McLanahan had never felt so insignificant. He had participated in lots of aircraft generation exercises, when his unit’s fleet of bombers and tankers was fueled and armed in preparation for a strategic war, but this was at least twenty times greater in magnitude than he had ever seen before. Even during Air Battle Force generation exercises at Ellsworth Air Force Base — which, even in these few days since arriving on Guam, seemed a billion miles away and years ago — things seemed to go in a smooth, orderly fashion: here, it was like some kind of controlled riot, or like the world’s largest exhibition hall with thousands of participants milling around from building to aircraft and back again.
Parked south of the air-defense fighters and on the other side of base operations were the support aircraft. They had one E-3C Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System radar plane, one EC-135L radio relay plane, and one RC- 135X reconnaissance plane parked there; an E-3 and another EC-135 were already airborne, participating in intelligence and “ferret” flights near the Philippines — obviously Masters’ NIRTSats were still down. There were also three EF-111A Raven electronic countermeasure aircraft, two Navy EA-6 electronic warfare aircraft, another U-2R spy plane like the one that was shot down near the Philippines, and a Navy E-2 Hawkeye radar plane from the
Barely visible across and in between the runways were the parking areas for the strike aircraft, surrounded by twelve- foot-high corrugated steel revetments to protect each other from damage should a bomb go off on one parking area. The smaller fighter-bombers — the F-15E Strike Eagles, the F-4 Phantoms, and the F-111G bombers, along with a few Navy A-6 Intruder bombers, were in the infield parking spots between the parallel runways, while the “heavies” — the B-52, B-l, and B-2 bombers — were on the west parking areas.
Construction crews had built huge shelters for the three B-2 Black Knights to protect them as much as possible/not only from the elements — with their nonmetallic composite construction, the B-2s were more resilient to the harsh tropical climate and corroding effects of salt air than the other planes — but from the prying eyes of spy satellites and newsmen.
Although the B-2 had been operational for some years and was no longer the oddity it first was when it was unveiled in 1989, it still attracted a lot of undue attention. Just beyond the aircraft parking areas to the west, McLanahan could just barely make out the Patriot air-defense-missile canisters poking just above the treeline, already erected and ready to fire in case of an air attack.
Air defense of Andersen, as well as the Seventh Fleet combat groups, Okinawa, and the other island bases supporting the Philippines operation, was a very important consideration. The primary concern was attack from submarine-launched weapons. The Chinese Navy operated six Wuhan-class cruise-missile submarines that fired antiship missiles with ranges varying from twenty to one hundred nautical miles; these missiles were thought to have a secondary land-attack role by programming the missile’s autopilot to impact a selected set of geographical coordinates. Navy and Air Force radar planes were used to scan the skies around Andersen for any low-flying aircraft, while Navy ships and antisubmarine aircraft patrolled for signs of submarines. The Patriot missile was somewhat effective against low-flying cruise missiles, and even the F-16 fighters with their AIM-120C Scorpion missiles were fairly effective at chasing down subsonic cruise missiles.
China also possessed four sea-launched ballistic nuclear missile submarines, all of which had been deployed into the Pacific and were thought to be a threat to all American forces. These submarines were being located and shadowed as best as could be expected — the diesel-powered submarines were hundreds of times quieter submerged than their nuclear-powered counterparts — but the feeling was that if the fight escalated to a nuclear exchange, the weapons being used in this battle would be quickly supplanted by the full strategic nuclear might of the United States anyway.
