Shanghaied - 2ACW

I could see those Singaporeans not follow the DAR and head East or to Canada. I'm pretty sure their leaders told them not to get involved in the civil war. Other allied exchange personnel such as those Germans, Saudis, Filipinos, and Japanese within the CONUS would probably be ordered to go within US territory. After all, none of the countries I mentioned do not recognize the DAR.

66 – Too many coincidences

White House Chief-of-Staff Sara Keating had urged the president to not do the planned press conference with the assembled journalists in the aftermath of first blood being drawn in the civil war. She strongly suggested that Roberts let his press secretary take the brunt of the anticipated uproar from the media: they’d get their kill, as all lions must, elsewhere too from SecDef Ferdinand over at the Pentagon. Roberts told her no, he was sticking to the planned briefing. In a last ditch attempt to shelter him from all the incoming fire – metaphorical that was – Keating said that he should take a one-on-one meeting with a friendly journalist instead. No, Roberts wouldn’t budge. He went into the lion’s den and got savaged, just as expected. The country and the world watched as journalists shouted questions, even accusations, at him. Roberts was targeted extensively by hostile members of the media yet journalists from friendly sections also laid into him. Regardless, he took it all. Unlike Walsh, he told Keating once it was done, he had no intention of hiding from the media and the people at large. After he departed that press conference, his press secretary took other questions which were asked of the Roberts Administration not directly related to the first exchanges of fire between federal United States forces and those of the rebellious Democratic American Republic.

Admiral Miller was at the top of the agenda for the media. The new Secretary of Homeland Security had been the senior-most presidential appointment to a Cabinet-level position which would usually require Senate approval. Roberts’ wide-ranging executive orders which he had signed within hours of being sworn in as the 49th President had allowed him to bypass the usual nomination & confirmation process in light on the declared National Emergency which he had inherited. All seven posts on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and new heads of both the CIA & the NSA had similarly been appointed in such a rapid manner. The press secretary answered the journalist’s posed questions about why that was done in the manner it was and defended Roberts’ actions by pointing out that other presidents had filled such posts in times of need in ‘recess appointments’. Moreover, the text of that EO signed by the president allowed for any of his appointees to be removed by the Senate if need be, should there be a justifiable cause to do so and a two-thirds majority too. Mentioning all of those appointees, those beyond the top-tier national security posts, the press secretary tried to deflect attention away from Miller. That didn’t work. It was he whom the media focused upon. For so many, he was a bogeyman figure. His reputation strongly preceded him with Miller intensely distrusted among journalists. Democrats from Congress, even a good number of Republicans too, especially those with a Libertarian outlook, feared for the country with him where Roberts had put him. The president’s press secretary tried everything, laughter as well as outrage, at some of the comments made about Miller. None of it caused the outpouring of distrust and fear to cease. He wasn’t wanted in the job by the White House press corps and they didn’t hide that. It wasn’t up to them who the Homeland Security Secretary was though.

Miller’s secretary watched that press conference yet he didn’t. Normally he would have engrossed himself in criticism directed at him and add those who it came from to his mental list of enemies. That was not an exaggeration at all, as others had found out to their cost. Instead, his secretary took notes on who said the worst things about her boss as he had told her to do. She did so because Mien Fuhrer, as she called him behind his back, was far too busy with his new duties. The Homeland Security Department was at the forefront of the war being raged against the DAR. Miller had told the president upon appointment that there were to be two fights to be had with those in Las Vegas who had betrayed their country. One of those would be on the battlefield with tanks and guns while the other was to be waged in the shadows. That was to be an intelligence war, one which Miller had been approved to lead. In the fight against the DAR, the CIA had initially tried to take the lead yet as Miller had pointed out, and the president had agreed, it was all a domestic matter after all. External intelligence agencies would continue to protect the United States, even divided as it was, from foreign threats while the DHS would focus on the internal one which the DAR provided. Such a decision had been made the afternoon when Roberts had become president and the then head of the CIA had handed in his resignation afterwards leading to that need to appoint a replacement with haste. Miller had found that the new boss at Langley was a lightweight in comparison to the man he had replaced. His position as heading the intelligence war would be unchallenged.

