Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

by Thomas Hobbes

  “The Tsar guessed the Chief of your General Staff would understand tanks and what they are really for,” said Father Dimitri.

  “As usual, older and simpler is better,” I added. “Retroculture also has its place on the battlefield.”

  “What about an air force?” Browning asked. “We'll get killed from the air.”

  “No air force has yet won a war,” I replied. “Air power is pretty much useless against light infantry in our kind of terrain, because it can't see them. Night and bad weather still protect vehicles effectively, unless they can find columns on the roads. Our shoulder-fired SAMS and Triple-A will make them fly high, and from 20,000 feet they can't see or do much. Plus, we have some ideas for fighting their air force in ways they won't expect.”

  “And we will have an air force of our own,” I continued. “We have mobilized ultra-light aircraft and their owners, which we'll use to help our infantry see over the next hill. We'll have other light planes for deeper reconnaissance and also to serve as fighters to shoot down drones. As has been the case since World War I, the most useful function of aircraft is reconnaissance. Bombing serves mostly to piss the enemy off and make him fight harder, especially when it hits his civilians, which it usually does. Remember, there is no such thing as a precision weapon in real war.”

  “And we've got some guys working on a navy, too,” I added. “It won't have ships like the U.S. Navy, but it will have a sting to it.”

  “Don't get me wrong,” I concluded. “The feds will have a lot more gear than we will. But there are tactical counters to most of it. The more automated a weapon or a system is, the less it can deal with situations not envisioned by its designers. And the feds are deeply into automation and systems. Any system is fragile, because they all have lots of pieces, and if you counter any piece the whole thing falls apart. We'll just have to be imaginative and creative and out-think their systems. Other people have done that, like in Afghanistan. So can we.”

  “It's clear the General Staff has been doing some good work,” said Fred Gunst, who led a battalion of militia in southern New Hampshire. “But general staffs are supposed to be about planning. I'd like to know what kind of campaign plans our General Staff is developing.”

  “You're right, and we haven't been idle there either,” I replied. “The most important planning is for mobilization and deployment. We've got some stuff in draft for you to take back and talk to your people about. We need their feedback to know if where we're going is practical.

  “But the gist of it is simple, as plans in war must be,” I continued. “We will have three types of forces. The first will be active-duty, mobile forces. We want to have the two regiments of light armor, plus one heavy armor regiment with the T-34s. With those will be three regiments of motorized infantry, in trucks, of three thousand men each. Each regiment will have some heavy mortars for artillery, but we want to keep the focus on infantry. We want lots of trigger-pullers, not mechanics and communicators and other support personnel.

  “They will be the first line of defense. Behind them will stand ten more regiments of light infantry, made up of first-line reservists. They will be subject to call-up in 24 hours. They will be usable anywhere, but long-distance transport will have to be provided with civilian vehicles. Tactically, they'll move on their feet.

  “Finally, behind them will stand a universal militia, which will include every male citizen of the Northern Confederation between the ages of 17 and 55. We've got enough AKs and RPGs coming from Russia to give one of each to every militiaman, plus a machine gun and a light mortar to every squad of twelve, which will be divided into three fire teams. They will operate only in their local area, because we can't transport or feed all those folks. But they will form a web of resistance to any attacker which will set him up for a counter-attack by our mobile forces and mobilized light infantry.

  “We've already done some gaming, both of deployment plans and possible enemy options. We're looking to do more, so identify your best war-gamers and we'll tell them what we need worked on. More minds beget more options.”

  “Great,” said Gunst, “but you haven't answered my question. What about campaign plans. We need something like the Schlieffen Plan. Aren't you working on that?”

  “No, and we won't,” bellowed a deep voice behind me. Startled, I turned around to find Bill Kraft. Big men can move remarkably quietly. “We want to be Moltkes, not Schlieffens,” he continued. “War cannot be run by time-table, like a railroad. Like Moltke, we know what we want to do. If the federals attack, we want to draw them in, encircle them, and wipe them out. But exactly where and how we will do that depends on what the enemy does, which can never be foreseen with certainty. We are gaming some possibilities, as we should. But we must be prepared to act creatively and above all quickly when the federals move, according to the situation they create and the opportunities it gives us. The key to good planning is to understand what can be planned and what cannot.”

  “I agree with that,” said General LeMieux. “It always drove me nuts in the U.S. Army the way they would develop some elaborate operations plan, and then become prisoners of the plan because it took so much time and effort to create. When the enemy did something unexpected, we would still follow the plan as if nothing had happened. Of course, that was in an exercise, so nobody paid a price. But God help them if they do the same thing against us.”

  “I suspect they will, and I also suspect He won't,” I replied.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The federal government in Washington believed in only one thing, but it believed in that strongly. It believed it wanted to remain a government. All the privileges of the Establishment depended on that, and the people who ran Washington couldn't imagine living without those privileges. So they were prepared to fight for them–at least so long as they could hire someone to do the actual fighting for them.

