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

[Snake Featherston]

The Reunification War, the Battle of Jammu, Part I:

When the offensive began in August the only surprise for the Republic of India was the simple scale of the attack. Analysts in Delhi had expected that the damage done to the Republic of Sindh by the endless political coups would forestall any large-scale attack for at least two years. Instead the attack happened in August and on a grand scale, a full-fledged army at combat strength with all the most modern weapons striking one of the relatively weakest sections of the Republic of India's lines.

The resulting start to the Battle of Jammu was that some of the Republic's fighters in the region were caught on the ground, though this war, the first modern war to see the full use of helicopter gunships and fixed-wing gunships, would see Republic of India US-issue Firecracker gunships and surface-to-air missiles inflict unexpectedly high losses on the Republic of Sindh's primarily fixed-wing air power.

The initial, temporary air superiority augumented the sheer weight of numbers of the attacking forces, though they faced an enemy whose weapons were high in quality and one whose determination was both real and quite a shock to the Republic of Sindh forces, which were forced into an unexpectedly slow advance, forced to rely on simple quantities of numbers and firepower to bull past smaller Indian forces on the way to Jammu. This was concurrent with the Republic of India's twin decisions to first halt the offensive aimed at Jammu and then both counterattack in this region and in the south to strike into Balochistan and there seek for a decisive victory.

Russia, outraged by the offensive, which it saw as potentially endangering warming relations with the United States and Europe, refused to intervene, while China, seeking its own warmer religions also refused to step in. Facing this isolation the Republic of Sindh's army would become more, not less, fanatical though this fanaticism of despair gained only higher losses and a more devastating defeat.

 

[Snake Featherston]

The Battle of Jammu, Part II, the Battle of Jhelum:

The Battle of Jhelum was one of the crucial elements in the Republic of India's victory at Jammu, though it was a tactical victory for the Republic of Sindh. Fought over three weeks, this was an engagement of infantry, armor, and artillery, with the use of rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank infantry weapons by the Republic of India's soldiers serving to drastically and over time reduce the Republic of Sindh's armored forces, while in a sequence of dramatic armored engagements the Republic of India's Forrests proved vastly superior to the R-90s used by the Republic of Sindh. The three weeks of fighting thus became a mixture of seesaw offensives, the Republic of Sindh attacking by day throughout, the Republic of India counterattacking both by day and by night. Use of helicopter gunships and the US Firecracker were proving extraordinarily successful, the Firecrackers' simple quantities of firepower resulting in massive losses of the Republic of Sindh air force that committed it to ever-greater overall losses, to the point that Firecrackers were able to begin interdiction campaigns. The fighting between the two rival infantry forces confirmed that the US-issue assault rifle was overall the better weapon to its Russian counterpart, though Russian-made artillery worked in a simple quantity that US guns could not match and in a caliber and quality that the US force had no equal to.

The sole redeeming arm for the Republic of Sindh in its last war would be its artillery, though the losses sustained in this battle and the resulting continuous reinforcements of troops to brush aside the large ROI force here meant that by the second week the Republic of Sindh diverted its intended second prong of its pincer to this offensive. A move roundly condemned at the time in Chandragupta and by later military historians, this tactical and strategic error arguably both shortened the war and the existence of the Republic of Sindh. The fighting that resulted became still more savage and it would not be until the third week that Delhi ordered its forces to withdraw further, the fighting having fulfilled its strategic purpose. The withdrawal proved a strategic gain, as it committed the Republic of Sindh, whose logistical leadership had suffered from the same damage as the rest of its army, to provide supplies over an increasingly vulnerable supply line as the forces, already depleted and demoralized, marched onward toward Jammu, while the Republic of India had built up two mechanized task forces around the north and south of Jammu, where the forces in the center, from Jhelum, sought to bait the most powerful forces of the Republic of Sindh's army into a battle that it was expected would be both a fatal and a decisive one, ending the military power of the Republic of Sindh.

