Blood and Ice: The New Mercian Civil War

(This article is authored by DoomFruit, and reproduced here with permission from StrategyForge.net)

Introduction

Following recontact with the Core in the last years of the 2170s, New Mercia possessed a growing industrial economy, an expanding and wealthy middle class, a stable, organised, democratic and fairly efficient government structure (as compared to many other Expanse and Rim worlds, at least) and a military that showed few signs of disloyalty. Barring the probably unavoidable - and, in the grand scheme of things, very minor - campaign of terrorism by the Mercian National Liberation Front, which was very loud and visible, but failed to become as effective as the guerilla war waged by the anti-European National Patriot Front in the 2140s, it appeared the the colonial government had a firm grip on it's world. All indications were that New Mercia was set to become one of the 'Big Three' economies of ZOCU, alongside Londenium and Hampshire, at least assuming that ZOCU was not destroyed by Europe and the PACT.

Today, in contrast, New Mercia is an impoverished, heavily militarised autocratic dictatorship - under Queen Margaret - with a truncated, if still considerable industrial base and a population that is somewhere between half and two thirds the size of the pre-war kingdom. Additionally, modern New Mercia, while not quite a rogue state, is explicitly antagonistic towards the EU in general and EU-backed Albion in particular, a very different situation to the strained but also generally amicable situation immediately post-contact and the current intention of most ZOCU states to atively try and build bridges with the Core.

This article will attempt to outline, in brief, the way in which the New Mercian Civil War in general and certain specfic events in particular, effected those changes, and how the legacy of the war continues to shape current New Mercian economic, military and diploamtic strategy.

Background

The Pre-War Situation

As I mentioned in the introduction, New Mercia between 2177 and 2180 was in the middle of an economic renaissance that was unprecedented in the history of the colony. During the period of direct EU administration before the Breakdown, New Mercia was treated and managed entirely as a resource colony. What industry did exist was intended and designed for the purpose of supporting a colony in a relatively unpleasant but ultimately non-lethal planetary environment. Given that the planners of the original colony mission had decided to test their own pet ideas about the proper way to build entirely self-contained and self-sufficient settlements - that's arcologies to you and me - that industry was somewhat more developed than one might have expected, but there was very little spare capacity to devote to competing with any of the big EU commercial interests that were involved in exploiting the moon's mineral wealth and massive dust deposits.

The New Mercians, predictably, took exception to the Europeans exploiting them so openly and effectively, and by the time the Breakdown hit, they had themselves a nice little guerrilla war going. It wasn't anything like the situation on Haraway - the EU was the legal authority on the planet, for a start - and the guerrillas showed no signs of winning, up until the failure of FTL travel left the colony isolated. The colonial administration, rather sensibly, decided to compromise with the pro-independence groups, and the result was the Kingdom of New Mercia - with the leader of the NPF as king. A report on the actions they took to survive the Breakdown could - and has - filled books. Large ones, I might add, so I'll skip that. Suffice it to say that, by the time they were recontacted, they had an industrial economy that was probably unsustainably large given the limitations on the volume of their shipping to the rest of ZOCU. In fact, it was probably the largest economic base in the region, even if it was less capable of building complex things like starships than Londenium. Since it relied on government subsidy for support, though, it wasn't an especially prosperous economy, and it was basically spinning it's wheels as part of a huge employment programme to stop people from starving, while slowly bankrupting the government.

EU recontact changed that, though. For a start, it was the New Mercians that built their system catapults, under EU supervision. that sounds pretty unbelievable today, but you have to remember that, at the time, the intention of both sides was to find a workable way to reconcile. New Merica needed the work, and the EU wanted to take advantage of a more-or-less developed industrial base and the huge dust supply right there in the system, so both of them got something out of the arrangement. That's one of the big reasons it only took a year or so to connect the system to the catapult network; the EU didn't have to ship everything from Earth. Once the catapult was built, of course, New Mercian firms had access to the wider markets of the Core, and there was plenty of demand for industrial muscle that far out; the Earth based corporations had better kit and more money to throw about, but they were a month or two away from places like Lylat, whereas New Mercia (and, for that matter, Outremonde and Neue Silesia) were right next door. The result was that all that superfluous, job-programme industry suddenly became a real money-maker, and the laws and organisational quirks intended to make sure that everybody had enough to eat and live on meant that a lot of the new wealth ended up spread over the entire population, rather than concentrated at the top, which created a rapidly expanding market of domestic consumers as well.