With presidential approval, plus the support of the Vice President and the new Director of National Intelligence (a somewhat toothless yet grand sounding post) too, Miller’s DHS was at the forefront of the conflict with the Democratic American Republic which Roberts was the face of. Miller believed that bringing the rebels to heel ultimately would come from the efforts which he oversaw too, not those of the Pentagon nor anyone else. He began the process of taking the DAR apart from within. Communications intercepts were made and there was the beginning of agent insertion. Contacts were forged with internal opponents with some of those forced into cooperation too. It was all typical intelligence work, what the CIA would do against a foreign adversary overseas. The DHS did it in America though, with the justification from Miller that acting against American citizens like that was done because they were engaged in a rebellion against the country. The usual laws and the inbuilt checks-and-balances against intelligence operations on home soil by the federal government were thrown out of the window using that justification. It was Miller who convinced the new president to sign that other EO where high-profile political & intelligence captives taken during the fighting were to be held without access to legal counsel nor contact with the outside world. One of his first tasks once he was at the DHS was setting up the infrastructure to allow interrogations to be done once captives began arriving at various selected sites. In addition, Miller had DHS people give orders to other intelligence agencies – all of which failed in their battles to retain their usual sure-fire independence – to conduct much of the work for them. Finding and running agents behind enemy lines, turning captives, intercepting signals and so forth, all of that traditional intelligence work to be done by others, was ordered to overseen by Miller. Such was the reason why Roberts found himself a day into his presidency needing a new National Security Agency head as well when the chief there at Fort Meade refused to resign and he had to fire her to allow Miller to do all that he wanted to.


Watching powerless through Walsh’s lame duck period as secessionism, insurrection and then ultimate armed rebellion took place, Miller had been in contact with people in & out of government about what was happening. The media hated him and so did many politicians, yet Miller always had had a long list of contacts in the intelligence world. None of them were highly-placed and almost all had a conflict (real or imagined, known or unknown) with the top levels of the organisations within the US Intelligence Community. Like-minded people had agreed with Miller that much of what had occurred out West during the build-up to the Unilateral Declaration of Independence made in Las Vegas had been too convenient. All of those events, those terror attacks and shocking acts, had fell just right for those who had a single-minded goal of pulling part of the country out of the union so they could get their own way politically. A giant conspiracy with hundreds, thousands of members even, wasn’t seen by Miller nor those who agreed with his outlook on that, but they did believe a very selective and tight group was behind much of what happened. Their activities had been driven by their goal where they had at times made use of events beyond their control yet at other times deliberately caused some of the chaos seen. There were too many coincidences.

The death of Shauna McCleary had been the clearest example to Miller of that. She had gotten herself arrested on federal sedition charges on purpose and seemed to have wanted to be held in federal custody so her supporters could make her out to be an imprisoned martyr. That all made sense. What hadn’t was her murder. There were theories aplenty, reasonable ones and the words of crackpots, about what had happened to see her demise. None of them Miller had agreed with. For the federal government or supporters of secession to kill her didn’t make sense. On his second day at the DHS, Miller had been told that the CIA had an extensive file upon one Felix Jesus Carrillo Morales. That businessman’s name had popped up again and again concerning those political figures at the top of the DAR. Miller had requested his file. The CIA had tried to give him nothing then sent over something so full of redactions is was pretty much just blacked out lines on pages with a few meaningless words here and there. Miller had gotten the un-redacted file after a call made from the president to Langley. Carrillo was, unbeknown to almost everyone but the CIA, a major player in the drug business. He worked with several cartels down in Mexico and supplied illegal drugs north of the US-Mexico border. Others who had tried to do what he had, work with several criminal gangs of such force as the cartels, had died in the attempt. You worked with one or none, that was the way of the business. He had his own full independence too, again something unknown to others to have achieved. Carrillo and his Vaqueros security group had been providing personal protection to key DAR figures ahead of secession without any one of them, people such as Maria Arreola Rodriguez, seemingly knowing about his criminal activities. Miller’s information at the DHS was that Carrillo somehow had California’s Governor Pierce – who was right there at the top of the Council of Thirteen – under his thumb. That rumour, which the CIA file had nothing on, led Miller to look into Carrillo as he did.

Working with his top people, Miller came to the belief, due to the weight of evidence when it came to just how far Carrillo’s tentacles reached in terms of his criminal enterprises, that it was very likely that Carrillo could have been behind McCleary’s murder. No solid proof was there early in the investigation, just a feeling due to the uncovered knowledge of his reach and what the CIA had shown he’d been able to built as a trans-national drug smuggler with such capabilities to influence people & events. It was Miller himself who made the jump assuming that Carrillo had killed McCleary to help speed secession along to grow his drug empire. His DHS people weren’t so sure yet Miller instructed them to go either prove his theory wrong or right. It was one he was convinced of though. It was madness on the face of it yet made sense to him. There was additional suspicion too in Miller that drove him to order the investigation into Carrillo to see if he was behind so much of what had led to the final acts which had seen the DAR formed. Those domestic terror groups in the West who had kidnapped and murdered federal employees had vanished. The DHS could only look from without, not from within the DAR, but they were gone. There was no evidence that the DAR had done anything to bring them to heed: the demands and declared political positions of them, all which Miller had previously believed based on pure suspicion alone were those of one group overall, hadn’t been fulfilled the instant that the Democratic American Republic came into being. Some stood in firm opposition to that new country. Using what was in that CIA file, Miller’s people linked names and enterprises to previously disjointed bits of federal intelligence. The pictures weren’t complete and could had shown something else if looked at a different way, yet Miller’s investigation there once more fingered Carrillo for all of that.

