Shanghaied - 2ACW

[James G]

Mar 26, 2021 8:48:13 GMT gillan1220 said:

Now here comes the dilemma of the USN's loyalty. I take that the DARN is using the old USS Midway musuem ship in San Diego and refitted it? Or is this a new USS Midway? I'm glad the USN didn't lose their Gerald R. Ford-class carriers. Would have a been a big blow if one came into the possession of the DAR. Is the third one, the USS Doris Miller, already in service by this time?

One thing I was correct is that America's adversaries are taking advantage of the situation.

By now, who is loyal and who is not should be resolved... should be. But they can change.
Midway is the John C Stennis with a name change: the namesake has a history of racist remarks and so the name was changed in 2022.
Miller not yet finished. Delays to that one.

It will be in the Baltic where real conflict, not muscle flexing, breaks out but who knows elsewhere.

[gillan1220]

Mar 26, 2021 9:09:07 GMT James G said:

Mar 26, 2021 8:48:13 GMT gillan1220 said:

Now here comes the dilemma of the USN's loyalty. I take that the DARN is using the old USS Midway musuem ship in San Diego and refitted it? Or is this a new USS Midway? I'm glad the USN didn't lose their Gerald R. Ford-class carriers. Would have a been a big blow if one came into the possession of the DAR. Is the third one, the USS Doris Miller, already in service by this time?

One thing I was correct is that America's adversaries are taking advantage of the situation.

By now, who is loyal and who is not should be resolved... should be. But they can change.
Midway is the John C Stennis with a name change: the namesake has a history of racist remarks and so the name was changed in 2022.
Miller not yet finished. Delays to that one.

It will be in the Baltic where real conflict, not muscle flexing, breaks out but who knows elsewhere.

This decade can't take a break. A Second American Civil War occurs then Russia invades the Baltic states. This is even way darker than the 1930s was.

[James G]

76 – Eyes

4th Platoon, SEAL Team Five, had been on a winter training exercise up in the Alaskan wilderness when the UDI was made in Las Vegas to declare independence for the Democratic American Republic. Their home base down near San Diego at Coronado came under the control of the newly-established DAR Armed Forces along with other SEALs who were there at the time. 4th Platoon reaffirmed their allegiance to the United States of America though. There were fears for their families and concerns over friends but they kept their loyalty. The fourteen men and two women (the first female SEAL passed training in 2019 with the first serving woman SEAL beginning in ‘22) with the detached special forces unit who had remained in US service. They were held in Alaska ready to play their part in the Second American Civil War when called upon to do so. When that moment came, to be sent off to fight their fellow Americans, those who had turned their backs on the country, 4th Platoon followed their orders. They didn’t hesitate, didn’t desert nor question them as others did. By that point so much blood had already been spilt yet there was also a high motivation and sense of loyalty among them. Their assigned task was dangerous. It was one that ordinary men and women would baulk at. Not 4th Platoon. They made ‘the jump’ as per their orders. That jump meant leaping out of the side cargo door of a KC-46A Pegasus jet at an altitude of thirty-three thousand feet. They leapt out and quickly opened their parachutes. The HAHO jump – lesser-known than a HALO operation – meant that their parachutes deployed when they were high in the pitch black skies over the Pacific North-West. Back to Alaska that tanker/transport flew while they fell to earth. Their commander, a female lieutenant, led her SEALs towards the LZ. She kept them in order behind her as gravity pulled them down as the parachutes fought against that. The LZ was reached perfectly without any complications. 4th Platoon landed on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. On the ground, parachutes were buried and the SEALs moved off. They conducted a rapid night-time march using cover already selected by satellite shots of the area. Throughout the darkness, 4th Platoon went eastwards through forests and reached US Highway-101 long before dawn. That road ran across their line of advance and was being used – sparingly though – by DAR military traffic. At a carefully chosen moment, 4th Platoon crossed it and disappeared into cover on the other side. They hid during the short hours of daylight with half of team on watch and the other half sleeping. The rest was needed for there was another march once it got dark, again carrying heavy loads. That was completed as 4th Platoon went east until they found another pre-selected point, ahead of schedule too. An OP was soon set up. From that position, the SEALs had an uninterrupted view upon where the strategic missile submarine DARNS Nebraska, the one loaded with all of those nuclear-tipped Trident SLBMs, was located. A hide was created, where members of 4th Platoon would spent most of their time as there was no need for everyone to watch the submarine, and emergency escape routes were walked. A rally point was chosen to escape to in the event of an attack and a second one was also selected by the senior enlisted SEAL, a veteran of many overseas combat missions, as well. Where possible infiltration points for an enemy were reckoned to be, there were trip-wires laid attached to flash/bang grenades. Obbo spots to guard against any incoming attack were also assumed: they’d have eyes on anyone who came their way. 4th Platoon had themselves a mini-fortress in where they were but one which, if entered by an enemy, they would abandon with haste rather than make a fight of it. Killing the enemy wasn’t their mission. Watching that submarine partially submerged near to NS Bangor was. There in Washington the SEALs stayed until ordered to leave… or take action.

A pair of New Mexico Air National Guard CV-22B Ospreys flew a cargo of Green Berets in DAR service towards Texas. Those two tilt-rotors left Libby Army Airfield, next to Fort Huachuca, and crossed airspace inside Arizona and New Mexico first before going over the international border into Mexico before they came near the El Paso/Juarez area. The illegal crossing was made at night and at low altitude. It was one undetected by the Mexicans who would have responded if they had known. The pilots of the CV-22s knew what they were doing though in staying out of sight of anyone watching either with their eyes or on radar screens. Flight time inside Mexico was short before there was another border crossing made, that time into the United States. The Rio Grande was left behind as the aircraft weaved their way across the sky with the pilots using night-vision goggles to navigate rather than any active nor passive radar system. A broken down company of DAR Army Special Forces was split between the cargo holds of each of them and were alerted that the LZ was ahead upon approach to it. Moving from airplane fashion to that of a helicopter, the CV-22s came to a hover in an isolated spot on the west-facing side of the Quitman Mountains. The Green Berets departed with haste once touchdown occurred with the loadmasters closing up the rear ramps the moment that the last man was out. Those passengers, carrying weapons and supplies, were off on a raiding mission in Far West Texas where Interstate-10 ran as the MSR for the US III Corps. They were no longer the mission for the CV-22 crews: getting home safety was theirs after that drop off. Back towards the Rio Grande and Mexico the aircraft went. Entry was made once again undetected – by the Mexicans anyway – into that foreign country as a course was then set to head back to DAR air space. The pair of CV-22s were almost there when the shout was made that they were under attack. Missiles were in the sky, ones fired from US Air Force jets back in Texas skies. Those fighters were F-16s from the Air Force Reserve flying out of Laughlin AFB, far down the course of the Rio Grande past the Big Bend. An AWACS directed their fire upon the spotted DAR aircraft. Altitude was rapidly lost and the forward flying speed went to zero as the CV-22s hovered literally feet off the ground without going forward. They were in dead ground, blow the horizon in a godforsaken nameless patch of desert. They stayed there and the AMRAAMs fired at them didn’t come near. A group of people were spotted by the aircrew from one of the aircraft before they started flying again. There were men, women and children who came towards them. A few weapons were spotted but they weren’t considered hostile. A party of refugees/immigrants, one of the co-pilots suggested to his pilot, and he was right: the border area south of the DAR & United States was full of them. Back to the new country which they served the aircrews few afterwards, escaping any more hostile attention towards them. What became of the Special Forces team and the people they saw too, they would never know.

A detachment of men and women – Battlefield Airmen the US Air Force called them; that would need a change – were inside Arizona on a combat mission. They were from the Kentucky Air National Guard’s 123rd Special Tactics Squadron and bellied-up near to Laguna Army Airfield, an outlying part of the Yuma Proving Ground. Organised as a Flight, several of them had real combat experience from fights overseas in the Middle East ahead of the mission into the DAR which they were sent on. Laguna, just like MCAS Yuma nearby, was a base of operations for DAR air activity. The airfield had been attacked several times ahead of their arrival by cruise missiles yet they were deployed after an air drop from a MC-130H Combat Talon to guide-in further strikes from on the ground. Eyes were wanted to be on the target due to, what they told ahead of deployment, some sort of weapon being used against missile navigation systems to limit the effectiveness of them. The Battlefield Airmen had the assigned tasks of Combat Controllers and Special Reconnaissance for the Laguna mission. They had security duties and the illuminating of particular targets for US Air Force strike aircraft. Laguna was a big place. In peacetime, it wasn’t home to any aircraft nor helicopters though there were plentiful facilities to allow them to operate. DAR engineers, RED HORSE units who had defected from the US Air Force, had been busy expanding upon what was at the airfield to allow for the sustained operations of both a squadron of MQ-9A drones and a flight of F-16s to fly combat missions out of the place. The Battlefield Airmen moved through the mountains – so much exposed open ground! – from location to location. They stayed out of sight away from security personnel on the ground and the small, hand-held observation drones deployed in a low-flying fashion to aid that security. None of what they did was easy. It was necessary though. Exactly where the targeted aircraft, plus the combat engineers too, were positioned when Laguna was attacked was what the Battlefield Airmen did. Those F-16s and combat drones were targeted while on the ground and so too were those who would repair damage to the facilities when the place was attacked. Laguna was attacked on two occasions with the Battlefield Airmen pinpointing exactly where the bombs were to fall when US Air Force F-35s got through DAR air defences and successfully hit the place. They were preparing for a third incoming raid, one which was an hour out, when several of them were spotted from above. Like locusts, those small drones detected Battlefield Airmen and relayed back what was being observed to the reaction team of the security force. The particular was drone was shot down and so was a second one which moved in: one of the Battlefield Airmen was a cracking shot with his rifle. The whole detachment had to move and weren’t able to direct a third air strike. They avoided a firefight with enemy security troops and lived to fight another day but in doing so had to flee some distance away from Laguna.

