Cannon Omake: Starting Dispositions in the Vanguardist War
Chimeraguard
We do deserve to exist.
Starting Dispositions in the Vanguardist War
New American Republic
The New American Republic had already taken a severe blow at the hands of the Vanguardists before the war officially began, with the initial Vanguardist core capturing the capital of Globe, seizing it and the surrounding territory as their own.
The NAR's situation was further complicated by the structure of the nation. Though it proclaimed itself a Libertarian Republic, in truth the NAR's structure was a feudalistic alliance of warlords (titled "Senators"), each of whom had near-absolute authority over their territories and the loyalty of their own private armies and militias. The President was merely the largest of the warlords, with control over the city of Globe and nominal authority over the others. This division has served the Vanguardists well, complicating the issue of forming a unified front and causing more than a few Senators to defect outright.
When Globe fell and the NAR's President Whitefield was forced to flee, he committed the one unforgivable sin for a warlord: showing weakness. An alliance between two of the more powerful Senators, Dean Baker and Chuck Wise, quickly had him arrested and executed, forming what would be the main power bloc within the NAR and rallying the remaining loyal Senators to their banner.
The alliance was a potent one. Baker had a network of favors and connections to demand support from other Senators, while Chuck Wise held a grip upon a significant portion of the nation's agriculture and an equally sizable militia. Nevertheless, things remain unstable. Baker's connections allowed him to claim the Presidency, but his alliance with Wise has become less stable as a result, though kept intact for now with extensive promises of land from Vanguardist territory. Furthermore, Whitefield had many allies among other Senators, few of whom were pleased to hear of his execution. For now, Baker hopes to weld together enough of a coalition to retake the capital of Globe, that such a victory will give him the prestige needed to be accepted by the majority.
United States of America (New Washington)
With the largest American population of any nation, solid allies on Cyprus and Naxos, a largely stable democratic government, and a navy capable of power projection across the Mediterranean, New Washington has a well-deserved reputation as the most powerful of the First Wave States. Despite all this, the nation has been dealt a rough hand by fate and chance since the beginning of the 2nd post-Event decade.
Early on in the decade, it seemed that the nation's fortunes would continue to turn for the better, with the unexpected murder of the First State of New Arizona's President causing the already-reeling nations to collapse entirely. But attempts to exploit this collapse led to the disastrous Battle of New Peyson, and soon after the loss of Malta to Downtimer revolt, as reinforcements were hastily re-routed to fill the lost ranks. By the time the dust settled, over 300 trained, professional soldiers had been torn out of New Washington's army.
The loss of hundreds of professional soldiers was a devastating blow to New Washington's military capabilities, albeit not one they couldn't recover from given time. Equally significant though was the blow to morale and prestige, having not only been defeated by a warlord who commanded a mere fraction of New Arizona's army, but having lost their Maltese colony to Crete in the aftermath. The other political parties of New Washington's Uptimer Democracy eagerly exploited this to criticize the ruling Progressive Party, which managed at least to hold its own by pointing out improvements their tenure had brought to domestic quality of life.
Even so, the election of late 11 AE looked certain to be a messy one, made even worse by the promise of a poor harvest. This was something the New Washington government had no control over and had the food reserves to endure, but it was an ill omen to begin an election season on, especially to a population that still remembered the Cold Summers in the aftermath of the Event.
This was the environment in which the Vanguardist faith was starting to take root. The first converts were Downtimers, as President Whitefield of the NAR quietly encouraged a few Vanguardists to join with the latest shipments of weapons to Downtimer rebels within New Washington. This rather foolish act was done in the hopes that the Vanguardist faith would prove a unifying factor amongst the rebels, and allow him control over them via his (self-perceived) ability to control Abiel Wyse.
Across the harvest season of late 11 AE, the faith would spread like wildfire. Downtimers would remain the primary source of converts, but even a number of Uptimers were coming around to Vanguardism, largely a motley collection of frustrated subsistence farmers in the interior and a mix of soldiers and militia demoralized by recent military defeats and the seemingly endless grind of conflict with Downtimer rebels. At that time though, the faith itself was still limited to the hinterlands away from the main centers of power in New Washington, until the election ended.
The results of the election were catastrophic. Not because one faction had clearly crushed all others in votes, but because there seemed to be no clear winner between the Labor Coalition (the far-left), the Progressives (center-left), the Republicans (center-right), and the Conservatives (the far-right). Escalating Downtimer uprisings combined with a notable refugee flight from the NAR as the Vanguardist insurrection began contributed to no small amount of chaos across many districts, leaving the voting outcome uncertain, and accusations abound of fraud as all four parties denounced each other, while claiming that they were the rightful winner.