Intended as a delaying action, the Battle of Jhelum was a marked triumph for the Indians in a strategic sense, as it delayed the Republic of Sindh's offensive and knocked its strategic balance askew. Instead of a hoped-for envelopment offensive the Republic of Sindh found itself instead committed to a direct headlong offensive, having already sustained increasingly unsustainable losses in the air, and its best, most aggressive armored officers and men having been lost in the earlier fighting, while the strategic withdrawal of the Republic of India's forces committed them to do more with both a smaller force and an ever-more vulnerable supply line.......

 

[Snake Featherston]

The Battle of Jammu Part III, The Battle of Jammu:

The Battle of Jammu was the largest single engagement since the Second World War, fought by a force which had all along been advancing logistically on a shoestring and forced into bitter attritional fighting as it advanced to the Republic of India's defensive line surrounding the city. Some of the more militarily rational generals urged Badahur Singh to allow his troops to withdraw but Singh, focusing on the map at the expense of the actual situation on the ground, refused and made no allowance for this.

Instead the Republic of Sindh was to find itself committed to a straightforward and inelegant advance into the teeth of severe resistance, and an advance that was progressively slowing. The weaponry of the Republic of India was exacting an ever-growing toll but the advance was by this point propelled by tactical momentum with no regard for strategic logic. As this Republic of Sindh force came its closest to the city of Jammu, which having been mostly evacuated during the Battle of Jhelum, took a pounding from artillery, a thunder erupted toward the rear of the Sindh force which found its logistical support severed at a stroke and encircled by a force superior in numbers and firepower.

The battle now turned into a monthlong struggle in the Jammu Pocket but with this, the destruction of the best-led and most consistently well-armed force by early October the conventional war's chances for the Republic of Sindh were over. The isolation induced by Sindh's growing belligerence now sunk in as neither Russia nor China made efforts to preserve it, and both made statements indicating they would welcome a fully united India.

 

[Snake Featherston]

The Reunification War, October 1991-February 1992:

The remaining months of the Reunification War until December, when Republic of India forces reached Chandragupta, were a gigantic mopping-up operation as the remaining order and stability in much of the Republic collapsed. What fighting there was in October and November tended to be relatively small-scale and in several cases was a battle fought to secure the honor of the opposing general before that general surrendered.

In December, however, the Badahur Singh regime refused to yield Chandragupta without a fight. As it turned out about a fourth of the neighborhoods of the city surrendered voluntarily and served as bases for the Republic of India Forces, though the fighting in Chandragupta rivaled the great urban battles of the Second World War for ferocity, street for street, house for house, and an ever-greater unreality to reporting from the capital. There was a famous scene earlier in the fighting where the government's spokesman said "There are no tanks in Chandragupta!" as the screen behind him showed Republic of India Forrests shooting at and destroying part of the barricades of a Republic of Sindh force.

When the city fell the stresses of a prolonged, bloody, and senseless battle led to some atrocities, in particular the bloody murder of Singh, his wife, and both his mistresses. The fighting marked the end of the existence of one running sore from the Second World War and the dawn of a new era in global politics.

 

[Snake Featherston]

The 1990s, 1992-2000:

For the world the end of the Reunification War was held as marking the end of the post-Second World War age of politics. The Republic of Sindh, as the most prominent post-WWII geopolitical legacy, had ceased to exist in a bloody war where Russia and China had sought to conciliate other states and to work to a truly unified solution by the Congress of Nations. The new era of politics was marked by the start of the spread of global Communism, where violence of a totalitarian nature waving this time a red flag began to appear.

In the 1990s Communism was simply growing in strength, the result of the Comintern's deliberate policy of reaching out to disillusioned ex-fascists. Too, in a world where fascism had left in many cases intact nobilities with strong political power and harsher lives for people excluded from full political rights the appeal of Communism and its claims to work for a true, popular, revolutionary social justice was rather obvious though neglected and discounted by 1990s politicians assured the end of fascism as a force to be reckoned with meant history had ended.

