Autocracy Ascendant: 2053 to 2055
The Interstellar Age, S01E03
The People’s Liberation Army never forgot their failure to conquer Taiwan in 2029. Instead, they learned from it.
Their previous invasion was defeated by a combination of effective anti-ship missile fire, and their failure to achieve air supremacy over the island. Successive PLA commanders took steps to ensure that these threats could be overcome in the next war that all knew would one day begin, and which many eagerly awaited.
None were more eager for the great war than General Fang Wenyan. Fang had served as a squadron commander in the PLA Air Force during the 2029 war, and was thus intimately familiar with the challenges the PLA would face in a second invasion, and a renewed confrontation with the United States. He devoted his career to devising solutions to those challenges. In that capacity, he was the architect of the infamous “Augmech Exercises” of 2042 - 43, which had shocked Western intelligence services with their display of next-generation PLA capabilities.
After the success of the exercises, Chairman Shang appointed Fang Chief of the PLA Joint Staff. In Fang, Shang found a general of the same mind as himself about the necessity and nature of the coming war. Over the next decade, Fang would develop, under the Chairman’s direction, an elaborate, globe-spanning strategic plan to achieve the CCP’s final victory.
The first step in that plan was to ensure that Taiwan’s allies would not be able to devote their full attentions to the defense of the island. That goal was achieved with aplomb by first the Indo-Pakistani War of 2052, then the outbreak of full-scale war in Europe and the Middle East in summer 2053. While the US Navy kept most of their fleet assets in the Pacific, many of the United States’ increasingly scarce air and anti-air assets had been diverted to first Israel, then to Europe by the time the attack on Taiwan began.
The second invasion was the responsibility of the new Eastern Army Group, commanded by perhaps the PLA’s most capable field commander, General Jin Tao. Jin had fought in the first war as an infantry officer, and was captured by the Taiwanese when the Tainan Beachhead surrendered. More than most of his colleagues, Jin was anxious to erase the stain of that defeat, and better positioned to do so.
The second invasion began with a massive cyberattack and electromagnetic jamming campaign, followed by an equally massive barrage of next-generation attack drones and multi-launch hypersonic missiles. Taiwan’s state-of-the-art point defense network was completely overwhelmed; military and infrastructure targets throughout the country were struck with near impunity and high precision, despite the disrupted GPS network after the “Silent Massacre” of satellites in low-Earth orbit at the start of the war in Europe. Similar strikes targeted military sites in Japan and Guam, instantly putting the defenders on the back foot.
While the strikes were ongoing, the Chinese navy sprang into action. The US, Australian, and Japanese naval and air forces that had been held back rushed into the battle. But this was no repeat of the air-sea battles of 2029. With a global war already underway, there was less concern over escalation—but Allied strikes against military targets on the Chinese mainland were largely ineffective, most either downed by PLA missile and point defenses, or falling off-target without Allied GPS to guide them. And this time, the dynamic of 2029 was reversed: Allied naval forces proved much better able to hold their own against the PLAN, while their once-dominant air forces now found themselves at the mercy of a much more capable PLAAF. With Chinese air superiority, the naval battle became unwinnable. As before, the Allied fleet was forced to withdraw, or face destruction, leaving Taiwan open to invasion.
PLA landings established beachheads in almost the same places they had twenty-four years earlier—but this time, the Taiwanese proved unable to reduce them. With control of the strait, the PLA Navy was able to resupply and expand the lodgements, while preventing Allied reinforcement of the island. From then, it was only a matter of time. In December, with Taipei surrounded, the Taiwanese government was forced to surrender. Generals Jin and Fang visited the capital shortly thereafter, finally wiping away the shame of their earlier defeat.
But by then, the war had long since moved on. Facing the threat of so-far invincible Chinese armies, and still reeling from its own nuclear war with Pakistan, India signed a nonaggression pact with the PRC on October 30th. Two weeks later, the war for the Asian mainland began. Southern Army Group, under the command of General Zhao Jiang struck into Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, overrunning the three ill-prepared states in a matter of months. Simultaneously, General Feng Gao’s Central Army Group supported a North Korean invasion of South Korea, rolling across the 38th Parallel on November 15, 2053 behind a similar ECW/strike campaign that had targeted Taiwan, supported by a massive conventional artillery barrage courtesy of the DPRK.
Seoul fell within days, half-leveled by North Korean shells and Chinese missiles. ROK and US forces were thrown back, conducting a bitter fighting retreat through the southern mountains. Much as they had a hundred years earlier, the remnants of their forces formed a defensive perimeter around the city of Busan, anchored on the Naktong river. But this time, there were no reinforcements coming; there would be no fightback to the DMZ.
For the second time in three months, the Allies were forced to conduct a hasty evacuation, this time from Busan to Japan. The PLAN was able to contest the evacuation, codenamed Operation Windfall, making it a much tougher prospect for the Allies than Dynamo II back in Europe; fortunately, with much of the Chinese Navy and Air Forces then occupied completing the conquest of Taiwan and supporting the invasions in Southeast Asia—to say nothing of the air campaign against Britain—the Allies were able to hold their own. 150,000 Korean and US troops were evacuated from Busan by January 7th, 2054—though unlike in Europe, almost all of their vehicles and heavy weapons had to be left behind, in order for the men themselves to find safety in Japan.
