Up With the Star: A different kind of Civil War ATL:

[Johnrankins]

It's a combination of bounce crossing and the great bulk of strength on both sides being in Europe. The Russian strength is larger than that of the Allies due only to the logistical limits the theater imposes on both sides, the inability to sustain troops there means it's one of those Budenny Specials. I might note that in this sense it's a more protracted Dodecanese Campaign/equivalent to Japan's New Guinea Campaign that lasts as long as it does from the simple problem of equipping troops to fight in Alaska and in Europe, if the European theater had gone even slightly better for the Central Powers the Alaska war would have been far shorter and far less glorious for ATL Russia than it actually was.

The problem is that the Bering Straights is 25 miles across with only tiny islands in between. How does Russia stop the US patroling the area with warships sinking everything in sight? Tons of little ships or subs aren't going to cut it. The Japanese tried that and it didn't work. You need lots of big, slow transports to supply huge armies across the straight. I doubt the Russians could land and supply a single brigade against US resistance not talking about a truly meaningful number of troops. They can possibly do a raid but that is about it.

 

[Snake Featherston]

The problem is that the Bering Straights is 25 miles across with only tiny islands in between. How does Russia stop the US patroling the area with warships sinking everything in sight? Tons of little ships or subs aren't going to cut it. The Japanese tried that and it didn't work. You need lots of big, slow transports to supply huge armies across the straight. I doubt the Russians could land and supply a single brigade against US resistance not talking about a truly meaningful number of troops. They can possibly do a raid but that is about it.

When they landed there was no US resistance as the USA did not expect Russia would be that stupid. With the USA's logistical build-up Budenny's protracted fight there became a progressive instance of idiot ball fanaticism of all the worst sorts. The Alaskan invasion was a good psychological blow....had Russia withdrawn immediately next and turned it into a propaganda piece. Their decision to stay and fight helped make it a clusterfuck and contributed to their ultimate overstretch by the end of the war.

 

[Johnrankins]

When they landed there was no US resistance as the USA did not expect Russia would be that stupid. With the USA's logistical build-up Budenny's protracted fight there became a progressive instance of idiot ball fanaticism of all the worst sorts. The Alaskan invasion was a good psychological blow....had Russia withdrawn immediately next and turned it into a propaganda piece. Their decision to stay and fight helped make it a clusterfuck and contributed to their ultimate overstretch by the end of the war.

How do you supply it once it gets there? The US navy WILL close the straights. Once that happens the Russian Army in Alaska is doomed. The Russians will quickly be out of supplies while the US can resupply at will.

 

[Snake Featherston]

How do you supply it once it gets there? The US navy WILL close the straights. Once that happens the Russian Army in Alaska is doomed. The Russians will quickly be out of supplies while the US can resupply at will.

Having looked more closely at what happened, in reality the Russians reform their armies in their Far Eastern territories. The Russian Army in Alaska sees the US, Canadian, and Japanese (Japan doesn't want Russia using the Aleutians as a direct springboard for a naval attack) cut off its supplies, becomes immobile, and holds out only because Budenny is too stupid to quit and surrender, preferring to hold out in a pattern characteristic of his OTL role in the Red Army. They don't escape, and by the end of the campaign their lavish logistical and firepower requirements are what helps do them in.

 

[Johnrankins]

They don't, which is one reason that it's US incompetence that lets them escape. Attacking Alaska is like Japan's invasion of New Guinea, it only looked good on a map and didn't really get Russia anything.

With the US controlling the straights even epic incompetence won't get them out. They have no supplies and can't leave. They are land locked in Alaska and out of supplies. The US then quickly whittles them down to nothing.

 

[Snake Featherston]

With the US controlling the straights even epic incompetence won't get them out. They have no supplies and can't leave. They are land locked in Alaska and out of supplies. The US then quickly whittles them down to nothing.

With the US controlling the straits epic incompetence *can* get them out provided the right circumstances happen. However in the actual invasion the interdiction campaign reduces the Alaska army to being immobile and completely crushed and it does not in fact get out. The delay in doing this is from Budenny's rather senseless in a strategic sense fanatical resistance and refusal to simply quit. The fighting is relatively small-scale and it only gets tough toward the very end, and it's more the difficulties of moving mechanized forces *through* Alaska that delays things.

Russia gets over the straits but only gets territory out of it, and in the actual war itself, as noted here: The success of the continual Central Powers interdiction campaign was to render Semyon Budenny's front increasingly immobile as the disappearance of Russian oil supplies, and US guerrillas torching Alaskan oil wells and/or securing them for Central Powers use dramatically enhanced the mobility of Central Powers forces. Thus in the third Battle of Valdez a large Russian Army was defeated by a smaller Central Powers forces due for instance to large numbers of Russian tanks being reduced to smithereens by the weight of US and Canadian firepower, unable to escape due to lack of fuel.

