When the exercises started the American pilots achieved -nothing. SAC had been studying the reports of The Big One as well and had spent a year defining its doctrines and tactics. The planned two weeks had stretched to four and then to six. Every day the B-36s had swarmed over the target area, serenely ignoring the fighters floundering around below them. The tighter pilots would go away, revise their tactics, modify their aircraft and try again - with equal lack of success. Below them. Observers watched and learned.
That was the secret of the Air Warfare Center, Red Sun was intended as a training exercise so that combat aircrews could train in the most realistic simulated war environment possible. Even the first Red Sun in 1948 hadn't been a competition between flying units, nor a duel between pilots. It had been a post-graduate university course in air defense technology and the lesson learned was simple. Air defense had failed completely, the United States was as vulnerable to high-altitude nuclear bombers as Germany had been a year earlier.
The lessons of the 1948 Red Sun had been compiled and circulated to strategists, tacticians, aircraft designers, anybody who could come up with answers. One answer had underlined how desperate the problem had been; since the B-36 was the only aircraft that could fly and fight comfortably at those high altitudes, the B-36 was assigned an air defense mission, to be executed by dropping nuclear devices on inbound enemy bombers.
Martin reflected that his last Red Sun before going away to become an officer in 1949 hadn't been any better. By then NORAD had been formed to integrate the defenses of the United States. It was loosely based on a German system called NAIADS that had failed to defeat The Big One. American investigators had liked the basic idea behind NAIADS but believed it had been executed badly. NAIADS had been a rigid, inflexible tree with information passing up and down a tightly defined hierarchy. NORAD, from its headquarters in Colorado, was the center of a flexible, multiply-redundant web by which information could flow around any damage caused by enemy action.
By 1949, the Air Warfare Center had changed as well. In the first Red Sun, the actions had been observed by spotters on the ground with binoculars. Over the year, they had been equipped with Contraves Kinetheodolites to precisely track the aircraft and record their maneuvers. The first radars had been installed and a series of lecture theaters had been built for debriefings. In doing so, a new science had been created called Range Instrumentation. A science that investigated the technology needed to measure and plot everything that happened over an area and reveal how it had happened.
Neither NORAD nor range instrumentation had helped much, not in 1949. Some of the fighters the defenses deployed had been stripped down and their engines boosted to develop more power at high altitudes. The modified F-72s and F-80s had managed to reach the B-36s that year but they had been staggering at the limits of their performance and the B-36s were in their element. As the summary at the end of the exercise had put it “The B-36s stopped ignoring the fighters and shot them down instead”. If they'd been using real ammunition, Martin would have left Texan Lady an ace.
The glory days of the B-36 hadn't lasted of course. It had faded away slowly. By 1951 the first of the new jet interceptors, drawing on the experience of the earlier Red Sun exercises had arrived. The F-94 Starfire was a hasty modification of a twin-seat trainer version of the old F-80C, fitted with an afterburner, it could make it up to the B-36s and stay there to fight them. Not well, it lacked the firepower for that, but at least it could try. Then, in 1952, the Northrop F-89 had entered the exercise. Sluggish and with an appalling accident record, it had the firepower the F-94 lacked. One aircraft had the performance but not the firepower, the other the firepower but lacked the performance.
These new Fighters, controlled by a thing called the “Air Defense Ground Environment”, were the child of Red Sun but they were weak and sickly children. At the end of the 1952 exercise, the summary had stated proudly “after five years of hard work, technical innovation and unrelenting effort, our air defenses have now advanced to the point of being totally ineffective.”
But, if 1952 had been disappointing, 1953 had seen a sudden change in the fortunes of the defenses. Two new fighters had joined the flightline at Nellis, the latest version of the F-94, the F-94C and the single-seat F-86D Sabredog. Both were able to fly and maneuver at the B-36 operational altitudes and, with their rocket batteries, had the firepower to do some real damage. The RB-36s were still out of reach but the loaded B-36s now had to fight to survive.
Something else was added to the equation as well, the first Ajax missiles had entered the exercise. Up to now, ground-based anti-aircraft weapons had been useless, ineffective against targets flying at over 36,000 feet. Ajax was effective against targets flying at up to 60,000 feet and that put even the RB-36 within reach. In 1953, for the first time, a combination of Ajax “firings” with attacks by the F-94C and the F-86D had managed to inflict significant “losses” on a B-36 attack.
Martin remembered that the ground gained had been lost during his first year at Red Sun. 1954 had seen the B-60, the all-jet version of the B-36 entering the exercises for the first time. About 80 mph faster and about 2,000 feet more service ceiling gave the B-60 the edge that the B-36 had lost. A year later the B-52 had made its first appearance. With over 630 mph maximum speed it marked an enormous advance over even the B-60. Yet that year, the first of the Century series fighters had arrived with their GAR-1 air-to-air missiles.
For the last five years, the B-60 and the B-52 on one side and the F-101, F-102 and F-104 on the other had been battling it out in the skies over Nevada. Electronic warfare faced off against missiles and radars. The old days when the bombers held an absolute technical advantage had gone but the fighters didn't have a decisive edge either. Now it was all down to tactics, technology and skill. And those were the things the forcing ground of Red Sun had been designed to develop.
Martin grinned. This year, two new Convair products were being deployed for the first time. As always, the best went first to Red Sun. SAC were sending their new RB-58C Hustlers and NORAD the F-106A Delta Dart. The 498th Fighter Interceptor Squadron based at Geiger AFB in Washington was going face to face with the 305th Strategic Recon Group fresh from conversion school at Carswell. This was going to be interesting. And, who knew? Perhaps he could talk one of the RB-58C drivers into giving him a ride. At Red Sun all things were possible.
Baronial Hall, Walthersburg, New Schwabia
Field Marshal Walter Model, once known as “The Fuhrer's Fireman” and now Baron of New Schwabia listened carefully. It had been his imagination, or possibly distant thunder, but it wasn't artillery. Here in Walthersburg, the city once called Stalingrad, the border of New Schwabia was close enough, if there had been artillery fire, he'd have heard it. In some ways it was foolish for him to have his home so far forward but there was no choice. Walthersburg was the great industrial center of his state. Astrakhan gave him oil and Rostov a port but Walthersburg was his industrial backbone. Lose that and everything else would be lost.
He'd already been luckier than most. Of all the little states that had sprung up in occupied Russia after the Americans had destroyed Germany, his was the one that was most powerful. He had been left with the best troops, the better part of an Army group with Panzers and infantry and even an SS division. He'd been left with enough aircraft to make a reasonable air force and the ground he occupied contained the foundations of a modern state.