But Japan would not remain safe for long. Allied commanders knew that this was where the next hammer blow in Asia must fall, but they could not agree what type of hammer would strike it. As the new year 2054 dawned, the Allies’ other island bastion off the Eurasian mainland, Britain, was still suffering under a sustained drone, missile, and cyberwarfare campaign. NATOs defenses struggled to hold the assault at bay, but with the Russian Navy humbled and the PLAN still in the Pacific, the threat of direct invasion seemed minimal. As such, as in 1940, the British government refused to surrender to the Sino-Russian juggernaut.
Beset by a slew of bad and worse prospects, Allied planners in the Pacific hoped that a similar fate might befall Japan: a long-distance attack campaign launched from mainland Asia and occupied Taiwan, which the island nation might be able to weather.
The difference was that on the English Channel, Sino-Russian forces were at the end of overstretched supply lines. The Sea of Japan was now their backyard.
A strike campaign indeed began at the end of February, targeting the Japanese home islands. Despite its destructiveness, this campaign paradoxically lulled the Allies into a false sense of security by confirming their earlier assumptions. After a month of routine strikes, the campaign expanded, effectively suppressing US air support out of Guam and Tinian, and once again overwhelming the US, Australian, and Japanese Navies with ECW and drone swarms.
Then, on March 31, the real hammer blow fell—in the form of one of the largest amphibious operations in the history of warfare. With Allied air and naval forces suppressed, Jin Tao’s Eastern Army Group carried out a massive operation, launching from Taiwan and Shanghai to land around Kagoshima and Nagasaki on Kyushu; the reorganized Central Army Group surged across the Korea Strait from Busan to land at Fukoka, and at Shimonoseki on Honshu; meanwhile, forces from Russia’s Eastern Military District conducted a diversionary attack launched from Sakhalin, landing raiding parties on Hokkaido behind a wave of airstrikes. Combined with a deception operation, this convinced Allied planners that a major landing force was to follow, keeping some Allied ground and naval assets tied up in the north.
With the Allied surface fleet kept at arm’s length from the Korea Strait by Axis area denial weapons, the main task of contesting the landings at sea fell to the US pacific submarine force. Once the world’s most formidable silent service, US SubPac had inflicted serious losses on the PLAN during the 2029 war. By 2054, it remained a force to be reckoned with—but Chinese anti-submarine capabilities had advanced significantly in the interwar years as well. While American submarines took a significant bite out of the invasion fleets, they took heavy losses in the process, and were unable to do enough damage to stop the invasion. At great risk, they would continue to harry Axis supply ships for the next two months—but within the first few days of the assault, it was clear the PLA juggernaut would not be stopped at sea.
The month-long strike campaign had made a fixed beach defense suicidal. Instead, Allied forces attempted to conduct a mobile, interior defense in the hopes of harrying the beachheads, and ultimately cutting off their lines of supply, as US-Taiwanese forces had successfully done in 2029. But this strategy had failed even in Europe, where the balance of forces on paper had been much more even, if not in NATO’s favor.
In Asia, the balance was decisively on the other side. Kyushu, where the lion’s share of Allied defensive assets had been deployed, was all but lost within days; by landing at Shimonoseki, the Chinese had effectively cut off Allied forces on the island on day one. With control of the seas around the island contested, and shifting daily in China’s favor, another evacuation was impossible. Most of the Korean troops that had been withdrawn during Windfall were either killed or taken prisoner, virtually destroying the occupied country’s army-in-exile.
The battle for the much-larger island of Honshu took longer; indeed, since the Chinese had effectively bottlenecked themselves by conducting only one landing there, the Allies hoped they might be able to canalize the Chinese advance along the two narrow routes through the mountains that led from Shimonoseki toward the Japanese interior.
Once again, Allied strategy was theoretically sound, but their capabilities came up short. The superior speed, ECW, missile defenses, and reconnaissance-strike capabilities of PLA augmechs made mincemeat of Allied mobile forces and pulverized static defenses. Continued Russian attacks and posturing on Hokkaido tied up Allied ground and air assets in the north, until their lines in western Honshu were already collapsing. By mid-April, Allied troops were retreating toward Osaka, with the enemy in hot pursuit.
In desperation, the Japanese Self-Defence Forces formulated a new strategy based around urban strongpoints, hoping this might negate some of the enemy’s numerous advantages. The city of Hiroshima seemed to provide a perfect opportunity to test this strategy, with its dense urban core built around a series of rivers flowing from the Ota to the sea providing natural barriers. Largely untouched Allied forces on Shikoku might be able to prevent an amphibious outflanking maneuver through the Kii Channel. With luck, the old and unlucky city might through its sacrifice buy the rest of Japan time.
