James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Apr 18, 2021 15:53:02 GMT
Those territories are all remaining part of the United States, staying with the government in DC. The others are independent nations and didn't join the DAR, unlike Guam and the Marianas which achieved statehood as one. I'm thinking that without a DAR military presence in the Western Pacific beyond local defence forces on Guam and Saipan, they remain allied to the United States. Palau, Micronesia, and Marshall Islands have a token military presence while American Samoa being deep in the Pacific would be irrelevant to the DAR. However, the Ronald Reagan Missile Defense Testing Site is in Kwajalein Atoll and would firmly be in USAF hands. I'd forgotten about such places. Yes, Kwajalein remains in United States hands. |
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Likes: 8,833
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Post by James G on Apr 18, 2021 15:53:27 GMT
95 – Cleaning House
Back during the presidential transition, as Walsh sat on his hands when there was a ripping apart of the United States, (retired) Admiral Richard Miller had been put forward as the nominee for DHS Secretary in the Roberts Administration. Mitchell had tried to talk the president-elect out of that. The vice president-elect had considered Miller far too divisive and even had nicknamed him ‘Hoover 2.0’. Nonetheless, Miller was appointed by executive order to the DHS by Roberts upon the 49th President taking office with the knowledge that a usual Senate approval process would fail: he wanted him there regardless of what Mitchell and other Republicans in DC thought about the man. That was down to Roberts’ acknowledgement that Miller would be ruthless and ruthlessness was what was required. Taking over from the deceased Roberts as the 50th President, Mitchell did consider firing him. There was an outcry concerning how Miller had been behaving with regards to overseas important allies – that Panda app issue with the British and also Canadian worries over how some of its citizens inside the Democratic American Republic had been targeted for intelligence ops against them – in addition to his general self-serving behaviour when it came to the US Intelligence Community. Roberts had allowed the DHS to control ‘assets’ of organisations such as the CIA, FBI & NSA in the fight against the secessionists out West. Senate Majority Leader Green came to the White House on Mitchell’s first full day in the hot seat and defended Miller’s activities. In an about-turn from his previous position, Green claimed that there was Senate support for what the DHS was doing in its fight against the DAR and he wanted to Miller to stay… only a few weeks beforehand, he had told Roberts that it would be a cold day in hell before Miller ever received Senate confirmation. Getting rid of Miller was thus considered by the new president to be too much trouble politically and also might just be detrimental to the war effort as well: Miller did a lot of harm to the cause but did more good at the same time. What he did do was clip Miller’s wings. That was something necessary. It was done in the name of the greater good, to allow for the reunification of the country to proceed successfully, but there were also a lot of personal scores being settled. Mitchell was on the side of the Intelligence Community and they got what they wanted in terms of the majority of their independence back.
Mitchell replaced a trio of top-level Roberts appointees who had national security briefs as he cleaned house somewhat. Out of the posts that had occupied for barely a week and a half went Roberts’ National Security & Homeland Security Advisors. They were regarded by Mitchell as not having adequately served his predecessor and he replaced them with people who he thought would do best by him. There was the additional firing of the Director of National Intelligence and replacement of him by Anna Ellis. Ellis was a former CIA head and someone whom Mitchell knew very well… maybe a little too well in the opinion of the new First Lady of the United States. The man she replaced had been weak and a pawn of Miller’s. Ellis wasn’t neither of them. Her brief upon appointment – one done with executive order rather than Senate approval to get her there – was to re-establish the supervision role of the office when it came to national security in dealing with the DAR: no more would Miller do that from the top of the DHS as he had been. One of Ellis’s first moves, with presidential approval, was to put a firm stop to Miller’s ‘purge of suspected traitors’ throughout the Intelligence Community. He’d been having employees of multiple organisations either sent on gardening leave or directly fired when their loyalties were questioned. Those weren’t political figures new in post following the presidential transition period when the DAR was established, but instead career officials. Miller had been investigating countless figures with his suspicions coming from his time out of office spent looking in rather than anything tangible as to what they might have done that he could find. The DAR had gotten help from people in DC and there was a belief in Ellis that they still had supporters acting as spies and agents in influence within the Intelligence Community, yet those would be dealt with via the proper means. If found, they would be turned and exploited. Miller had been doing the opposite and creating institutional-wide enmity for legitimate DHS operations by doing what he had. Ellis also followed Mitchell’s instruction to increase the hunt for those involved with the AIA terror group though to de-prioritise the seemingly endless circular search for reputed mastermind. Whomever that ‘K’ was, Ellis was told that getting the murderous gunmen and assassins must take priority.
In office, Mitchell found himself as the leader of the free world when there were many crisis’ overseas that friends and allies looked to America to solve. His country was in the middle of a civil war but global problems continued. For the United States to play the world’s policeman while trying to deal with the insurgent DAR was impossible. There was the issue with Russia and its attempts to force a conflict in the Baltics. Buoyed by their recent short victory in fighting the Vietnamese in the Spratly Islands, the Chinese had eyes cast further afield and were moving military forces about in South East Asia to frighten everyone there. In the Middle East, there was that container ship still on its side (with contents spilled) in the Suez Canal in a so-called accident that everyone knew was no accident. The blocking of that vital waterway for trade and military forces too came alongside Iranian military exercises in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. Israel was itching to start bombing Egyptian revolutionaries while demanding that the US Navy didn’t pull out of the Eastern Med. Destabilisation of the US-Mexican border meant that Mexico was undergoing cartel violence which easily eclipsed what had been seen during the previously worst possible considered violence of 2024-25. Those were the big, high-profile issues yet there were many others that all eyes were upon Mitchell to somehow solve. He could do no such thing though, not when his country whose leadership he had inherited was engaged in civil war.
Mitchell needed a vice president. There were many who wanted that position, plenty of them willing at once to throw their hat into the ring as they sought the post for all that it could bring to them and their careers. Media speculation ran rampant over who Mitchell would pick. There were a lot of clickbait stories online about whom it might be while talking heads on the networks discussed serious and non-serious candidates alike. One outcome suggested was that Mitchell might choose a Democrat: what happened in 1864 might be repeated in a fashion similar to the National Unity of then. The circumstances of the First and Second American Civil Wars were vastly different though. Partisanship in America was so entrenched that Mitchell would have to be a fool to even make that attempt. He announced that he’d made his mind up as to who he wanted to become the 53rd Vice President pretty soon upon taking office, informing his chief-of-staff (who moved with him to the White House) of that and surprising him with such a choice. It was Terrence Darby, that congressman from Washington state who had since the secession back there remained in DC speaking up for the people of the West, those who weren’t supporters of secession that was. Front and centre with that coalition of Democrats and Republicans aiming for unity in message, Darby had outshone the Democrats onboard. Mitchell knew him well enough and had been in the congressman’s district during the transition period when the first flames of rebellion were alight in the Pacific North-West. Those were fought against by Darby albeit unsuccessfully in the end. Mitchell’s subordinate didn’t oppose the prospective nomination though did point out that there might be a difficult political fight. Darby would need to be voted in by both houses of Congress and he didn’t have as many allies there as other possible candidates would. The new president asserted that he could get him through the nomination. He said he didn’t think that Darby would be voted down. In talking with Green and also House Speaker Fraser, Mitchell was made to understand that he would have a massive fight on his hands to get his way by putting Darby in where he wanted him. The congressman wouldn’t get the votes needed. Other candidates were suggested to Mitchell, ones that the two of them and the Republican Party leadership believed would. When Mitchell rolled over and accepted the refusal to consider Darby, his chief-of-staff was taken aback. The concession made by someone like Mitchell so easily to the will of Green and Fraser surprised him… it was almost as if he knew all along, that he was playing some sort of game there.
