52: air strike

When news reached the Washington Situation Room that the Federal Army's 3rd Armored Division had raised the white flag in the burning ruins of Wichita, the expressions on the faces of President Miles and Senator McConnell were as if they had just eaten a mouthful of filth.

"Surrender? That coward Howard actually surrendered?!" McConnell shouted, jumping up from his chair.

His face, usually hidden behind conspiracies, was twisted with extreme anger and disbelief.

"He still had two full-strength combat brigades in his hands! How could he surrender?!"

"He had no choice, Senator." The Secretary of Defense, the hawkish general who had once pushed hard for this war, spoke with a voice full of deep exhaustion and frustration.

"According to reports from survivors who retreated from the front lines, what we faced in Wichita was not an army at all, but a group of ghosts."

"Ghosts? Ghosts... It's those damn ghosts again, it's that Paradox Technology again!"

"Yes, ghosts, Paradox Technology." The Secretary of Defense slowly closed his eyes, as if recalling the descriptions full of fear and chaos that the surviving soldiers had given during their debriefings.

"Our soldiers never knew where the enemy was from start to finish. Our tanks were destroyed by attacks from the sky before they could even fire, and our artillery positions were met with precise counterattacks from the other side of the horizon after firing their first round..."

"All our communications were intercepted, all our tactical deployments were predicted, and all our information superiority was completely wiped out."

"Our soldiers didn't lose to the Alliance's National Guard," he opened his eyes and said, word by word, "we lost to that damn, omnipresent, Satan-like Paradox Technology!"

The surrender of the 3rd Armored Division was just the beginning, the start of a chain reaction like an avalanche.

In the following weeks, from the Texas border to the mountains of Colorado, news of routs also arrived one after another from other Federal Army front lines.

Their experiences were almost identical to that of the 3rd Armored Division.

After losing their information superiority and air support, their troops—once invincible in campaigns like the Gulf War—became fragile and vulnerable in the face of the Alliance's future warfare system, consisting of drones, robotic dogs, railguns, and information suppression.

The entire mode of warfare seemed to have changed overnight into something that McConnell and his staff, still stuck in 20th-century military thinking, could not comprehend at all.

They did not understand why, despite having more soldiers, more tanks, a stronger air force, and a larger industrial capacity, they were losing so thoroughly and so miserably.

They were like a group of 19th-century Redcoats armed with the finest muskets, suddenly stumbling into a WWII battlefield dominated by machine guns and radios.

Before they could even form up into neat ranks, they had already been completely shredded by firepower from another era.

...

This brutal war taking place in the American heartland, through various satellite imagery and intelligence analyses, also stirred up massive waves within the military systems of countries around the world.

If the Battle of Wichita only gave people a preliminary taste of the cruelty of future warfare, then when the Alliance Army demonstrated that brand-new, efficient, and highly informatized combat system after withstanding the Federation's first wave of attacks, military observers from all nations gasped in shock.

"Information is the battlefield, algorithms are firepower."

At the National Defense University in China, a professor responsible for strategic research summarized his observations of the war with these ten words while lecturing to senior officers.

"We see that the Alliance Army's victory is not because their weapons are so advanced; we have long had theories for concepts like railguns and drone swarms, and we even have prototypes in our laboratories."

"Their true advantage lies in perfectly coordinating these weapons through a powerful central AI and an omnipresent information network."

"Every one of their drones, every robotic dog, and every individual soldier is merely a sensor and actuator on this massive war machine."

"It is that AI hidden behind the scenes that is commanding the entire war."

"It can process battlefield information at speeds exceeding human limits, formulate optimal tactics with absolute rational logic, and transmit orders to every combat unit with millisecond-level latency."

"This Gestalt-style collaborative combat system is the key to their invincibility."

His words plunged all the battle-hardened generals present into deep thought.

They realized that everything they had learned in the past about classic military theories—maneuver warfare, infiltration, and saturation fire—might become obsolete in the face of this brand-new mode of warfare.

This civil war taking place across the ocean was like the sternest of teachers, giving all nations of the world an open lesson on "what modern warfare is" in the bloodiest way possible.

All major powers began to frantically increase their investment in the informatization, intelligence, and unmanned construction of their own militaries.

And to seek cooperation with Paradox Technology on military reform.

A global revolution in military thought was ignited in advance by this civil war.

...

Facing the intensifying flames of war within the United States and the potentially catastrophic impact on global stability, the United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting.

And in a rare move, it unanimously passed a resolution strongly calling for both warring parties to immediately cease fire unconditionally and return to the negotiating table to resolve their differences.

However, this resolution was like a piece of waste paper to the soldiers on both sides, who had already been blinded by rage.

For the Federal Army, they bore the shame of potential defeat, and the pride of having once fought across the world made the flames of revenge burn fiercely in their hearts.

And for the Alliance Army, they were immersed in the joy of continuous victory and the pride of defending their homeland; they vowed to drive those "traitors" who started the war completely out of their land.

Once the seeds of hatred are sown, they cannot be easily uprooted by a piece of empty paper.

After experiencing severe setbacks in the initial phase, the Federal Army quickly adjusted its tactics.

They abandoned the large-scale, sweeping army-group style offensives and began to contract their defensive lines, withdrawing their main forces to the east of the Rocky Mountains, which served as a natural barrier.

They attempted to rely on the complex terrain of the mountains and their still-advantageous logistics to wage a protracted war of attrition against the Alliance Army.

However, the high-spirited Alliance Army did not give them any chance to catch their breath.

