot of coffee on the bar and breathed deep. Real coffee, every day. The man was a saint.
“You just have to know who to threaten, sir.”
The Colonel raised a hand. “I don’t even want to know,” he said quickly. There was coffee to be had in the city, even a coffee shop up in the Fisher Building at the far end of the Blue Zone, but the cost of the stuff was outrageous. With the hyperinflation even on a Colonel’s salary he balked at the prices. He poured himself a cup, aching for some milk; two percent, skim, breast, even that “environmentally conscious” vegan soymilk found on the Army bases that tasted like ditchwater filtered through dirty underwear.
“Intelligence seems to think the Tangos are up to something.”
“Oh? Why’s that?” He knew the report would be on his desk, and he would read it, but it was always good to hear someone else’s slant on the news. He found a few battered sugar packets and poured them into his cup.
“Heavier than usual signal traffic in the region. Slightly higher casualties to snipers in the past few weeks. Spotters report more movement than usual along the Ditch.”
Most of their casualties were to snipers, and always had been. One shot fired, and they could rarely even determine from where, much less by who. But as for spotters… Parker shook his head. “If we can spot them we should be able to kill them,” he growled, not for the first time. Using soldiers to surveil the likely traffic areas was archaic in this era of drones, but could he get a resupply on those? No. Three years into the war the two CONEX boxes containing nearly all the small drones in the city had been sabotaged, and since then what few drones they’d had left seemed to disappear or get downed faster than they could be replaced. It wasn’t just in the city, there seemed to be a real shortage of them Army-wide, both the bird-sized flitters and the armed UAVs the size of small planes. And he’d learned—forget about getting anything high-tech or cutting edge like MURVs or sentry guns, they couldn’t even get new runflat tires for their Growlers or Spikes. He’d been out of Spikes for a year. Maybe it was that the better gear was all tasked for missions in the “real” war. Or maybe the Army just didn’t have enough in inventory. He could never get a straight answer out of headquarters. He sighed.
“Anything concrete? Did they go to the trouble of actually listening to any of this traffic? Or following the people on the ground, getting eyes on, determining whether or not they’re guerrillas or just residents?” That there were still people who lived in the city outside of the Blue Zone amazed him, but they were there, it was a fact. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of them, although the local population was a fraction of what it had been before the war. Over four million, he’d read somewhere, in the greater metropolitan area, before the fighting had started. Those civilians were why they didn’t shoot everybody on sight. Or, at least, his troops weren’t supposed to, they had strict Rules of Engagement, but war was war, and morale was in the toilet due to those damn snipers… He stirred the coffee with a finger.