Erika Cook was one of those who had shamelessly put herself forward as a candidate for the vacant post. Florida’s governor had discussed taking up the post on national television and explained what she could bring to the office. Senator Jerry Stokes, who’d run a campaign based on race through the Republican primaries the year before against Roberts, did the same as Cook did. He put himself out there though commentators were convinced he wasn’t serious: how could he serve under a noted anti-racist like Mitchell was? Of the four names put to Mitchell by his party’s top people in Congress, they named the Governor of Kentucky, two senators from solid Red states (out of Indiana and North Dakota) and also a congresswoman from Texas. Cristina Cruz Flores was that final name. She was another one of the New Republicans, the young minorities who had kept the South in party hands as demographics had changed so dramatically through the Twenties. Cruz had been called the Republican’s answer to Maria Arreola Rodriguez, a comparison she had never enjoyed. The young Latina was no liberal, not someone who wanted to forge a New America and neither was she a traitor to the United States! Roberts had early on offered her a place in his administration but she had declined. Her star had risen dramatically since the events in the West and Cruz had been considered for the nomination to the State Department by Green & Fraser if Roberts had failed to get Jo Renzi through as he finally did. She was sounded out by them for that post and then for the vice presidency ahead of Mitchell being told that they wouldn’t support a Darby candidacy. Things had changed for Cruz and she was willing to join the Mitchell Administration. Mitchell’s eyes had flicked up when her name had been put to him and she was the only one he showed signs of considering at that meeting. He invited her to the White House on his third day in office. She’d wanted to go back to Texas as Winter Storm Ted battled her constituents but Mitchell kept her in DC. Cruz and her husband dined with the President and First Lady where a long conversation was had afterwards about what she could bring to the office. Mitchell wanted her right out there fighting against the DAR, in public making the administration’s case for the conflict. Her views on what treatment in political terms the West when brought back into the fold would get were discovered by Mitchell to be in line with his: they had to make sure that nothing like that secession happened again. Asked to be the new vice president, Cruz accepted the president’s offer.
Confirmation was going to take some time, even with Green and Fraser speeding things up, but Cruz would be the new Vice President of the United States. With that agreed, Mitchell went that evening to the Pentagon – he didn’t have SecDef Ferdinand and the Joint Chiefs come to him; he wanted to surprise them – to get a personal update on Operation Fire Spear. Roberts had been issued a threat by those in Las Vegas and it was one which Mitchell’s predecessor didn’t get to meet. The 50th President accepted that challenge on Roberts’ behalf.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Apr 19, 2021 18:13:03 GMT
96 – Challenge accepted
Maria Arreola Rodriguez was treated as if she was a hunted woman. Her security people wouldn’t let her sleep in the same bed twice. They feared a bomb through the ceiling or assassins clambering in through the windows if her location could be fixed. Across Las Vegas, long the City of Sin and what had become the capital of the Democratic American Republic, MAR was moved from one place to another for her own safety. Her wife and kids were back in Walnut Creek under the same roof while she was transported here, there and everywhere from hotel to private residence to hotel. Her few public appearances were done at short notice and often cancelled at the last minute. Broadcasts out over the internet, so favoured by her for many years, were rarely done live less her location be fixed and attacked from afar. When she had questioned the real need for all of that, MAR was reminded of the vitriol back in DC where there were people of influence literally calling for her head and it was too pointed out how many enemies of the United States had been killed in targeted attacks throughout the years when their movements could be fixed. It was for her own safety, she was told, that she lived such a crazy life. She was the president of what she and those at the top declared with utmost seriousness was the most dynamic and democratic country in the world. No public vote, country-wide nor within any of its eleven component states, had validated that democratic argument. The progressive policies which supposedly gave the new country its dynamic nature had been only put to the vote of selected politicians who unanimously passed them. MAR had heard the ‘North Korea’ comparison made from outside critics and knew it was false but their arguments against what the DAR claimed to be and what it had become cut deep. It left her bruised and wanting to change things. None of that was possible though, not while the country which she led was under attack so thoroughly as it was and fighting for its life.
The growing pro-democracy movement within the DAR during late January 2029 was a personal blow to its president. She had ridden the wave of public anger against the unjust electoral system of the United States – and the alleged state-backed killings which came with that – on a promise of honouring democracy: that being her ‘winning’ the election back the previous November. So many of her most impassioned and once die-hard supporters had turned their backs on her to take part in those protests. Celebrity backers, fellow politicians, activists and ordinary people were against the government which she led. She had given them the freedom and democracy which they craved yet their demands were for her to stand down and for their new version of democracy to prevail… one like the old one in fact. Those protests had become one and the same as the initial anti-war protests when each grew alongside the other and merged. MAR wanted democracy and she also didn’t want the war to continue. Yet, she had been put in an impossible situation where there could be no democratic vote (her shrinking supporters pointed to November 2028 as the only vote needed) and war had been brought to the DAR by the vengeful, selfish United States. When the Unilateral Declaration of Independence had been made, she and the Council of Ten – as it was then before expansion – had delivered what they had told each other would be a fait accompli to President Walsh and his successor President Roberts. The new nation had been formed and those in DC could do nothing about that. To make them understand such a thing was impossible to destroy using unjust military force, MAR had agreed to the forming of the military force which General Fuller had overseen the creation of. The thought of nuclear weapons made her very uncomfortable but she had likewise agreed that the DAR had to have them so as to defend itself against a threat of foreign aggression. But there wasn’t supposed to have been a war with the United States! MAR had thought that a few fights would be had, some limited ones, before those in DC came to an understanding with her that Americans shouldn’t kill other Americans but resolve their differences by other means. She was a pacifist. For her entire political career, she had opposed American overseas conflicts where her country intervened in the internal affairs of others when acting as a world policeman and imposing its own – wrong – system of democracy upon them. It was just wrong, to fight and have innocents killed. War had come though. It was one which she was the face of for her country. How that aggrieved her.
When January turned to February and Winter Storm Ted battered the DAR along with a good portion of the United States too, MAR hoped that the break in fighting that came with it could be used to give peace a chance. Fellow members of the Council of Thirteen joined with her in having their foreign minister, Tommy Zane, try to seek a settlement…. or at least get the Americans talking. He was even authorised to try any make use of people such as ex-Ambassador Jessica Toomey over in Europe (someone not favoured in Las Vegas despite her professed love of the DAR) to help with any back door route to get President Mitchell talking. The DAR had successfully defended itself, helped by weather and terrain, from a full frontage attack to wipe it out ‘within a week’, as what had been said in Congress by senior people, and the pause was something that MAR hoped would be used for jaw-jaw instead of war-war. Others in her government weren’t at all convinced that Mitchell, even more so than Roberts might have been, would go for that but it was tried. The outline of what Zane could put up for discussion, in terms of what the DAR was willing to concede, weren’t formalised yet no one in Las Vegas, MAR included, was willing to see any sort of territorial concession. Zane got nowhere. MAR had thought he might find an opening but, as before, he was unable to make any headway with his brief of talking to other governments, not even the one he had once served. During that period, MAR was distracted. Hawaii lost its governor in what had all the hallmarks of a targeted killing, like she was warned she was at risk of having happen to her, and there were domestic issues within the DAR of immense magnitude. The economy was still in the toilet. MAR had no idea how to fix that. There was violence which Minister for Public Safety Lauren Quiroz couldn’t solve and an outcome of her failing to witnessed a police strike take place in Los Angeles… with the expected consequences of that coming true with mass looting and unrest. Several Council of Thirteen members, plus Eleanor Rawlings – the DAR’s Minister for Defence & Security – too, pushed MAR into accepting that the country needed to establish a fully-fledged intelligence service. Fuller had formed an effective military intelligence network and Quiroz had specialist police detachments (an FBI-lite type of set-up) yet it was put to her that there was a need for something along the lines of what the United States had in terms of a CIA and NSA combined. ‘Aghast’: that was what Vice President Cicely Blair Padley told other top-tier figures was the reaction from MAR to that. Like endless American overseas wars, MAR had long been a vocal opponent of all that the CIA and NSA did – real and perceived – across the world. Even with a different name, mission statement and serving the DAR, she was horrified at the idea of being responsible for having one created for the country which she led. The Council of Thirteen was a democratic body and they outvoted her on that. Personal loyalty to her kept the seven-to-four outcome semi-respectable but she had decisively lost the argument on that. It was another gut punch for her to have to accept.
During the early hours of February 2nd, MAR was asleep in her bedroom within the Ahern Hotel. That was located off The Strip and she was deep within surrounded by security. She awoke when it seemed like the whole city was shaking…
...that was illusionary. Bombs fell upon Las Vegas and it was quite something but the reports which afterwards that the whole city had been shaken as dramatically as told were just the imaginations of the fearful. Fear was a good reaction though in the minds of the planners and executors of Operation Fire Spear. In the aftermath of the previous United States attack upon selected ‘regime targets’ in Las Vegas, Rawlings had publicly threatened to attack DC if Las Vegas was attacked against after that destruction of the building being used for parliamentarians. When no immediate attack had come, she had openly declared that Roberts, and then Mitchell as well, were too scared to do so for the fear of the DAR military reaction. Fuller’s boss, the public face of the DAR’s war to retain its independence, had challenged the leader of the United States and Mitchell accepted that. It was a test of him and his country. To not respond meant that blackmail like that, from adversaries domestic and foreign, would go on to an unacceptable outcome if not responded to. His response was bomb Las Vegas once again.
