Cyberstrike, James Barrington [short story to read .TXT] 📗

The SINCGARS system operates in the VHF – Very High Frequency – FM radio band and employs frequency hopping, changing 111 times every second, to ensure secure communications.

Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt and the GAU-8/A Avenger

When combat aircraft are designed, the provision of weapon mounting points is of crucial importance. Usually, pylons are fitted on the underside of the wings or occasionally on the base of the fuselage. The obvious exceptions are heavy bombers like the American B-52, which carry their payload inside the fuselage in bomb bays, and stealth aircraft like the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk and the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, which have to carry their weapons internally to preserve their extremely low radar cross-section and avoid compromising their stealth capability.

But there is one aircraft that breaks all the rules. It doesn’t so much carry a weapon as is built around a weapon. The Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt, affectionately known as the Warthog, or just the Hog, and rather less affectionately as the ULF, or Ugly Little Fucker, is essentially an airframe constructed around a cannon. It’s effectively a flying gun.

The GAU-8/A Avenger is a Gatling-type gun as big and heavy as a large family car, tipping the scales at over four thousand pounds when fully loaded, representing over 15 per cent of the unladen weight of the A-10. What that means in practice is that if it ever has to be removed from the aircraft the tail of the Thunderbolt has to be supported first – otherwise the aircraft will tip backwards when the gun is taken out.

The weapon is mounted very slightly towards the port side of the A-10 to allow the firing barrel of the Avenger – it has seven rotating barrels – to be aligned precisely with the centreline of the aircraft to avoid the massive recoil from shifting the aircraft off the attack line. This is essential because the recoil generated by the weapon firing is 10,000 pounds-force, slightly more than the 9,000 pounds-force output generated by each of the A-10’s jet engines.

It fires 30mm projectiles fitted with plastic driving bands, to help preserve barrel life, from cartridges nearly a foot long, at a rate of 3,900 rounds per minute, meaning that the entire standard magazine load of 1,150 rounds would be exhausted in just eighteen seconds of continuous firing. To preserve barrel life and conserve ammunition the weapon is normally limited to one- or two-second bursts.

Accurate up to 4,000 feet or about three-quarters of a mile, the shells pour out of the rotating barrels at the rate of sixty-five every second, delivering a virtually solid stream of ordnance, more like a hose pipe than a machine gun. It’s an enormously effective tank-buster, typically employing a five-to-one mixture of PGU-14/B API (Armour-Piercing and Incendiary) rounds and PGU-13/B HEI (High Explosive Incendiary) rounds. The PGU-14/B rounds are slightly the heavier of the two, mainly because each shell has a penetrating core of depleted uranium and titanium inside an aluminium outer body, which delivers enormous kinetic energy on impact. ‘PGU’ stands, rather boringly, for ‘Projectile Gun Unit’, a kind of military confusion-speak for ‘cartridge’ or ‘bullet’.

Abū Omar al-Qurashi al-Baghdadi

Hamid Dawud Muhammad Khalil al-Zawi was born in 1959 in a village called Al-Zawiyah (hence his name) near Haditha in western Iraq and had an almost entirely undistinguished career as a police officer before working in an electronics repair shop and becoming the imam of a local mosque. Things changed for him, and for tens of thousands of other people, when coalition forces led by the United States of America invaded Iraq in 2003.

Al-Zawi responded by starting his own small terrorist gang and then became a major figure in the militant opposition group known as the Mujahideen Shura Council. This was formed in January 2006 and was an umbrella organisation that contained half a dozen Sunni Muslim insurgent groups including the Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, far better and more concisely known as ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’. The council didn’t last long, being disbanded in October of the same year, and was replaced by ISI, the Islamic State of Iraq, essentially a rebranded al-Qaeda in Iraq. Al-Zawi became one of the three leaders of the new insurgent organisation, taking the position of the First Emir of the Islamic State of Iraq.

Not only did al-Zawi change his profession radically, switching from being an imam responsible for the religious education, welfare and guidance of his congregation to acting as a Kalashnikov-toting terrorist leading an insurgent group that specialised in slowly beheading people in front of video cameras, but he also changed his name.

A kunya

Names can be confusing and, in the Arab world, somewhat flexible. Given names can be replaced by a kunya, a teknonym or paedonymic that identifies the individual by reference to their offspring. So a man, irrespective of his actual name, may become known as Abū Waleed, meaning ‘father of Waleed’, while a woman can be called Umm Muhammad as the ‘mother of Muhammad’. But a kunya can also have an entirely different and less innocent meaning, being used as a nom de guerre by Arab terrorists and unconventional or clandestine warriors. Osama bin Laden, for example, used the kunya ‘Abū Abdullah’.

Hamid al-Zawi first adopted the kunya Abū Mahmud, but then adopted the noms de guerre Abū Omar al-Qurashi al-Baghdadi and Abū Hamza al-Baghdadi. The ‘al-Baghdadi’ suffixes literally translate as ‘the one from Baghdad’ or ‘who came from Baghdad’, meaning that his origin was either Baghdad city or the Baghdad Governorate, which of course it wasn’t: the village of Al-Zawiyah is located in the Al-Anbar Governorate. Presumably he deliberately chose the name as part of his nom de guerre to try to associate himself with the capital of the country.

The name Abū Omar appeared on the radar of the coalition forces at a fairly early stage as a spokesman for the Mujahideen Shura Council, but his very existence was persistently questioned. In July 2007 an American military spokesman stated definitively that he did not exist and