In Japan the death of Emperor Hirohito was followed by the coronation of his son Akihito, who took the reign name Heisei. The Heisei era was to begin with the first Japanese Emperor to have full absolute power, though Japan would find itself ultimately beginning a re-armament as the Communists, with Indonesia willfully accepting the more hardline view of World Revolution, began their first appeals to the masses of the world.

In India the 1990s were to see difficulties in economic and political reintegration of the former Republic of Sindh, and disgruntled fascists from the region were to be the core of the All-Indian Congress of Worker's Councils which formed one of the most enduring Communist insurgencies. For all this India's progress toward democracy was by far accelerating, though issues of poverty and class remained major barriers to it.

The Republic of China was to begin a successful economic outreach program, and would industrialize for a far greater degree of success starting in the 1990s than it had under more hardline fascism. The growing prosperity of undemocratic, illiberal China meant that its polarity with democratic India became a feature of early 21st Century politics, as did the emergence of the more hardline, militarized, ideological Communist movement which named itself the Jiang Jieshi Army.

In the South Pacific Australia and New Zealand allied with Japan against the rising forces of Communism, while Australia began the difficult internal processes of reconciliation with Aboriginal peoples. Australian Republicanism held a referendum in the mid-1990s that failed by a relatively comfortable margin, though Republican sentiment was to prove strongest here of all the Commonwealth countries.

In South America most of the states remained trapped within the economic confines of agrarian economies, though Brazil proved the first South American Great Power. The difficulties of surmounting economic and political limitations continued to tax the leaders of South American states, and the emergence of Communist insurgencies increased unwillingness to consider serious and necessary reforms.

In North America the USA was to find itself scrambling to address the new world of politics, having started too late on a relatively slow foundation, its Presidents struggling to adjust to a world where the USA by virtue of inaction was now having to adjust not to an end of History but to a multi-polar world. The rise of Communism meant that more hardline US Conservatism soon found a new bogeyman to fear, and the prospects of a Red Scare would grow.

In Africa the end of Apartheid proved more peaceful than expected, though in one sense it replaced one one-party regime with another, while the continent as a whole remained ravaged by the legacies of wars and ideological confrontations. The emergence of more militarized Communism met an ironic check in the form of the Congo, which sought to prevent what it called "Deviationist movements" from wrecking its own hegemony in the African interior.

In Europe and the Middle East the 1990s saw more serious steps taken to a united economic bloc. Discussions were held to integrate the Ottoman Empire into this bloc, though Communist Italy was to be excluded as a potential menace to the stability of Europe. Russia also was excluded due primarily to a view that Russia was too awkward as yet to be intengrated, and the result was the formation in the 1990s for the first time of a European Economic Community, a united European economic bloc that could develop the potential to rival the United States and Russia both.

For Russia the 1990s were a relatively quiescent time of the Romanov Restoration and the emergence of the New Absolutism that began to extend itself down into Russia, the primary results of this decade being both attempts at renewal and reform, the Tsar seeking to return Russia to being his vision of an ordinary state. This quiescent period was to lead to a question mark when in 2000 Alexander IV died and was succeeded by his son, Ivan VII.

One more post left in this timeline, a general survey of the 21st Century up to 2011.

 

[Snake Featherston]

2001-11:

In the 21st Century the world first began to take full notice of a new ideology which had begun to prosper during the Second Great Game, Communism, as the emergence of multiple Communist insurgencies, all in practice very different movements meeting local, regional goals but to their enemies one monolithic bloc proved a sign that the Communists were now making bids for the minds of the disgruntled, hardline, militarized Fascists unwilling to accept the political results of the collapse of totalitarianism. In truth by no means a new phenomenon, the rise of the Communists simply seemed such at the time. The Congo dictatorship was the one Communist regime not isolated by the world at large, from a misperception that its destruction of pro-Comintern forces was due to sympathy for democracy as opposed to fearing that these movements risked destabilizing the regime.