Several nondescript buildings within the city which the DAR was using as government demi-ministries were hit. Bombs fell in the middle of the night when few people were working in them with minimal collateral damage sought. Some of that came though. Those targets were in the middle of a city and while accuracy was almost perfect, it wasn’t entirely so. A second conference centre, once more being used by parliamentarians to draft laws where there was almost zero opposition, almost empty at night too, was bombed as well. The sprawling and important Nellis AFB on the edge of Las Vegas was likewise hit. Away from the city where the DAR had made its capital, military targets at Fairchild AFB, Fort Hunter Liggett, Hill AFB, Luke AFB and Vandenberg SFB were struck at. Mitchell put stealth bombers over the West during a gap in the worst of the weather. Ted had moved southwards and behind it, that second storm Ulysses had at that point yet to move in fully. The US Air Force put its stealth bombers over the DAR to drop bombs on key targets such as those – Hunter Liggett was the rear-area HQ for Fuller’s operational command; the airbases were major installations full of enemy forces – during the weather gap that the Pentagon had spotted. Missile strikes, even using the hypersonic ARRWs, weren’t used due to the accuracy problem delivered via that computer virus. In time, the same targeting issues were a fear for the bombers but before then they were put to good use.
The lone B-21A Raider in US Air Force service hit Las Vegas along with the last of the MQ-180A Sabres too. They delivered their carried payloads into that city leaving more numerous B-2A Spirits to strike the targets in Arizona, California, Utah & Washington state. The airbases outside of Nevada were hit by a pair of bombers, coming in one after another, rather than just single strikes. An awful lot of explosives were dropped on them with devastating results. Two more of the B-2s, flying individual routes, went above the Oregon High Desert (in the southeast of Oregon) and the Sonoran Desert (in Arizona between Phoenix and California). Eyes on the ground had sight of mobile radars and associated support systems which the DAR Air Force kept on the move through those empty expanses of territory deep in the rear of their country. Many, many GBU-53 StormBreaker high-explosive bombs, each a ‘small’ 250lb weapons, fell atop the enemy with laser-designators on the ground guiding them in. The Oregon target for the B-2 which struck up there was an experimental version of the Green Pine ballistic missile radar – Green Pine X – which the DAR was using to guided surface-to-air missile counterstrikes against inbound United States cruise missiles that managed to stay on-course. Down in Arizona was a top secret AN/SPY-8 radar. That was an air-search system for SAMs too though one with also an offensive capability as well using directed energy radar waves concentrated when needed to cripple an aircraft or missile. The Green Pine was something being built for the Israelis (with a later view to have it support American THAAD missiles too) while the SPY-8 was to have only been used by the United States and knowledge of it wasn’t in the public domain. Those two radars, plus another SPY-8 which the Pentagon had no eyes upon, had been at Area 51 in Nevada when the DAR was formed. They were supposed to have been destroyed ahead of the loss of Area 51 to the secessionists… and that had been a lie. Atop two of the three powerful and highly-capable radars the US Air Force dropped bombs. The SPY-8 destroyed in Arizona had eliminated a MQ-180 in-flight a few nights beforehand using the energy of directed radar waves but was unable to locate the B-2, nor the B-21 over Las Vegas which was in its target envelope, before destruction. The Pentagon wanted to find and wipe out the other missing radar system and would keep looking after February 2nd for it too.
The bombers with the 509th Bomb Wing flew back to their temporary home at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio with the armed drone instead going onto Alaska instead of back to Pope AFB in North Carolina. The MQ-180 had other missions planned for it after dropping a few bombs on Las Vegas (the B-21 did the worst of the damage) and those missions included getting overhead shots of various key targets for future attacks in the Pacific North-West. Maria Arreola Rodriguez didn’t come to any harm nor did anyone senior in her government: Fuller had been at Hunter Liggett on the Pacific coast a day beforehand but he and the majority of his mobile command staff survived as they were elsewhere when the air attack came. Destruction of buildings in Las Vegas came alongside the immense damage wrought to important airbases and the wiping out of both of those key radars. Mitchell had given the answer of the United States to Rawlings and her threats. He meet them head-on and refused to back down in fear from her promised response with his no surrender approach. He was ready to see if she and Fuller would be able to convince the Council of Thirteen to try and have a go at striking at the United States’ capital, and then if the DAR could do that. It was a high stakes game the 50th President played with that, yet it was one he thought he could win.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
Posts: 7,608
Likes: 8,833
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Post by James G on Apr 20, 2021 18:26:43 GMT
97 – Other government agency
Kim Ito had spent her professional and political careers using her maiden name rather than the last names of her first then second husbands. The first had been divorced by Ito during her time as a congresswoman and she had soon afterwards married an Australian as her second, with whom she had had a secret relationship with while with her first. Michael Steele was that second husband. A former diplomat who had been serving his country at a diplomatic representation in Hawaii, the two of them had fallen in love and each left their partners. Steele had later on walked away from his diplomatic career too to go into business while staying in Hawaii when his new wife had returned from DC to run for the lieutenant-governorship. He had kept a low profile during his wife’s time in politics. Rarely were the two of them seen together at public functions during the pre-secession times: they were a private couple. The business dealings of Steele had caused a few rumbles among critics but Ito had never been tied directly to those attacks. Due to the general anonymity that Steele had, almost anyway, when Ito asked him to go to the Australian Consulate-General in Honolulu and be part of a message chain on her behalf, no one had paid any attention to him. He’d already been there, back to where he had once worked, a week before that second trip when he had arranged for their two children to fly to Australia to stay with their grandparents on an official evacuation flight of Australian & New Zealand nationals. The flight out for those dual-national teenagers hadn’t raised an eye because no one had paid attention and neither did his follow-up trip to the diplomatic compound. Steele had gone past crowds of Americans lining up seeking a visa using his own passport: nothing about that trip itself was away from any watching eyes. Inside there, speaking with someone with whom he had once worked with, Governor Ito’s husband passed on the message which she asked him to. Steele spoke with a serving officer of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and informed his contact that his wife wished to take Hawaii out of the Democratic American Republic and back into the United States using the good services of Australia as a conduit for information.
Such an act caused a late night secret meeting down in Canberra when word of it all reached the Australian government. It put Prime Minister Darren Kirkbride in an awkward situation yet not one which he considered would be fatal for his government. Australia had been supporting the United States with diplomatic, intelligence and logistical support since the Second American Civil War had so unexpectedly started. Attempts by the illegal regime in Las Vegas to try for limited recognition and trade ties had been openly and harshly rebuffed. Kirkbride had previously had a good relationship with Walsh and tried to maintain that with Roberts before Mitchell took the hot seat in the White House. Australia’s security was foremost in that yet there were so too many other ties and long-standing mutual interests. Ito using her Australian-born husband to do what she had done did come as a surprise yet it was one which Kirkbride realised soon enough was in the best interests for Australia to facilitate. The matter was kept secret but was understood that it was something that one day, maybe soon or maybe in many years hence, would come out. Kirkbride had concerns over the domestic political implications of that. However, that was in the future and, in the short-term, he didn’t see any gain in refusing the help requested. The United States was an important ally and Australia was in a position to assist: the DAR was an aberration which since formation had caused no end of trouble and any long-term success that new country had would cause further woe for Kirkbride and his own country. With agreement from the senior figures in his government, and after talking to the Governor-General too, Kirkbride contacted President Mitchell. His foreign minister spoke with SecState Renzi and there were also talks between the head of the ASIS – in so many ways Australia’s MI-6 rather than an organisation like the CIA – and his counterparts in DC too. Australia was willing to help with striking a fatal blow against the DAR, one for the ‘liberation’ of the people of Hawaii, because Kirkbride saw in doing so would only be of benefit to his country.
Steele’s contact at the Consulate-General met him in Honolulu the following day in a rendezvous within a downtown hotel rather than back in there. At that meeting, the Australian spook brought with him someone unexpected by Steele: an American woman. Asked by Steele if she worked for the US State Department, she told him that she was employed instead by someone else. Ito’s husband learnt the term ‘other government agency’ that morning. The female spook had been someone recently inserted into Hawaii, before Ito set in motion her plan, for intelligence-gathering. While what happened was all unexpected, it was something that her employers in Langley had faith in her to handle when out there on a limb alone deep inside DAR territory. The Australian diplomat left them to talk after an introduction was made though the Consulate-General and the ASIS weren’t out of the game: they would continue to play a big role in what happened afterwards using the protected diplomatic compound’s communications infrastructure. Steele had brought with him Ito’s cell phone and it was quickly cloned. The phone came with the Panda messaging app installed and one with all of the links on it to those in power at the top of the DAR. That was quite the intelligence prize for the United States, and the Australians who would be privy to all of it as well, but Steele and Ito were likewise of major importance. The governor’s husband briefed his new friend – someone who told him to meet her in hotels from that moment on in a manner which would suggest to anyone watching their liaison was one of a ‘romantic nature’ – on what Ito had told him and she gave him instructions to pass onto the governor as well. They parted ways soon after that with Steele returning to the governor’s residence where his wife was waiting for him and his apparent lover (the CIA agent was under deep cover) went back to the Consulate-General… complete with a false Australian passport too.