What you're describing is what actually was noted in the original invasion: the moment the straits are closed Russian armies wind up in a clusterfuck.

 

[Grand Prince Paul II.]

How is Poland doing?

This pattern further consolidated a push for a military alliance of Pacific Rim states, an alliance formed in the pivotal Treaty of Tokyo, where the Japanese, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaya, Singapore, Australia, New Guinea, and in a significant instance of Korean autonomy not in this case challenged by Imperial Russia due to the enemy targeted formed a Pacific Alliance of Free States.

Last time I checked, Korea was China's satellite state, not Russia's.
Russia should not be able to challenge Korea's membership.

Spanish Morocco and independence

Does that mean Spain's former North African colonies will remain independent from the Kingdom of Morocco?

 

[Johnrankins]

With the US controlling the straits epic incompetence *can* get them out provided the right circumstances happen.

HOW? The troops can't swim back the 25 miles of artic cold water. The tanks can't cross it. Nor artillary, nor supplies. The US fleet will be there in a week at most. Once that happens that is all she wrote. They are completely cut off and then it is a mere question of time and probably not much time at that. A few weeks, maybe. A modern army uses a huge amount of supplies and resupply won't be coming. With extreme luck they might do some damage before the surrender but they aren't lasting more than a month or so, even with epic incompetence.

 

[Snake Featherston]

How is Poland doing?

Still the westernmost province of the Russian Empire.

Last time I checked, Korea was China's satellite state, not Russia's.
Russia should not be able to challenge Korea's membership.

Given the Sino-Soviet split, Russia doesn't care about furthering China's interests, as they're returning to the more traditional imperial rivalry between those two states. Russia fears that a Korea that might be autonomous and pro-Western is a menace to its borders just as much as or more than a Korea that's pro-Chinese but at least contained by Chinese "supervision" of its foreign policy.

Does that mean Spain's former North African colonies will remain independent from the Kingdom of Morocco?

Yes.

HOW? The troops can't swim back the 25 miles of artic cold water. The tanks can't cross it. Nor artillary, nor supplies. The US fleet will be there in a week at most. Once that happens that is all she wrote. They are completely cut off and then it is a mere question of time and probably not much time at that. A few weeks, maybe. A modern army uses a huge amount of supplies and resupply won't be coming. With extreme luck they might do some damage before the surrender but they aren't lasting more than a month or so, even with epic incompetence.

The Russians use a lot of firepower and Alaska's big is why they last as long as they do. They don't escape in the actual events of the Alaska invasion, instead they do the whole "resist to the bitter end" thing that happpened IOTL WWII. I simply said they *could* escape if things went right for them and horribly wrong on the US side. In the actual scenario the Russians lose mobility and are rooted out one by one.

 

[Johnrankins]

The Russians use a lot of firepower and Alaska's big is why they last as long as they do. They don't escape in the actual events of the Alaska invasion, instead they do the whole "resist to the bitter end" thing that happpened IOTL WWII. I simply said they *could* escape if things went right for them and horribly wrong on the US side. In the actual scenario the Russians lose mobility and are rooted out one by one.

Using a lot of firepower is another way of saying "using a lot of supplies". Supplies they can't waste when being cut off. Within a few weeks at most they are out of fuel and low on both ammo and food.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Using a lot of firepower is another way of saying "using a lot of supplies". Supplies they can't waste when being cut off. Within a few weeks at most they are out of fuel and low on both ammo and food.

That's what actually happens to them in the timeline, again using that quotation from the actual posts you're talking about: The success of the continual Central Powers interdiction campaign was to render Semyon Budenny's front increasingly immobile as the disappearance of Russian oil supplies, and US guerrillas torching Alaskan oil wells and/or securing them for Central Powers use dramatically enhanced the mobility of Central Powers forces. Thus in the third Battle of Valdez a large Russian Army was defeated by a smaller Central Powers forces due for instance to large numbers of Russian tanks being reduced to smithereens by the weight of US and Canadian firepower, unable to escape due to lack of fuel.

The US Army *does* do everything you're talking about. Once interdiction sets in the Russians lose any ability to sustain the campaign and are mopped up, the last fighting is the most bitter and ferocious because Budenny is in command and carefully hoarded all his supplies for a street battle.

 

[Johnrankins]

That's what actually happens to them in the timeline, again using that quotation from the actual posts you're talking about: The success of the continual Central Powers interdiction campaign was to render Semyon Budenny's front increasingly immobile as the disappearance of Russian oil supplies, and US guerrillas torching Alaskan oil wells and/or securing them for Central Powers use dramatically enhanced the mobility of Central Powers forces. Thus in the third Battle of Valdez a large Russian Army was defeated by a smaller Central Powers forces due for instance to large numbers of Russian tanks being reduced to smithereens by the weight of US and Canadian firepower, unable to escape due to lack of fuel.