An ad hoc team of Washington Army National Guard commandos detached from the 19th Special Forces Group ran counter-guerrilla tasks in northern Idaho. They spent most of their time chasing shadows. An elusive enemy was sought by them, members of the Patriotic Corps militia who had fled from Spokane back over the state line when the secessionists in that city were defeated and instead took their fight to rural Idaho. Intelligence-driven missions led the commando team in their hunt. Governor Winkelman, the Republican who had joined those Democrats as a full member of the Council of Thirteen, had re-established himself back in Boise and won over many of his state’s people. Idahoans weren’t necessarily pro-DAR but there were an increasing number who trusted that Winkelman had done the right thing in leaving the United States when he explained it as he did. That was a minority of the people though those he had brought on-side were aiding the war effort. All of the troubles which had beset Idaho throughout the Years of Lead had been blamed upon out of control armed militia, most of them from out-of-state. Winkelman had pleaded with his state’s citizens to help bring them under control and end their activities. Tip-offs came to the state military authorities who assigned the commando team who had come across from Washington to follow those leads. It seemed to those involved in the hunt for guerrillas that they were being lied to. Here and there they were send, finding nothing almost every time. On several occasions, they either walked into an ambush against them or came close to doing so. Strict orders were for them to not kill civilians unless in self-defence. There was a lot of temptation to disobey the orders when it was clear who was behind the attempts to kill them were civilians with guns who opted at the right moment to lower them and not fire: if they hadn’t, the commando team could have justifiably shot them. Eyes were on the national guardsmen at all times. There were civilians who followed them about and contacted guerrillas. One of them came too close to an ongoing operation for comfort: he was recognised from being near to a previous attempted ambush against the commando team. Detained under martial law powers, he was only secured after a fist fight where he took on three members of the commando team and was only brought down by being whacked on the back of the head with a rifle butt by a fourth. He said he was a retired US Army Ranger but one of the commando team was that himself and the suspected guerrilla’s answers on his service didn’t hold up to questioning. He’d been a soldier, just not a Ranger. The man was American yet expressed hatred towards both the DAR and the United States too. He only gave them that, rather than any real answers as to what he was up to and who he working with. One of the national guardsmen wanted to ‘question’ him using various means to elicit information. Permission was refused and he had to be handed over to representatives from the Idaho Military Department. Sometime later, the commando team was told he had escaped custody. They knew that they would be seeing him again and hoped that when they did, he’d have a gun, open fire & they could shoot him.

Alpha Teams from the 5th Special Forces Group had been inserted across the Rockies’ passes in Colorado, far from where the Main Front of the fighting was. ODA 5126 was one of them, a detachment of Green Berets with extensive experience of combat on distant shores. They witnessed the effect of the Glow-worm computer virus up close and personal without being told anything about it. Cruise missiles which were supposed to have closed access through the mountains for the DAR Army spread across central & eastern Colorado weren’t shut. The weather and all the snow made things extremely difficult for resupply efforts for those fighting the US Army’s VII & XVIII Corps but was still possible with the transportation links not blasted to ruin. When ODA 5126 was sent in, their mission to report from on the ground on what they saw and hinder enemy engineers trying to repair all the damage that the cruise missiles were meant to have done. The Alpha Team’s commander was lost in an accident during the air drop to get them in. That was bad luck. There was more of that when a DAR Army AH-72C Lakota helicopter spotted them soon after landing. It fired on them and that was returned using a Stinger missile to bring it down. There was a rush to depart from the LZ for ODA 5162 with the fear that the crew from the Lakota had gotten a warning message out after having eyes on them like they had. The passes through the mountains where US Highway-24 wound its way away from Colorado Springs weren’t blocked as they were supposed to be. The Green Berets moved to fulfil that requirement by using explosives to create rockfalls in selected places and then attack military vehicles to use them to block the route elsewhere. When the enemy – Colorado national guardsmen – showed up to investigate, they were sniped at while ODA 5126 was on the move. The bad luck went away. No one came close to them, not even when the DAR Army tried using low-flying drones with fancy tech onboard to search for them. Eventually, US Army paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division showed up. There had been helicopters air-lifted into the captured Peterson AFB and they were used alongside captured DAR ones to ferry paratroopers up into the mountains. A cautious link-up was made between the Green Berets and paratroopers with worries that it was the enemy instead of friends. That went off without a hitch though. Once relieved from where they were, ODA 5126 didn’t go home. They had secondary tasks and moved off deeper into the Rockies. The mountains were full of the enemy. Where possible, they would try not to directly fight them and instead carry on with the armed reconnaissance task set for them at other places of interest yet that didn’t mean that the Green Berets would walk away from one. They had raiding to do as well as scouting, all to draw as many of DAR forces as possible away from the Main Front as possible to allow the war to be won as they were sent to Colorado to do.

3rd Squad were Rangers from the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. Their base at Fort Lewis had been taken by the DAR when that new country’s military leader personally persuaded the leadership there to either defect or walk away their positions rather than fight against fellow Americans. 3rd Squad had had its own defectors, then and also when they were sent off to fight against their countrymen. Other Rangers had stayed though. They did their duty to a country who they swore an oath to serve… forgetting the previous one to the United States. First to Utah they were sent with a mission to aid the establishment of DAR rule there. That meant being part of the unopposed takeover of Hill AFB. Utah was a crazy place where the Rangers didn’t enjoy being. The ‘people power’ there was something which they saw first-hand the meaning of. Things like that weren’t what the DAR president nor her government had spoken of nor what General Fuller had said that DAR stood for. Their sergeant, a true believer in the American Democratic Republic, had lost his faith after Utah. He kept that to himself and 3rd Squad together as a unit but his heart was no longer in it. Along with those in the small unit closest to him, a plan of action was formed: he knew that the others would go along with it in the end… because they would have no choice. The chance to act came when 3rd Squad was sent to Wyoming. They were tasked with an Obbo mission near to Cheyenne watching the interstate & railroad links which went through there: their eyes were meant to be on the significant traffic going through Cheyenne. It was meant to be reconnaissance first and then, later on when reinforced, an assault was meant to take place against the rear areas of the 10th Mountain Division’s supply lines as that US Army units moved down from Wyoming into Colorado. Using off-road vehicles, 3rd Squad crossed the new border from out of Utah into Wyoming and went towards Cheyenne. Their sergeant waited until they were deep inside ‘enemy territory’ before he told his men that he was breaking his second oath of service and upholding his first. 3rd Squad was to re-defect, to go back to US service. No one objected openly. If there had been a fight, those who quit the DAR cause were prepared to do that but there was no one who wanted to do that. The nearest US Army position was sought with it found to be manned by national guardsmen with the 38th Infantry Division instead. Care, much care, was taken to make contact without a firefight. 3rd Squad went into the custody of a military police unit and were taken to US Army Counterintelligence. They’d gone back to where they belonged and would have to deal with the consequences of what they had first done before the change of loyalty. They thought it was worth it though.

Delta Force staged for a mission in Cheyenne. 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (the Tier One Special Mission Unit’s long name) were sent to a forward staging post there in Wyoming ready to undertake a combat mission deep inside the Rockies. Delta were briefed upon that mission when at the small city’s airport, which had been serving as a forward airfield for A-10C tank-busters flying missions also down in Colorado. Personnel from the Intelligence Support Activity – ISA, the US Army’s clandestine human intelligence service full of ‘operators’ – told them that they had some of their people on the ground near to the resort of Aspen. Those guys, who had a handful of Green Berets with them for security, had eyes on the resort’s airport. They were waiting on a plane to arrive. That aircraft was meant to be, if the top secret intelligence was to be believed, carrying General Fuller himself. The DAR Armed Forces’ chief was supposed to be paying a visit to his Colorado Corps rear HQ located in Pitkin Country close to where Aspen was. Fuller would take a helicopter flight there, meet with that general trying to stop Colorado being liberated, and then go back to Aspen afterwards to re-board his plane. Delta Force was to capture him when he returned from that visit, before he could fly back out of Colorado. The ISA briefers explained that shooting down Fuller aboard his aircraft or in the helicopter, or also blowing him up at wherever that corps HQ was, wasn’t what the Pentagon wanted. He was to be captured. They were to do that in conjunction with those on the ground there. Several times, the message that he wasn’t to be killed no matter what was repeated. Anyone he was with including his security detachment and aides were fair game but not Fuller. Back in DC, they wanted him alive for intelligence and propaganda purposes. Delta were told that there would be three MH-47G Chinooks from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment with them. A trio of heavy-lift helicopters like those was more than was needed for the mission but were being sent due to the weather conditions as there was back-up needed facing the risk of conditions. If needed, some of the A-10s from Cheyenne were going to be airborne as well. Get him out alive, the comment at the end of the briefing came, without a scratch on him. Delta waited for the go order and prepared to board the helicopters. They were psyched up. The waiting went on for a long time. When it finally looked like they were about to get that desired go order, they were told to stand down. Fuller had changed his travel plans. The mission was off. Delta didn’t go into action that night and had gone all the way to Cheyenne for nothing. They weren’t told why as the ISA kept that to themselves.

Marine Raiders had served in World War Two and were re-established in 2006 for the War on Terror. First known as the Marine Special Operations Regiment, the designation had been later changed to the Marine Raider Regiment. The marines were commando-trained and undertook worldwide missions. Both the 1st & 3rd Battalions from the regiment had gone over to the DAR when that new country’s armed forces were formed. They were California-based and it hadn’t been an easy process, not by a long shot. The commander of the 3rd Battalion lost his life in the transfer of service. There were many desertions and a full-blown mutiny in response. The DAR Marine Corps needed the Marine Raiders to see action though and so sent them off to fight even without many loyalty issues resolved. 1st Battalion went to New Mexico to support the 1st Marine Division. It was employed in various roles when broken down into fourteen-marine detachments known as Marine Special Operations Teams. Those MSOTs were all over the battlefield which New Mexico became when their fellow marines, those serving with the 2nd Marine Division from out of the East Coast, entered that state to liberate the West. Marine Raiders in US Marine Corps service were present, those from the 2nd Battalion. The task for those serving with the 1st Battalion wasn’t to engage in frontline fights but rather serve in the rear both sides of where the moving frontline was. At first, they fought against enemy insertion of commandos into the DAR rear and struck behind the lines over near Texas too when US forces crossed the new border. One of the MSOT detachments fought with US Green Berets ahead of an assault against Kirtland AFB and another detachment pursued others fleeing from a raid on DAR military convoys going up and down Interstate-25. Those MSOTs sent east attacked an artillery battery supporting the 2nd Marine Division and also a forward airhead for helicopters established inside New Mexico for national guardsmen with the 28th Infantry Division. The MSOTs were mobile. They were used all over the place, sent from mission to mission. It was a fire brigade role for them and they engaged in infantry fights as well as the front-lines moved deeper into New Mexico. Their special skills were increasingly put to use there rather than in the direct action special forces role than what they were trained for. It was a waste of capability in that regard yet the 1st Marine Division and the New Mexico Corps needed them for what they ended up doing. The weight of numbers was on the side of US forces and there was urgency at the front-lines of that fight more than what could be justified for sending the MSOTs into the rear areas either side. Those behind the Twentieth Century reformation of the Marine Raiders would have been left aghast at first the defection of so many of them to an illegal country established on United States soil and then how the 1st Battalion was used as it was in the end. But, as marines did when serving the governments in DC and Las Vegas, those MSOTs fought well again and again. There was a lot of talk before seeing action about not wanting to fight brothers-in-arms, when it came to looking fellow Americans in the eyes on the battlefield, yet they did what they were ordered to do and fought.

