The Plot to Kill the Tsuchikage
(Without Ever Stepping Foot in Iwagakure)
TL;DR: Tie the legitimacy of the Tsuchikage to excellent finances and conquests, gut their ability to pay for either, thus inevitably leading to Rock replacing their own Tsuchikage in an undeclared revolution. Bonus points in that the revolution probably still won't be able to fix what we fuck up.
Longer form:
Ultimately, a lot of the Kage's legitimacy rests upon three things: Tradition, success, and being able to pay people. Let's say we want to fuck up the Tsuchikage. We can't really make her an untraditional pick, if we had the ability to safely beat the shit out of Rock we would have, and so that leaves us with the option of attacking number three. Fortunately, this seems to be the weakest point of the newest Tsuchikage, as well as ninja society in general, because ninja are shockingly callous with the people who are their ultimate paymasters.
The backbone of this plan is this: We know from Mist and Leaf that money in their respective lands flows from the people to the local lords to the daimyo to the office of the Kage, from which it then flows to the clans and the clanless ninja. The key here is that the office of the Kage distributes the money through mission pay. In other words, when it comes to a ninja's paycheck, the buck stops with the Kage. If we can attack the money supply before it reaches the Kage,
so long as nobody can be credibly caught attacking the money supply, the blame for that falls upon the Kage.
Previously, we had come up with plans that amounted to roughly the same thing: conduct wide-scale hydrological sabotage to intentionally create mass disruption among the peasantry and thus fuck up their tax revenue, thus choking out Rock's money supply. This has obvious downsides, to the tune of at least four digit body counts from the widespread starvation, dislocation, and destruction such a move would create.
There is, however, a much more elegant and morally acceptable target: tax collectors and local daimyo. More specifically, the deeds of local daimyo - although if they were to accidentally overindulge in luxuries at an awfully high frequency, that too would be acceptable. The goal is to cripple Rock's ability to collect taxes at a local level by strategically burning records of who owns what and killing morally acceptable daimyo and tax collectors (e.g. abusers as we ran across in that Stickball, Salt, Surprise, although actual implementation by Asuma will no doubt be far messier). Without the ability to know who owns what, Rock's tax-collecting apparatus will be unable to tax people according to what they farm - or perhaps, more accurately, they'll start taxing indiscriminately and be surprised when they literally cannot beat more rice out of the farmers that they can reach.
However, it is of the utmost importance that
nobody be caught destroying these tax records. We cannot afford to give Rock an acceptable target to unite against, or point the finger at, at least not in the early stages while her financials are recoverable.
So, to recap Phase One: we kill a bunch of Rock's tax collectors and destroy a whole bunch of their records, beginning to collapse their money supply.
Phase Two is where things get devious.
Because in Phase Two, we start planting
books scrolls and rumors throughout Rock. Specifically, we start planting information about Rock's internal financial status being
absolutely fantastic. Preferably, if we can tailor this to being a deniable operation of either Rock's office of the Kage or one of their major clan allies.
Why would we choose to buoy confidence in Rock's financial status as we're busy sabotaging it, instead of blowing wide open that the Tsuchikage has been unable to protect the tax supply?
Because the Tsuchikage will be more able to walk off "a brief hiccup caused by clearly enemy action" than "hey guys we lied about our financials being fantastic; we literally have no more money to pay all of you". That latter case is how we're going to depose the Tsuchikage through a revolt of Rock's ninja against the Tsuchikage.
By planting a false account all throughout Earth Country, this starts selling the lie that Rock's finances are fantastic, in a way that the group we're stealing the identity of will likely be unwilling to contradict; to say "hey guys we didn't actually write this, our finances are shit actually" would be a direct attack against the Tsuchikage, and this early into her reign it would likely be seen as a disastrously bad move. Similarly, the Tsuchikage will likely be unwilling to contradict a deniable press release that one of her subordinates apparently ordered but did not tell her about, especially one that plays up her fundamental legitimacy of being easily able to pay her ninja.
Meanwhile, we keep on blazing a trail through Rock's tax records. Keep up the pressure to make their taxes absolutely uncollectable. In their desperation to restore some semblance of taxes, they will likely try to send out teams to collect and survey taxes on C-Rank missions - and will likely reflect that in the power level of teams they send out. After those teams start failing to repair the hole in the budget, they're likely going to turn to more extreme measures; inter-state tarriffs between cities, jacked up taxes on the city-dwellers, jacked up taxes on any farmers they can still collect taxes from, kill missions against disloyal daimyo who are clearly committing tax fraud against the great state of Rock, you name it.
All of this will serve to further cripple their own internal economy, and thus their income stream.
Finally, after the educated (ninja) population has been so confident that Rock's financials have been fantastic, even with the cost of absorbing new conquests...the Tsuchikage has to commit to saying the treasury is empty, and the ninja cannot be paid.
One quick bloodless coup later, there's a new Tsuchikage inheriting an utterly collapsed tax collection system and economy, leading to further political and economic collapse.
And we won't need to ever step foot in Iwagakure.
(This plan is heavily inspired by the run-up to the French Revolution, if not the French Revolution itself, from the period of about 1786 - 1789).