The European Economic Community, led by Berlin, was to begin talks with Russia for admission when Ivan VII indicated Russia was keenly interested in what he termed "the new Congress of nations, dedicated to confronting this new enemy that imperils civilization as did the old one." The discussions would bear fruit by 2009, when Russia would be admitted, and Ivan VII symbolically chose a descendant of Pushkin, Russia's great liberty-loving poet, to be the signer of Russia's admission. The new EEC was dogged by the potential question of a common currency, favored by some nations (France and Germany) and opposed by the Russians, British, and Ottomans. For a continent where the World Wars had cast a long shadow this was at first just a minor hiccup.

With the Communist bloc the 21st Century saw Iran and Indonesia establish a new and revitalized, overhauled Communist International, one with the power to expel and to isolate states that did not adhere to the party line. Iran and Indonesia, as the oldest and largest Communist states, respectively, were to be the most formidable two states in this bloc, though the prospect of Communist control of the Straits of Malacca led to the first clashes of what would be termed not a Great Game but the Quiet War of ideologies.

In Africa the formation of the African Union finally began to take some effect, the chosen seat of that Union being Mogadishu, and the Union taking steps to establish a united trading bloc and a formal Rapid Reaction Force, steps which were to prove successful by the 2010s, though taking this success into practical results proved rather difficult. In South Africa corruption and scandals would dog the new ANC government, while beginning in the 21st Century a new type of virus appeared worldwide, spread by chimpanzees to human beings and first identified in the United States.

The continent of Asia saw the emergence of a polarity, Chinese authoritarianism leading to one variant of prosperity, rich and illiberal, and India leading to a prosperity rooted in democracy. China and India would begin their own steps to a regional contest for hegemony, and fear of the Chinese juggernaut proved one means of reconciling Sindh and Indian leaders, while the emergence of a Communist insurgency on former Sindhi soil proved another such means. Japan, Australia, and the Indochinese states were to continue working to halt the spread of Communism near the Straits, with a potential risk that this might mean committing ground troops to the Straits.

In South America the rise of Brazil as a Great Power was followed by the similar emergence of Argentina, where long-term development began to show results. The emerging competition of the two states spilled over into the emergence of Communism to create a steady militarization of South American politics, and for a change the USA posed a counterweight to two states that had no issue whatsoever throwing their weight around and were far closer to their neighbors than the USA was.

In North America Mexico had begun its own transition into a developed economy, and this transition would accelerate in the 21st Century. The emergence of developed economies in the three biggest states of the continent was concurrent with the fall of the old one-party regime and the election for the first time of a liberal party as opposed to the old illiberal party-state. The USA would spend the 21st Century's first years in a renaissance of global interventionism, aiding the confrontation with the Communists and stepping into an Argentine-Brazilian confrontation over Latin America.

By the 21st Century the world was entering an information age, spreading information on a scale and degree not before rivaled. For the Communists this proved a godsend, as like fascism in its earliest days the new totalitarianism made great use of the cheaper, more available new technologies to associate itself with cutting-edge science and culture. The human race had begun steps for manned exploration of space, including a space station manned by the US and European space agencies, and discoveries in fields of science made throughout the 20th Century were beginning to accelerate. With the rise of the Communists, however, technology was once again proving a double-edged sword.

In the 21st Century, therefore, the end of one totalitarianism had brought about the first stages in the emergence and growth of another, in a context where technological growth was accelerating, and where some steps to forming united continents co-existed with the emergence of a new and bitter ideological confrontation, in a world where states had weapons to end civilization, and where all these processes co-existing marked a time of cultural growth and violent confrontations.

 

[Snake Featherston]

And with that, Up With the Star is completed. It's gone from 1864-2011. Comments, questions, things to revise if I do a Mk. II later on?

 

[TyranicusMaximus]

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

Sad thing is, if I got around to making a timeline, I'd probably still call tanks tanks, even with an early 1800s PoD

 

[Solroc]

Well, looks like this TL is over. Great run though, you made it to TTL's present-day.

