Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

by Thomas Hobbes

  In response, the resistance strengthened. Men and reasonable women rallied, marched, and organized. They denounced the Gathering, said it no longer represented them and called for new elections.

  When Azania first formed, it had a military similar to those of most former states and state fragments: the old National Guard, some local regular military units and a few militias. The Fair Discrimination laws had reserved all military positions for women and the men had been dismissed. This eliminated at one stroke almost the entire Azanian army. What it left were a variety of women technicians and a cadre of pilots left over from the final senility of the U.S. Air Force, when it had begun training women to fly fighters and bombers. Now, the only real military force the Zany Gathering had was an air force.

  So it used it. On July 4, 2037, opponents of the Gender Purity Acts gathered on the lawn of the old State House in Sacramento. They rallied to demand universal suffrage and a restored state government like the one they used to have. They were husbands and wives and kids, grandmothers and babies in prams, armed with nothing more dangerous than signs, petitions, and sparklers.

  The rally began at noon. At just a quarter after, two F-35s, formerly of the U.S. Navy, flew over. The first dropped cluster munitions, the second a Fuel/Air Explosive device. Over a thousand people died on the spot.

  Unlike Cascadia, Azania had not closed its borders. Those who opposed the radicals could vote with their feet, and they did. They left by the hundreds of thousands, most heading west into the Rocky Mountain states. The people there did not have much themselves, but they shared what they had, including their homes, with the newcomers.

  In Berkeley, the Gathering debated what to do about the exodus. On the one hand, a nation without people wouldn’t last very long. On the other, they welcomed the departure of the ideologically impure, the mothers. Borrowing from another Brave New World, they had made “mother” their term of abuse for women who did not share their view of men, a view summed up in Azania’s official motto: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

  Their ideology informed them that, across north America and around the world, millions of oppressed women were desperate to be free from men. So the Gathering issued a clarion call to feminists everywhere to come to Azania, the world’s first “Man-free Zone.” And come they did, by the thousands. Soon, the inflow of feminists exceeded the outflow of normal people. Azania, it seemed, would represent ideology’s long-sought triumph: a triumph over human nature itself.

  Down east in Augusta, I hadn’t paid Azania much mind. It was a long way away, the Christians had all fled, and I couldn’t imagine our own women getting a case of the zanies. Oh, we had a few. Maine’s Episcopal “bishop,” Ms. Cloaca Devlin, was one. A leftover from the last apostate days of the Episcopal Church of the USA, she still ranted and raved, though her following was minuscule. Most Episcopalians, myself included, had long ago joined the Anglican Church, established with the help of orthodox Anglican bishops from third world countries.

  But I had miscalculated about the Northern Confederation’s women. They were deeply interested in what was going on in Azania. They were interested and appalled. In their eyes, Azania represented the ultimate degradation of women, worse even than the whorehouse or the female soldier or the crooner who in the old American Republic had dared to call herself “Madonna.” Marriage and motherhood represented women’s highest calling, and in Azania women had turned their back on both. They felt something had to be done.

  Northern winters leave plenty of time for tongues to clack, and among the sewing circles and quilting bees during the winter of 2037-38, a plan was hatched. When spring came and the roads were again passable, women began making their rounds, gathering signatures. Their goal was a ballot referendum on the question, “Resolved, that the Northern Confederation shall undertake any and all actions short of a declaration of war to overthrow the wicked and unnatural feminist government in Azania and return northern California to the civilized world.”

  I was as contemptuous of Azania and all it represented as anyone. Still, I wasn’t sure we should involve ourselves out there. Looking back on it, I felt that Cascadia would have fallen of its own weight without our assistance. It would have happened more slowly, but it would have happened. I wasn’t the kind of soldier who was looking for wars to fight. If time would do the work for us, why shouldn’t we let it?

  One fine spring day in the year 2038, I waded through the mud over to the governor’s office to get his take on it. The women’s petition drive was moving fast. After the third straight dinner of cold fish hash and colder looks, most husbands found it prudent to sign. I laid out my doubts to Bill Kraft, and asked him whether, as Maine’s governor and the N.C.’s Field Marshal, he perhaps should speak out against the petition.

  Bill sat back, puffed on his pipe and thought over what I had said. When he replied, he put a different light on the matter. “First of all, regardless of my own views, I don’t think I ought to try to influence the petition process, or even the referendum itself, when the initiative comes from our people.”

  “Remember, our government is founded on the idea that the people are sovereign. Unlike the old American Republic, we’re serious about that. That’s why we have the referendum process and a weak central government. If our women can convince a majority of voters that we should intervene in Azania, then we probably should. If I thought we were putting our national existence at stake, I might feel differently, but I don’t see that in this case.”

  “Azania has nuclear weapons,” I warned.

  “I know that. But it doesn’t have missiles that can reach us. They have bombers, but I trust the Boys from Utica to take care of that threat. They might smuggle a weapon in here, but our border controls are pretty darned good. I’m not saying there’s no risk. Anything worthwhile has risks. But the risks are not so great that I should try to thwart the political process.”