That sort of situation usually creates stability, rather than discord, but it turned out that (predictably enough) not everybody was all that happy about being cut free from the EU. Enter the MNLF. These fuckers were the pro-European counterparts to the NPF of several decades earlier, or that's what they claimed. In reality, they were completely different. The NPF, for all it's faults, never targeted civilians directly as far as anybody has been able to tell. Sure, they were willing to accept atrocious civilian casualties when attacking their targets and didn'e exactly take extensive measures to avoid collateral damage, but they didn't deliberately attack civilians. The MNLF, in contrast, had a hard on for leaving bombs in maglev terminals and shooting up shopping districts and playschools. If you want a comparison, the MNLF was like the Provisional Irish Republican Army from the 20th Century - or maybe the Tamil Tigers from the same era - whereas the NPF was more like some of the more responsible guerrillas on planets like Van Lang today. Anyway, what it boils down to is that the MNLF were pretty nasty, and the EU stuck them on their list of banned terrorist organisations pretty sharpish. That probably pissed them off a bit, since they were trying to rejoin the EU, but it didn't stop them bombing the shit out of all sorts of interesting places, including an attempt to cut the New Anglia orbital elevator, which probably would have had unfortunate consequences for the entire arcology if they'd managed to pull it off.

The EU, for their part, were actively helping the New Mercians with their terrorist problem. The New Mercian army - officially the Royal Mercian System Defence Force Ground Command - was pretty large by this point, and they'd actually started out with EU military doctrine, since their original cadre came from the EU security troops stranded on the planet. That said, their entire combat experiance up until that point had been in the Magnate War, and Mercia wasn't really all that heavily involved to start with. The upshot of this is that they had more or less green troops with absolutely no experiance in counter-insurgency or security, and the MNLF were running rings around them. They weren't going to stand for large EU combat formations on their world, but they were perfectly happy to have training detachments and the like. This comes back to the fact that both sides were after peaceful reconciliation, and the assumption was that now ZOCU wasn't really needed, people would be returning to the fold, probably with a lot more local autonomy since ZOCU worlds weren't at all reliant on Earth anymore. Unfortunately, at the same time, the EU managed to get a UN mandate passed for a whole bunch of newly recontacted worlds, and they included New Mercia on that list. I'm of the opinion that they had genuinely good intentions, but I'm from Ireland, so I may be just a tad biased. Anyway, the result was that a bunch of Peacekeepers got deployed there as well (that was UNOFME - the United Nations Observation Force for New Mercia), and the New Mercians resented the hell out of it. That was the point at which public opinion of the EU really started to sour. It wasn't anything overt, really, but you started getting attacks on individual EU and UN soldiers if they didn't stay in well traveled areas, and it was enough to make the diplomatic situation somewhat tense. That was more or less the way talks with ZOCU as a whole were starting to go, though, so the specific cause of the ill feeling wasn't really noticed, and nobody was paying enough attention - on either side - to notice that public opinion was starting to link the EU directly with the MNLF. There wasn't any evidence for that, but lack of proof hasn't stopped the mob from deciding somebody's guilty before, and it didn't here.

It wouldn't have been all that much of a problem, though, since the government was pretty committed to trying to work some sort of solution out. Whether they'd succeeded or not, I don't know; I was actually deployed there at the time, and there was a lot of discussion about applying for actual membership in the EU, as an actual nation, rather than as a colony. I guess that would have solved a lot of the problems, although I still don't think they'd have been comfortable. It's a moot point, though, because the MNLF demonstrated that they were completely batshit and launched the April Fools Coup.

Now, a lot of people can't understand how the hell those whackos managed to pull off something so devastating. Well, you have to remember, New Mercian arcologies aren't all that much like Earth cities. Everything's a lot closer together. Plus, despite everything, they didn't really have a tradition of how to respond to terrorism, so they didn't have lots of troops protecting their government buildings. They did have a battalion at the palace compound, but that's about it. They weren't exactly expecting to have to fight a major battle, especially with people who up until that point hadn't been inclined to do more than leave explosives in bins. So, when the MNLF hit them, they were badly unprepared. The coup is the clearest evidence available that the MNLF had backers somewhere in the EU, since they'd managed to get their hands on modern kit. Whether it was an official intelligence operation or some corrupt procurement manager with a beef against ZOCU for not welcoming Europe back with open arms, I don't know, but the end result was New Mercian police with tasers and microwave guns against heavily armed militants with modern military exoskeletons, payload rifles and even a handful of battlesuits. The MNLF went through them like hot knife through butter, and then did the same to the light security around the Home Office, Foreign Office, Parliament, the Ministry of Defence... pretty much all government buildings. When they got inside, they just started murdering everybody they could find. At the same time, they were securing maglev stations an telecoms nodes and trashing them. The general consensus is, their plan was to eliminate the government, and either get New Mercia to fall apart completely or take over themselves. Both of those would have had the effect of letting the EU back in.