  They quickly found an important ally in the United Nations. The Washington Establishment was just one part of the Globalist Establishment, and they all stuck together. They shared a common belief in three things: A New World Order that would replace the state with an international super-state, in effect a world-wide European Union; cultural Marxism; and that everything, everywhere, should be decided by people like them. Globalism still faced a serious opponent, Russia, and Russia blocked any armed action to support Washington by using her veto in the Security Council.

  But by working through the General Assembly, the U.N. came through in September with what Washington needed most: money, real money, not worthless greenbacks. It provided Washington a ten trillion yen loan, with more to follow.

  The Feds used the money wisely. They started paying what was left of the old U.S. armed forces in yen. Virtually all the Christian soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen had resigned, and what was left were willing to fight for Washington, as long as they got paid.

  The flow of yen also brought the federal army new recruits, mostly black gang members from the inner city, immigrants straight off the banana boat, and women. The gangs demanded they be accepted whole and designated as military units, with names like the Bad Boyz Battalion and the West Philly Skullsuckers, on the grounds that “forcing them into a white male structure would deny their unique cultural richness.” The result was units that spread drugs and mayhem throughout the federal army but ran as soon as someone shot at them. The immigrant outfits had Spanish as the language of command, and their officers would do anything for a bribe and nothing without one. The all-female infantry battalions were issued cardboard penises so they could take a leak in the field without wetting their drawers.

  With a motley collection of remnants of regular units, some urban National Guard outfits happy to get paid in yen and assorted other rabble, the federals made their first moves. In October, they invaded Indiana, which had declared itself a republic. The Indiana government had forbidden any defensive measures as provocations, with their Republican governor promising that “my good friends in Washington are wholly opp
osed to violence in any form.” He was first on the list of sniper targets when the two remaining battalions of the 82nd Airborne dropped on Indianapolis; they got him as he ran for his limousine. A brigade of black gangs from Baltimore and Philadelphia took Fort Wayne and spent three days looting and burning the place, with the enthusiastic help of some local Boyz. The videos of panic-stricken whites fleeing their burning suburbs and the blackened corpses of necklaced Koreans outside their looted stores told the rest of us what to expect.

  Other states that had seceded but failed to organize a strong defense got the same treatment: Iowa in December, Nebraska and the Dakotas in January and February, Kansas in March. Taking these rural states proved easy; all that was required was a coup de main in the capital with some airborne forces, followed by show trials of secessionist leaders and their public executions. The favored method was the use of all-female firing squads.

  But news soon began filtering out that the capitals and a few other cities were all that the feds controlled. Local militias sprang up in the countryside, and any federal troops who ventured far from town were found swinging from trees or impaled on pitchforks. Soon, the cities and towns emptied, as people went to live with relatives or friends or fellow church members who had farms. Federal garrisons and their Quisling politicos had to be moved and supplied by air, and the planes and helicopters accumulated lots of holes from hunting rifles. But the U.N. kept real money flowing in, and Washington grew more confident.

  On March 25, 2028 President Warner announced a major coup. He had negotiated a treaty with Mexico recognizing Mexican co-sovereignty over Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. In his speech to Congress, Warner said, “We are recognizing and healing an old wrong, that hateful war in which white Norteamericanos tore these states from the bosom of Mexico. Mexican-born citizens now make up more than 50 percent of their populations, and it is only just that they should feel part of their homeland. To insist otherwise would be to deprive them of their human rights. We have no doubt that Mexican co-governance will benefit all the citizens of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, as they may now fully share the vibrant culture of our southern neighbor.”

  As the treaty allowed, on March 27, the Mexican Army moved north across the Rio Grande. In Brownsville, Laredo, Las Cruses, and Nogales, they were met not by smiling senoritas and Mexican hat dances but with bullets and Molotov cocktails. It wasn't just the Anglos who fought them, so did many of the Hispanics. These people had emigrated to get away from the brutal Mexican Army and the corrupt and incompetent Mexican government. Unlike liberals in Washington, they had no illusions about what Mexican co-rule meant. It meant rule by torture, ballot-box stuffing and la mordida–the bribe.

  The state governments reacted fast and well. They mobilized their National Guards and the remains of the two U.S. Armored Divisions at Ft. Hood joined them. Then they called for volunteers and seceded from the Union. In Houston, Governor John Dalton spoke of “a treasonous and tyrannical regime in Washington that has plunged Santa Ana's knife into the back of Texas.” Washington responded with a drone strike that destroyed the Alamo.

  From Mexico City, U.S. Ambassador Irving P. Zimmerman emailed Washington that “the regular Mexican Army, which has benefited greatly in recent years from American aid and training, will quickly suppress such disorders as nativist-extremist elements may generate.” The reality was that the Mexican Army was the same inept outfit it always had been, useful only for massacring unarmed peasants. Texans weren't peasants, and they most certainly weren't unarmed.

  The Mexican troops never made it beyond the border towns. Hemmed in by roadblocks made of trucks and buses, their vehicles set on fire by gasoline bombs and their troops shot at from rooftops and from behind every door and window, they melted into a panicked mob. A few managed to surrender, and a few more made it back across the Rio Grande. The rest littered the streets like dead mayflies.