[James G]

77 – Cauldron

The 4th Infantry Division had no hope of coming out as the victor in the uneven, three-to-one fight it got involved in within Colorado. The DAR Army element there in the northern portions of that state was finished from the moment that the US Army decided to employ the whole of the re-established VII Corps against it coming in from a trio of directions. The cutting of the supply links running back to the West through the Rockies and the eventual air superiority that was achieved only decreased the time that the 4th Infantry Division could make a stand: they were finished the moment that the fight started. Politics drove the forward deployment of that unit, plus the rest of the Colorado Corps and the New Mexico Corps too, though. Colorado’s governor, a key member of the ruling Council of Thirteen, wouldn’t hear of any suggestion that the majority of his state, the high population areas on the eastern side of the mountains, be left undefended for instead a defensive line to be strung from the outset through the Rockies. A forward defence it was, Governor Rowan’s influence had made sure of, and one which saw the loss suffered to the DAR Army of a unit it couldn’t afford to lose.

For the first two days, the 4th Infantry Division had held on. By the third day though, it came apart. Surrounded on three sides with those to the south beginning to make their impact felt, the only way to keep fighting was to fall back westwards and tighten the lines. However, Denver and then the Rockies were behind where the 4th Infantry Division started the war. There was no way that it would fight within either of them, which gave even less room to fight. The 4th Infantry Division needed room to fight. It was trained and equipped to fight a battle of manoeuvre, even in the terrible weather conditions of late-January 2029 which it did in. Tanks, armoured vehicles, mobile artillery and helicopters along with the soldiers did their best. The US VII Corps took them apart though when all of its forces finally managed to get into the fight. The 4th Infantry Division was pulled apart with its components rendered unable to assist each other as they fought to survive. Where there was no physical separation enforced between sub-units, United States air power achieved that from above. US Air Force, Air National Guard, Air Reserve and even some US Navy aircraft (EA-18G Growler electronic attack jets) won control of the skies and struck at those below. They had to be careful as while Colorado had many areas of near emptiness, there were plentiful civilians in the areas where the 4th Infantry Division fought it out with the VII Corps. Forward air controllers on the ground and distant operators of the many drones flying did their utmost to keep the bombs from falling upon where civilians were. There were no instances where an excuse could be made for ‘collateral damage’ that would kill them: those involved were reminded again and again that those were fellow Americans down below the falling bombs who they were to liberate!

The 4th Infantry Division had a peacetime establishment when garrisoned at Fort Carson of three combat brigades, with four battalions apiece. Two of the brigades were Mechanized and equipped with variants of the Stryker wheeled vehicle while the third was an Armored unit consisting of tracked Abrams’ tanks & Bradley infantry carriers/scout vehicles. That tidy formation had all been mixed up for the fight on behalf of the Democratic American Republic: there were ad hoc units about with a focus on spreading out the M-1A3s to oppose the many US Army tanks. There was a lot of artillery on-hand, including Army National Guard heavy guns. If the 4th Infantry Division had faced a lesser opponent even with the numerical superiority which the VII Corps had, or if the VII Corps had been smaller, then maybe that might have been enough to see them last longer than they did if it was the US Army they fought or win if the opponent wasn’t. Such hypotheticals and overall strength meant nothing for those on the ground fighting Colorado, either with that DAR unit or their opponents, when they were faced with bullets and explosions. VII Corps units took casualties just like the 4th Infantry Division with national guardsmen serving in the 29th Infantry Division coming off the worst of the lot of them. All across the northeastern quadrant of Colorado soldiers fought and died for the two governments which they served. Many, many more were injured. Forward aid stations resembled scenes out of horror movies. There were rows and rows of body-bags filled with corpses. The left-overs of war spat out over the brim of the boiling cauldron, so one journalist embedded with the 10th Mountain Division would put it in a filed report after seeing what she did near Loveland. The 4th Infantry Division had losses unsustainable in terms of personnel and sub-units. It was broken apart and pounded to smithereens. After three days of it all, there really wasn’t much of it left. To carry on despite all of the that was akin to murder. The divisional commander said that in his last report to the Colorado Corps HQ before he had his battle staff destroy their radio equipment. That done, he sought a way of ending the fight for the 4th Infantry Division.


To the south, where the 82nd Airborne Division had their airhead at Colorado Springs, the three brigades assigned were each given separate tasks. One of then went up into the Rocky passes to link up with Green Berets & Rangers, a second applied pressure on the flank of the 4th Infantry Division and the third held onto Colorado Springs facing off against those DAR Marines who wanted to retake the ground which they had seized. The paratroopers under US XVIII Airborne Corps command had Colorado Springs fully under their control. They weren’t going to be forced out of the Air Force Academy airfield nor Peterson AFB, not after they had brought in with them all of their heavy weapons and too had on-hand close air support. Butts Army Airfield, in the southern portion of the large Fort Carson complex was against taken by 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers. They’d used it as a LZ on D-Day but the 4th Marine Regiment had forced them out. Back to Butts – those jokes wrote themselves as far as the paratroopers were concerned! – they went when enemy attention was focused on the Interstate-25 corridor in the Security-Widefield area. They reopened that short airstrip for their own use and forced the 4th Marine Regiment to redirect attention back that way. In a coincidence only of timing, yet those what many paratroopers linked to their success at Butts without any evidence, retaking that airstrip saw the end of the long-range missile strikes against Peterson’s runways. No longer did DAR Tomahawks from mobile launchers a good distance away crash into them to harass flight operations and make the need for a third site important enough to see lives lost taking it once again. It was a case of one thing happening and then the other occurring for those on the ground. The Tomahawks didn’t stop because of the 82nd Airborne Division though. That was the work of the US Air Force – admittedly though who had many aircraft in Colorado Springs at facilities taken by the paratroopers – which ended those attacks. They had shot up and bombed enough supply columns down in New Mexico laden with reloads for the joint Tomahawk/SM-6 mobile missile launchers. Missile fire from the remaining stocks was redirected elsewhere by higher authority above the DAR’s Colorado Corps who wanted to keep Colorado Springs’ airheads (carefully targeted as they were surrounded by civilian areas) under attack because the 82nd Airborne Division was smack bang in the middle of the state in which they were fighting to defend yet didn’t have the reloads.

Fighting continued up the course of the Arkansas River where US Highway-50 ran from Kansas to meet the I-25 at Pueblo. The rest of the Colorado Corps, the 25th Infantry Division to which those marines were assigned along with others, engaged other portions of the XVIII Airborne Corps. The 35th Infantry & 101st Airborne Division (the latter’s name reflected it history not its capabilities) finally got their act together and made significant advances forward. The 25th Infantry fell back in the direction of Pueblo. The DAR Army soldiers and DAR Marines under command did well to delay the attackers but couldn’t stop them from coming forward faster than it was hoped that might be able to. What was happening around Colorado Springs bled away the defensive forces available. A third of the understrength 25th Infantry Division was drawn into that fight to stop the division’s rear from ripped open. US combat aircraft flying from there had minimal flight time to seeing action – increasing their carried war-loads – and an immediate recovery site for those damaged. DAR air activity had taken that blow of so much being captured on the ground or escaping in panic which limited the friendly air cover available for those fighting in the south of Colorado. There was no link between the two main combat elements of the Colorado Corps. That was needed because while they fought separate battles, the combat support & service support elements within the corps didn’t. It was a mess for them yet something recognised as a stroke of genius made by the Pentagon in sending the 82nd Airborne Division there on a hazardous but ultimately rewarding mission.

The XVIII Corps had a two-division attack go westwards across the south of Colorado. The Arkansas River valley had some width but wasn’t big enough for the two to go down together. Doing so would also go against US Army doctrine of being bunched up when their was an overextended opponent. There was a spread of forces. The 101st Airborne Division operated in many ways like its name suggested and how it had decades beforehand in an airmobile role rather than as traditional light infantry force it had become. Extra helicopter lift to boost the meagre amount assigned allowed for a leap-frog approach to be made outside of the valley and away to the south of where the national guardsmen with the 35th Infantry Division fought the DAR Army in many fights. As the 25th Infantry Division fought the delaying action it was ordered to, it was pushed back with haste due to the flank activities of Screaming Eagles soldiers. The Colorado Corps believed that the whole division (or at least most of it) was being airlifted in waves to go forward and wondered where all the helicopters had come from. It was only a brigade plus doing that with everyone else in HMMWVs and trucks. The movement did enough though to force the DAR Army to be overawed by what the XVIII Corps was up to. They lost Las Animas in the river valley and then the Colorado Corps HQ was informed that elements of the 101st Airborne Division were on the edges of the immense Pinon Canyon Manoeuvre Site. Running across that US Army property was Highway-350… which went to I-25 and the link down to New Mexico for the Colorado Corps. It was deduced that by sending the 101st Airborne Division so far out there on the left flank, the XVIII Corps was trying to trap the 25th Infantry Division in a cauldron from which there was no escape especially since they had moved more raiding units towards the Rockies south of where they had already been active. The fight was lost in the southeastern quadrant of Colorado like it was in the northeast, especially since US air power was roaming free seemingly unchecked too. Saving the 25th Infantry Division and non-combat elements of the Colorado Corps below Colorado Springs became the priority. It was decided to get them out of the trap before it could be closed. That was made difficult though by the contact that the 4th Marine Regiment was tied up in on the edges of Colorado Springs. The marines couldn’t break that easily. The simple option was to leave them behind when the escape was made, to have them act as a rearguard. When higher approval from General Fuller was sought for the Colorado Corps to make plans to do just that, he asked the 25th Infantry Division’s commander was aware of what that would mean: those marines would be left behind to their fate after fighting so well for the cause. The commanding general did. Thus, approval came to make a run for it. As part of that, deception would be needed to be employed and that meant that no word went to the DAR marines outside of Colorado Springs. Tipping them off, trying to get them out even, would mean losing everyone else.