It was a realisation which made Miller want to see Carrillo dead in a ditch somewhere… yet something that he had to marvel at too for how it had all been done. Carrillo hadn’t covered his tracks because, while talented, he was still an amateur. Other than that, Miller held the man’s work in high esteem despite his hatred of what that criminal had done to his country.


The clue was in the title: Department of Homeland Security. Miller had taken that seriously upon taking the position as DHS Secretary and did so throughout his service. His job was to protect the nation, even when it was divided and even from itself. The formation of the DAR had brought about an exposed threat to the country from without. Hostile foreign intelligence services were at once identified as either already or soon to start penetrating the United States’ national security from the moment that Miller took up his post. With presidential authorisation, orders went out from Miller’s office that all and everything was to be done to ensure that the country was protected against adversaries from overseas aiming to take advantage. Roberts, Mitchell and Ferdinand had all been in alignment with Miller’s thinking that there would be moves made at infiltration to not just steal secrets but keep the civil war going for longer than necessary by enemies of the United States. It made sense. It was what America had done to its enemies in the past. That was to be stopped from happening where detected, and done too in DAR territory as well. Foreign intelligence operations weren’t to be tolerated, to allow them to develop to see where they went: they were to be shut down. Any foreign agents, either their nationals or third-country operatives, caught within United States territory were to be at once deported. As to any of those captured inside the DAR… Miller was given permission to deal harshly with them. ‘Harshly’ was a loosely-defined term, one which Miller had been glad to be on the executive order he had been given a copy of. Isolation, ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ and even disappearances – for good – were actions which Miller had considered were covered under ‘harshly’.

US Customs and Border Protection was an agency part of the DHS. Ahead of Miller taking up his post, those employees within DAR territory had either agreed to work for that rebel regime or resigned. Control over the borders with Mexico and Canada where there was DAR territory was lost to the DHS. The president of the Democratic American Republic had declared an amnesty for all illegal immigrants, including Dreamers as the US Supreme Court had said she was, upon forming her new country. Rumours of that, taken to the extreme in what that meant, had seen a flood of migrants head towards the United States. Many of those coming northwards from Central America through Mexico – Mexicans themselves were far outnumbered in the rush of people heading into America from elsewhere in Latin America – were pointed either accidently or by design the wrong way: towards Texas. Miller’s extensive intelligence work pushed him away from addressing that issue as much as he had wanted to yet it was a big concern. The United States’ southern border was in chaos. In addition, where those migrants had gone towards Arizona, California & New Mexico, there was no ‘open border’ as they had been told… not officially anyway. The DAR did have an immigration policy. So much of the border was in fact open though without the DAR being able to effectively stop the flow of migrants. Alongside them came drug smugglers – those like Carrillo – seeking to take advantage. The DHS had to look ahead, to after the conflict against the rebels was won, in how to deal with all of that as it wasn’t a problem to be resolved once those in Las Vegas fell from power.

Miller sought to Crack The Panda.

That Chinese messenger service in commercial use, the remarkably secure Panda app, which the leading members of the DAR had been using pre-secession and once they had their country up and running too, had defeated all efforts to hack it. Since the previous year, the US Intelligence Community had been trying to defeat its encryption. The fact that those engaged in rebellion against the United States were using a Chinese service was an outrage! The Panda had all of that advertised security, borne out by fact, but to Miller and others like him, the belief was that the very top levers of the Chinese intelligence services had a back door access. In the past, the NSA had created a commercial messaging app and seen it used by enemies of the United States ahead of it being turned on them: Israel, Miller was told on his first day at the DHS, was at that point doing the same thing with an app they had created (and sold to unsuspecting users as European through front companies) to use against their enemies. Miller’s intentions were to do that down the line with something else yet he was driven early on in his time as DHS Secretary to as soon as possible Crack the Panda. Assistance was, like before, sought from the Five Eyes partners in the global intelligence network of the US, UK, Australia, Canada & New Zealand. There was also help sought from others such as the Israelis and other players in the field who didn’t have such a public reputation for cryptological warfare. Once Miller got his way, the intention that he had was not just to read messages between those on the other side to fight the intelligence war – nor shut it down as Walsh had been seeking to do – against the DAR. He had bigger plans. There would be exploitation done. He’d turn those enemies of the United States against each other via black propaganda selectively fed to them and bring down their whole rotten house of cards. Ahead of that happening though, every conceivable effort was thrown at Cracking the Panda. Miller had been sure that there was a way to achieve that and that those who had tried before hadn’t been creative enough nor as driven as he was.

