Thread by @mgerrydoyle

this isn't a cautionary tale. it's just a story.

The Burke-class destroyers made no secret where they were headed. They knifed through the warm, clear water, arrow points at the tip of wakes stretched out beneath an unblinking sun. Behind them was open ocean. In front of them was a speck of land studded with weaponry.

The island had one name in Chinese. It had another one in English. It hadn't existed even 10 years ago as anything more than a note on a chart. The undersea life that had once flourished there was buried under tons of sand, concrete and geopolitics.

A military installation needed eyes. Radars peered in every direction, at the sky and over the ocean. In a red-lit room 10 meters beneath the island's surface, a Chinese technician sweltered with a half-dozen others, tapping his foot as he stared at a flickering monitor.

Computer fans hummed; the overtaxed air conditioning wheezed. Two dots inched their way across his screen. A supervisor tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up, blinking away the sweat. The supervisor nodded. Using a mouse, the technician clicked through several menus.

Deep inside the lead destroyer, red lights began to punctuate a compartment bathed in comforting blue. Messages flashed. Teenagers turned to older sailors, pointing at monitors flickering with confusion. There had been jamming before. There was always jamming. But this was new.

Phantoms danced across radar plots, screaming across the ocean at impossible speeds and vanishing. Screens drowned in clutter. Then a shout cut through the stale air. Inbounds!

The Chinese team watched their equipment, waiting for the American ships' powerful air-defense systems to react to the streams of disinformation washing over them. A thousand sensors across the island were poised to drink in all the data they could.

There were only 10 nautical miles between the ships and the islands. Missiles, would take just seconds to close the gap. No one on the ships' bridges saw smoke trails, but that didn't matter. They were there on radar, illuminated by billions' worth of equipment and training.

Launch cell doors snapped open. Fire and smoke swept the ships' decks as Standard Missiles leaped out into the afternoon sun to confront the enemy. Two. Four. Six. And then the Tomahawks.

Commander, there are cruise missiles! The Chinese radar technician's voice broke as he pointed at his screen. And then his radar plot dissolved into meaningless static as the Burkes vomited their own jamming into the air. This wasn't the plan. This wasn't what they meant to do.

Around the island, automated air-defense systems came alive, tracking the incoming Tomahawks. A few managed to launch missiles before they were destroyed by the faster, radar-seeking Standard Missiles that had been fired alongside their anti-air brethren.

Even the subsonic Tomahawks covered the distance quickly. Each carried 750kg of high explosive, enough to turn a hardened aircraft shelter inside out. In a matter of minutes, the island's surface was transformed into a pitted jumble of concrete and metal.

The captains ordered flank speed back the way they had come. In the exchange, a few real anti-ship missiles had made it into the air; one made it through, its 500kg warhead shearing off the deck gun of the lead ship and leaving a black, smoking wound.

Across the South China Sea, more radars switched on. Aircraft scrambled into the sky. Submarines went from lurking to hunting. Ballistic missile launchers rumbled into position.

After the war, the incident would be studied. A dispassionate reckoning of five minutes at sea that reshaped half the world.

That hadn't been the plan.

It wasn't what they meant to do.