  “Second,” Bill continued, “I think you misunderstand the situation in Azania. It’s different from Cascadia. In Cascadia, by the time we intervened, a small, corrupt elite was running the place by force and terror. Most of the people were just waiting for a chance to rise up against them. That’s not true in Azania. The radical feminists drove their opponents out and brought more women like themselves in to replace them. The whole country is made up of True Believers. In time, of course, you are correct: all ideologies fall in time, because eventually reality reasserts itself. But where the whole population has caught the ideology bug, that time will probably be measured not in years but in generations.”

  “So what?” I asked. “Why can’t we wait for generations?”

  “Because ideas have consequences,” Bill replied. “For a time, through the first generation, Azania will seem to work. In fact, it’s a perfect hellhole, as our women recognize. But not all women will be so wise. Remember, Azania intends itself to be a beacon to the whole world. The poison it has imbibed will spread elsewhere.”

  “Think of the damage the French Revolution did, not only to France, but to all the West. In a sense, Azania is its final and most bitter product. It is part of the price paid for the Duke of Brunswick’s fatal decision at Valmy.”

  Bill had told me about that before. More than once. “Hier schlagen wir nicht.” With those words the Duke lost the chance to strangle the French Revolution and “The Rights of Man” in their cradle. That was exactly what I was saying now: we’re not going to fight this one.

  “OK, then what do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Start planning a campaign. I expect the referendum will get on the ballot and pass handily. I certainly wouldn’t want to tell Mrs. Kraft I voted against it.”

  “Where should I start?”

  “What do you know of the Azanian military?”

  “They’ve been building it up as fast as they can. They’ve gone the high-tech route, the stuff the U.S. military was losing itself in toward the end. Information warfare, computerized systems of systems, remot
e sensors, stealth. They believe technology can tell them everything an enemy is doing and allow them to hit him with stand-off weapons. Push-button warfare.”

  “Then plan to defeat that.”

  “With what, Bill?” I asked plaintively. “The referendum says we should do everything short of declaring war. Where am I supposed to find troops?”

  “In the Vendee.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The Vendee was a province of France. During the French Revolution, it remained loyal to the king, and paid the usual price in lootings, burnings, murders, and massacres by those devoted to the Rights of Man. To this day, July 14 is no holiday in the Vendee.

  The English had raised a French Royalist army from the Vendee. Bill Kraft was telling me to recruit my army from among the Azanian refugees.

  But history told me something more. The army the British cobbled together from among the French Royalists was a defeat waiting to happen. It was torn by factionalism and petty jealousies, commanded by incompetents who thought rank was leadership and motivated by regrets and recriminations. The French Revolutionary army kicked its butt clear out of Europe.

  That Royalist army was the prototype of all exile armies. The Whites in the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Nationalists, the anti-Castro Cubans, the Iraqi exiles who lured America into that quagmire were all cast in the same mold. Maybe Bill Kraft thought it sufficient to train would-be soldiers in sound tactics and techniques. I knew that for trained men to become an army took much more. It took cohesion, motivation, and belief in a cause strong enough to sacrifice ego on the altar of Mars. I hadn’t a clue how we could find or create those virtues among the Azanian exiles.

  But I’d long ago learned that when I faced a problem I couldn’t solve, the best course of action was to work on the parts I understood. The General Staff should be able to think through how to fight a high-tech opponent. So that was the place to start.

  In April, 2038, the Northern Confederation General Staff numbered 23 officers and one NCO. Ten officers were assigned to the General Staff in Augusta and the rest to the field forces. Of the ten in Augusta, four were on leave—spring planting—so the group that gathered on the 20th in the General Staff ready room was six officers, plus myself, plus Danielov, our single Staff Sergeant on the General Staff. By our standards, that was a large meeting.

  The referendum was scheduled for May 15, and everybody knew it would pass. Our job, as I explained to the assembled multitude, was to answer two questions: how could we find or create an army to retake Azania for civilization, and how should that army fight a high-tech opponent?

  “What exactly do we mean by a high-tech opponent?” John Ross asked.

  I turned to our intel officer, Major Erik Walthers, to explain. “The Azanian military has realized the wet dream of the French Army of the 1930s,” Walthers explained. “The whole thing has been reduced to artillery and forward observers. The artillery is high-tech, with stealth bombers, missiles, and logic bombs to hit enemy computer systems, and the FOs are automated sensors, but the concept is the same. The centralized headquarters is now banks of computers, a fusion center that automatically targets any enemy the sensors detect. It’s the same crap the Pentagon was pushing in the 1990s. The U.S. Marine Corps called it ‘Sea Dragon,’ the Army called it ‘Force 21’ and the Air Force called it ‘Global Reach, Global Power.’ Or collectively, ‘Transformation.’”

  “Why have they gone this way?” Ross asked.

  “Because it's the only way women can fight,” answered Danielov. “It’s clean, air conditioned, and comfortable. No mud, no bugs, no humping packs or squatting in poison oak to take a shit in the woods. They'd rather buy it than do it.”

  “The Azanians have a few battalions of what they call infantry,” Walthers said. “They’re recruited from among the bull dykes. As you can imagine, they’re not anything we would recognize as infantry. Their actual function is as security guards for airfields, computer centers and headquarters.”