The US Army *does* do everything you're talking about. Once interdiction sets in the Russians lose any ability to sustain the campaign and are mopped up, the last fighting is the most bitter and ferocious because Budenny is in command and carefully hoarded all his supplies for a street battle.

It just seems to me you have more than a few weeks of fighting here but maybe I misinterpreted something.

 

[Snake Featherston]

It just seems to me you have more than a few weeks of fighting here but maybe I misinterpreted something.

Yes, due to the battle in Nome where Budenny uses street fighting and things like running infantry unarmed into armor to cover up for his mistake. Urban warfare as a means to compensate for his overall weaknesses and because he's too stupid to quit. After interdiction the only limits on the Central Powers is getting the troops there and once they're there only one side's going to win. And it won't be Russia. Again, this is the kind of militarily senseless fighting that Japan engaged in and that characterized some Eastern Front battles of OTL, from a strictly military POV the campaign was over when the Central Powers cut off supplies.

 

[Snake Featherston]

The Wayne Administration, 1984-1992:

President Wayne would inherit the Presidency and finish out President Miller's term, and won one election in his own right due to the raw reverberations of the assassination and turmoil roiling the world leading his Administration to be seen as a bulwark of stability and endurance. Wayne, however, proved a passive and undecided leader, who had divided counsels and proved willing to do nothing at all. In this regard he was seen as another James Buchanan, an indecisive leader whose failures to act portended ultimately greater weakness and damage to the United States than might otherwise have been expected. His pattern of indicating US acceptance of new trends belatedly and at a point when it was annoying at best and enraging at worst and his dilly-dallying in the Reunification War contributed to his defeat in the 1992 election by a candidate whose policies represented a more hardline approach to backing US intervention in the wider world.

Miller's Administration came to be seen in a chorus of criticism and in certain sections of speculative fiction as the moment in which the USA squandered multiple opportunities to establish a clear moral and geopolitical authority to act unilaterally. Instead in the wake of the Romanov Restoration and the establishment of the United Indian Republic the USA was to find itself inured to existing in a more multi-polar world, facing China, Russia, India, Brazil, and the prospect of a united European economic bloc.

 

[Snake Featherston]

The Republic of Sindh, Isolation and the decision for war:

As the Republic of Sindh was to be ever-more-isolated, it began to face three interrelated crises. First, the endless oscillation of coups by generals meant that no coherent, consistent government existed in the Republic, none able to define or to act upon policies. This meant in turn that the Republic, facing growing crises and isolation, was unable to adopt proper or correct policies from simply having no government able to adopt policies that would last for more than six months, until the last government, that of General Badahur Singh in January 1991.

The second was a growing economic collapse as the cut-off of aid meant that agriculture in the Republic was proving inefficient as the problems of the ongoing collapse of the system mean people left the countryside to go into the cities, where the tensions and violence absorbed these growing populations and worsened a demographic catastrophe and extreme vulnerability. Adding to this was a problem of emigration to India, whose growing prosperity and stability looked far better than the Republic of Sindh's growing anarchy.

Finally was the attempt by Sindh to build its own stockpile of nuclear weapons, the Russian weapons in Sindh having been withdrawn as the Romanov Restoration had continued and the discussions between Russia and India resulted in the Treaty of Riga, where Russia accepted a unified India and India accepted an Afghanistan controlled by Russia, both sides accepting and agreeing to enforce a DMZ along the new Indo-Afghan Border. India had by the 1980s developed a small stockpile of its own weapons, but expected, and rightfully so, that it could fight and win a conventional war without needing to resort to them. Fear of Sindh with such a weapon proved a regional nightmare, and India's defensive precautions led to the return of Badahur Singh in his third government, this one lasting the longest, into 1992, and to Badahur Singh's desperate decision to unleash Operation Whirlwind, an attempt to defeat the Indian army in a conventional war to both shore up his government and to show that Sindh was a power to be feared if not respected.

What he expected and what occurred, as he sent a ramshackle army torn by deep internal divisions, its modern Russian equipment facing India's US-issue weaponry, on a desperate gamble into the teeth of a far-superior force that was surprised only by the scale of the attack and its suddenness, not by an attack, proved something else again.

 

[Snake Featherston]

The Reunification War, opposing sides:

The Reunification War, lasting from August 1991-February 1992, was the largest conventional war since the Second World War, and marked the most decisive triumph by one side over another in the entirety of the 20th Century. The fighting involved the most up-to-date equipment used by the two most militarily powerful states in the world, Russia's modern R-90 landship (the Romanov Dynasty redubbed all Russian Landships with the word Romanov as a prefix, one trait that was mercilessly mocked in US-media satire) opposed the US Forrest Main Battle Landship and both sides were equipped with the most modern missiles and small-arms and air power.