[James G]

78 – Panic

The DAR Air Force gave the mission of raiding military targets in the Dallas–Fort Worth area to the 56th Fighter Wing, a training unit fulfilling a wartime combat role, who passed that down to the 308th Fighter Squadron with its F-35A Lightnings. That squadron had been detached from its parent wing at Luke AFB and had moved down to Davis-Monthan AFB also in Arizona ahead of the fighting starting. It was likewise a peacetime training unit yet the aircraft in service were used by pilots from overseas NATO allies as part of a joint training effort. The Belgians, Danes, Dutch and Norwegians had been sent home while their aircraft – which did legally belong to them – had a repaint over their markings. A solid blue roundel with a horizontal white stripe through the middle adorned the tail with the letters ‘DARAF’ printed below in red. Hi-Fi Flight, six of the F-35s, were given the task of the first raid, one which took place in daylight. They took off from Davis-Monthan – going up above AMARG where aircraft of military value were still being removed from to be put into service – carrying a heavy war-load but little fuel. A tanker met them in the skies of southern Arizona where the thirsty strike-fighters guzzled fuel. They then raced westwards, heading low into New Mexico where the fight to retain the independence of the Democratic American Republic raged on the ground but also in the skies. Hi-Fi Flight stayed away from the ongoing air engagements and out of the coverage of ground-based air defences supporting the US Army’s III Corps who were pushing to cross the Rio Grande: attacking them was someone else’s fight. Texan skies were soon entered when Hi-Fi Flight was diverted away from US Air Force fighters looking for intruders. The spareness of much of Far West Texas was overflown first before the F-35s went low above West Texas. They flashed over Interstate-20 with several of the pilots disappointed to see much military traffic on that freeway. Again, that fight was for someone else. Avoiding populated areas and known military sites on the way to the targets for their raid was done by Hi-Fi Flight. Check-points were met with turns made as the selected route was followed. The F-35s then approached the two cities, and the suburban ‘infill’ between them, from the south. Two pilots took their aircraft into a climb with their mission being immediate fighter support while the other four aircraft within Hi-Fi Flight broke into two pairs while remaining low. Of the six pilots, four of them were women. There were full-time US Air Force pilots among them who had defected to the DAR Air Force as well as reservists who had answered the call to serve the west rather than the United States. One of the female pilots was a reservist who had flown airliners until a few weeks beforehand and like one of the men who’d defected too, she was an Easterner who believed in the real democracy which the DAR promised to bring: she wasn’t fighting for her home state but an idea. Bombing their fellow brothers- & sisters-in-arms below them had never been part of that promise when the DAR had been formed yet they had signed up to fight to defend what had been formed and regarded the mission which took them so far into Texas, like the others which they had flown, to be unpleasant yet necessary.

NAS Fort Worth was struck first. Two of the F-35s swooped in from seemingly out of nowhere to those on the ground below them. Bombs fell from underneath the two aircraft, dropped with near-perfect accuracy. A big target, destroying NAS Fort Worth in one pass was impossible even for the impressive war-load that the Hi-Fi Flight aircraft carried. The focus was hitting what was important there and doing enough damage to justify the mission. That was the runway, the flight ramp and the adjacent Air Force Plant 4. Holes were ripped deep into the tarmac while on the flight ramp there was death & destruction caused around military transport aircraft parked there unloading supplies & people. As to that third target located at NAS Fort Worth, Lockheed Martin built F-35s (including the ones flown by Hi-Fi Flight) there in that US Government-owned building. Bombs smashed into it bringing quite the violent sudden halt to production. The other two F-35s on the strike part of the raid attacked the Grand Prairie Reserve Base at nearby Hensley Field. That was closer to Dallas and like the first target, sat on the edge of a lake in the middle of an extensive urban area. Bombs were dropped upon the runway and the flight ramp. It too was full of military transport aircraft supporting the war effort raging up in New Mexico with Grand Prairie being a rear-area airhead for supplies flowing in from across the country before they were moved closer to the front-lines. There had been combat aircraft based at Grand Prairie as there had been at NAS Fort Worth when the fighting had started though those had moved closer to the action a day before the air raid. The targets found at each site were still legitimate military ones though, even that aircraft manufacturing plant. Half a dozen C-17s and C-130s were knocked out of the war at Grand Prairie: the wreckage of those once fine aircraft, plus the holes ripped in the runways, would take some time to clear away and allow for flight operations to once more continue.

No fighters challenged the two F-35s which had gone high. Once all the bombs had fallen from those on the attack, that pair dropped down low as Hi-Fi Flight departed the Dallas–Fort Worth area at speed. They went north first before making a turn to the west. Behind them they left chaos on the ground yet no one chased them. Across North Texas went Hi-Fi Flight on the way to New Mexico. They once more avoided enemy forces on the ground – US II Marine Expeditionary Force elements – and also the US Air Force which had fighters up looking for them. The Rio Grande was sighted by the flight leader and the approach of the F-35s drew fire when they were to the south of Albuquerque. That was friendly fire: DAR Marines fired on them with damage done to one of the aircraft. It wasn’t thought to be fatal for aircraft nor polit but was not something welcome at all. Those below had seen aircraft coming from the east and ignored the fact that they were in a safe travel lane! The same tanker from which Hi-Fi Flight had refuelled form on the way out met them on the way home, though on that second occasion in New Mexico skies. After that top-up of their tanks, Hi-Fi Flight flew all the last leg of their journey back to Davis-Monthan. Close to there, when the landing gear was retracted on that battle-damaged F-35, the scale of that became apparent. The gear wouldn’t fully go down. The pilot, that female airline pilot who came from Tennessee yet fought as a reservist for the DAR air Force, made the error of believing she would make a safe landing. She died in the attempt when crashing just off the runway. Before they reached home, Moonie Flight went out of that Arizona airbase when the 308th Squadron sent some more requisitioned foreign aircraft back once again to the same general area as where Hi-Fi Flight had gone. Hitting different targets than had already been struck at was the mission for Moonie Flight and those pilots knew that the US Air Force would be better prepared a second time around. Still, eastwards off to a fight they flew. As to what happened in Dallas–Fort Worth when it was attacked from their air, even in such a targeted fashion against military sites, the panic anticipated by the DAR military higher-ups was correct. El Paso had previously seen civil unrest in the aftermath of air and missile activity there – that Texan city was right up against the DAR border – and doing the same thing once again elsewhere in Texas was desired. Hitting military targets was the priority and what the pilots were told when they were sent out but to have that be followed with panic that would tax the civilian authorities, leading to them calling up military assistance, was left unsaid yet well understood too. So many people in Dallas–Fort Worth had seen the jets in the clear daytime skies above them. They had watched those F-35s strike with impunity and get away Scot-free too. That could only be a good thing for the DAR cause those senior people who wore the new uniforms issued for their new air force believed.


It was night-time when the US Air Force put several squadrons of air power into the south of Arizona, behind the front-lines in a deep strike of their own. The 48th Fighter Wing – also known as the Statue of Liberty Wing in a uniquely authorised dual name – had a home-base in the UK yet had been deployed to Poland before the urgent recall home to fight fellow Americans. Fielding four combat squadrons, two with ageing yet potent F-15E Strike Eagles and two more with F-35s, the 48th Fighter Wing had moved to Sheppard AFB in Texas, close to Oklahoma. Training units from there had moved out and civilian air traffic which shared the four runways for flights to Wichita Falls Airport were absent. The Tenth Air Force (a reserve headquarters) was the higher command for US air units spread across Oklahoma and Texas engaging the DAR: they issued the orders for the multi-squadron deep strike into Arizona. The targets were many and spread from the New Mexico state line almost as far west as California. There was fighter support and also assistance from electronic warfare units on-hand as well. CSAR was available for rescuing downed pilots who made it most of the way back as well.

Davis-Monthan AFB was among one of the many DAR air facilities struck. F-15Es hit there, dropping bombs atop of aircraft parked within hastily-constructed concrete revetments. The runway and facilities were hit too. Laguna Army Airfield, Libby Army Airfield, Luke AFB, Tucson ANGB and MCAS Yuma were bombed as the 48th Fighter Wing went after the sites from where the DAR Air Force was flying its jets across Arizona. There was pre-mission targetting from satellite images as well as computer stored layouts of each: they were US Armed Force properties ahead of the DAR being formed and nothing there was unknown apart from recent defences. In addition, there were spotters on the ground too. Reports from aircrews afterwards spoke of great success. They’d dropped their bombs exactly where they were supposed to and claimed that they had laid waste to a good chunk of the enemy air force caught on the ground there. Hitting those half dozen air facilities was the task of the F-15Es: the F-35s went after a different target set. Bombs from those aircraft were joined by short-range missiles launched against smaller military targets in the form of fuel units supporting the ground war raging in New Mexico. Aviation & vehicle fuel was in great need for those engaged in combating United States forces aiming to liberate the West. Much of that was moved by fuel tankers travelling by road either long-haul or by making shorter trips from transfer point to transfer point. The latter moved about with the DAR Armed Forces keeping them under concealment. Where they were suspected to be within Arizona, the 48th Fighter Wing went after them. In addition, there were also sections of pipelines being laid. It was faster and more efficient to move fuel that way. There was no one giant pipeline running above ground throughout Arizona to make for an easy target, but all sorts of connecting sections linked by tankers. The terminals and waypoints were where the F-35s went after rather than sections of the pipelines unless those went over natural obstacles such as rivers and gorges. Doing all that at night made it more difficult than if the air strikes had been made in daylight. The targets had to be found and confirmed for what they were. The darkness offered concealment though and that was much needed because the 48th Fighter Wing faced strong opposition in its opening mass attack.