  But the war didn’t stop at the border. Texas swiftly organized its forces and counterattacked into Mexico, with Arizona and New Mexico providing diversionary attacks. The government of the Republic of Texas had the good strategic sense to announce that its only enemy was the despised government in Mexico City, not the people of Mexico. It invited Mexicans to join its march, and thousands did. A mixed force of Texans and Mexican rebels took Monterrey on April 24, and by May 11 they were in San Luis Potosi. What was left of the Mexican Army concentrated at Queretaro for a battle to defend the capital.

  But that battle was never fought. The Texan invasion gave the Indian population in southern Mexico the opportunity for which it had long waited. On April 25, with the fall of Monterrey, Indian rebels in the Yucatan proclaimed the rebirth of the Mayan Empire at Chichen-Itza. Nahuatl-speaking Indians, the last remnants of the once-fearsome Aztecs, announced the rebirth of their kingdom in Tenochtitlan three days later. Indian columns, some led by feather-clad priests and Jaguar warriors and others reciting the Popul Vuh, marched on Mexico City. The Texans pinned down the Mexican Army, so there was nothing to stop them. Mexico City fell on May 21. On the 23rd, an Aztec high priest cut the beating heart from Mr. Ambassador Zimmerman and offered it to the Hummingbird Wizard atop the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan.

  Reeling from the fiasco in the Southwest, Washington cast about for something it could do that might work. The U.N. was not about to cut the money off, but the federals wanted more than money. They were working hard to persuade the U.N. to send troops.

  The Security Council was still a non-starter. Russia did not want to appear to side too openly with the rebels in an American civil war, but it had used its veto once and could do so again–which is why the U.S. Navy made no attempt to block the arms that were arriving in Portland on Russian ships. In Washington, the feeling was that if Federal forces could win a major victory, Russia might have to go along with sending a U.N. peacekeeping force that would define “peace” as putting the federal government back in control.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff met with President Warner on June 15, 2028, to give him their considered advice. The seceded Rocky Mountain states, they opined, were effectively protected by the guerrilla war in the Midwest. To support a major offensive in the Rockies, federal forces would require secure supply lines, highways and railroads, in the conquered states west of the Mississippi. But their supply lines were not secure.

  The Confederacy was too strong to take on until Washington had the rest of the U.S. back under its control as well as major U.N. help. Talks were under way in Beijing about securing large-scale Chinese assistance; an expeditionary force of as many as 20 Chinese divisions was being openly discussed. Mao's successors had little liking for regional rebellions elsewhere, given their own vulnerability to the same. But they would only act as part of a U.N. mandate, which brought the problem full circle.

  That left us.

  The Joint Chiefs recommended initiating a full naval blockade of all Northern Confederation ports, coupled with round-the-clock air, drone, and cruise missile attacks. After about 30 days, the ground war would begin. The main attack would be up I-95, roughly along the New England coast; once Maine was beaten, New Hampshire and Vermont would be cut off from the sea and surrounded on three sides. Their situation would be hopeless.

  The best of the federal regular forces, the remains of the old U.S. Army and Marine Corps, would carry out the main attack. A supporting attack would be launched from New York state into Vermont by the 42nd National Guard division, an outfit recruited almost entirely from Harlem.

  President Warner noted that the naval blockade would be difficult politically, because of probable Russian reaction. Otherwise, he seemed ready to approve the plan.

  But his Secretary of Defense wanted to say something. She had represented Harlem in Congress, and after her defeat by a Black Muslim candidate the administration had given her the defense job to maintain her visibility; she was one of its biggest supporters in the black community. The 42nd Division was her baby—in fact, she had carried several of its babies, until t
he abortionist had restored her shapely figure—and she wanted it to have its chance to shine.

  “Mr. President,” said the Honorable Kateesha Mowukuu, “I am the only black woman at this table. We have heard what these white men have to say. I would remind you that in this war, white men are our enemy. Now you will hear what a black woman has to say, and I expect all of you to listen with respect.”

  “Blacks have been the only true warriors in history. White men can't fight. It's because their noses are too small. Courage comes from the nose, not the heart, as the African spiritual healers you call witch doctors have long understood. That's why black warriors eat their snot! What do you white folk do with your snot? You wrap it up in a little white surrender flag and put it in your pocket. So you don't have no courage.

  “All the great warriors in history have been black. Caesar was a black man, and so was his enemy, Hannibal. The Spartans were black. They just dyed their hair blond, to fool their enemies into thinking they were weak white people. Charlemagne was a black man. In French, charlemagne means ‘kinky hair.’ The Vikings came from Africa, which is where they got those helmets with horns on them. Gunpowder was invented by ancient Zimbabwean scientists, who made it from elephant shit. You ever hear an elephant fart? Black scientists knew there had to be some juju behind that.

  “All of America's military heroes were black people. Washington was a black man. We know that because he came from Washington, D.C., which is a black city. General U.S. Grant had a black grandmother, and so did Robert E. Lee. In fact, it was the same black woman, which is why they looked so much alike. Eisenhower is really a black name, and General George Patton got his pearl-handled revolvers from his black grand-daddy, who took them off Simon Legree.