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I love the Pacific Rim films but you don’t need a Jaeger to kill a category five Kaiju.You need one B-1B Lancer. And a wingman. So two B-1s.Let me explain.Pacific Command see a disturbance in the breach and notify the USAF that a huge Kaiju - let’s call him Megatop - is climbing through, hell bent on wanton destruction all along the Pacific Rim. He is a monster, a category five. The biggest they have seen. A city killer, if he is allowed to make landfall.The USAF staffer passes a launch order to the alert ten bomber force based at Guam which is the closest base to the breach, lying not far from the Philippine Sea.A pair of sleek B-1 bombers sit in the rain on Guam, as their ground crews rush ground power units over to start the APUs to bring internal power online and start up the ancient computer systems and inertial navigation systems.They carry ten 5,000 lb laser guided GBU-28 penetrators, guided with JDAM kits. They are also carrying eight JSOW stand off munitions.Normally based at Ellsworth AB in South Dakota, the 34th Bomb Squadron - the Thunderbirds - are rotating through Guam to provide quick reaction force for CINCPAC to use whenever another Kaiju makes an appearance. It’s been a fairly busy autumn.The downpour picks up as the crews climb aboard and the engines are started. Collision and Nav lights are switched on, the crews strap in and the wheel chocks are removed. The rain spatters on the cockpit glass as the flight crews go through their checklists. There is very little tension.WRAITH ONE ONE and wingman WRAITH ONE TWO switch on their weather radars as they head to the active runway, where four USAF F-16Cs are waiting to escort them. The Vipers crackle off the wet concrete in one flight and then WRAITH flight enters the active. A minute or so goes by before the tower clears them.“WRAITH ONE ONE WRAITH ONE TWO Guam tower, wind is zero one six from one seven five, youre clear for departure runway two seven left. Good hunting, Thunderbirds”The PIC of WRAITH ONE ONE, Captain Amy “Buns” Nakamura, grins into her mask and looks both ways left and right, and having already discussed takeoff abort procedures with her co-pilot. She is satisfied they are ready to go. Her manicured hand rests on the four throttle levels. She’s in no great hurry.“Guam tower, WRAITH Flight, clear takeoff twenty seven left, copied the wind. See you in a couple hours. Keep the beer cold.”There is no Kaiju that can get anywhere close to the coruscating power and awesome display of what comes next.Bobbing and bucking on the parking brakes WRAITH ONE ONE’s four GE404 engines at first spit fragmented orange flame and then as the nozzles open out the plume turns a blinding electric blue in the darkness. The parking brakes come off with a thud of relief and the two enormous bombers scream down the runway like the departure of God himself with a noise so loud and stunning that car alarms a mile away are rattled into life as the very ground shakes as if concussed by ancient demons.There are scarier things out tonight than Megatop.Miles away, the massive Kaiju swims upwards through the black darkness unable to think of anything but making landfall at Manila or Hong Kong or Taipei and sweeping all before it. Kill. Kill. Kill. Almost five hundred metres long from nose to tail, impossibly strong, and with metre thick hide covered in razor sharp spines, Megatop is the biggest Kaiju ever. Grown and bred solely as a fighting machine of God-like proportions the likes of which Planet Earth has never seen, he approaches the surface of the water. There are no boats around. Instinctively knowing where the human cities are, he swims north on the surface of the sea, churning up great clouds of spray and waves as his thousands of tonnes of mass eases through the cold sea at a rapid seventy miles per hour.Megatop is a terrible harbinger of biblical death and calamity, an incredible sight for anyone who can see him closing in on land.Who is watching?The human satellites are. Dozens of them. And so are their drones.…And so are the crew of WRAITH ONE ONE and their wingman.