Going towards the targets, engaging them and on the return home, the 48th Fighter Wing lost five aircraft. They were ‘lucky’ to suffer such ‘minor’ casualties due to the opposition. It could have been far worse. A further pair of aircraft which weren’t lost to enemy action didn’t make it back to Sheppard and instead diverted to nearer friendly bases. They would be out of action for some time, adding to the overall negative score to see seven aircraft in total which did not get back to that airbase within sight of the Red River on the mission return. Two of the F-15Es on the way to hit Tucson ANGB – close to Davis-Monthan and sharing the runway with the civilian airport – were blasted out of the sky by distant AMRAAM missile hits fired from unseen DAR F-16s. One targeted 48th Fighter Wing aircraft exploded in mid-air while the other crashed into the side of Mica Mountain outside of Tucson. Two of the aircrew aboard the first F-15E died in that airborne explosion while the other pair in the second aircraft ejected to be later captured by DAR forces. Striking at a hidden fuel site near to Casa Grande, where Interstate-8 & I-10 combined and fuel trucks ran aplenty, a SM-6 ground-launched missile fired from a long way off hit that aircraft undertaking that task: his wingman saw a ‘chute but the pilot was never found despite the Casa Grande region not being in the middle of any sort of real wilderness. On the way home, going through enemy-held territory in New Mexico, two more F-35s were hit by AMRAAMs. F-22A Raptors launched them with the unseen killers claiming two kills. One pilot skilfully made sure his doomed aircraft didn’t crash into the El Paso urban area (nor Juarez across the river in Mexico either) before bailing out and ending up among US Army troops there. The other tried to land his shot-up F-35 at Biggs Army Airfield yet failed: he died in a fiery wreckage in the desert a little way off and within yards of the New Mexico state line / DAR border. When in Poland, the 48th Fighter Wing had been held ready to conduct deep, semi-strategic air strikes against Russia should it attack NATO in the Baltics. Losses had been expected in that endeavour which they weren’t called upon to undertake. Those happened when at home though, the first time that (as a whole) the 48th Fighter Wing had ever been in the United States after being formed overseas in the 1950s. It was a costly first mission. Success had been had though and there were afterwards more bomb runs to undertake for the formation.

[James G]

79 – Stand your ground

Not much of the fighting on the third day of major combat in New Mexico took place during the hours of daylight. At the end of January 2029, the days were short and the nights long. The humidity wasn’t much of a factor in choosing darkness to operate in for the two opposing sides. Instead, it was a matter of concealment: the lack of that available. Away from the mountains, of which they were many, there was still a lot of bare open ground. When the first clashes had taken place between the New Mexico Corps of the DAR Army and the US Army’s II MEF & III Corps, that lack of natural cover had cost each side dear. Independently, yet seeing what the other was doing too, they opted to leave most of the combat manoeuvre operations until either before dawn or after sundown. That wasn’t to say nothing happened during the day, because it did, it was just that all the ‘big stuff’ happened without the skies being bright above so everyone could see what was going on. Service-personnel fighting for the governments in both DC and Las Vegas died during those daylight hours though. A trio of CH-53K King Stallion heavy-lift helicopters overloaded with a reinforced company of DAR Marines were shot down near La Joya, where the Rio Grande was paralleled by Interstate-25, with over fifty casualties incurred. National guardsmen from Vermont attached to the II MEF walked into a minefield near Dilia in the eastern part of the state. It was unmarked and unexpected. Ahead of their commander trying to extradite them from that mess, a hostile drone operator spotted them and the sighting was passed onto an artillery unit. Those volunteer, part-time soldiers far from home came under the fire of a battery of HIMARS multiple-barrelled rocket launchers. There were extensive casualties while those men were out in the open and unable to move. In those two instances – which were in no way exclusive of the daylight casualties suffered – the units involved should never have been as exposed as they were to enemy fire in such a manner. Those who lost their lives or were left with life-changing injuries suffered because someone messed up.

The 1st Marine Division (DAR Marines) fought in those hours of darkness delaying actions to allow them to fall back to the trio of ranges which formed the Sandia-Manzano Mountains. They were pulled back towards that high ground so that a naturally strong defensive position was available in them covering Albuquerque behind – along with the massive air facility at Kirtland AFB – and also any access to the Rio Grande as well. They engaged approached units from the II MEF (US Marines) who fought to try and stop a retreat made in good order. In addition, each of those opposing large formations saw action on the northern flank on the slopes of the Santa Fe Mountains too. Those national guardsmen with the 28th Infantry Division who wandered into that minefield were pushing in that direction, heading in the direction of the distant the state capital Santa Fe. The 1st Marine Division had to extend itself to cover that flank. It wasn’t just about politics – New Mexico governor had left Santa Fe yet demanded to her fellow Council of Thirteen members that it not be easily lost – but because where I-25 ran around the base of those mountains, the New Mexico Corps didn’t want to see that road link up to Colorado for them in enemy hands unless there was no other choice. Pushing forward towards the Sandia-Manzano Mountains, whose tops were covered in winter snow, where both the 2nd & 4th Marine Divisions. The former was far larger and with more combat power than the latter. Regardless, the Marine Reservists with the 4th Marine Division fought just as hard. When the evening fell and the advance forward resumed after a series of early morning battles, the New Mexico Corps brought the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment into action again. It had done damage to the 2nd Marine Division the day before but turned its attention towards the Marine Reservists fighting along the course of Interstate-40. That was the historic Route-66 and went through the mountains at the Tijeras Canyon. Such a distant objective was a long way off for the 4th Marine Division who had a brigade of Pennsylvania national guardsmen from the 28th Infantry Division under their temporary command. They were clearing the way ahead slowly when there was the sudden appearance of tanks and tracked infantry carriers on the flanks. The Blackhorse Cav’ had avoided all enemy detection from the air and crashed into the side of the US forces. It was a short armoured raid yet with fantastic results achieved. 4th Marine Division riflemen came under fire along with the national guardsmen yet the focus of that attack were the supply and service support elements that the Abrams’ & Bradleys shot-up at close range. The Blackhorse Cav’ disappeared back into the darkness afterwards. US Marine tanks were mostly at that time in the Willard area, a good deal away. The 2nd Marine Division had orders to advance towards the southernmost slopes of the Manzano Range and go around the high ground where the 1st Marine Division was falling back to. The defences were supposed to be turned from the flank rather than driven through in a sure-to-be costly slaughter. A clash of tanks, Abrams’ against Abrams’, happened around there with the fighting joined by aircraft and helicopters. That was one won by the 2nd Marine Division and they pushed on afterwards leading to the 1st Marine Division once again having to extend its operational area, widening it to near breaking point, all to keep the US Marines from getting to where they were seeking to reach: the New Mexico Corps’ rear and its supporting infrastructure.

Air support for the II MEF had started the war based in Oklahoma with some portions spread down into Texas too. Much of the 2nd Marine Air Wing had moved forward once the shooting started with a transfer made to Cannon AFB just over the New Mexico/Texas state line. The DAR Armed Forces hadn’t made use of Cannon when establishing their defensive force to retain their declared independence. However, on the day before the fighting started down what everyone called the Main Front (Montana to the Mexican border), there had been extensive demolitions and purposeful destruction done there. Booby-traps had been laid too as to hinder US forces who it was known would take over once they moved into New Mexico. Force Recon Marines had grabbed the place once the go-order came yet by them, those who had done so much damage had departed. Cannon wasn’t a complete write-off though. It hadn’t been easy to get part of it open as a useable facility but that was achieved in record time: the DAR Armed Forces hadn’t believed that their former brothers-in-arms could do what they did with such haste. The 2nd Marine Air Wing brought into Cannon several squadrons of F-35s as well as many of their AH-1Z attack helicopters. Flight time to the front-lines was exceedingly short allowing for heavy war-loads. Cannon was somewhere that the DAR targeted. They fired Tomahawks at it from ground launchers and JSOWs were employed from aircraft employing them from distance. Long-range artillery, special shells fired by ‘standard’ howitzers, opened up on Cannon for as long as it was somewhere that could be hit. The shells used were the laser-guided Excalibur ones: ‘magic bullets’. US Marines spent a lot of effort hunting for those targeting the shells who were operating close by and also seeking to destroy the distant mobile guns as well. In defence against missiles and shells, CIWS weapons were used. Rapid-firing guns and short-range SAMs too defended the II MEF-held Cannon from those attacks as best as possible. There was a spread by the 2nd Marine Air Wing to many other sites – the nearby town of Clovis had an airport and there were other airfields; F-35Bs also flew from improvised airstrips when metal sheeting was laid down on flat ground – yet Cannon was the centre of their operations when they first went into New Mexico. That was why it took so much incoming fire.

A ‘stand your ground’ order was issued to the 40th Infantry Division, the New Mexico Corps’ other major combat component. They fought down in the south of that same state against the US Army III Corps. That was done. The national guardsmen (from California mostly yet also various other states of the DAR including Hawaii as well as Arizona & New Mexico) held onto what they had during the third day to keep the III Corps from achieving its mission. The task set by ARNORTH’s commander, General Corrigan, was for the III Corps to finish off the last scattered resistance in the southeast of New Mexico, get across the Rio Grande in strength between El Paso & Truth or Consequences and start moving towards the Arizona state line. The three-to-one advantage, four-to-one in certain estimates, that they had should have seen the III Corps do that. They failed again though in going up against the 40th Infantry Division. An embarrassment it was, something to be ashamed of for the senior United States commanders involved. There were reasons why the III Corps couldn’t get achieve the task set out. However, to many of those who heard them, they sounded like excuses! The terrain wasn’t favourable for the multi-division corps with all of its masses of tanks and armoured vehicles. Not until they would spread out and seek cover would they operate properly without constant fear of air attack. The DAR had plenty of air strength in the region to combat all the US air power but also interfere with III Corps operations. The Lincoln National Forest within the Sacramento Mountains were in the US force’s rear early on yet somewhere full of enemy raiders. Where Holloman AFB was in III Corps hands, and filling up with Tenth Air Force assets, the cover offered for raiding parties and spotters from there was excellent. The III Corps had the 1st Cavalry Division and 3rd Cavalry Regiment under command, both US Army combined arms units, as well as two Army National Guard divisions. For all of their strengths, the 36th & 48th Infantry Divisions had weaknesses too, especially with internal command issues due to recent reorganisations seeing the former transformed into a near all-Texan unit and the latter a recent creation by the start of 2029 which hadn’t been fully completed when it was sent to war. Texan national guardsmen had a bad start to the conflict when sent into New Mexico first and then when the 48th Infantry Division moved its heavy 155th Armored Brigade (national guardsmen from Mississippi & Kentucky) into combat in the northern reaches of the White Sands they didn’t fare much better. Localised counterattacks by Californian tanks before they retreated back over the Rio Grande caused panic and many casualties. When the 256th Infantry Brigade came up behind their sister unit to take over the task of clearing the eastern side of the Rio Grande – maybe even make contact with the US Marines to the north – they faced a significant air attack where the DAR Air Force put a full squadron of F-16s down low dropping cluster munitions and also Mk.77 bombs. Napalm weapons those Mk.77s were, employed far away from civilian areas atop the heads of unprotected national guardsmen out in the desert near the abandoned Condron Army Airfield. The horrors of the outcome of the napalm strike stayed with those who bore witness at the time and afterwards for the rest of their lives.

