“We need time to construct fortifications in Pinglin to protect ourselves from the Chinese advance. Therefore, we will set up a temporary defense along this ridge,” Gutierrez indicated a point on the map about a mile northwest of Pinglin. “That temporary defense will hopefully buy us a few hours to get things in place here. Colonel Brown will command that defense, using three companies from his battalion.”
Brown instantly looked in my direction and said, “I’ll get my best soldiers on the job.” Lucky me.
When Gutierrez had called the all-officer meeting, I’d had my platoon commanders get everyone ready to march. That head start paid off. Twenty minutes after the officers meeting broke up, I was in position with the first platoon of my company.
The ridge was occupied by several barns, storage facilities, and farmhouses evidently used during the harvest of the tea plantations in the area. In quick order, we named the area Farmers’ Ridge. There was a single three-story building that housed apartments, presumably for the workers, as well as a covered open-air garden on the top floor. Surrounding the area was a dense forest, which we could only see above from the top two floors of the apartment building.
Soldiers on the ground wouldn’t be able to see the Chinese until they were about a hundred feet away, practically point-blank range. We were also at the top of the ridge, so we’d be vulnerable to Chinese artillery fire.
To Lieutenant Williams, I said, “This is a perfect fucking mess.”
Williams considered for a moment and replied, “You’ve got that right, captain.”
I radioed my platoon leaders and told them to dig a line of trenches about twenty feet behind the buildings. A simple series of foxholes, considerably less impressive than the trenches used in World War I, would be our only defense against the Chinese onslaught that was surely on its way.
I radioed Colonel Brown. “Empathy One, Empathy Four is in position.”
The radio crackled with Brown’s voice. “Empathy Four, this is Empathy One, have you spotted the enemy?”
I bit back a curse at Brown’s intrusive stupidity. Did he think I wouldn’t tell him about that? “Negative, Empathy Four. Will report when they appear, over.”
Of course we’d be looking out for the enemy. The whole point of being on top of the hill was that we could see the enemy. The problem was that the forest prevented us from seeing soldiers coming up the ridge until they were almost on us. We had exactly one good vantage point — the top of the apartment building.
The danger of Farmers’ Ridge was equally clear, however. We had no artillery or armored support. With the People’s Liberation Army-Air Force still contesting control of the sky over Taiwan, our air support options would be limited, and for this first day there was none at all available.
So, we had a perfect view to direct fire support that we didn’t have. And what did we sacrifice in order to achieve this advantage? Chinese artillery miles away near Taipei would be able to fire directly on us.
Brown knew all this, of course. As soon as I’d seen the topographical map of Farmers’ Ridge, I’d suggested a reverse slope defense to Brown.
The basic intuition most people have about defending a hill is that you want to get to the top first and hold it. That was certainly true back in ancient Greece because the whole battle was basically about pushing the other side until they broke, and any eight year-old knows that you can push harder with more momentum from the top of the hill.
The problem with that strategy for the past couple hundred years has been that the top of a hill is easily in direct line of sight of the enemy’s artillery. That’s why the Duke of Wellington famously preferred to defend the downward slope of a hill — a reverse slope defense. The enemy artillery couldn’t easily fire at a position on the other side of the hill, and infantry could surprise and ambush attackers coming over the crest.
The same logic applied to our current situation. The People Liberation Army’s artillery could easily hit the top of Farmers’ Ridge, but not the far side. With a reverse slope defense, we could fight the PLA infantry isolated from its artillery support. That was the argument I put to Brown.
Brown responded: “You know what the newspapers would say if we try a reverse-slope defense and lose? They’ll ask why we didn’t occupy the top of the ridge when we had a chance.”
I tried to keep my cool. “But sir, the papers don’t know shit about fighting a war. The reverse slope defense gives us a chance to win. If we just occupy the top of the ridge, if we just do the stupid, obvious thing, the Chinese will push us out.”
“But no one will be able to say we made an obvious mistake, captain,” Brown had said. Not for the first time, the optimal tactics of a bureaucratic war differed dramatically from those of the battlefield.
Brown wasn’t even at the battlefield. While the Pentagon had shown a rare modicum of common sense in refusing to allow General Gutierrez to bring a two-ton command trailer with him to Taiwan, that hadn’t stopped Colonel Brown from setting up an ad hoc command post in Pinglin’s central bank. I hadn’t had time to visit the post, but I assumed it was in the vault of the bank, the better to insulate Brown from the dangers that faced the soldiers under his command.
Ten minutes after my company began digging in, two more companies arrived, deploying on our left and right flanks. About 300 men and women were furiously digging in the dark with their entrenching tools.
Lieutenant Barker radioed in. “Empathy Four, we’ve got drones overhead. My guys have seen two small drones about a thousand feet up. Please advise, over.”
That was a dilemma I had considered on the march over to Farmers’ Ridge. The Chinese had obviously planned the nuclear attack very carefully. Though it was still too early in the morning for me to see any drones clearly, no one doubted that the Chinese would have drones overhead scouting out ahead of its armored units. Even if the drones hadn’t been there, Chinese infrared satellites were surely stalking our every move.
A reasonably well-equipped Taiwanese unit had jamming devices to neutralize satellite eyes, and autonomous antiaircraft guns or lasers to deal with the drones. By contrast, we only had Stinger missiles not far removed from those given to Afghan tribesmen almost half a century ago to shoot down Soviet helicopters.
I radioed back to Lieutenant Barker. “Do not engage the drones. Get back to digging.”
No sense giving away our position before we had to, and I figured we had to save the Stingers for shooting down Chinese helicopters. We didn’t have enough missiles to take potshots at every drone we saw. Asimov’s Fourth Law of robotics, they called it in military circles — there are always more drones than missiles. An equally true corollary was that if you’re fighting a major power with an essentially infinite number of cheap, small drones, shooting million dollar missiles at ten- or hundred-thousand dollar drones was an exercise in futility and waste.
General Gutierrez had, to his credit, requested from the Taiwanese an air drop or rush truck shipment of such a laser or automated gun unit to take out drones. It would take several hours for the weapons to arrive, however, and in the interim, we were about to become the first U.S. military unit to go into battle without air support to fight a modern enemy with drones.
The Chinese artillery started up fifteen minutes after Barker asked about the drones. There was no warning at all, just a sudden explosion about fifty yards away.
I had staked myself out on the top floor of the three-story apartment building, figuring that someone needed to take the risk of being in the most obvious target on the ridge in order to tell what the hell was happening on the battlefield. I ducked down below a wooden table and waited as shells continued to pound down around our positions for several seconds.