“Got him, dead ahead bearing three two two, about sixty miles away. Looks like he’s swimming away from us.”The powerful targeting pod the Lancers carry shows the enormous Megatop in clear alacrity. It also shows clearly on the on board radar when set to surface scan mode. The weapons officer on board WRAITH ONE ONE cross checks his targeting with his colleague aboard WRAITH ONE TWO. It is decided not to waste the expensive JSOWs on Megatop and close to thirty miles and drop the JDAMs instead. Bring the pain early.Cruising serenely at a height of forty thousand feet the bombers and their escort seem peaceful. Far beneath them a thin layer of cloud at around two thousand feet obscures the surface of the sea. As with most Kaiju bug hunts they will never actually set eyes on the massive beast below them, swimming toward land.“Target locked, WRAITH flight, weapons free.””Weapons away, now now now… …All weapons away.”“Good track.”Each B-1 drops five GBU-28s. These twenty four foot long, 5,000lb bombs carry a kinetic hard penetrator casing and a JDAM guidance kit. They are cued using SNIPER pods underneath the B-1s and are locked on different places, from the top of the jutting shoulder of Megatop, down his grotesque spiney back and across the vast width of his armoured hips and base of his two tails.Megatop does not even hear the aircraft. They are thirty miles away when the munitions are dropped and he has no idea what is about to fall on him. He is lost in a warm and fuzzy daydream about snapping the Shenzhen Tower in half and using it to crush the Jaeger the puny humans send to fight him…Travelling at more than the speed of sound, the telegraph pole-like missiles are moving too fast for man or Kaiju to see or hear.Gradually, indefatigably, unerringly, the missiles close the distance from behind and zero in on the massive target like the robotic killers they are.The first impacts the bottom of Megatop’s armoured shoulder, penetrates twenty five feet into his armoured, muscular frame and then detonates, cracking open his fifteen foot thick bone like a stale walnut. The blast tears the top bicep away and leaves the arm hanging on by a few tendons.The second and third bombs go into the same shoulder and blow the arm clean off, tearing open the beast’s cathedral-like armoured ribcage. Megatop is savagely wounded already.Bellowing in shock and agony, Megatop straightens up in the water and turns toward the threat.What could be delivering such crushing blows from behind???Megatop opens his steaming maw to bellow again in confusion. Luminescent blue Kaiju blood pools decorate the surface of the water all around in a sick echo of the starlight above.There is nothing behind him but dark sea and the moon twinkling off the wave tops through breaks in the cloud.Who or what could ha…The fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh bombs arrive with unerring accuracy, tearing the throat out of the thrashing leviathan, rending away his other shoulder and arm from his torso and then - mercifully - penetrating deep into his thick skull through one of his six eyes and exploding in the cranial cavity. The top of his head flies up into the tortured night sky like the turret of a knocked out tank from a war long ago.Both Megatop’s brains have been pulverized by the concussion and explosives. As the smoke and flame die down, the hulk of the lifeless monster slips limply back into the water and begins to sink with all the grace of a torpedoed battleship. The eighth, ninth and tenth bombs streak into the water and it almost seems unfair that they do more precision butchery on the vast carcass as it slides below the waves, now torn into three pieces, for the last time.“Good effect, good effect WRAITH flight, cease firing. Good job everyone, let’s head home.”The graceful Lancers sweep their wings back and light the afterburners, climbing and turning East. Back to Guam.The F-16 pilots watch the bombers disappear into the darkness, filled with awe.It is another successful mission. As long as the Kaiju keep coming out of the breach so humanity will keep killing them. No Kaiju has made it to land for a decade now.The Americans have developed a long range naval strike missile using their huge but now obsolete Harpoon stocks. Whilst not very effective against modern naval ship threats, Harpoon missiles it was found out, are devastatingly effective and do terrible things to the hapless Kaiju.There is a joint Sino-American project to put into space a fleet of orbital bombardment satellites that fire monstrous kinetic darts made of a heavy tungsten and DU alloy that are fired from orbit and can engage Kaiju even a hundred metres below the water. Similar in size to a GBU-28 as the Lancers use so effectively against Megatop, they streak down at Mach 27 and are many orders of magnitude more effective than any conventional bomb. Like mini nuclear