The 1st Cavalry Division attempted to do what the 36th Infantry Division had been unable to to do and force a major, sustainable crossing over the Rio Grande. That was tried in the Hatch / Rincon area, upstream from Las Cruces. There was reasonable ground there for that to be done: elsewhere, immediate high ground was directly over the river all along the western side. There was still some of that near where they went over the Rio Grande but not as much and only on one flank. Air support was requested and delivered to assist with bombs falling from jets which got through DAR Air Force defensive efforts to hit that western high ground. III Corps’ commander wanted an Arc Light strike from B-52s but was asked if he was joking. Those big bombers weren’t going to be used so close to enemy air defences! Tanks and armoured vehicles went over the river – which wasn’t much that far north – and engaged 40th Infantry Division elements leading to initial success in the evening attack. There was no fighting in the small town of Hatch (civilians from there had been urged to leave), and both soldiers and M-1A3s sought to get onto State Highway-26 which led deep into New Mexico past Hatch. From that high ground wilderness, seemingly every heavy gun available open fire once the post-crossing movement was made. There were a lot of defenders there who hadn’t been pummelled into nothingness despite all the artillery & air strikes made. As they fired upon the almost helpless 1st Cavalry Division elements below, flight after flight of Apache gunships rolled in. Stinger missiles shot skywards to bring down a good few but nowhere near enough. The Apaches did immense damage and brought the advance to a standstill. There was supposed to be further air support for US forces to make sure that the 40th Infantry Division couldn’t rush forces towards Hatch to turn back the river crossing. Those promises weren’t kept. Hawaiian national guardsmen, aided by those from Guam also far from their Pacific island homes, with the 29th Infantry Brigade entered the fight under that Apache cover. Back, back and back again they drove the shattered US Army assault force all the way to the river. In the darkness, the last 1st Cavalry Division elements withdrew. They could have dug-in and stayed but rather than be pounded while immobile, they were pulled out and across the Rio Grande. The Battle of Hatch was one which the DAR would trumpet afterwards as a massive victory for them. It was in the manner that they stood their ground and denied the III Corps a bridgehead to exploit yet it was just as costly for them too. They lost a lot of those national guardsmen and also the helicopter gunships when US air power, showing up late but eventually still showing up, massacred Apaches at forward airstrips not hidden effectively enough from observation. Pilots in A-10C attack-fighters had themselves some fun indeed shooting them up. The situation in southern New Mexico become a stalemate in the aftermath. For the Democratic American Republic, that was a win though.

[James G]

80 – Who will speak for the West?

Who will speak for the West?

The ‘West’ being the people residing in the Democratic American Republic that was. Various politicians and public figures sought to be the person to answer that question where they would be the one to speak on behalf of those out West, and the only one to do so too with all other voices silenced. They appointed themselves as those who had the interests of the people out there within that illegally-formed country best at heart. In Washington DC, they made a lot of noise and fought it out to be that one voice.

Among the frontrunners for that much-coveted position were Tommy Dunbar, Samantha Leach & Mary Beth Sheldon. The first was the Arizona senator who hadn’t done what others from the states out West had and not boycotted Congress nor joined the government of the DAR. The two women were the US Secretary of State under President Walsh (she had been one of the two key people who tried to get rid of him in his last days in office) who was also Arizona-born, and the other was a California congresswoman. They were all Democrats who spent much time calling their fellow Western politicians ‘Jacobeans’ – rather than Democrats – as well as the term ‘traitors’ which the Republicans were using extensively. From the three of them there came continuous defence of the people out West and reminders to anyone who would listen that none of the people in those states which had left the union which was the United States had voted for that secession. In addition, there was no democracy practised in the Democratic American Republic: they each added that to their many public comments. Dunbar, Leach & Sheldon again and again sought to stop the demonisation which they believed they heard of all Westerners by repeating these cold hard facts. There was a lot of that demonisation going on for the trio, all trying to make as much noise as individually possible rather than fully co-operating, to openly oppose. The West fought back against the attempt to liberate those states and that brought about significant bad feeling. The former Governor of California, the registered Independent Julio Marti-Rivera, tried to coordinate a united front of Western politicians who had remained loyal to the United States and sought to do all that could be done to speak up for the people out there. Marti-Rivera didn’t have the success which he wanted though. That trio were all too egotistic and they also didn’t like the idea of uniting too with Republican voices speaking for the people of the West which he had brought onboard in his fledgling coalition.

Terrence Darby and Vic Groves were two high-profile Republicans from the West who made their presence felt. The former was a Washington state congressman and the latter served as the Governor of Utah. Darby had been in DC when his state’s democracy was assailed with the armed removal of the sitting governor and then the secession. From Utah, flying out of Hill AFB where he had first ran to, Groves had fled in fear of his life. The two of them had constituents back home who they reminded everyone of had been forced against their will into that new country, and then put on the front-lines of a war. A good media performer, Darby worked with Marti-Rivera’s coalition. Groves was brash and not a team player. He blamed ‘out-of-state anarchists’ for all of Utah’s woes… ignoring the fact that it was Utahans themselves, albeit a minority, who took control of his state to hand it over to DAR control. He had all sorts of names for those involved with DAR and ‘interesting’ ideas as to how to punish them. Most of those invoked execution. The much noise that the two of them made was along similar lines to those trio of high-profile Democrats where they demanded that all Westerners not be blamed for the actions of a few. They also fought back against the demonisation of the people back where they had come from. The politicians, officials and senior military people involved in the DAR on the other side of the civil war which had torn the United States in two were those who deserved all the blame and punishment, the two of them told the media at every opportunity, and not the vast majority of law-abiding, true Americans in their home states who had had no choice in what had happened.

Someone else who made their presence felt in DC when claiming to speak on behalf of the West was Nicholas Toomey. His approach, his position on the DAR, was different from the others. He’d served in the White House as Deputy Chief-of-Staff to the 46th President before going back to his native Nevada first before travelling abroad. Overseas when the DAR was formed, Toomey expressed support for that new country and the democracy promised within when he returned to the United States. He didn’t go out to Las Vegas nor anywhere else in the West though. Instead, Toomey defended the DAR when in DC. He stayed just inside the law when he did so, coming extremely close yet never stepping over the line. His defence was of the democracy in the new constitution and how that served the people of the West. Toomey called repeatedly for an end to the civil war so that the democracy could flourish… and people would stop dying as well. Such public behaviour brought about threats to his life and also attempts to catch him out and get him to say something too much when he made all of his public appearances. It had been in Germany where he had been when Maria Arreola Rodriguez declared unilateral independence and his sister had stayed there when her brother had flown back to the United States. Jessica Toomey was a Chicago native and had served under the 47th President as her Ambassador to the EU. Brother and sister had stayed in Europe afterwards through the Walsh presidency when the 48th President had no need for Jessica’s services. Speaking in Berlin, Brussels, Rome and then Vienna, the multi-lingual Jessica put the case repeatedly for the DAR to European audiences. She went much further than her brother did, stepping right over the line into what was clear treason. Her assertion was that she was a citizen of the DAR though, no longer one of the United States. Jessica told Europeans again and again of all of the wonders of democracy in the DAR and how the people there were having a war waged against them when they had just wanted to express their freedom to leave the illiberal, failed nation which was the United States. She asked for support from Europeans for her new country and questioned how they could deny that when they claimed to stand for democracy too.


Outside of the DAR, Americans in the rest of the divided country were witnesses to extensive media coverage of the war being waged. There were videos, photographs and testimonies of the fighting going on where it effected the people of the West. Millions upon millions were aghast at their fellow Americans being killed and wanted that to stop. However, that didn’t translate into any real anti-war movement that gained any traction early on in the Second American Civil War. The cause was seen as right, even if terrible, by Americans outside of the DAR due to all that the DAR did before the shooting started. Then, as the war ‘came home’ to the rest of the divided country, the efforts by determined activists to try and create a significant movement in opposition to the conflict fell flat. The DAR lashed out like it did, fighting back against the war being waged against them. There were air attacks, missile strikes and commando raids made outside of the West. Following the US Air Force strike on Las Vegas, the carefully-targeted one to demolish the DAR Parliament, there was a return firing made of ARRWs back. The DAR Air Force had far fewer of those hypersonic guide missiles with speeds to make the eyes water yet used some of their limited stockpile to hit a trio of military targets far from the West. Fort Knox in Kentucky, Robins AFB in Georgia and Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio might not have been high on the ordinary person’s imaginary target list for a strategic missile attack. They were vital targets for the DAR war effort though because of the extensive use being made of them by the US Armed Forces to keep the war going away from just soldiers, tanks & aircraft at the front-lines. They were each deep inside the eastern portion of the United States. Minister for Defence & Security Eleanor Rawlings announced those missile attacks in public just like she told the world of how the DAR Air Force had bombed US Air Force bomber bases in response to the first attacks against her country. She also threatened to strike Washington itself – no precise targets given – if Las Vegas was struck at again. As was the case with the president to whom Rawlings served under, who the majority of Americans had voted for in the November 2028 election, she became one of the key faces of the West in the minds of the American public. Rawlings was attacking the United States and represented that DAR for those outside of it when they thought of the people within. Empathy, compassion and understanding for their fellow Americans went out of the window the military attacks made and the boastfulness of it all.