Ito’s husband was welcomed back with a strong hug for she had feared for his life. The two of them spoke in the bathroom in low voices with the taps running and the toilet flushed several times. Playing at spy-craft they were with that but only if a first-class intelligence operation was being run against them would that have failed them. No one was watching though. Regardless, using that improvised protection against eavesdropping, Ito was brought up-to-date on all that had happened. She told Steele that ‘other government agency’ meant CIA but that was immaterial. What was important was that contact had been made with the US Government and her attempt to in many ways re-defect Hawaii was at that point on-course. After seeing her husband’s return, Ito had meetings herself that day with the state’s senate & assembly leaders and also the commander of the recently re-established Hawaiian Territorial Guard. The assembly speaker had by that point already spoken with the DAR’s new military commander in Hawaii and it had been a productive conversation. Nothing on that, nor all what Ito was overseeing in total, was finished with such haste being employed but real impediments hadn’t been thrown in the way. There was plentiful secrecy yet no one was watching. It could have all been done faster if that had been realised. It wasn’t until the following day, again for a late morning secret meeting in a hotel room in Honolulu, but this time just between two people rather than three, that things really got going on the other end. The progress that Ito made surprised her husband’s contact, those back at the Consulate-General and also in both Canberra & DC too. She’d done a lot. Hawaii was ready to go back where it belonged and that was back to the United States.
The US Navy aircraft carriers USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Gerald R. Ford had departed the general Hawaii area after raiding military installations on Oahu and elsewhere which had seen the unplanned yet fortunate killing of Ito’s predecessor. The Roosevelt had received instructions to head towards Panama and provide air cover for US Navy ships from the Atlantic flooding the Pacific after going through the Panama Canal. As to the Ford, it had been tasked to head east also yet to race at flank speed for the Pacific North-West and launch air attacks against DAR targets in Oregon and Washington state without the enemy knowing what was happening until it was. A third carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy was at that time closing in towards Hawaii itself after making the trip from the Middle East: the aim was that DAR Navy efforts would be on trying to follow the other two and not see the third coming up from behind. New orders came to two of the three Pacific Fleet carriers while – unbeknown to them – those secret meetings were happening in Hawaii involving third nationals. The Roosevelt was to stay on course but the Ford was to turn around and the Kennedy was given instructions as to not launch attacks the moment it was in range yet prepare to do so if necessary. Explanations weren’t forthcoming to battle group commanders on why that was the case. Admirals at the top knew what was going on yet everything else was classified. The spilling of the secret was feared while at the same time there was also the readiness to act against Hawaii if Ito was unable to pull off everything she promised without bloodshed but there would still be a fight for Hawaii’s allegiance. Post-strike intelligence pictures were looked at by those at the top to see again how much damage had been done during the air raid over Hawaii: they wanted to know what there was still useful for the US Navy. A return to hopefully an old base made new was what the admirals wanted. They nodded at their political masters comments about Hawaii returning to the fold politically and that delivering a major political blow to the DAR but of foremost importance in their mind was getting their bases back after several weeks of being effectively homeless at sea!
US forces in Alaska had seemingly been forgotten about by everyone. The DAR’s General Fuller had stripped Hawaii of the majority of its military assets when there was still a big United States military presence there on the flank. ARNORTH and AFNORTH – the United States’ military commands for operations against Fuller’s Western Command – considered Alaska out of sight, out of mind. In Alaska there were many capable air units, which had been used against Hawaii a bit, and also a significant ground presence. Two full combat brigades of US Army regulars had been orphaned when their parent divisions had gone over to the secessionists. They had been joined in Alaska by national guardsmen from New York who also brought with them their divisional headquarters (the 42nd Infantry) to command Hawaii’s ‘defences’. Those defences were positioned to defend Alaska against a hypothetical Russian strike, one foreseen when the civil war started and paranoid fears ran abound that Moscow might take advantage. There was no chance of that happening, and so Alaska and the troops there had been put out of mind by those in DC too. The sudden arrival of new orders to Alaskan headquarters surprised those there: they actually hadn’t been forgotten about. The 3rd Airborne Brigade (from the 2nd Infantry Division, which was fighting for the DAR) was given alert orders to move while the Eleventh Air Force’s 3rd & 354th Wings were prepared for significant combat operations. Able to read a map, those not in the know about all that was going on, those not the generals at the top, understood that the operations they were preparing for would involve Hawaii. That made sense. What they couldn’t understand was how those were suppose to happen. Weakened, significantly so, Hawaii wasn’t exactly undefended. Attacking there would be quite costly and didn’t look achievable if the goal was defeat DAR forces. But of course, none of them knew what was going on on the ground in Hawaii.
They didn’t know in Las Vegas either.
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gillan1220
Fleet admiral
I've been depressed recently. Slow replies coming in the next few days.
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Post by gillan1220 on Apr 21, 2021 6:56:03 GMT
I wonder how Tulsi Gabbard would react seeing her state being absorbed into the DAR only to re-defect.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Apr 21, 2021 15:34:29 GMT
I wonder how Tulsi Gabbard would react seeing her state being absorbed into the DAR only to re-defect. Hawaii aren't yet out. It won't be easy getting back in as it was walking away. Those involved in the transfer will want assurances and 'the enemy' might get wind too! |
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Apr 21, 2021 18:06:59 GMT
98 – Ulysses
Winter Storm Ted, which hit the western half of North America at the very end of January 2029, was quite the immense weather event. Following on behind that came its big brother Ulysses. The impact from the latter was far worse and that included a significantly higher loss of human life. Ulysses was an ice storm rather than a ‘traditional’ winter storm. It crossed the border from Canada in early February and intensified when it met the tail end of Ted. In the days preceding its arrival, when it caused chaos up in Canada, those within the United States and the breakaway Democratic American Republic had had different opinions on its exact course. In Las Vegas, it was thought that it would follow almost the exact route that Ted did while in DC, the thinking was that it would move further to the east when coming southwards and the worst effects would miss large portions of the DAR. Meteorological predictions made in DC were more accurate than those in Las Vegas… to their misfortune. Ulysses ranged further eastwards and struck Minnesota where Ted had not before going south all the way down to Louisiana and Texas. For three days, Ulysses shut down almost all military operations as part of the Second American Civil War from the Mississippi to the Front Range of the Rockies. Civilian disruption was just as bad as it was for those in uniform. Power failures meant that heating for homes was difficult and the lights went out. Emergency FEMA broadcasts informed people to boil drinking water due to the threat to public health when water treatment facilities were hit. People died in vehicle accidents, outside due to exposure and even in their own homes too. The roads and rail links were shut down for military use and there was almost no flying either: being airborne was bad enough but the deadly ice on the ground for aircraft at air facilities was frightening. US military forces had to once again aid civilian authorities in need too.
Christina Cruz Flores had gone to Missouri after President Mitchell had made the public announcement that he wished for her to become the 53rd Vice President. A morale visit to troops and then an event planned to make a televised address to citizens of the West who had fled the DAR and were in one of the big FEMA camps in Missouri (there were even larger ones further west) were on the cards for Cruz. The idea was for her to make a flying visit there before returning to DC for the first stage of her confirmation hearings. The itinerary for her visit was one arranged in the White House and the threat of a direct impact from Ulysses on that was downplayed. No one listened to the weathermen! Cruz ended up stuck in Missouri when the ice storm passed over that deep Red state in the heart of the country. She made the best of it and was even pictured ‘mucking in’ at one of those FEMA camps. That wasn’t usually her sort of thing but it made for some images well-received back in DC and they were used more extensively that negative coverage when she was heckled by some of those refugees who didn’t want to be part of the photo op staged like it was. The US Air Force listened to the weather experts better than the White House did. The airlift still at that time underway moving US forces out of Europe and back home had been victim to Ted affects. When Ulysses came barrelling towards the central portions of the country, re-routing was done of inbound flights away from it. Road and rail convoys to move what was flown home away from airheads had to be rearranged and not everything went perfect with that but at least there were no air crashes of vital airframes, cargoes & personnel due to the ice storm. In addition, whereas Ted had gone further south down into Mexico, Ulysses was projected by to take a left turn once it reached the Gulf Coast: it was predicted to go towards Florida afterwards. Further planning and re-directing of activity was done by the US Air Forces in conjunction with the other uniformed services in light of that. The airlift was something that Ulysses could mess with but it wouldn’t be something that the storm would stop unless those in blue got careless or arrogant about ‘a little bit of ice’.