Something I've had in my mind for a long time. I wanted to do a different take on a 2ACW than I've seen elsewhere.

Media becomes an OPSEC breach which is a headache for the Pentagon.

69 – Super-duper missiles

The USS Michigan, a cruise missile submarine converted from a ballistic missile boomer, launched an attack on the Democratic American Republic from far behind where the Main Front was in the east. Wave after wave of Tomahawks were fired from the Michigan when it was less than a hundred miles off the coast of Northern California. They were sent inland, striking varied targets across much of that new country whose defences were positioned against a threat from the other direction. From out of the twenty-two missile tubes which had once held Trident SLBMs, seven Tomahawks each were shot skywards. Several misfires occurred but almost a hundred and fifty of those missiles were sent towards Arizona, California, Nevada and Oregon. The firing process was rapid and once done, back down deep into the waters of the Pacific Ocean the Michigan went. It was the second time in two years which the submarine had completed a full launch of its entire arsenal: the Chinese mainland had got a dose of all that the Michigan was capable of giving out in January 2027. Before the attack orders had come for the strike against the DAR, the submarine had been on the other side of the Pacific – near to Palau, behind the Philippines – ready to once more do that again to China should war once more erupt. A speed run beneath the middle of the Pacific, all while there were ‘difficulties’ aboard among a small number of the crew, had been made so that the Michigan could do what it did. With empty missile tubes and no friendly port nearby, the submarine was left without a mission post launch. It had done its job though. Those Tomahawks had gone to where they were supposed to, aimed at exclusive military targets held by those in rebellion against the legitimate US Government.

Warships also in the service of the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet who had remained loyal to the recognised government in DC made their own attacks against the DAR too. None of them came as close to shore as the Michigan did, fearing DAR counter-action (which several did face), and they too shot off many, many of their own Tomahawks. The West Coast was struck and so too was Hawaii as well. The cruiser USS Lake Erie led a surface action group which included a trio of destroyers which joined her in hitting Hawaii. Those ships sped away afterwards yet were chased by aircraft coming out of the airfield at Barking Sands, where the missile test range was located on Kauai. The aircraft were faster. DAR Navy strike-fighters were those who made the responding strike with FA-18F Super Hornets launching both JSOW and SLAM-ER missiles. Lake Erie led the air defence mission and there was a downing of many of those inbound missiles but not all of them. The cruiser was struck by one missile and would survive: the destroyer USS William P. Lawrence was hit multiple times and would be lost to the sea with heavy loss of life being incurred.

Flying from Alaska, B-52H Stratofortress’ which usually called Minot AFB in North Dakota home (they’d been moved back out of the firing line) also struck at the DAR from behind when those huge, old bombers launched waves of cruise missiles too. Those were ALCMs and JASSMs fired from off the shoreline of Canada’s Vancouver Island and down towards Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington. The timing of the launch was coordinated with the US Navy making their own missile attacks. All over the early morning skies there were those missiles flying towards military targets deemed to be of value to the DAR. Those air and naval strikes in the rear came alongside far bigger ones – also coordinated to make it one giant Time On Target attack – coming in from the east towards the DAR. More B-52s as well as B-1B Lancers shot off ALCMs & JASSMs. They were fired from outside of DAR-controlled territory and passed above where the front-lines of the civil war ran. Down through the Rockies they struck home, hitting road and rail links where those ran through the mountains across the east of Colorado and down into New Mexico somewhat too. The Front Range behind Denver, those mountains which looked down upon the city, were blasted at selected points. Cheyenne Mountain further to the south (near Colorado Springs) was left alone yet nearby there were huge explosions to strike the access route of US Highway 24: Interstate-70 linking Denver to the west got similar attention. Deeper inside DAR territory where the communications links came across the Rockies the target list was extensive for that United States missile strike when more missiles hit. General Fuller had his army closer to the new border but his supply lines ran back through the mountains. Two of the B-1Bs involved from the 28th Bomb Wing, flying from Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio following their Ellsworth AFB base in South Dakota having been targeted by the DAR Air Force, were carrying a special load: thirty-one ARRW missiles each (internally & externally). Those were brand-new hypersonic, glide weapons with a top speed of close to Mach 20. Many years past, the 45th President had called them ‘super-duper missiles’. The Chinese had been on the wrong end of the first ARRW live test in wartime. The DAR got its own taste of them. Launches were made from over Indiana before the aircraft returned to their temporary home. Very soon afterwards, those missiles hit their targets. Edwards AFB in Southern California was struck dozens of times. It was one of the DAR Air Force’s key airbases from where they had important combat aircraft capable of carrying their own ARRWs – Fuller had secured a stock of them – based outside of Los Angeles. Las Vegas was also hit. The DAR Parliament had been using a convention centre and it was levelled after multiple hits; Nellis AFB outside of the city, a facility comparable to Edwards, was also targetted. Blowing up where the parliamentarians had been meeting was done at presidential direction and was the only civilian target struck… or ‘regime target’ as a Pentagon press briefing would afterwards call it. Those politicians weren’t there but it was where they had been spending all of their time creating the laws of their Second Republic. Inside Las Vegas they might have felt safe, had been the reasoning of President Roberts for the attack, yet not after that.


