Red Dragon 4, Klub missiles,

& the tyranny of math

A funny thing happened to on the way to the latest installment of our series Red Dragon Rising – we almost lost one of our main characters.

Worse: we almost lost a destroyer. And the war.

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A quick briefing for anyone who hasn’t read the books:

In the series, climate change and economic problems have caused China to seek solutions outside of its borders. It begins by invading Vietnam. The U.S President recognizes that this is just the beginning of what may become a series of conquests, and wants to nip things before they blossom into World War III. But with the U.S. itself ailing and most of the public dead set against war, he has to move somewhat cautiously – not to mention covertly and, at different points, with questionable legality. America helps Vietnam, gradually becoming involved in a proxy war, and then finally explicitly exchanging fire.

Hopefully that’s informative enough without giving too much away.

One of the main threads in the final book involved a U.S. Arleigh Burke destroyer, fictional, of course, though closely based on real life. As things ratchet up in book four, the destroyer faces a succession of threats and finally does battle with a variety of enemies.

Smack in the middle of the plot progression was a small encounter with a pair of Chinese bombers, dispatched to sink the ship. (There's a story about how the name of the ship changed from one book to another, but I’ll spare that horror story for a different time.)

Larry and I sketched out the battle roughly, then I went on to write a first draft. Both when we were first talking about that battle and then when I was writing it, I saw the encounter as more of a pace setter – something necessary to amp things up, but not as critical as the other battles in the plot line.

In the fictional universe we created, the Chinese had purchased a number of Backfire bombers, and equipped them with a number of so-called Sizzler anti-ship weapons. The Sizzler – more formally the 3M-54E “Klub” missile – is a doozy of a weapon. Probably its most endearing feature, at least to the person firing it, is its final stage, where it takes a supersonic leap at the target, accelerating madly in a rabid sprint to its target. Just the thing to add a little spice to a plot.

As I originally wrote the draft, I posited that the planes would be flying from well inland China, and because of that would only be equipped with two of the missiles. They would make their attack from relatively close range. The destroyer would fend the missiles off, and then shoot down the planes.

I have to confess that part of this was due more to what needed to happen in the rest of the book than out of fealty to actual Chinese tactics. And there was a bit of leeway there – as you probably know, in real life China hasn’t (yet) bought any Backfires, and there were reasonable questions, at least to me, about how they would operate and where they would be based.

Reviewing the draft, Larry pointed out that the Chinese would almost certainly be using the aircraft to much better advantage, given what had already happened in the book and the series. For one thing, the planes would be based much closer than I had posited, and would almost certainly be carrying a full complement of the missiles.

“Hey, those things are light” is how I think he put it. “They’d load those suckers up.”

Not really a problem – we did a little bit of math along with the research, plugged some values into Larry’s excellent Harpoon simulator, and concluded that each aircraft would be reasonably expected to be carrying eight missiles. Then we also decided that they would employ classic Tu-22 tactics – very low altitude approach, pop up attack, etc.

Theoretically, that still wasn’t a problem, until Larry pointed out that given everything that had happened to this point, the Backfires would also be very wary of the destroyer, and would undoubtedly opt to stay out of range of its SM2 missiles. Which basically meant that they would make their attack no further than eighty nautical miles.

(I can see the hands shooting up to ask about SM3s. Because of plot complications – I don’t want to give away the rest of the book – only the SM2s could be used in this engagement. And the Chinese at this point, I decided, couldn’t know about SM3s. Well they could, but I still couldn’t afford to fire any.)

So OK. We gave the Backfires eight missiles apiece, and had them launch their popup attack from eighty nautical miles, the effective range for the SM2s. (Eighty-one if you want to be exact. Larry was working the calculator – I just had pencil and paper and tend to round down in real life anyway. Avoids trouble when I balance the checkbook.)

The destroyer had sixteen missiles coming at her from eighty-one miles away. They would start out “slow” but as they closed would hop up to roughly three times the speed of sound. Oh, and at wave-top level.

What does Harpoon say about that?

Hmmmm….

As soon as I realized the planes would launch from that distance, I knew there was no way that the destroyer could shoot down the Backfires, which really bummed me out. There’s nothing I like writing better than a good explosion, especially when it takes place in the air.

But as Larry started doing the math on the SM2 volleys and working the Harpoon numbers, I had a much worse feeling – I realized the American ship wouldn’t survive the attack.

We went back and forth, trying to change some of the variables – maybe there were less missiles on the Backfires because, uh, because, uh  . . . but in the end, escaping any reasonably sized volley wasn’t in the cards, let alone the simulator. We’d already expended our ERAMs, we weren’t touching the SM3s (admittedly for plot purposes, but they wouldn’t have helped the way we set this up anyway), and even the close-in Phalanx canon – one of my favorite weapons in the world – would be overwhelmed by the leakers.

In short, our ship would be sunk before the climax of the book. Which not so incidentally meant the U.S. would lose the war with a good hundred pages to go.

In real life, the U.S. Navy does have a few ways of dealing with this exact threat. For starters, they probably would have another ship with the destroyer (couldn’t change that because of the plot), air cover (ditto), or be operating much further from the Chinese mainland (double ditto). The ship might also be able to rely on its counter-measures a little more effectively than we did, although in my opinion we were pretty realistic there as well. (We did use the Nulka, which is a nifty radar cloak, but given the parameters of the engagement, I’m not entirely sure that even that superb weapon could solve the problem, at least not well enough to set the Americans up for the next battle. Which of course was our actual consideration.)

What all of this means, in fact and in fiction, is that the combination of Backfires and Klub missiles is a pretty awesome problem. We’re sure the Navy is well aware of it, but the math is very daunting.

In the end, we took a solution not available to American sailors: we changed the attackers, and their weapons.

I hate spoilers, so I won’t say what happens. But I will say this – I love math, except for when I hate it. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it’s the spreadsheet and calculator that rule in the end.