While war raged in the West, there were domestic terrorist incidents within the United States as had been witnessed throughout the Years of Lead. The secession in the West hadn’t been something to bring them to an end: Western independence wasn’t a long-term thing nor a cause of the many social ills. The bombing of an abortion clinic in Massachusetts nor the shooting of an obnoxious ‘comedian’ in Minnesota were related to the immense partisan divide in the country where political violence was rampant. Incidents like those were tied to the civil war though with blame from dishonest sections of the media claiming that the unseen hand of the DAR had something to do with them. When an accidental explosion occurred at an off-shore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, there was reporting that that too was was work of those who had forcefully broken away from the rest of the country. A huge fire raged in the aftermath of the blast which claimed almost a dozen lives from one of the many drilling operations providing fuel for the US war effort against the DAR. It was said that the DAR had done that when it was clear that it certainly wasn’t anything of the sort. The people of the West were blamed for that like so much else that they had nothing to do with. Violence was seen in DC. The whole city was supposed to be a fortress yet there were a pair of especially high-profile attacks made there in Washington a week into the term of President Roberts. Fort McNair was bombed with that facility being the headquarters of the Military District of Washington and an administrative post rather than a garrison. No responsibility was claimed for the blast there within the confines of the District of Columbia which killed seven service-personnel. Hours after that attack, Senator Dunbar was gunned down in the street. He’d made a speech in the US Senate and had afterwards travelled to CNN’s DC Bureau Office a few blocks away to do an interview to talk about his worries about people back in his native Arizona. When he exited a vehicle along with bodyguards provided by the Secret Service – there had been threats against him for being a Westerner, even one so strongly opposed to the DAR –, two gunmen armed with M-16 assault rifles murdered him, three agents and also an innocent bystander when firing rapidly in broad daylight. They fled the scene and successfully escaped a city which had been in military lockdown for most of the month. His murder was blamed on the DAR in the public imagination yet that was false. It was to do with the American Insurgent Army and Dunbar’s Senate role in investigating them and who was behind them. That news was ‘less sexy’ for much of the media as opposed to wild, inaccurate claims that there was DAR involvement.

Jennifer Webb returned to Colorado the day that the first US Army troops entered the state of which she was the lieutenant-governor. She’d fled for her life – chased out by gunshots – ahead of secession led by Governor Rowan. Webb’s return wasn’t to the state capital Denver at first (nor Colorado Springs where the 82nd Airborne Division was either) because that large city was still in ‘enemy’ hands. She went to the small city of Holyoke… a town really despite its official status as a city. National guardsmen from Virginia serving with the 29th Infantry Division had taken it, plus its little airport, for the United States and thus liberated Holyoke and the Coloradoans who lived there. A speech was made in Holyoke by Webb where she declared herself to be Colorado’s legitimate governor rather than Rowan. She looked forward to the liberation of the rest of the state including Denver from what she declared to be an occupation by traitors to not just the United States but the people of Colorado too. In something not cleared with the Roberts Administration, the Pentagon nor anyone else back in DC, Webb followed up those remarks by declaring that Colorado wouldn’t be under any sort of martial law once liberated. There would be legal civilian rule in her state, Webb told the few Coloradoans who turned out as well as the rest of the nation through the media coverage which she got with her statement. Her argument was that democracy had to be returned to Colorado and that meant civilian rule, not by the military. There would be re-run of what had happened in the Deep South in the aftermath of liberation from the rule of the Confederacy during the First American Civil War. Webb came out and said what a lot of people had been thinking but had not gone public with in such a manner as she had. She did so knowing that no one in DC had at that point taken the decision as to how to treat liberated areas of the West and the people there once US military forces moved in. It was something that aggravated many yet she was targeting her audience in Colorado rather than elsewhere. More than just her personal quest for power, which she believed was rightfully hers, to Webb it was only right that the people of the West were treated just like all other Americans and had civilian democracy returned to them. She didn’t want to see martial law or anything like that. Of course, her being on the ground there in Colorado gave her more legitimacy as someone to speak for the West too over those who remained back in Washington. Her speech in Holyoke propelled Webb to the forefront of the race to be the lone voice speaking for the people who lived out in the DAR.

[James G]

81 – Zero-day vulnerability

DAR Army signals intelligence operatives working from Fort Huachuca in Arizona weren’t even searching for the travel movements of ‘Gold Six’. They were instead working at a higher-level target than the codename which the commander of ARNORTH used. However, instead of intercepting and decoding orders coming down from the US Northern Command to the army-group level command which was the US Army North, they became aware of a trip which Lt.–General Corrigan was making from his headquarters at Fort Sam Houston in Texas up to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and back again. His method of transport, his route and the general timings were all out there to be found by someone not even trying that hard to look. Stupidity it was and there was the shaking of many heads at Fort Huachuca at how dumb the security on the other side was. The signals interception unit commander passed the information up the chain of command not expecting what happened to occur. No one told him, nor his subordinates afterwards who had done all the hard work, that Operation Rattlesnake was then drafted and given a green light. From all the way at the top in the DAR Armed Forces, from General Fuller himself gaining permission from Minister Rawlings, there was the instruction to use the intelligence which had fallen into their lap and make an attack against Corrigan while he was flying. He was the senior commander of the varied US Army & US Marine Corps units invading the Democratic American Republic. His death would throw a spanner in the works of that and, additionally, would be a masterstroke of propaganda to be exploited for all that it was worth. Rattlesnake was done fast and on the fly because the pay off from it were regarded as being worth the expense if it failed.

A different signals intelligence unit, one operated by the DAR Air Force as a mobile ground station from inside Utah, tracked Gold Six in-flight. There was a US Air Force C-40B Clipper VIP transport – a converted Boeing-737 – which flew from Kelly Annex in San Antonio on a northeastern routing first, taking it far away from where the fighting was with the DAR. That aircraft went over North Texas and Oklahoma too before going north and arriving at Sherman Army Airfield on the banks of the Missouri River just inside Kansas. Less than an hour later, there were supposedly secure radio messages picked up by those who shouldn’t have heard them that Gold Six was outbound from Fort Leavenworth and on its way back to Texas. Once again, the flightpath which the C-40 would take was to stay far back from where the fighting was inside Colorado & New Mexico. Rattlesnake was put into motion to stop Gold Six from getting back to San Antonio. A trio of F-22A Raptors in DAR Air Force service lifted off from Santa Fe Airport. That civilian facility was being used exclusively by military aircraft supporting the war effort due to its location and size. Those stealth fighters were flying with the 433rd Weapons Squadron, a unit originally from Nellis AFB that in no way had a full squadron’s worth of jets on-hand: ten F-22s were at Santa Fe. Three were sent after Gold Six and they went out individually rather than as one force together. The information on the return route for the targeted aircraft wasn’t exact – it hadn’t been for the flight to Kansas – but there was a good idea of it. Each F-22 pilot was tasked to use their aircraft’s systems to find the C-40 and then engage it. They were sent where best estimates believed that Gold Six could be found when above Oklahoma and Texas. Fuller had given the mission a fifty-fifty chance of success when he had told Rawlings about it but he was too pessimistic. What had come from Fort Huachuca and the capabilities of aircraft such as the F-22 pushed that up to at least a seventy-five per cent chance of success when there was post-mission analysis (to see what could be learnt) done of the targeted killing.

Those fighter pilots flew supercruise to enter US-controlled airspace. They weren’t seen by E-3G Sentry AWACS aircraft nor F-22s in opposition service. Each of them entered the search area and activities their radars. The F-22s had an APG-77 radar fitted with a ‘low probability of interception’ as its rating. It was dangerous to use such a system in enemy territory though. On and then off those radars went with the pilots dashing about in between while saying silent prayers to stay ahead of the enemy coming after them. One of the pilots picked up Gold Six when over Oklahoma. The target aircraft came almost right towards her, flying high and level in pitch black dark skies. Four missiles were launched by the pilot: overkill for a helpless target yet she wanted to get the kill. Those AMRAAMs streaked away and slammed home just as all sorts of alarms sounded aboard the C-40. Impact was confirmed by the pilot and she broadcast a one word confirmation – ‘Trembles’ – over the airwaves as the mission order instructed her to do. That was in no way desired by her nor her fellow F-22 pilots but was in the order. It called off the rest of the hunt and allowed for the go ahead of a distraction effort back to the west using other fighters to open up an air gap to get them home.

Gold Six went down fast. The starboard wing had been sheared off and most of the nose/cockpit was a ruin after multiple missile hits. There was no control in the sudden descent towards the ground as the big aircraft spun around all over the place. Most of those onboard were either dead or unconscious when it could fall no further. Impacting tail first, there wasn’t much left of the C-40 afterwards: it was reduced to a fifth of its size before there was an almighty explosion. That blast occurred half a mile from the Davis Correctional Facility near Holdenville, Oklahoma. No one could have survived the impact. US Air Force search-&-rescue, in conjunction with local & state authorities, did look for survivors in case someone had been blown clear but that was a forlorn hope. All thirty-five souls aboard – the flight crew, Corrigan, key members of his staff and high priority military passengers making the flight from Kansas to Texas – were lost. The F-22s made it back safety though in helping get those pilots home, the aircrews of two F-16s were lost with their own aircraft in a massive air battle over the north of New Mexico.

ARNORTH’s commander had been killed in a targeted assassination to eliminate a top-tier US Army commanding general. It had happened due to lax communications security and DAR military guile. That was all bad enough. What was worse was that the information as to what was going to happen with the downing of Gold Six was, in theory at least, in the hands of US intelligence ahead of time with enough of that to stop it occurring.


Department of Homeland Security Secretary Admiral Miller retained a vice-like grip on intelligence matters of a non-military nature pertaining to the secession in the West throughout the early stages of the Second American Civil War. A bogeyman to those on the Left, as well as many Right-leaning Libertarians too, Miller ruthlessly enforced his department’s jealous guarding of so much information that rightly should have been shared with others. The justification that the fight with the DAR was a domestic affairs and dealt with the matter of a threat to Homeland Security allowed him to do all that he did. It was up to him to also decide what was military-related and what wasn’t too… which drove the Pentagon crazy until that was finally, after a lot of bad stuff had happened, sorted out not in the favour of Miller. It wasn’t just the Defence Department kept in the dark on many matters of importance. At Miller’s instruction, there was no briefing of the State Department that Tommy Zane, the DAR Minister for Foreign Relations, made a secret trip to Tokyo before going onto Seoul as well. On an official level, Japan and South Korea shunned DAR diplomatic attempts but they had been removed out of the United States’ close orbit following the Taiwan Conflict and their position as possible friends for the DAR in trade terms should the nation which Zane represented manage to retain its independence allowed for a back-door opening. Miller discovered that Zane met with the foreign ministers of both nations in secret yet no one told the new Secretary of State that. It was kept quiet by Miller because he wanted to see what intelligence that would develop as Zane tried to expand upon this overseas trip: what wasn’t desired was a major diplomatic spat between Washington and those two capitals where Zane would know he had been busted and there would be no more contact made.

