Chapter 642: The Autobots' Counterattack (Part 1)

When news reached the country that the USS San Antonio, a dock landing ship belonging to the Navy, had been attacked by aliens while docked in the Red Sea, and that several Autobot corpses had been reclaimed by the Autobots, the Pentagon immediately fell into chaos.

"Optimus Prime is not dead? The Autobot Leader is not dead?"

Inside the Pentagon, there was more than just one or two people who were terrified.

It is well known that since the end of World War II, and especially after the Cold War, the United States has completely degenerated into the culprit of world instability.

CIA intervention, regional invasions, supporting proxies, exporting democracy, and so on—by wantonly squandering national power and military spending, the United States has manipulated most of the Earth in the palm of its hand.

Call it the American elites suffering from persecutory delusions, or call it being prepared for danger in times of peace; say they are doing it to secure congressional funding by hyping up crises, or perhaps they believe that Americans simply do too many wicked and guilty deeds, and judge others by themselves.

In short, from the military to the civilian sector, this country produces a massive amount of reports, analyses, and topics every year regarding "XX Country Threat Theory" or "The Fall of America."

Among these, analyses of the United States being sneak-attacked or invaded by "XX Country" are even more enduringly popular topics.

Reports and analyses about Canada or Central America swallowing the United States through immigration, the Mexican-American War, the Russians invading, or even nuclear sneak attacks by North Korea are not only frequently written by think tanks like RAND, which then sell the so-called response plans to the Pentagon at high prices.

Even the Ministry of National Defense itself keeps a group of such analysts who do nothing all day but specialize in writing about the possibilities of threats and invasions against the United States by various countries, along with response plans.

These people have simply done too many wicked deeds, so they cannot help but worry about being retaliated against one day.

And after the Autobots and Decepticons, two extraterrestrial races from an interstellar civilization, appeared on Earth, the Pentagon specifically pulled together a group of analysts to conduct a series of analyses regarding the dangers of the Decepticons and Autobots potentially invading the United States or having a full-scale conflict with it.

This analysis team and their analysis plans even saw a several-fold increase after the main forces of the U. S. Navy's Second and Fifth Fleets were attacked and suffered heavy losses.

After the main force of the Second Fleet was wiped out, Congress immediately approved a special fund of 860 million dollars for the Pentagon to comprehensively analyze and calculate what percentage of a chance the "Beacon of the World" would have in a full-scale war with the Cybertronian civilization.

As the cooperation between the Autobots and the United States completely collapsed, the threat of the Autobots also became a matter of concern for the gentlemen in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

This truly delighted a group of analysts who relied on peddling articles to stir up a climate of terror, and the analysis results they produced did indeed startle everyone, including themselves.

Because analysis also requires some facts and theoretical foundations, and as they reviewed more and more data—including many past records from NEST and video footage of fighting alongside the Autobots—a very specific viewpoint gradually gained consensus among the various experts.

If the United States were to truly go to war with the Autobots, then for the United States, the losses might be even greater than the Vietnam War.

Analysts from all over the United States unanimously agreed that the Autobots are more threatening than the Decepticons because they are more rational and better understand strategy and coordination.

This means that if a serious conflict occurs, the Autobots would likely abandon direct warfare with the U. S. military and instead choose to strike key cities and higher-value targets within the United States.

Besides this, they also believed that the vast majority of weapons currently equipped by the United States pose no threat to the Autobots.

Individual soldier weapons performed particularly poorly; over the past year or so, while NEST troops were cooperating with the Autobots to strike the Decepticons, it had been exposed more than once that, aside from grenade launchers, heavy machine guns, and rockets having a little bit of power, other weapons simply could not cause them any damage.

The heavy weapons of the Army, Marine Corps, and special operations forces lack sufficient mobility, and the various fighter jets of the Air Force, Naval Aviation, and Army Aviation cannot land a fatal blow on the Autobots, who possess an average speed of over two to three hundred kilometers per hour, can ignore terrain, and possess extremely high mobility.

Aside from nuclear weapons, the only U. S. military weapon currently known to have performed well was the GBU-43B that achieved success in previous bombings; according to the analysis of the U. S. military's battlefield assessment team afterward, it also relied on a sneak attack, plus the distraction of the Decepticons, and an Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb from an unknown force to achieve certain results.

In the end, the analysts submitted a thick and very detailed analysis to the Ministry of National Defense, the White House, and Capitol Hill.

They believed that if the United States were to ever have a conflict with the Autobots, please be sure to block the war outside of the homeland.

Otherwise, once those Autobots reach the homeland and destroy it city by city, the resulting losses would be absolutely unacceptable to the United States.

And there is a major premise to this, which is that the Autobot Leader, Optimus Prime, is dead.

Otherwise, once a conflict occurs between the United States and the Autobots, Americans would not hesitate to analyze it from the most dangerous perspective.

If Optimus Prime were to continuously summon more Autobots from the universe to Earth, and if their numbers were to truly exceed several thousand or even tens of thousands, then whether Earth would still be under human control would be an unknown.

Therefore, upon learning that Optimus Prime was still alive and had angrily attacked a naval vessel because the United States had stolen Autobot corpses to transport back home for research, the United States instantly fell silent.

The most dangerous situation they had imagined had appeared!

Waltham, Massachusetts, the location of the headquarters of the famous large American arms dealer—Raytheon.

As a manufacturer of advanced missiles, few people know that Raytheon is not only a large arms dealer, but also has many businesses under its umbrella in fields such as general aviation, energy, and chemicals.

At its headquarters in Waltham, Raytheon has as many as seven laboratories and twenty-three research institutions belonging to different departments and subsidiaries.

As one of the main equipment contractors for the U. S. military, it is only natural that Raytheon has also received some special treatment.

This kind of treatment is not only reflected in the tilting of orders and national technical support funding, but also includes some special research items.

For example, alien corpses; Raytheon was one of the first arms giants in the United States to receive Decepticon corpses from the government for research.

Not long ago, through constant lobbying, they also successfully obtained an Autobot corpse that the U. S. military had acquired on the battlefield in Jordan.

As the main purchaser of Raytheon's products, the Air Force, in order to obtain greater discounts and more advanced products from Raytheon in the future,

used a C-5 transport plane the day after clearing the battlefield to send the corpse of a well-known Autobot to Waltham.

And the name of the corpse's owner while alive was Bumblebee.