General Fuller was thrilled when the weathermen were wrong about Ulysses hitting the West really hard. Ted had left almost the entire DAR outside of Hawaii and its Pacific holdings covered in a thick blanket of snow. To have an ice storm come in afterwards could have meant that many more days would have been spent with Fuller unable to do anything with his efforts to defend his nation’s independence. There was still a lot that couldn’t be done yet Fuller was left in a better position than his counterparts to the east. Flight operations received priority. Aircrews and those on the ground who supported them (the latter far more numerous than the former) had had a few days of well-deserved rest yet Fuller got them back to work. He moved around his assets and there was also work done to try and repair some of the grave damage inflicted when stealth bombers had struck at several key facilities with their sneaky – going around the weather they had – Operation Fire Spear. He set about issuing orders for the movements of troops too in light of recent US military operations under their new commander right before Ted hit. The 2nd Infantry Division received updated instructions, changing their destination since they had been pulled out of the fighting in Idaho. Instead of going to the western half of Colorado, Fuller tasked that force to go down to New Mexico. The situation was even more pressing there and should, once the weather cleared up, US Army North go over on the offensive with everything they had towards Arizona, Fuller’s fear was that the DAR would be done for within weeks. Air assets went that way and the troops coming down from where they had been blooded a little in Idaho were to be joined by others. Both the 189th & 196th Infantry Brigades – separate training units converted into combat formations full of reservists answering the call to the colours for the DAR – were sent towards the western half of New Mexico as well to get there ahead of US forces anticipated to be racing west as soon as they could. Moreover, there were marines in Hawaii which Fuller wanted sent to the same battlefield. The 3rd Marine Division there was only a division on paper after assets had been previously striped away yet Fuller wanted the rest of those marines on the mainland: orders went to Hawaii for them to stand ready to fly out with the DAR’s military chief in the dark about what was happening there politically.
Before he had been forcibly retired from uniformed service with the United States, Lt.-General Darius Fuller had been with touching distance of getting his fourth star and climbing to the highest ranks within the US Armed Forces. He had been serving at the Pentagon when the Taiwan Conflict suddenly turned to that short but extremely violent, and quite terrifying, US-China shooting war. His post of Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been him integral to what had happened when then-President Walsh had instructed American interference against the Chinese as they set about conquering Taiwan and then their counterattacks against that. It wasn’t due to what he had done while serving where he had at such a crucial time that saw his downfall but instead the politics of his wife at that point in early 2027. The excuse made for getting rid of Fuller (among others) had been that it was China-related yet it was really all political. He had sought revenge afterwards though when the chance came, when he manoeuvred himself to become the C-in-C of the DAR Armed Forces, he had pretended that it was about his service to the democratic ideas of that new country. Kicking his former country, the nation which had turned its back on him and who he waged war against, was what it was really all about though. That last posting at the Pentagon had been part administrative, part operational. Fuller had before that spent the majority of his US Army career working in the fields of intelligence and counter-intelligence. That was his speciality. His chosen key staff – Westerners mainly yet with still many Easterners like him too – at the top of the DAR Armed Forces contained many officers who had likewise spent their careers in US Armed Forces in such roles too. The numerical weakness that the forces under his command had when faced with those seeking to destroy the DAR had been offset by some remarkable achievements in getting one over on his former comrades-in-arms back in the Pentagon where deception, trickery and outright lies had made sure that the DAR wouldn’t be ‘crushed within the week’ as some fools there had said to equally stupid idiots on Capitol Hill. One of the big lies was the fate of so much secret equipment at Area 51 in Nevada. Experimental weapons of war were reported back to DC to have been destroyed ahead of capture when the facility was taken by Fuller’s flying columns. There had been very little of that. Area 51 had been taken before the deliberate planned destruction there of communications gear, laser technology and radars could be undertaken. An outgoing report from the senior man on the ground who had switched allegiance told of all of that elimination of what the Pentagon didn’t want Fuller to get his hands on. Not all of it was ultimately useful yet some of those mobile radar arrays had been. The Green Pine X ballistic missile interception system had been put to great use and so too had the pair of SPY-8 air-search radars that had that in-built offensive capability. Eventually, the Pentagon had discovered what had been done when Fuller made use of those radars yet it had cost those who wore the uniform of the United States dear. He still had a few other surprises up his sleeve but the radars were of great value.
When Las Vegas was bombed, two of the three secret radars, spread far away from there out in the wilderness in distant states, were knocked out too. One more SPY-8 remained operational and there were also airborne radars in service (aboard AWACS aircraft and the fantastic ones in F-22s) but the blow inflicted was severe. Fuller took their losses personally. He didn’t believe that it was just luck that allowed for Pentagon planners to locate them and destroy the two that they did. The capabilities of their reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering were known to him and his key people involved in the deployment of those radars. They hadn’t been located through sloppiness nor any secret detection system that the DAR Armed Forces didn’t know about. Those radars were used sparingly and on the move. Only by someone providing information closely-guarded to the other side had Operation Fire Spear allowed for B-2 bombers to drop ordnance on them like they had. Fuller thus knew he had a spy to deal with. It was someone in the know, with access to the most secret elements of the deployments of his new country’s air defences. He had tasked his counter-intelligence people to find that traitor to the cause and also uncover how that information was being send out too. Fuller wanted punishment delivered upon whomever had done that – he’d take pleasure in seeing punishment done too as he took the whole matter personally – but he also wanted to exploit the communications method which the spy had been using. First though, there was the hunt for the guilty party before a ‘game’ could be played back with those on the other end.
While he had the pressing matter of a traitor on his mind, Fuller spent time with the meteorologists. He went through with them their updated predictions on what Ulysses would do once it reached the Gulf Coast and took that left turn. Fuller sought assurances that the weather system wouldn’t start tearing up the East Coast, not for a few days at least anyway. While they made no promises, the weathermen told him that that was unlikely: Ulysses would go out to sea. They didn’t ask why he wanted to know all that he did and was so interested… yet they were uniformed military weather specialists and not civilians so therefore had an idea. It was clear that Fuller was interested in how that storm might affect air operations a few days after his ‘chat’ with them with regard to aircraft flying over the East Coast. The DAR Air Force had a big mission coming up and Fuller was seeing when he would be able to follow his own orders for a response to the attack on Las Vegas.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Apr 22, 2021 18:07:44 GMT
99 – Plans
Lt.–General Lambert had moved the Main HQ for US Army North up from Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio to Oklahoma’s Fort Sill right before Winter Storm Ted had hit. The change in location was mainly down to his feeling that San Antonio was too distant from many of his component forces under ARNORTH command: Fort Sill was more centralised. Moreover, he was both an artilleryman and an Oklahoma native. He chose a location which he felt at home at with such a choice. There was a Forward HQ (a mobile column) established inside New Mexico where Lambert had left his deputy in-charge during the two storms which hit when January turned to February. At both locations, those at the two sites suffered under the adverse effects of the weather leaving the headquarters blanketed in snow first and then covered in deadly ice the second time around. Fort Sill was protected by missile batteries and patrolling soldiers too with the weather giving each had hard time. There was an airstrip adjacent to the command post which Lambert had established in central Oklahoma yet he was unable to use it during the unprecedented weather event. He didn’t travel away from his headquarters and spent the time inside in meetings with his staff as well as making outside communication using secure satellite links to talk to the Pentagon.