Miller’s private war with the DAR was multi-levelled. There were secrets kept like that to develop intelligence on the sly alongside more overt means of operation where debriefings were conducted of defectors. The DHS supervised the insertion by other federal agencies of undercover operatives into the West and had their work reported back to his office to the impotent fury of those heading component pieces of the US Intelligence Community. It came to Miller’s attention that there were a group of porn directors and stars making a filthy spoof about members of the DAR government engaging in sexual relations with one another. Their production was damn crude though well made. Their motivations were of hatred of those they blamed for the civil war and also how decrees had come from Las Vegas shutting down their business as it didn’t align with the progressive politics espoused there in the DAR capital. The DHS helped with some of the editing in terms of giving the deep fakes a more realistic edge to them, gave ‘suggestions’ on how some of the particularly explicit scenes should involve key DAR figures and helped with its broadcast to the West. It was part of the propaganda war being waged. President Roberts wouldn’t have approved but Miller didn’t seek that. While that was a little bit outlandish, there were other deniable acts done too where false information, fake news and outright lies were told with the targets being those in the DAR. As he did with the Zane information, but not with matters like that explicit movie, Miller involved himself personally in the ongoing efforts to Crack the Panda. Top-level DAR leaders continued to use that Chinese-developed secure messenger app, the one which the National Security Agency & others had long been unable to hack. All the stops were pulled out to get a look-see at their high-level communications, even a temporary one. A break came in that endeavour.

British politicians long talked about the Anglo-US ‘special relationship’. The idea of that, the London had special influence with the United States, was often sneered at elsewhere in the UK: across the North Atlantic, that term just wasn’t something most used. It was said by detractors that there was no special relationship, one which gave great favour from Washington to Britain. That was true in many ways but not all. There were extensive ties in the intelligence field. The Americans had fantastic intelligence ties with other countries, those in the Five Eyes (Britain included) and allies such as Israel too, but even then there were deeper ties with the UK. The intelligence services of the two nations did immense work together. On occasion, they didn’t tell each other certain things when decision were made at the political level, yet where career spooks on both sides of the ocean had for so long worked together sharing plenty, that there were ties beyond politics. Britain’s intelligence services had been for some time working to hack into the Panda app. There were domestic users of that and there was the international cause as well. The United States under presidents Walsh and Roberts had asked for assistance too. An opportunity came the way of MI-6 and they took it where a Chinese defector from the MSS intelligence service fell into their lap. His debrief brought attention to his ties to Panda and how, as suspected, the whole thing with that service provided for civilian use was nothing more than a Chinese Trojan Horse! The defector – named PUDDLEFOOT – had been on the end of inserting the necessary code to allow the MSS to read messages between users at will. A hack was made using a time-limited Zero-day vulnerability in the anti-hack defences of the Panda app. It was a joint UK-US effort and physically undertaken within Vietnam (an unwilling third-country host) to Crack the Panda.

For nine hours, five minutes and fifty-one seconds, the Panda was hacked. PUDDLEFOOT told them how to do it and was on-hand to guide the raid through the messenger service’s database where messages were backed up for storage: the marketing for the app said that there was no such storage and so many people believed that!. An AI-driven security effort shut down the hack in the end. Before that though, a wealth of information was taken. GCHQ and NSA each knew what they were after when they went looking. They already had the names and phone details of various targets of their intelligence operations. For Miller’s people from the DHS who interjected themselves in the NSA part of the hack, they went after the message history of selected DAR figures as well as their contacts. It was all taken away for analysis so that it could be exploited in time. Who those investigative targets – people like Maria Arreola Rodriquez, Cicely Blair Padley and so on – spoke to, how they did so and what they discussed was all useful for looking backwards and to be employed in operations at a later date. There were ideas about black propaganda to insert into their communications should the situation arise with another hack made available through a further Zero-day vulnerability to be prised open, if that one should be one to allow a physical insertion of messages rather than just reading previous ones.

The date dump was huge. It was shared elsewhere with domestic partners and selected allies. In all the information gained when there was success to Crack the Panda, the issue with Operation Rattlesnake to target Gold Six was there. Rawlings discussed it with Vice President Padley and California Governor Pierce. It wasn’t given much of their attention and Rawlings was instructed by those leading Council of Thirteen members to go ahead without seemingly any real discussion. However, Gold Six’s real identity and how his killing was to be achieved was all in that hacked database. It was something that the DHS had their hands on before the mission went ahead and the commander of ARNORTH was assassinated. Miller didn’t know about it until afterwards. Those people of his who saw it, like those at the NSA, didn’t focus there due to all the other information which they suddenly gained… and there was a lot of that, all real insightful political stuff. Corrigan’s plane was shot down though and when the cat was walked back, it was realised that the assassination could have been stopped in time. That was if the DHS had been seeking to do that and they could have passed it onto the Pentagon to be believed there. In short, it would have taken a lot to go right to stop Rattlesnake from happening. Still, the opportunity had been missed. Upon realising the implications of what happened, Miller kept schtum. The Pentagon wasn’t told and those down the chain were stepped upon to shut up while being reminded that their duty was to the intelligence war being fought. The cover-up was unnecessary when the truth would have been enough maybe not to put a band-aid over bad feelings yet been one of honesty after the fact. Instead, Miller did what came naturally to him and tried to hide everything. He didn’t want to lose his power should the DHS be unfairly blamed for not stopping Corrigan’s assassination.

His cover-up worked at his end. It didn’t work with those in GCHQ and MI-6, those who had relationships with American intelligence services such as the CIA and the NSA that went beyond Miller’s successful power-play to gain all the power that he had. They also didn’t like Miller in London either: he’d made no friends, only enemies overseas. On the ‘advice’ of trans-Atlantic friends, they made a stink on their side of the ocean about what had happened. Wasn’t Britain an ally of the United States, a country beset by civil war instigated by people who had a Chinese influence over them? Shouldn’t all the information about Rattlesnake, Gold Six and what came from when the Panda was hacked be made available to allies in DC? Intelligence chiefs presented those arguments to their political masters and awaited the outcome which they and their American friends wanted to see with Miller falling from grace.

[James G]

Back in Colorado next with the ground war and the Liberation of Denver.

[gillan1220]

How is life in the DAR for ordinary civilians not involved in the conflict? Is it truly democratic (i.e. the liberal's/progressive's paradise)?

[James G]

Apr 2, 2021 2:47:44 GMT gillan1220 said:

How is life in the DAR for ordinary civilians not involved in the conflict? Is it truly democratic (i.e. the liberal's/progressive's paradise)?

I have an update for that pencilled in for either update 83 or 84: late this weekend.
On paper, it is that. Yet, the truth is different. What isn't happening is blamed on wartime conditions and DC aggression.

[gillan1220]

Apr 2, 2021 10:06:38 GMT James G said:

Apr 2, 2021 2:47:44 GMT gillan1220 said:

How is life in the DAR for ordinary civilians not involved in the conflict? Is it truly democratic (i.e. the liberal's/progressive's paradise)?

I have an update for that pencilled in for either update 83 or 84: late this weekend.
On paper, it is that. Yet, the truth is different. What isn't happening is blamed on wartime conditions and DC aggression.

I'd view the DAR as what one of those fictional nations the left/liberals imagined like CHAZ or CHOP. So basically everyone has free education, free health care, and equal pay. Freedom of speech maybe tolerated but those who do something short of disagreeing with a different opinion maybe considered a crime.

I'd imagine both Las Vegas and DC isn't a good vs bad. Both sides are morally questionable. I'd see the DHS Secretary someone akin to J. Edgar Hoover.

[gillan1220]

Mar 29, 2021 18:18:49 GMT James G said:

A solid blue roundel with a horizontal white stripe through the middle adorned the tail with the letters ‘DARAF’ printed below in red.

I decided to generate the roundel of the DARAF. Link on my DeviantArt: www.deviantart.com/godemperorgillan/art/DARAF-roundel-875114162

[gillan1220]

James G, America Uncovered uploaded this episode on their channel last March 16, 2021. It is beginning to look like your story.
Is the US Breaking Apart? | Why Some Conservatives Want to Form New States

[James G]

Apr 2, 2021 13:35:58 GMT gillan1220 said:

Apr 2, 2021 10:06:38 GMT James G said:

I have an update for that pencilled in for either update 83 or 84: late this weekend.
On paper, it is that. Yet, the truth is different. What isn't happening is blamed on wartime conditions and DC aggression.

I'd view the DAR as what one of those fictional nations the left/liberals imagined like CHAZ or CHOP. So basically everyone has free education, free health care, and equal pay. Freedom of speech maybe tolerated but those who do something short of disagreeing with a different opinion maybe considered a crime.

I'd imagine both Las Vegas and DC isn't a good vs bad. Both sides are morally questionable. I'd see the DHS Secretary someone akin to J. Edgar Hoover.

Politically, it is in many ways like that. Not so much the CHOP/CHAZ stuff though. Before the war, California and Oregon both finally cracked down on anarchist zones due to extreme violence: when Utah 'fell into revolution', there has been much anarchy there though.
The DAR constitution is based on the US one with free speech but there are exceptions: media control is a big deal and so too are gun rights.
The country is founded on the principle of freedom and democracy. Not much of that is happening though and the blame for the lack of action is upon the War of Aggression launched against them.
Each Gov is doing some bad things yet neither is being really evil. They are going out of their way to not injure civilians, punishing soldiers who do so by accident even. Hoover is a good analogy for Miller though Miller is not going to have as much long term success in his endeavours.

Apr 3, 2021 2:52:30 GMT gillan1220 said:

James G, America Uncovered uploaded this episode on their channel last March 16, 2021. It is beginning to look like your story.
Is the US Breaking Apart? | Why Some Conservatives Want to Form New States

[iframe title="YouTube video player" width="560" height="349" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/oANB31uZLz0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="1"][/iframe]

I gave this a full watch. the Pacific NW / Inland NW has been there in my story and a flashpoint, yes. Republicans in OR & WA opposed to state governments and the change in demographics in ID led to Democrats gaining in strength. I got the inspiration from real events alluded to in that video too.