Coordination Commitee of the Global Defense Network and the Armed Forces
Location: an unmarked office in Potsdam
Attendants: representatives of the oversight commitees of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Leipzig (B, H, M, C, F, S, L) and two generals (Y, Z), special reporter of the Network division on behavior of dimensional entities (W)
Classification: not applicable – unavailable for classification
B: Ladies and gentlemen, our agenda for today has the general status report and two special topics, the clusterfuck near Frankfurt and the deal with the Americans. We all know that the status is nominal, so let’s move this to the end and start with the political. General, the room is yours.
Y: The good news first. We have secured an ongoing supply of drones reliable in the presence of dimensional entities and a promise to make available the spare air transport capacity of the US Air Force and -
L: At what cost?
B: Would you let the man finish?
Y: - and the spare capacity of US military hospitals, as well as access to sat terminals for reliable communication with demensional entities around. This allows us to keep up surveillance of B zones up to the levels the plans call for plus considerable reserves. The joint control bases shall be operational by the day after tomorrow. Yes, there has been a cost. The government has agreed to treat US GDN personel like NATO troops and lifted the limits on the positioning of nuclear weapons on our soil.
C: This government sells concessions cheaply.
Z: I need to remind you that foreign policy is a domain of the government alone.
L: A politically correct lack of a spine still keeps you from walking
F: I’ll take the helicopters. We needed them.
B: That is a question for later.
Y: For now we have decided to play it safe and exclusively strengthen the surveillance of the B zones and send nothing to the C zones
M: The fact remains that you are quite ready to yield to foreign interests.
Z: NATO membership has been a center piece of national policy for decades. And you need to make up your mind. If you want something „the GDN“ wants something. If we make deals it is „the Americans“
H: The internal organisation of the Network must remain in our domain.
Y: The government has agreed to respect that, yet consistency is still consistency. We have a duty to obtain the means necessary to defend this country. We are merely continuing the way we have dealt with NATO allies in the past and it is sadly clear that extraordinary weapons may be needed.
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C: Your little side deal with the Americans, how about that?
S: I want my people back.
Y: You are getting them back. The program has been curtailed.
H: Is that all you have to say about the deal?
Y: That is everything that concerns this body.
H: Is that so?
Z: National defense is the core task of the state and the armed forces. The state must secure the means needed for that task. You can pick whether I am quoting Clausewitz or Mao. You knew it would come this when you broke your secrecy and approached the government.
L: You little …
B: Enough of this. We are moving on to the second topic. Our briefing please.
W: Ladies and Gentlemen, yesterday saw an unexpected mass movement of dimensional entities from a C Zone into a B zone. Let me make very clear that this is not a failure of the detection system. An intrusion so close to the edge of the zone was unfortunate but within expectations.
F: If I may, we even detected them, but with only about two hours of lead time, there was no point
in setting up an intercept.
M: it is not your fault. Nobody is blaming you. Let’s continue.
W: Thank you. Nor was it technically a failure of the ground reporting forces and the evaluation services. The numbers were reported within the expected ranges of imprecision. The forces at close readiness were simply insufficient in numerical strength.
B: Why?
W: That is indeed the crucial question. Shall I cover the basic reasons or do you want the short version.
F: In depth, I absolutely insist. I lost men there.
W: Very well. The strategic sense of C zones is to let us sweep them at a time of our choosing, preferably after the grid has been reestablished and we will have gotten the fighters currently detached to detection back. This allows for superior numbers on our side. That category 1 and lesser monsters decay is a bonus. That obviously depends on the dimensional entities largely staying where they are. However, most of them can walk or fly, so they will wander around. We have mathematical models based on Brownian motion …
F: Doesn’t that depend on how fast they are?
W: Sure. We are working with normal distributions for both modes of movement, adjusted for the environmental influence on the type of dimensional entities corrected for …
B: That much detail is not necessary. Could you come to the point relevant in this case?
W: Ah yes, sorry. Basically I am saying is that we assume that dimensional entities walk randomly.
H: But that is not true. People attract them.
W: Exactly therefore we need to correct for that. In fact that is the crux of the matter is that there is a second mode of attraction which is to rhythmically and visibly moving objects. We can ignore residual populations in the C zones. We correct for elevations and wind, as some of them have a superior sense of smell, that allow them to see people in B and A zones, as well as for highways and railways. They ignore ships, we are not exactly sure why, it may be a function of size or speed.
B: Please come to the point.
W: Yes. We had not figured in large industrial structures them mostly being immobile, safe for the operating crews. We have made an omission though: wind power.
C: Now I see it. In hindsight …
Y: Hindsight is always perfect. What can be done.
W: It has already been done. We have included windmills in the early warning network and will shut them down after close intrusions.
Y: That’ll help only in B zones some distance away from C zones.
W: Exactly. But anything else we simulated broke our limits in terms of resources both in personel and material. There are too many of these things.
Z: We will have to write those in the C zones off. Can we compensate?
W: For now yes, until the predicted saturation of the B zones sets in. Details will be in your customary written supplements.
L: By the way, why do you ignore unevacuated people?
M: They keep them things in by being eaten. That actually helps.
W: Exactly. We need to be pessimistic in the models, so we disregard that effect.