I'm kind of confused though with the whole landship=tank. When did that happen? Was it really obvious or was it a subtle change kind of thing?

And I'm very curious over the different doctrines in tank warfare since you said they don't have the German example to use. So what would be the difference between the American and Russian doctrines of tank warfare?

 

[Snake Featherston]

Well, looks like this TL is over. Great run though, you made it to TTL's present-day.

I'm kind of confused though with the whole landship=tank. When did that happen? Was it really obvious or was it a subtle change kind of thing?

And I'm very curious over the different doctrines in tank warfare since you said they don't have the German example to use. So what would be the difference between the American and Russian doctrines of tank warfare?

That happened all the way back in WWI. From post 267:

To add to the difficulties of the Allies, the experients done in 1916 about a type of mobile tracked artillery that might permit a break in the deadlocks of the Trenches had begun to bear fruit. A new, strange device entered the increasingly more technology-dependent war. These landships, coupled with the dramatic improvement in Anglo-German air power and the entry of the United States, with its industrial potential and large reservoirs of fresh troops began solidly to tilt the war in favor of the Central Powers by January of 1918.

The landship has several alternate names of which tank is a relatively popular one in the British Army but the USA just calls them Landships.

The evolution of armored warfare by the USA and Russia here from post 352:


In the aftermath of the victory of a joint infantry-armored-airpower force over the French army in 1918, three different militaries began investigation of the possibility of the new types of warfare. Russia, under Lavr Kornilov, the German Empire, and the United States all developed three distinct approaches. General Tuchachevsky, who with Marshal Zhukov would become both of them Lavr Kornilov's ablest and brightest soldiers, developed the concept of the Deep Operation.

Reflecting Russia's wealth of resources in the human and materiel senses, Russian armies were to develop at all levels flexibility and firepower to wage combined-arms offensives on an operational level. This would form what were called in the English-speaking countries the "Russian doll formation" which proved extremely efficiently deadly.

And the USA:

In the USA the development of Combined-Arms Warfare became what was called "Converging Column Warfare." The USA's inspiration was less Great War than in the 1860s, where General Grant had broken a war that had seen a great deal of deadlock in a few months by applying mobility, firepower, and the ability to follow from one idea with maximum flexibility on the battlefield.

The US version of combined-arms warfare would be first only before the Russian in dependence on technology and firepower, US troops developing a great quantity of weaponry and with the larger peacetime army beginning experiments in war games. In all three countries these developments would by the time war returned to Europe mark them as levels above the rest in ideas and the means to turn idea into reality.....

Blitzkrieg as we know it appears as a concept but the Deep Operations equivalent ITTL rendered it irrelevant as the Germans were playing defense for almost the entire war and never really got their chance to take the offensive.

 

[George Carty]

Just a quick question -- would the Ottoman Empire have been able to modernize properly (which would surely require mass literacy) without doing something about its dysfunctional script?

Wouldn't it have to change either to the Latin alphabet, or to a variant of Perso-Arabic script that explicitly represented vowels (similar to the Yaña imlâ alphabet script for Tatar, perhaps)?

 

[Snake Featherston]

Just a quick question -- would the Ottoman Empire have been able to modernize properly (which would surely require mass literacy) without doing something about its dysfunctional script?

Wouldn't it have to change either to the Latin alphabet, or to a variant of Perso-Arabic script that explicitly represented vowels (similar to the Yaña imlYaña imlâ alphabet script for Tatar, perhaps)?

Israel as I recall does just fine with the vowelless Hebrew script, IIRC.

 

[George Carty]

Israel as I recall does just fine with the vowelless Hebrew script, IIRC.

But vowels are far more important in an Altaic language such as Turkish, than they are in Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic.

Mehmet Paşa oldu (Muhammad became a Pasha) and Mehmet Paşa öldü (Muhammad Pasha died) are both written محمد پاشا اولدو in Ottoman script.