said.
‘Tell me about it,’ Simon said. ‘And those are my boys, and I
worry about them. Lightly armed paratroops against any kind of
foreign armour, we’d get slaughtered. It would be a very, very
anxious six months. And it gets worse. Because what happens
when the heavy brigades eventually get there? What happens is
they roll off the ships and they get bogged down two blocks
later. Roads aren’t wide enough, bridges aren’t strong enough,
they never make it out of the port area. They sit there stuck in
the mud and watch the infantry getting killed far away in the
distance.’
Nobody spoke.
‘Or take the Middle East,’ Simon said. ‘We all know Iraq
wants Kuwait back. Suppose they go there? Long term, it’s an
easy win for us, because the open desert is pretty much the
same for tanks as the steppes in Europe, except it’s a little
hotter and dustier. The war plans we’ve got will work out just
fine. But do we even get that far? We’ve got the infantry sitting
there like tiny little speed bumps for six whole months. Who
280
says the Iraqis won’t roll right over them in the first two
weeks?’
‘Air power,’ Summer said. ‘Attack helicopters.’
‘I wish,’ Simon said. ‘Planes and whirlybirds are sexy as hell,
but they don’t win anything on their own. Never have, never
will. Boots on the ground is what wins things.’
I smiled. Part of that was a combat infantryman’s standard
issue pride. But part of it was true, too.
‘So what’s going to happen?’ I asked.
‘Same thing as happened with the navy in 1941,’ Simon
said. ‘Overnight, battleships were history and carriers were the
new thing. So for us, now, we need to integrate. We need to
understand that our light units are too vulnerable and our heavy
units are too slow. We need to ditch the whole light-heavy split.
We need integrated rapid-response brigades with armoured
vehicles lighter than twenty tons and small enough to fit in
the belly of a C-130. We need to get places faster and fight
smarter. No more planning for set-piece battles between herds
of dinosaurs.’
Then he smiled.
‘Basically we’ll have to put the infantry in charge,’ he said.
‘You ever talk to people like Marshall about this kind of
stuff?’
‘Their planners? No way.’
‘What do they think about the future?’
‘I have no idea. And I don’t care. The future belongs to the
infantry.’
Dessert was apple pie, and then we had coffee. It was the usual
excellent brew. We slid back from the future into present-day
small talk. The stewards moved around, silently. Just another
evening, in an Officers’ Club four thousand miles from the last
one.
‘Marshall will be back at dawn,’ Swan told me. ‘Look for a
scout car at the rear of the first incoming column.’
I nodded. Figured dawn in January in Frankfurt would be
about 0700 hours. I set my mental alarm for six. Lieutenant
Colonel Simon said goodnight and wandered off. Summer
pushed her chair back and sprawled in it, as much as a tiny
281
person can sprawl. Swan sat forward with his elbows on the
table.
‘You think they get much dope on this post?’ I asked him.
‘You want some?’ he said.
‘Brown heroin,’ I said. ‘Not for my personal use.’
Swan nodded. ‘Guys here say there are Turkish guest
workers in Germany who could get you some. One of the speed
dealers could supply it, I’m sure.’
‘You ever met a guy called Willard?’ I asked him.
‘The new boss?’ he said. ‘I got the memo. Never met him. But
some of the guys here know him. He was an intelligence wonk,
something to do with Armor.’
‘He wrote algorithms,’ I said.
‘For what?’
‘Soviet T-80 fuel consumption, I think. Told us what kind of
training they were doing.’
‘And now he’s running the 110th?’
I nodded.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Bizarre.’
‘How did he do that?’
‘Obviously someone liked him.’
‘We should find out who. Start sending hate mail.’
I nodded again. Nearly a million men in the army, hundreds
of billions of dollars, and it all came down to who liked who. Hey, what can you do?