The command which Lambert had inherited upon the death of his predecessor had been something that he had been trying to completely rearrange ahead of the two storms doing their worst: there hadn’t been the time though. Corrigan’s death was technically one while in combat allowing the former ARNORTH commander to be treated as some sort of heroic figure. Lambert was the one dealing with the mess left behind and he had no good words to say about the time-server, the incompetent fool whom he had taken over from. However, he kept his mouth shut on that. It suited those in DC to somewhat lionise Corrigan for their own political gains and that required him to nod along to the platitudes while getting on with the real work needing to be done. Lambert had been in Europe when Corrigan had been tasked to assemble an army to strike west and to put down the armed rebellion which the Democratic American Republic was. He’d had access to some information about what Corrigan had been doing ahead of the opening attack made and then how it had gone at the start. He’d held his head in his hands at it. There had been an overwhelming advantage which ARNORTH had had yet Corrigan hadn’t made correct use of that across the board. Only up in the northeast of Colorado, an offensive operation going forward which had had its faults yet was overall generally sound, had there been success met. Corrigan hadn’t lived to see the ultimate success there. Elsewhere though, Lambert considered how Corrigan had arranged his forces and what he had done with them to be a disgrace. Offensive capability was diluted by the wide geographical spread. There had been seemingly little thought given to supporting attacks between the component pieces of ARNORTH with its corps and their divisional elements. Only there on the attack to take Colorado Springs and move to encircle enemy forces outside of Denver so that big city would be isolated had there been any of that. Lambert had afterwards discovered that why things had gone so wrong there, and not done so elsewhere, had been the influence that two of the corps commanders had: the two officers who led the wartime-established US VII Corps and the standing US XVIII Airborne Corps. They’ll won the fight there, one which the deceased Corrigan was being credited for after he’d been flying on that unarmed aircraft when DAR Air Force interceptors targeted it for a shoot-down. The deployments into Montana and with the forces tasked to move out of Texas into New Mexico had been all wrong. Opposition forces were given time and opportunity, practically gifted that, to make a staged withdrawal back to naturally defensive positions behind strong geographical figures. They’d been allowed to make a fight for their own claimed territory – a great propaganda move – and blood US forces when it was clear that they couldn’t hold on when forward deployed. If Lambert had been commander of ARNORTH at the start, he would have used special forces supported by airborne units to do what was done in the Colorado stretch of the Rockies and secure access routes through the mountains denying the ability of the opposition to withdraw back to where they had wanted to. For little expense, so much could have been gained. Corrigan’s failure to do that in the south of Colorado and the north of New Mexico had been mistakes Lambert had been unable to at once fix upon taking over. He had managed to change the situation entirely in central New Mexico and give the DAR a beating when crushing their forces outside Albuquerque yet that had come late and the victory won there was nowhere as near complete as he would have liked it.
All of his criticisms had been noted by those in the Pentagon. They preferred the narrative of Corrigan as a hero though, cut down in his prime by a cowards enemy. What they also wanted was progress in the future rather than references to past ignominious defeats.
When he was snowed in at Fort Sill, Lambert worked with his similarly trapped staff to make sure that under his command, ARNORTH went from victory to victory. His mission orders were to take his soldiers and marines all the way to the Pacific coastline and liberating the West while doing so. There was a whole lot of plans drafted as to how that could be done once the weather cleared up. That involved a major reshuffle of forces, the addition of reinforcements and a change of focus. The so-called ‘broad front strategy’ had been junked by Lambert upon taking over and he had Pentagon support to continue that through February without political interference. It had been the will of politicians sticking their noses in, combined with what Lambert understood was a willingness by both Corrigan and the commander of US NORTHCOM to try to please them, that had allowed the madness of trying to liberate Idaho with such weak forces and also try to fight through the Rockies after Denver when all attention should have been directed further south. That was where the better ground was located and where there were excellent communications links either side of the front-lines. Back in DC, there were Members of Congress who had pushed for equal attention, maybe more in fact, to be given to liberating Idaho & Utah as there was for elsewhere in the states claimed by the DAR for their own illegal country. Those two had been ‘stolen’ by the secessionists in Las Vegas late in the formation of their regime whereas others had gone along more willingly. An American and a patriot, Lambert had been just as outraged at all of that as those in DC. Regardless, his business was that of war. To liberate Idaho and Utah – the two of them being Red states under occupation by Blue states wasn’t something lost on him when understanding the politician’s motives – could come by taking the majority of New Mexico, running riot across Arizona and tearing up into California and Nevada from the flank. There would be a collapse of the DAR’s ability to fight when that happened and without the need for any extra unnecessary bloodshed, the rest of their country would cave in when Lambert did as his plans called for and sent his tanks to California’s Central Valley!
Big plans like that for how his offensive would go were drafted alongside other ones of equal importance despite them not having the sex appeal that a westwards drive at speed would. Lambert’s staff worked to have the forces in-place to do that while preforming other necessary tasks so that ARNORTH could win the war he was tasked to lead on the ground and no longer get bogged down fighting the fight that the enemy wanted to have. Orders were cut for transfers of units and changes to operational areas. There were new tasks for Lambert’s forces to undertake including the screening of the Santa Fe area and pinning withdrawn DAR forces inside the Rockies where they could be left to wither on the vine. Additional incoming forces brought into the fight after being flown across the North Atlantic with the airlift, lighter combat support & service support units, were ordered to slot into different sub-commands below ARNORTH. Lambert issued instructions for where individual replacements, soldiers replacing the dead and injured, would go in number rather than any widespread distribution. New supply routes for his forces where they were at that time and where he planned to have them were worked out. It was the same with his air support from US Army & US Marines assets plus those of the US Air Force too. Other fire support was re-tasked to new missions too which saw a stripping away in non-important areas of operation to allow for an increase where Lambert wanted to see them better used. There were personnel changes with regards to new commanders and staffs further down the command chain too. Engineering units were given instructions to begin moving once it was possible to do so to open up the way ahead for both the supporting units as well as combat forces. They were going to get to that task once the weather improved.
So much of what Lambert wanted to see done was held up while Winter Storm Ulysses did its worst across almost the entire front and deep throughout the rear areas where ARNORTH was spread. All the plans in the world were fine to have along with desire to get on with the business of fighting to destroy the DAR and the traitors within. However, what Lambert needed was the bad weather to end. Once it lifted, the weather people promised him a long period of reasonable weather to operate in. There would still be cold and wind yet no more snow and the shocking ice fall either. Without that, ARNORTH could get on with what it was tasked to do. Lambert planned to take them all the way deep into the West and see the Central Valley, Las Vegas too, not just on his maps.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Apr 23, 2021 16:23:46 GMT
In the update below, I have done a speculation on the payload of the B-21A Raider as being capable of carrying either 72no 500lb bombs or 36no bombs and 12no JASSMs. Assumptions on my part because the precise details aren't known but it is meant to carry less than a B-2A (which has a capability of eighty bombs and sixteen missiles). Or course, other payloads, different mixes are possible too.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Apr 23, 2021 16:24:20 GMT
100 – Bombers over DC
General Fuller had standing orders to put bombers over DC in light of United States air attacks against Las Vegas. They had risen to the challenge of the threat of retaliation by bombing the capital of the Democratic American Republic once more, and so the DAR military chief made plans to do as promised and return the favour. Several hours before he sent his trio of B-21A Raider stealth bombers towards their distant targets, the Council of Thirteen intervened in what he had been given permission by Minister Rawlings to do. That intervention wasn’t welcomed by neither Rawlings nor Fuller. Key members of his new country’s ruling body decided that striking where the plan called for was too risky. They feared that those at the top of the US Government might overreact. They might think it was an external attack of a strategic nature and, in a moment of panic, do something drastic. Fuller had been incommunicado at that key moment – flying from Arizona to Oregon in radio silence less his movements be monitored for a strike against him – and his deputy, the very capable Lt.–Gen. Natasha Harvey, had tried to limit what those politicians were fearing. She’d told them that the US Armed Forces would see the attack for what it was and not start giving orders for ICBMs to fly towards Moscow and Beijing! A suggestion was put by her to them: either she or Fuller would place a call to the US Strategic Command HQ at Offutt AFB in Nebraska five, ten minutes ahead of time and say an air attack was on the way and it was one made by the DAR with no nukes involved. Governors Isaac and Pierce had asked her if she was mocking them with that idea but she had been deadly serious. It was a viable option with no threat to the mission. Regardless, the Council of Thirteen didn’t like the original plan when presented to them and changed it. Fuller had wanted to bomb Andrews AFB and the Pentagon, both outside of DC itself, while striking inside against both the Navy Yard (full of headquarters establishments & admin. infrastructure) as well as the State Department complex. They would only allow for the Navy Yard to be hit yet absolutely ruled out hitting the other targets. When on the ground in Oregon, Fuller had got in touch and suggested striking secondary targets as the primary ones instead. They were lined up in case a last-minute look at opposition defences made hitting the priority ones impossible. He’d wanted to bomb his first choices but realised that the Council of Thirteen members – the governors of Oregon and California spoke for many others there – weren’t going to allow it. What was important to him was that the DAR kept its promise to hit back and he could live with the change in targets. They agreed to his changes. Governors Rowan (Colorado) and Quinn (Washington) urged their colleagues to stick with the plan, even modified, because the two of them were with Rawlings in the thinking that doing nothing when a clear open threat had been made was suicidal for the DAR. Fuller got his go ahead to use his three bombers to go after four targets just inside the edges of DC and also in nearby Maryland. Falling bombs to be put atop DC targets came with missiles to be fired from them too against further targets away from the United States’ capital city.