The two sides, however, were very different in terms of what each army was composed of. The Army of the Republic of Sindh was devastated by the sequence of coups, many of its best leaders having been either exiled or murdered during the political instability that had characterized the 1980s, the soldiers demoralized, and as a result both its tactical and strategic leadership suffered immeasurably. The Army's sole endurance factor came from the monomaniacal refusal of Badahur Shah to quit the war and his ruthless, draconian discipline of soldiers who did not agree with his mad effort to prolong the war well after its loss, as well as the reality that if or when it lost the nation it fought for would no longer exist, giving it the courage of despair.

By contrast the Republic of India's army was much larger, a democratic conscript force, equipped with US-made equipment, with an overall far more sound leadership and with superior morale and ability to use its technology. The Republic of India had expected an offensive but it had expected a more limited one than had actually occurred and was mobilized more than sufficient to meet the offensive expected. The ultimate victory of the Republic of India owed itself to the demoralization and weakness of its enemies and to the far greater military and political power the Republic of India could call upon and use effectively, while the Republic of Sindh would by the fall of 1991 exist only in the dwindling hard core of support for Badahur Singh.

 

[MarshalBraginsky]

The Reunification War, opposing sides:

The Reunification War, lasting from August 1991-February 1992, was the largest conventional war since the Second World War, and marked the most decisive triumph by one side over another in the entirety of the 20th Century. The fighting involved the most up-to-date equipment used by the two most militarily powerful states in the world, Russia's modern R-90 landship (the Romanov Dynasty redubbed all Russian Landships with the word Romanov as a prefix, one trait that was mercilessly mocked in US-media satire) opposed the US Forrest Main Battle Landship and both sides were equipped with the most modern missiles and small-arms and air power.

The two sides, however, were very different in terms of what each army was composed of. The Army of the Republic of Sindh was devastated by the sequence of coups, many of its best leaders having been either exiled or murdered during the political instability that had characterized the 1980s, the soldiers demoralized, and as a result both its tactical and strategic leadership suffered immeasurably. The Army's sole endurance factor came from the monomaniacal refusal of Badahur Shah to quit the war and his ruthless, draconian discipline of soldiers who did not agree with his mad effort to prolong the war well after its loss, as well as the reality that if or when it lost the nation it fought for would no longer exist, giving it the courage of despair.

By contrast the Republic of India's army was much larger, a democratic conscript force, equipped with US-made equipment, with an overall far more sound leadership and with superior morale and ability to use its technology. The Republic of India had expected an offensive but it had expected a more limited one than had actually occurred and was mobilized more than sufficient to meet the offensive expected. The ultimate victory of the Republic of India owed itself to the demoralization and weakness of its enemies and to the far greater military and political power the Republic of India could call upon and use effectively, while the Republic of Sindh would by the fall of 1991 exist only in the dwindling hard core of support for Badahur Singh.

Landships are kinda different from tanks, right?

 

[Snake Featherston]

Landships are kinda different from tanks, right?

Kind of in that armor ITTL is a bit more advanced than IOTL, and in that the evolution of armored warfare is a bit more sophisticated and smooth than IOTL. They are equivalents, however, just like TL-191 Barrels. The R-90 and Forrest landships are equivalent in function to the T-90 and M-1 Abrams but in terms of technical details they are a bit different and in terms of mechanized warfare OTL concepts differ from TTL's in several, subtle ways (such as US strategic v. Russian operational concepts, the German-style tactical mechanized warfare never came into its own ITTL, fortunately). They're also called landships because the word "tank" doesn't take off as it did IOTL.

 

[MarshalBraginsky]

Kind of in that armor ITTL is a bit more advanced than IOTL, and in that the evolution of armored warfare is a bit more sophisticated and smooth than IOTL. They are equivalents, however, just like TL-191 Barrels. The R-90 and Forrest landships are equivalent in function to the T-90 and M-1 Abrams but in terms of technical details they are a bit different and in terms of mechanized warfare OTL concepts differ from TTL's in several, subtle ways (such as US strategic v. Russian operational concepts, the German-style tactical mechanized warfare never came into its own ITTL, fortunately). They're also called landships because the word "tank" doesn't take off as it did IOTL.

That term is also used in the Worldwar books too, only the Race actually use the term landships for tanks.

 

[Snake Featherston]

That term is also used in the Worldwar books too, only the Race actually use the term landships for tanks.

ITTL it comes from sci-fi stories describing proto-tanks as an homage to those stories, and this origin of the term is mostly obscure to later generations. It was a proposed name for them IOTL, too, I might note.