weapons, the darts have energy releases comparable to small nukes on impact. They are a handy solution to readily and effortlessly decapitate any Kaiju they hit. One hit, one kill. No messing around.Meanwhile the Russians have been developing a twenty kilotonne nuclear tip for a silent homing version of their Shkval nuclear, super-cavitation drone-torpedo that is designed especially to stalk swimming Kaiju quietly and then hit it at 100+ knots. Like the kinetic rod weapons the US and China favour, the Russian solution is one hit, or even one close miss and one very dead Kaiju in many pieces, it’s obliterated remains sinking to the ocean floor in an all too familiar scene since the Kaiju unwisely started trying to come through the breach to kill us. These Russian torpedoes are carried by Backfire and Blackjack naval bombers and also by the Russian naval fleet which itself had become extremely capable at hunting and killing Kaiju. It had become almost like a sport now.As WRAITH flight lands back at Guam after only about ninety minutes in the air, the ground crew boss asks one of his junior team to fetch the Kaiju stencil and the green and blue paint. This is kill number forty two for him, his bomber and her pilot, Captain Nakamura. The Lancer, a 1988 vintage grand old lady is named “ALUMINUM OVERCAST II” has forty one kill markings on her nose already, (alongside bomb markings having seen action in Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom, Afghanistan and the Iran Campaigns) making her one of the top five scoring airframes in the Unit. She is a grand and mighty warbird in every sense of the word. Who needs a Jaeger?There will be free beers in the crew mess tonight. The team have earned it.Of course this dramatized and rather cheesy storyboard is meant to illustrate the ease in which we as a species could just reach out and terminate a Kaiju were one to appear. Our major warfighting weapons are in many cases designed specifically to crack open or slice right through heavy armour or concrete. Even if Kaiju skin and bone is as strong as thick concrete, we have ideal weapons to mercilessly destroy them.Another advantage we possess is the ability, as demonstrated in the story above, to launch these weapons with pinpoint accuracy well away from the Kaiju itself. Modern warfare has stand-off precision weaponry as one of its principal tenets. Russia, China, the UK, US and other nations have Kaiju Killer cruise missiles that they can launch from a thousand miles away, that they can not just hit a moving Kaiju with but choose which ear or nostril they want the missile to penetrate through! Kaiju are fearsome monsters but cannot contend with a thousand mile standoff reach.Kaiju are in fact uniquely unsuited to defend against the weaponry we would employ against them. They are massive and easily targeted with radar. They cannot move quickly enough to reliably dodge numbers of incoming missiles. A EMP burst at the right time would be effective against radar or IR guided munitions but the Kaiju lack the ability to preempt strikes and of course such bursts take time to reload so much like using tandem charges to defeat AP systems on tanks, staggering the incomings will be effective.Kaiju can soak up massive kinematic damage and are well suited to fighting Jaegers. One wonders why humanity would invent such huge and costly solutions to fighting them when the Jaeger themselves merely play to the Kaiju’s strengths.Indeed, the films show numerous Raptor type aircraft making pucker close strafing runs with their M61 Vulcan cannon (before being swatted from the sky like insects) as if 20mm rounds are going to make any real impression on even a tiny Kaiju. This is, charitably, poor tactics. For a start, the Raptors would a long way away. They are air superiority fighters with no business getting up close and personal for a frank exchange of views with a Kaiju. The strike aircraft of choice for taking the fight to (or a little distance from) the marauding Kaiju would be from the high end fourth gen stable not the vaunted and expensive fifth gen stealths. This is very much the F-15E, Super Hornet, Typhoon, Su-34 and Su-35 area of expertise if we’re tasking strike fighters and there are no bombers like the B-1 around. All are equipped with the latest radars, targeting pods, IR systems and all carry big loadouts of pointy things a lot more threatening to a Kaiju than the puny potato gun on a Raptor.It really isn’t very hard - you need accuracy, big penetration