On the night of February 4th, once Winter Storm Ulysses had gone the away as Ted had done beforehand, the B-21s departed from NAS Point Mugu on the Californian coast and met tankers to top them up with fuel near the Four Corners. That rendezvous where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico & Utah met was made in radio silence and soon afterwards the bombers flew further east into enemy territory. They split up and took indirect routes towards their distant targets on the far side of North America. One of them, Bomber #3, came within radar range of a US Air Force E-3G Sentry AWACS aircraft when flying through the Mid-West yet it wasn’t properly identified for what it was. Fighters were sent looking for what many believed was a ghost target and their pilots had no luck in locating the bomber which had just for a moment been partially detected. The sighting was ultimately written off as a radar glitch… until a few hours later that was. As to the other two, no one got a whiff of them. They and the third descended upon the wider DC area in the early hours of February 5th 2029 and commenced their bomb runs. DC was supposed to be protected – fighters, radars and missiles – but those defences did no good at all in stopping what came.
First hit was the Navy Yard. It was located near where the Anacostia River met the Potomac. From out of the belly of Bomber #2 fell thirty-six 500lb JDAM-guided bombs. They slammed into multiple targeted buildings with near-perfect accuracy and caused a great deal of destruction on the ground. Bomber #3 was just on the other side of the Anacostia, down in the southeastern reaches of DC where the headquarters of both the Defence Intelligence Agency and the Department for Homeland Security were located. It dropped twice as many bombs – everything inside its internal weapons bays – over the two of those sites. Immense damage was done and there were significant casualties among those military and federal employees working at each during the early hours. No warning came to them that over seventy 500lb high-explosive bombs were going to hit their places of work like that. Bomber #1 had no target inside DC but instead went to Fort Meade not that far away. There at that Maryland location there were some military facilities but in the main, the site was used by the National Security Agency. Another three dozen bombs fell there, with those 500lb weapons smashing into the iconic buildings and causing immense casualties. NSA operations took a major hit and they were left afterwards in a far worse state than the DIA and DHS were.
Two of the B-21s launched missiles after their bomb runs. They fired several JASSM missiles in seemingly every direction away from their courses set for home. Those cruise missiles raced towards distant targets far away from DC to strike at a pair of mobile radars west of them and also half a dozen power distribution facilities scattered across New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. In New York state, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, those undefended civilian sites which provided the power to keep the lights on in so many cities were hit with terrific explosions when the JASSMs slammed into them. A cascading power failure came about following the sudden strike with the exact effects of that planned out by Fuller’s staff back in Las Vegas based on when the missiles would hit each site. The computer modelling was something that a lot of work had gone into with that. Many other locations were still operational but they struck the important ones and in a manner designed to bring down the whole power grid over an immense area. The plan worked. From Boston to New York, from Philadelphia to DC and from Buffalo to Pittsburgh, the power suddenly went out after a flicker of lights. Tens of millions were at once affected. The majority were asleep at the time yet others were awake to see everywhere go dark. Once the sun came up the next morning, while artificial lights weren’t needed everywhere, the loss of them was still something important… as it was with everything else that was needed across the North East which used electricity. Hospitals and key infrastructure had emergency generators and there were efforts started to get the power grids up and running again yet nothing with that was easy. Civilian unrest would occur and that included widespread looting in certain sections of many big cities including both New York and DC.
The bombers flew home. There was panic in DC and among the US Government – President Mitchell was woken up – yet no one there seriously considered that the attack was anything but what it was. The DAR had done as promised and struck in revenge for the bombing a few nights beforehand of their capital along with that wider B-2 strike against the West. US forces tried to locate the B-21s during their flights to link up with those tankers and make a return to their dispersed operating location beside the Pacific. It was something that was impossible to do though. The bombers had been over DC after getting there successfully and flew home, meeting the same tankers again near the Four Corners, without being caught either. They went back into the mobile protective shelters located at that DAR Navy air facility with the hope that the camouflage and remote location would hide them.
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gillan1220
Fleet admiral
I've been depressed recently. Slow replies coming in the next few days.
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Post by gillan1220 on Apr 23, 2021 16:45:11 GMT
For the first time since 1814, D.C. came under enemy attack.
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Post by redrobin65 on Apr 23, 2021 23:58:13 GMT
Well that's going to make the US less than happy to say the least, especially if the disruption from the power outage results in a bunch of deaths. Too bad about D.C., it's quite a nice city.
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Post by jedicommisar on Apr 24, 2021 7:20:41 GMT
There is something we need to discus namely Mexico, there is a certain segment of American "media" that portrays Mexican immigrants as invaders how do you think they are treating MAR, "She was sent up by Mexico to brake up Our Great Country, we need to do something about the treat of Mexico!" and the worst part is there are going to be people that listen to this and demand strikes against Mexico, weather anyone in power listens is of course completely up in the air
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Apr 25, 2021 18:31:23 GMT
For the first time since 1814, D.C. came under enemy attack. Yes. Though in very limited fashion. Those in Las Vegas did fear flattening parts of it, such as Congress and the White House, would bring too strong of a reaction and cause an unintentional world war. Well that's going to make the US less than happy to say the least, especially if the disruption from the power outage results in a bunch of deaths. Too bad about D.C., it's quite a nice city. It'll cause civil unrest and effect the war effort: just as desired. The problems can be fixed but it'll take time. The bombings in DC are right at the very SE quarter, almost in Maryland, but it is still the city being hit. There is something we need to discus namely Mexico, there is a certain segment of American "media" that portrays Mexican immigrants as invaders how do you think they are treating MAR, "She was sent up by Mexico to brake up Our Great Country, we need to do something about the treat of Mexico!" and the worst part is there are going to be people that listen to this and demand strikes against Mexico, weather anyone in power listens is of course completely up in the air Interesting point. Mexico has already been destabilised but that won't be seen by many people in the US as any form of US punishment. They'll blames Mexico for all its 'own' problems. I have some later ideas for Mexico but I'll give that some more thought now! |
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
Posts: 7,608
Likes: 8,833
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Post by James G on Apr 25, 2021 18:31:58 GMT
101 – Change of heart
The speed with which the opening of contact with the US Government had been achieved, and the success met there, had been something that Governor Ito had found pleasantly surprising. She wanted to take Hawaii out of the Democratic American Republic to rejoin the United States and found that those in DC were willing to work with her to make that happen. Ito would reverse the illegal decision taken by her deceased predecessor in removing Hawaii from where she considered it belonged, as part of the United States, and with that restore what she saw as real democracy, not the bastardised version of that proclaimed from those secessionists in Las Vegas. However, while making contact and getting across an understanding of intent was easily done, getting over the final hurdle was more difficult. Ito and the state’s political leaders wanted to secure for themselves legal protection. She and the key figures at the top of Hawaii’s legislative bodies had had no input in that state’s previous succession. The then serving governor along with the four members of Hawaii’s congressional delegation had done that. They had committed active treason. Yet, by not opposing what happened, just sitting on their hands while it went on, Ito and her supporters had still been participants in what had occurred. The fear that the US Government would punish them was a major concern. Doing nothing to stop what had happened might not be considered as bad as actively taking part but she and them realised that it was still something that they could be punished for even after Hawaii’s change of heart brought about the re-defection they wanted to achieve. Securing the necessary guarantees drew out the process of Ito being able to move forward. That was further complicated by the circumstances of how contact was established and maintained with those in DC. Using third party foreign nationals, her husband and the Australian Consulate-General as a go-between, had been done by Ito to avoid detection of those in Las Vegas she (wrongly) believed were watching for betrayal. There was no direct back-and-forth negotiation with the Mitchell Administration where the problems could be ironed out with ease. Everything took time. The wait for a reply then the drafting of a response before that could then be sent off, at her end and there in DC too, dragged out what had first seemed like an easy process. The leaders of the state legislature had secured the support of the military commanders of prominence in Hawaii, those who had sworn allegiance to the DAR with what they said fingers crossed behind their backs, and they had been poised to bring their forces on-side. During the waiting for their political masters to get what they wanted in terms of legal protection, orders came from the DAR Armed Forces’ commander-in-chief to prepare to send a good bulk of those to the mainland. That could be delayed but not for long. Those in uniform made it clear their civilian masters that any real delay, beyond what could be excused as internal communications hiccups, would allow ‘the enemy’ to get wind of what was going on. Ito understood that. Still, she wanted to make sure that there would not be unjust punishment for her and those like her as Hawaii’s leaders. She needed to have cast iron guarantees. In addition, not just thinking of herself, Ito had to likewise consider the needs of the island chain’s population. She wanted DC to provide immediate relief in terms of food and medicines to Hawaiians. Her state’s residents needed access to relief with haste and she wanted to make sure that the federal government would deliver on that rather than kick the issue into the long grass. That was of real urgency every passing hour.