Frustrated with electoralism and seeing the chaos engulfing West Anatolia as an opportunity, the Conservative Party (the far-right party of New Washington) attempted a coup. Supported by right-wing elements of the army and a number of the nation's increasingly influential landlords, the coup was nevertheless foiled in relatively short order by loyal military units, the local police, and a variety of hastily mobilized citizen militias in the capital itself.
Fearing annihilation on charges of treason, the Conservatives threw their lot in and declared their support for the newborn Christ's Kingdom on Earth, ordering loyal military units on the border to invite the Vanguardist soldiers in to defend the new "faithful" from "Liberal-Communist tyranny." Though rather stunned at this about-face, the commander of the Vanguardist units at the New Washington border was swift to take advantage, and before long much of the New Washington interior was occupied by Crusaders.
This would prove to be a fatal miscalculation by the Conservatives however. Having assumed the highly religious Vanguardists would hold similar political beliefs to their own, they were appalled to find that the Vanguardists identified far more strongly with the various Downtimer sharecroppers and de-facto serfs that worked the farmland of the landlords of the interior. The Vanguardists viewed these Downtimers as their kin, particularly as the Vanguardist faith was widespread among their number and viewed the Conservatives (correctly) as little more than opportunists and false-converts. The plantations soon burned, many landlords found themselves killed by their former laborers, and the Vanguardist invaders have been greeted as liberators by most Downtimers.
In New Washington itself meanwhile, the unprecedented crisis led to a hasty political ceasefire. With the Conservatives gone, a Coalition Government was formed around the incumbent President Dengra of the Progressive Party, denouncing the Conservatives as traitors and the Vanguardists as deranged fanatics. Nevertheless, politically this coalition teeters on a knife's edge, with all three of the remaining parties despising each other and still viewing themselves as the rightful winners of the election. Further complicating factors has been the defection of a small but noticeable number of Labor Coalition and Republican members to the Vanguardists (with the LC defectors praising the Vanguardists' equality of treatment Downtimers, and the Republican ones viewing it as a version of "Christianization" of them that they have long-advocated.)
A mere year after the collapse of its main rival in the First State of New Arizona, and New Washington looks ready to fall into the abyss itself. The army has been gutted twice over by combat losses and defections, forcing the government to rely heavily on the National Guard of the various towns and counties, along with even more ad-hoc units of citizen militias. The only silver lining so far is the fact that New Washington retains control of the capital, coastline, and the majority of the industry, though what territory remains is, like its neighbor in the NAR, facing significant resistance from Downtimer Vanguardist rebels. As it stands, President Dengra hopes to be able to assemble a coalition of nations across West Anatolia, along with New Washington's own allies for the purpose of defeating the Vanguardists. At the same time though, quiet feelers have been extended to the Republic of Naxos about the possibility of hosting a government-in-exile, just in case.
Christ's Kingdom on Earth
A nation still in the process of its birth, Christ's Kingdom on Earth dominates the interior regions of New Washington and the New American Republic, having seized the former NAR capital of Globe and returning it to its original name of Sfard. From here, the Vanguardists have spread across much of West Anatolia, and even in areas not under their direct control, one can often find widespread unrest and rebellion in the name of Abiel Wyse, the Younger Brother of Jesus Christ.
Although the Kingdom has expanded with astonishing speed and the ranks of its army swell with recruits, the Vanguardist state has a number of problems. Among the most obvious is its location in the interior cutting it off from the sea, and with it the vital fishing industries that can sustain a nation even through a poor harvest. With the poor harvest of 11 AE, most granaries lie empty, and if the chaos of warfare interferes with the farming of 12 AE, the new state could be facing a famine in short order.
Furthermore, while the newly born nation's territory is vast, it is not truly entirely under Vanguardist control. Across both former NAR and New Washington territory, loyalist holdouts remain a constant issue. Ranging from isolated military detachments to bands of settler-militias fearful of execution by vengeful Downtimers, the vast majority of them are armed with at least some amount of pre-Event weapons, making them a troublesome opponent that would require extensive military efforts to fully root out.
But perhaps the most potentially devastating of the Kingdom's weaknesses is the very speed that has allowed it to spread over more than half of the territory of the two largest nations in West Anatolia. To attain that speed, much of the Kingdom's territory has been left under the rule of either its pre-formation warlords (particularly in the case of former NAR lands), de-facto military rule, or a chaotic mix of local rebel bands frantically trying to hash out something resembling a proper bureaucracy. Until the kingdom manages to form some sort of administrative apparatus, its organization resembles not so much a nation-state as an army with pretensions of one, a situation that will only worsen the longer it takes with an increasing risk of causing the entire cause to collapse under its own weight.
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