Along the Main Front, where all hell was due to break loose once AFNORTH and Western Command clashed on the ground, less dramatic air and missile attacks were made ahead of that. Across the eastern reaches of Colorado and New Mexico, drone operations in the hours of darkness saw the opposing sides using identical equipment. There were MQ-9A Predators in the service of their air forces while their armies had MQ-1C Grey Eagles up as well. Missions were run of surveillance as well as attacks. The drones were targeted from the ground and in the air in direct attacks using live weapons to stop their activities. In addition, there was also electronic warfare conducted against them. The DAR Armed Forces had employed that against the immense United States cruise missile attack which came their way, with the Pentagon afterwards finding out how effective that had been in post-strike analysis. In a tactical sense, such warfare conducted against drones by each side had a mixed bag of success for the two of them. It was far easier to kill a drone with a missile rather than to try and make it crash through interference. Lower down, even smaller drones flew as the drone wars went onwards. Some were hand-launched by soldiers while others were a bit bigger.

Moreover, flying up higher than others, the big drones also conducted their own missions with RQ-4B Global Hawks in the sky. They were on pure reconnaissance tasks yet too faced attacks. Each side took down a handful of them, severely denting the overall number in service. Killing them was the work done by DAR Army and US Army missile operators armed with SM-6 surface-to-air missiles. Since 2024, those weapons designed for use by the US Navy had been in US Army service. Getting at a RQ-4 was no easy feat but the SAMs lofted towards them did extremely well and brought them crashing to earth so that the other side couldn’t get the intelligence picture required. The same launchers for the SM-6s also came with Tomahawks: once more a naval weapon had been brought for ground service off-the-shelf. Those cruise missiles were fired in a semi-tactical role towards identified high-value targets with SM-6s shot towards them as well when spotted. Shorter-range ATACMS missiles likewise flew east and west, many of those engaging ground forces lined up ready for the first main instances of heavy combat. Those missiles brought death and destruction where they went. It wasn’t just in Colorado and New Mexico, DAR territory, but in parts of Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas & Wyoming where the civil war sprung to life for so many who had hoped against hope that it really wouldn’t.

Among all of the firepower unleashed, groups of soldiers entered the other’s territory by covert means. Green Berets – though also some US Navy SEALs – made silent insertions going both to the east and to the west. The Special Forces community had been torn apart like the rest of the US Armed Forces by the formation of the Democratic American Republic. The DAR took control of both the 1st & 10th Special Forces Groups though, as was the case with the 19th Group too of national guardsmen, there were missing component parts in other areas of the country or overseas along with waves of desertions, defections & mutinies. The 3rd, 5th, 7th & 20th (the last National Guard manned) remained loyal to the United States. Detachments of various sizes with all sorts of missions set about conducting their assigned tasks. There were reconnaissance, observation and patrol missions. Targeted assassinations and other direct action strikes were the job which others were given. Some went out to cause random chaos in the enemy’s rear to draw attention away front line forces while further teams were tasked to seek out partisans and such like. Eyes were what those involved feared the most when deployed, the eyes of their fellow Americans caught on the opposite sides of a new border. They could be seen and reported to the military authorities. In overseas operations, Green Berets would often be forced to ‘act’ against being seen with extreme violence: that wasn’t something that those sent into action during the Second American Civil War were ordered to, or even prepared to, do. Those were their fellow Americans, civilians, whose eyes on them which they were on constant guard against.

Global knock-on effects are many. It has left things for so many up in the air.
Foreign governments and their reaction about civilians is covered below. I've covered the Philippines in that.
Nice images. I'll get to the air power soon enough!