Under Elon's tough orders, the Alliance army pressed their advantage, crossed the ruins of Kansas, and brought the flames of war to the heartland of the Federation.

The main forces of both sides soon met again in the key city of Missouri—Columbia.

A larger and more decisive battle was about to break out here.

This time, the Federal side had learned to be smart.

They knew they were completely at a disadvantage in conventional ground combat and information warfare.

Therefore, they decided to deploy their trump card, which they believed to be invincible—air superiority.

They assembled over a hundred combat aircraft and bombers of various types, including 18 F-35 Lightning II fighters and 10 F-22 Raptor fighters.

These 28 fifth-generation stealth fighters, representing the highest crystallization of human aviation industry, were their last pride.

Their plan was simple—use the unparalleled penetration capability of these stealth fighters to bypass the Alliance's air defense system and conduct a decapitation air strike directly on the Alliance's temporary command center where Elon was located.

They believed that as long as they took out Elon, the backbone of the Alliance, the Alliance army would collapse without a fight.

However, they were once again using old-era thinking to gauge an opponent from the future.

June 12, 2031, early morning.

At a Federal Air Force base on the border of Missouri, 28 stealth fighters, resembling black reapers, taxied and took off in succession under the cover of night.

They did not turn on any radar or communication equipment, blending into the pitch-black night sky like ghosts in a state of absolute radio silence.

In the Federal Air Force's combat manual, this was a perfect surprise attack that could not be detected or intercepted.

However, what they did not know was that the moment they took off, all their information—from takeoff time, flight formation, and planned flight path, to the carried weapons and fuel status of each aircraft—had already been clearly seen by an omnipresent "eye."

In the Alliance's air defense command center, "white flower" clearly presented this information in the form of a 3D dynamic model to Pierre, the Commander-in-Chief of the Alliance Army.

"They didn't even bother to change to a new flight path." Pierre looked at the familiar penetration route on the screen and curled his lips in disdain.

"Order our Diamond Dome air defense system to prepare a surprise for them."

"Diamond Dome" was the code name used by the Alliance for this brand-new integrated intelligent air defense system provided by Paradox Technology.

The core of this system was not traditional phased-array radar, but a brand-new technology called "AI Cognitive Filtering Radar."

Traditional radar discovers targets by emitting electromagnetic waves and receiving echoes.

And stealth fighters achieve invisibility by minimizing and deflecting radar echoes through special shapes and radar-absorbent coatings.

But the working principle of the AI Cognitive Filtering Radar is completely different.

It does not emit electromagnetic waves of a single frequency, but complex signals containing countless frequencies and waveforms.

Then, a dedicated AI—specifically, a sub-program of "white flower"—cognizes and filters the massive amount of background echo signals.

It is not "looking for" a target.

Instead, it is "identifying" an "anomaly" that has intruded into the normal background environment.

For "white flower," the disturbance to the background environment caused by an F-22 flying through the sky and the disturbance caused by a normal bird are completely different in their characteristics.

In front of this kind of radar, so-called stealth technology is like a sniper wearing a ghillie suit, thinking they have perfectly blended into the jungle, not knowing they are standing in front of a high-definition camera with thermal imaging.

Those 28 F-35 and F-22 fighters had just taken off from the airport, had not yet flown over the battlefield, and hadn't even had time to open their weapon bay doors.

On the screens of the Alliance's air defense command center, they had already become 28 clear light spots firmly locked by red squares.

"Targets locked, requesting permission to fire."

"Fire," Pierre said nonchalantly.

Dozens of vertical launch systems disguised as shipping containers deployed around Columbia opened their covers simultaneously.

Countless "Patriot-3" air defense missiles shot straight into the night sky like arrows released from a bow, trailing long exhaust plumes.

Their target was not the aircraft themselves.

But the airspace that "white flower" had calculated for them, where those 28 stealth fighters would definitely pass in the next few minutes.

This was an ambush with a predetermined outcome.

"Alarm! Alarm! Incoming missiles!"

When the lead pilot of the F-22 formation saw the dozens of high-speed targets closing in from all directions like a meteor shower on his advanced helmet-mounted display, his mind went blank.

"This is impossible! How did they discover us?!"

He instinctively yanked the control stick, attempting to perform an evasive maneuver.

But it was all too late.

The speed of those air defense missiles was simply not something his type of aircraft could evade.

One after another, brilliant and deadly fireworks exploded in the night sky.

The 28 fifth-generation stealth fighters, representing the Federation's last aerial pride, were all shot down without even knowing how they had been exposed, turning into balls of burning fire and crashing toward the cold land of Missouri.

None survived.

The air strike failed.

The cruise missiles launched immediately after were also easily neutralized by the Alliance Army in various unheard-of ways.

Such as detonating them in mid-air with high-energy lasers, or simply using drone swarms for physical interception.

The combat effectiveness and morale of the Federal ground forces finally could not hold up.

On the front lines of Columbia, there were even instances of entire units fleeing the battlefield in the face of the Alliance Army's advance.

This decisive battle, which the Federation had pinned its high hopes on, eventually turned into a one-sided chase.

The battle lasted for less than two weeks.

With no massive casualties on either side, the Alliance army easily occupied the entire state of Missouri in a manner akin to an armed parade.

And with the change of hands of Missouri, the Alliance army also launched an equally efficient "cleanup" here.

All assets belonging to the capital tycoons of the old era—oil refineries, banks, media...

Were all quickly taken over and liquidated by the Alliance's provisional government.

The influence of those oligarch families that once acted recklessly here was uprooted.

Far away in California, Elon saw the front-line battle report and was so happy that he posted over a dozen tweets in a row on social media.