When the 3rd Marine Division – no more than a brigade after earlier removals of key elements – didn’t fly out of Hawaii for Arizona on February 5th, General Fuller refused to believe what he heard of excuses as to why that didn’t happen. When he was left unconvinced by the commander on the ground in Oahu, he took his concerns to Minister Rawlings. Nothing he heard about the apparently reasonable delays cut it with him and not with her either. They went to the Council of Thirteen to bring to the attention of that body a suspicion that something was afoot. Ito was a member of that ruling council. Joining the conversation remotely from where she was on Oahu, she lied through her teeth following a pre-drafted script on how to explain what was happening with the only significant ground-based military force left in Hawaii not leaving. Ito denied that there was any issue with the loyalty of the commander of that force and backed up his assertion that the bomb damage done to air facilities at the end of January by the US Navy’s raid, plus the presence of US Navy carriers east of Hawaii, were responsible. It wasn’t up to him, and by extension Ito either, Rawlings replied to judge those risks against what those higher in the chain of command ordered him to do. Hawaii’s governor – who had never had a good relationship with the US senator who had become the DAR’s Minister for Defence & Security – stood by the senior officer on the ground in Hawaii and his best judgement. Moreover, she questioned the right of Rawlings to assert that she, Ito, had no business interfering. Civilian control of the military was a key plank of the DAR Government and she sat on that nation’s highest body. All of that took the others by surprise. It was a dispute which went personal which the other members didn’t see the need for it to be. The marine commander on the ground on Oahu seemed to be overstepping his authority, yes, but Council of Thirteen members stood with Ito when she supported that officer. She was not one of them but the matter of what was right and what was wrong was more important. Ito promised them that the situation would be resolved and that Hawaii would be sending the last troops available in her state off to the front-lines soon enough. She further lied when she assured them that there was total commitment to the DAR too from her and Hawaii. Fuller and Rawlings fumed, and there were a couple of council members uneasy, but Ito got away with it all. She brought herself a little more time, just a bit.
Hours after that difficult conversation, Ito slipped out of the governor’s official residence in Honolulu and went where her husband had previous gone to that Australian diplomatic compound. The ASIS had brought into Hawaii via the diplomatic bag a secure satellite communications link-up. Spooks and politicians in Canberra would afterwards hear all that she said when she first spoke to SecState Renzi and the President Mitchell too… but that was known by all involved ahead of time. What mattered was that the Governor of Hawaii could finally make direct contact with those at the very top in DC. The conversations weren’t very long yet they were successful. Ito and the people she was fighting for, Hawaiians both at the top in political terms and the ordinary people too, would get what they needed. She also was left secure. There would be no prosecutions through the Justice Department nor any informal persecution for behaviour undertaking back in January in not stopping the secession of Hawaii. Urgent civilian relief would arrive and Hawaii would be protected against what Ito feared would be a DAR military attack done out of spite. What she had to give up was any hope for the ability to somehow ‘save’ the Hawaiian Army National Guard units deployed in New Mexico and fighting against the United States. The fate of all of those national guardsmen – misguided and deceived she had said again and again to Renzi and Mitchell – was nothing that neither she nor those in DC could control. Hawaii’s state assembly & senate speakers had tried to get Ito to forget trying to secure a way out for them, telling her it was impossible as they were fully under DAR control, and she had to finally accept that. Nothing could be done for them but the one point six million plus people in Hawaii in the meanwhile were what mattered. Once the agreement was struck to get everything else she wanted, Ito considered the promises made by the Mitchell Administration to be binding for the president and her too. She left the diplomatic building and went back to inform her co-conspirators, politicians and military officers alike, that they would get protection just as the people of Hawaii would be provided for. Word then went out from those who put their trust in the concessions that their governor had won to prepare the state for the re-transfer of allegiance back to the United States.
Rapid action was taken with that there and also for others under instructions from those in DC too.
The US Navy was the first to return to Hawaii, beating the other armed services in getting Operation Blue Eagle underway. At first light the following morning, combat aircraft from two carriers appeared in the skies above the island chain Pacific state. They didn’t meet any opposition nor did they launch a second air raid. Combat was prepared for if something went wrong yet it wasn’t sought. Blue Eagle was supposed to go off without any bloodshed. From the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, CMV-22B Ospreys flew in lower than the circling combat jets and made landings on Oahu as well as Big Island. Parties of officers and sailors in specialist fields arrived at military sites with a focus upon the bomb-damaged Pearl Harbor. As had been the case in the skies, there was no resistance on the ground. They were met by ‘friends’: DAR Navy officers who until less than a month before had been with the US Navy too yet had chosen to defect. Those men and women had once more changed their uniform insignia back to that of the United States though with crude Hawaiian state flags shown as well. The defectors submitted themselves to US Navy control while also making it clear that there was likewise allegiance to Hawaii as well. Naval facilities on the island were open to those who rightfully owned them.
The US Air Force and US Army played their role in Operation Blue Eagle too. Using tanker support, F-22s and F-35s flew down from Alaska and into Hickham AFB. Behind them came larger aircraft transporting soldiers. With so much capability tied up in the airlift bringing US forces home from Europe to the mainland United States via the North Atlantic, what was on-hand for a smaller yet just as important airlift out of Alaska wasn’t much. There were no big military freighters used but instead C-130J Hercules’ (who also needed tanker support) as well as requisitioned airliners. The 3rd Airborne Brigade – once part of the DAR-supporting 2nd Infantry Division – was flown down to Hawaii. The soldiers and their light gear weren’t all moved in one lift but rather a series of staged flights. The lead elements came in on the C-130s ready for a fight too. DAR Marines in Hawaii plus the state’s militia with their Territorial Guard was supposed to be on-side and willing to re-swear their loyalty to the United States but only a fool would have sent those soldiers from Alaska in unprepared for something going wrong. No gunfire met them, just Hawaiian military representatives and the commander of the 3rd Marine Division himself. Those on Hawaii went over to US military command just as easily as they had jumped ship the month beforehand to a secessionist regime.
One of the Ospreys which had landed pier-side deep within the shore establishment at Pearl Harbor took a short flight to Hickham to pick up federal government officials who’d come in on the third C-130 just behind the leading elements of battle-ready US Army paratroopers. A handful of military police and military intelligence officers went with the civilians as the Osprey made another short flight. It landed soon afterwards in Downtown Honolulu on the main road right outside the State Capitol building. Territorial Guard militiamen had cleared the way of obstructions and a perfect touchdown was made. The civilians and military escort went out of the tilt-rotor aircraft and up the steps of that iconic building in the middle of the city. Governor Ito, the state’s civilian leadership and several military officers were waiting for them. Introductions were made and handshakes exchanged. Representatives of the State Department, the Justice Department, the Pentagon and from the Mitchell Administration out of the White House went in there along with FBI agents and Secret Service officers. Others would follow on the ground but they made that dramatic entrance first. Ito sat them all down and then began to discover what President Mitchell’s promises the night before actually meant when the US had forces on the ground.
It took some time before those in Las Vegas found out. Nearly eight hours passed before Fuller and Rawlings were able to confirm that they had lost contact with Hawaii not as a result of an opposition attack but instead in a deliberate manner enforced by those on the ground. Fuller’s military intelligence people were able to provide him with communications intercepts showing not just that that had been done but why it had been too. There would be silence allowing for US military forces to arrive unhindered by anyone who might not be willing to accept that change of heart. Rawlings at first refused to believe it. Hawaii was the minister’s home state. She kept asking for clarification, for proof that it wasn’t some sort of trick. When Fuller could give her that, she tried backdoor communications links to her supposedly allies there in Hawaii. All of those were shut down. The Council of Thirteen became the Council of Twelve once they were told. Action was demanded. Hawaii would be fought for, members confidently declared, and whatever US forces had gained a foothold would be thrown back into the sea. Such statements like that made great sound-bites but Fuller had to explain to them the reality of how that was impossible. It couldn’t be done. He didn’t have the forces to do that and there wasn’t enough accurate information of all that was going on there in Hawaii to make it work. The silence made the takeover possible to protect. Those in Las Vegas had to accept that one of the founding states of the Democratic American Republic had been lost and there was nothing that could be done to change that.
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