  “How effective is Azania’s high-tech military?” I asked Walthers.

  “It can hit stationary targets if it can find them,” he replied. “It can easily drop a bomb or put a missile on a building. It’s deadly against large concentrations of troops camped in the open or caught moving in columns on the roads.”

  “But that’s all it can do. Camouflage defeats it, deception defeats it, digging in and dispersion both defeat it. You’ll take some attrition, of course. The easiest ways to beat it are stay dug in, like the Serbs in Kosovo, or move too fast and covertly for it to track. But the latter is difficult.”

  “It sounds like Desert Storm,” said Mike O’Hearn, our Air Officer. “We were great at hitting telephone exchanges in downtown Baghdad but never got a single mobile Scud launcher.”

  “The whole high-tech warfare business was an extension of the propaganda about Desert Storm,” Walthers said. “By the late '90s anyone who followed the literature knew the initial claims from Desert Storm were bullshit. But if the lie is big enough, the truth never catches up. Azania has swallowed the lie. I think that is to our advantage.”

  “The way to fight high-tech is with low-tech,” I agreed. “But if there are any exceptions to that rule, we need to know them. What about stealth?”

  “Azania has four operable B-2s, about 20 F-117s, and around 50 F-35s,” O'Hearn said. “Thanks to the fact that our Russian friends never throw anything away, we’ve gotten our hands on some of their old long-wave radars. They were built in the 1950s, and they pick up stealth perfectly. The F-117s can’t reach the N.C., and if they send any B-2s our way, I’ll have F-16s on 'em long before they reach our borders.”

  “What about the F-35s?”

  “They are horrible air-to-air fighters. They have a higher wing loading than the F-105, and less than a 1:1 thrust-to-weight ratio. They're Thuds. Our long-wave radars will pick them up. We’ll use GCI to vector in for visual kills with Sidewinders and guns. And remember, we’re facing women pilots.”

  “How will you counter their AMRAAMS?”

  “Formation effects.” Every radar-guided missile ever built was a sucker for enemy fighters flying a box or diamond formation. They all went for the centroid.

  “OK, it’s obvious you’re on top of the air side,” I said. “What about their sensors?”

  “The key to enemy sensors is to capture one of each major type early, take it apart and see how it works. Once you know how it works, it’s easy to design counters. I’ve got my guys ready to go out there right now and start scarfing them up,” Dano said.

  “Go to it,” was my order. In the Vietnam War, the high-tech “McNamara Line” had tried to catch NVA infiltrators with sensors so sophisticated they could distinguish human from animal aromas. The North Vietnamese foxed them by hanging buckets full of piss in the trees. Most fancy sensors had simple counters. But Ron was right: you first had to know how they worked.

  “What about all their computer crap?”

  Our data dink, Capt. Christian Patel, grinned. I knew the N.C. military wasn’t vulnerable to information warfare, because I had forbidden it to own or use computers. That was the only real electronic security, plus it kept people thinking about the enemy instead of some damned system. The one exception was Patel’s department: Offensive Information Warfare, or as it was usually known, the Goatscrew Office.

  “We’re already having fun,” Patel said. “We started hacking their system the day after I heard about the petition drive. Info war against women is more fun than a hog-calling contest in Pakistan. They talk all the time, they can’t keep a secret and they’re conspiratorial, so when we mess something up they blame each other. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen hair pulled electronically.”

  “What vulnerabilities do we have in our civilian sectors?”

  “A few, but no show-stoppers,” Patel replied. “Thanks to the power shortage, almost everything has been de-computerized. Most communication is by mail. Banks rely on ledgers, as do businesses. Transp
ort is horses and steam locomotives, neither of which find much use for data. The area that gets hydropower from Niagara Falls is a partial exception, but the power system itself has put in manual back-up for its computerized systems. I would recommend they switch to that before we open hostilities.”

  “Agreed. Draw up a directive to them and I’ll sign it. What else is there on the technical side? What about missiles and nukes?”

  “They’ve got both, but they know we also have nukes, which means neither we nor they can use them,” Walthers replied. “Their missiles are short range, and missiles are only useful against fixed targets.”

  “OK then, what about the big question: how do we fight this bunch of Amazons?” I asked.

  “With infantry.” The reply was from Major Van der Jagd, our tank specialist. “Light infantry, on foot, on bicycles, and on dirt bikes. The largest unit should be a platoon, which is too small for high-tech systems to find, target, and hit, especially if it keeps moving. It doesn’t have to be very good infantry, since there won’t be any infantry facing it. Low-quality militia can do most of the job, which is stomping sensors and scaring women. We’ll need a few high quality units to cut through quickly to the key targets: airfields and missile storage sites, computer centers and headquarters. Dano, can your guys handle that?”

  “Sure, with augmentation from some of our own light infantry units. Can we use our own personnel?”

  “Yes, a few,” I replied. “Remember, we have the public with us in this war. How many men will you need?”

  “A few hundred, no more,” Dano replied. “I’m not worried about Dykes on Bikes.”