and a lot of explosive power. All the aforementioned platforms can bring this by the bucketload.I wonder what would happen if you fitted a JDAM penetrator kit to a MOAB, pushed it out the back of your C-17 and then hit a Kaiju with it. Short answer is the Kaiju knows very little about it and Hannibal Chang will be picking up a lot of surprisingly small bits of the huge creature from a surprisingly wide radius. The guys who lovingly build the Kaiju would likely call that “a disappointing outcome” at the (very much closed casket) funeral, we suspect.But what about on land?Well, the first thought that entered my head was how effective modern AFSDS rounds would be in punching painful holes in the thick hide of a Kaiju. These tungsten sabot rounds are designed to penetrate the toughest armour with ease and would readily go through a metre or so of rock-like bone armour no problem. This would be the equivalent of sticking the beast with a stiletto as there is no explosive charge. You’d need to hit something vital to do meaningful damage, though certainly such a strike would be painful and distracting for a Kaiju. Modern AT missiles such as Kornet, Konkurs, Spike or Javelin would also penetrate with no difficulty but lack the explosive power to do much damage once they do. But by sheer weight of fire, several tank rounds and AT missiles would start to degrade the Kaiju quickly. One solution would be to arm the missiles with thermobaric warheads which would do a lot more damage than just PETN or whatever HE they use in the warheads these days.Plunging artillery fire? Yeah that would really hurt. HIMARS/Smerch rocket fire or guided 155mm HE round platoon rapid fire salvo into the topsides of an exposed Kaiju would really ruin his day. Much more effective than tank or AT missile fire and I dare say a lot safer as you don’t need to get within a mile of an angry Kaiju very miffed that you’re poking tungsten holes in his side. That’s unlikely to end well for the tank crews or missile gunners. Best to stand back and let the big stuff do the job from a safe distance.What about at sea?Well the Kaiju would learn very quickly that attacking human naval ships is a bad idea unless you’re attacking from deep under the water. As mentioned above, modern anti ship missiles are a very fast, supersonic or hypersonic penetrating dart with warheads of 700–2000 lbs that are not surviveable in any great number no matter how hard the Kaiju thinks he is. These are BIG and very heavy missiles filled with jet or rocket fuel that are designed to penetrate the armoured topsides of steel naval ships, penetrate down into the very guts of the ship and then tear the ship open with a big explosive warhead and resultant fires. That is broadly similar to what a modern ASM would do to a Kaiju. It gets ugly pretty fast for them. Modern naval vessels can launch many missiles very quickly and they are well capable of hitting a moving target so aren’t easy to just dodge. Menacing a naval task group with Rihanna on might have been a good idea for the aliens in Battleship but will end very badly for a Kaiju silly enough to try it.No, if you’re a Kaiju the best strategy is stay submerged for as long as possible. As soon as they rear their ugly head, those pesky humans are liable to blow it clean off. There’s not much above the water that isn’t extemely painful and rapidly fatal. Better to limit your exposure to these weapons as far as is possible. Stay submerged.Below the water, the human weapons are much more primitive. Their submarines are slow, lumbering and do not fire their torpedoes very quickly. Getting hit by a modern submarine launched torpedo is an irritation more than anything as they do not really penetrate and rely on large warheads that detonate on contact. They won’t do much to a Kaiju and only come in ones or twos not in great swarms as the missiles do. They are slow and easy to dodge. The Kaiju are big and hard enough to not be affected much by the blast overpressure under the water. The sensible tactic from the human side is to keep the billion dollar nuclear submarines away from the Kaiju and to prosecute them from above using Cold War era nuclear depth charges, and then missiles once they come up for air or to make their displeasure at you raining little nuclear bombs on them very clear. Swimming on the surface as in the above scenario merely invites a quick death from above.Hope this helps next time you’re ever forced to take on a Kaiju and your Jaeger is at the cleaners.Peace.