Of course, not everything goes right; in this case, they fluffed their timing on the attack on the palace, and that gave the Guards Battalion warning that something was up. The Guards were the exception in the RMSDF at the time, in that they actually had combat experiance, and they had a company of EU 'advisors' in the compound with them. They had much better kit than the security goons the militants were facing elsewhere, too, and they kicked the shit out of the force attacking the palace, but the MNLF shifted reinforcements to the attack and literally ran the defenders out of ammo with human wave attacks. They didn't get everybody, but they did get the entire Royal Family on the planet at the time, including King Charles (the son of King John), his wife Mary, and the first and second in line to the throne, Princes William and Peter. The only survivor was the then-Princess Margaret - who is currently Queen Margaret, for those of you who are especially dense - and she was on Londenium at the time, studying genetics.

So, the MNLF more or less accomplished their objectives, but New Mercia refused to just fall apart, and they started shifting troops in from elsewhere. It took them a while, since their military C3I loop was ridiculously centralised and they'd just had their central control node set on fire and exploded, but they put something together and retook Landing Arcology. The total death toll was in the thousands, but the MNLF was pretty much wiped out, which is why you never hear about them later in the war.

In an ideal world, that would have been the end of it, but because of the confusion, nobody really knew what was going on. Nobody knows what started the riots, or if they all started for the same reason (some people apparently thought the EU had invaded, others thought it was a plot to kill the King and so on), but pretty much everybody blamed Europe as the 'obvious' backers of the MNLF, and they took their anger out on the people living in pro-European neighborhoods. The people living in those areas, of course, formed their own mobs more or less in self defence. Again, it's pretty hard to paint a coherent picture - I was on the bloody moon at the time, and I had no idea what was happening - but it seems like the local New Mercian military commanders decided that the riots were being staged in support of the coup attempt and tried to crack down on the 'pro-European' crowds while they left the 'Loyalist' mobs alone. That pretty much had the effect of asking the army to help rioters kill anybody that lived in a pro-European area. Considering that maybe a third of the RMSDF had family in areas like that, they weren't going to stand for it, and a bunch of them joined the rioters. That was a complete mess, with SDF soldiers shooting at each other without even being sure which side the other guys were on, and it ended up with the colonial government losing control of most of the Sunside arcologies other than Petershaven, and pretty much gutted the SDF. The rebels didn't get off much better, but they did end up with tow more or less intact corps on their side.

The Early War

The war itself can be roughly divided into three (or maybe four) parts. The first only lasted a couple of months. That's the 'Early War' period, and it's the very first round of fighting before both sides exhausted their immediate pre-war stockpiles and war materiel and had to stop to actually get themselves organised. It's more or part of the period of rioting, since neither side had much in the way of organised command and control or overall strategy; the rebels were trying to capture or break important shit, and the loyalists were trying to stop them, all more or less at the discretion of the local officers. The second stage is usually called the 'Sitzkreig,' which means phoney war is is a term stolen from the much more sensible World War Two. Anybody familiar with the term can imagine what happens here - a whole lot of nothing. This was the period where both sides were getting their feet under them, and it lasted a couple of years. There was a bit of fighting, but it was mostly some skirmishing in the mountains just to show the other side that, yes, they still didn't like the other guy. The third stage is the 'active war' phase, and can be pretty easily divided into two - the mobile war and the stalemate. There's not really a distinct shift between stages two and three, but at some point the skirmishing stopped being minor and became major battles. Eventually, the New Mercians forced their way onto the Fuller Plateau and drove the Albionites away from the three argologies in the area - maybe with the aid of deliberately deployed bioweapons that killed a few million civilians as well - until they ran into the mountains and got stuck.

I'll get to all of that stuff later. First things first; the early war.