This it did, but no more—and not much. The Battle of Hiroshima lasted for one bloody week, from April 28th to May 5th. As it had a century before, the city was leveled to the foundations, this time by conventional rather than atomic weapons. Jin Tao, commanding the operation in person, drove his forces relentlessly, storming river after river and outflanking and surrounding strongpoints whenever possible. The PLA showed no mercy, blasting the entire city and its defenders to pieces and rolling over rivers as easily as their comrades had in Europe. By May 6th, they resumed their tireless march toward Osaka, and thence to Tokyo.
The Japanese and their allies were shaken by the battle. At an enormous cost in lives, materiel, and infrastructure, they had slowed the enemy by only a few days. If similar urban strongpoints were set up in the other cities along the southeastern route toward the capital—particularly in Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, and finally Tokyo itself—the PLA might be bogged down for months. But given the forces available to each side, defeat seemed increasingly inevitable. Japan would see its greatest and most ancient cities utterly destroyed, with millions made homeless and tens of thousands killed, to no purpose except to buy a few more weeks for her Allies to prepare to defend their own countries.
Their imperialist ancestors had chosen a similar fate for a far less noble end in 1945, only veering from their suicidal course when two of their cities had been atomized by nuclear weapons. In 2054, the democratic Japanese were not willing to make a more noble, but ultimately just as pointless sacrifice. One more urban stand would be made at Okayama—but only to delay the PLA while the remaining Allied forces on Honshu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido evacuated, along with the Japanese government and as many at-risk civilians as shipping could be found for. These would flee to the United States to carry on the war, and the tattered flags of Japanese and South Korean liberty would join that of Taiwan in exile there. But Japan itself was to be lost.
The Battle of Okayama was the last major engagement in the conquest of Japan. When it ended after ten brutal days on May 30th, 2054, the evacuations were already well underway. The PLAN, stung by their failure to prevent the evacuation from Busan, once again tried to contest the operation. The two fleets clashed in a massive naval engagement called the Battle of Shionomisaki, despite taking place hundreds of miles south of that promontory. The three-day battle was tactically inconclusive, with both sides withdrawing after suffering heavy losses. But as that prevented the PLAN from stopping the evacuations, it was an operational victory for the Allies.
It was the only such victory they would enjoy. As Jin Tao’s ground forces continued to advance, each Japanese city they arrived at declared itself open, and offered no organized resistance. Finally, Tokyo itself surrendered on June 29th. By then, the Allied fleets were already sailing hard for a friendly port. With their air cover badly denuded, and US bases on Guam and Tinian suppressed by long range strikes, the troops and ships evacuated from Japan would never have made it back to Pearl Harbor in one piece. Instead, they headed first for the Philippines, and then Australia, harried by Chinese air and drone forces all the way.
Apart from the missile and drone strikes they had been suffering for months, the Japanese heartland was to be spared the devastation of the war. But for many Japanese, as for the civilians of South Korea, Southeast Asia, and Europe, the real nightmare was only beginning.
By late 2054, after 18 months of war, the Chinese and their regional allies were masters of Eurasia. The speed of their advance had shocked and panicked the world; most of the states in these regions that had not been conquered, such as Malaysia, Cambodia, Spain, Italy, and many others, had either surrendered, soon sent delegates to declare their neutrality, or even request alliance with the new regime.
In the countries that had been occupied by the Authoritarian Axis—a list which continued to grow as the months dragged on—occupation authorities began filtering the population. Existing governmental, bureaucratic, and security apparatuses were dissolved, the leading members of these organizations disappeared, most never to be seen again. They were replaced by CCP apparatchiks.
The occupiers began forcing the lower level employees and bureaucrats who were allowed to remain in these organizations to be implanted with cybernetic technology designed to track and modify their behavior. Any who refused were imprisoned, or implanted against their will. The technology made them compliant. The general population in occupied Europe was by this time being subjected to the same treatment. The first groups targeted were criminals and those labeled undesirable, including homosexuals and other “deviants,” religious leaders, and countercultural content creators. Next came journalists, academics, and school teachers.
Protests and riots against this policy were met with violent crackdowns; tens of thousands were injured or killed in Paris, Kyiv, Warsaw, and Berlin. By the time similar programs rolled out in occupied Asia toward the end of the year, the point had been made. Mass protests did not occur in Japan, Korea, or Taiwan—but increasing numbers of people fled to the mountains to hide, or to join the growing insurgent movements there.
These insurgent groups began to target the “social centers” where implantation took place. But these attacks could only slow the process, not stop it. As months passed, most citizens in the targeted communities were implanted. While those implanted did not always become the compliant subjects the CCP hoped, those who continued to resist were easy enough to deal with by older, more direct means.
Even in countries which the PLA had not directly conquered, such as Indonesia and Cambodia, CCP teams were sent in to demand the “socialization” of government and security officials. When neutral Malaysia refused this process in January of 2055, their country was immediately invaded by the PLA and forced to surrender unconditionally. The rest of the “neutrals” in the region got the message, and allowed their bureaucracies to be co-opted by CCP agents and implantees.
These campaigns made it clear that the CCP’s goal was not merely political and military dominion over the globe, but to alter human nature itself—to turn the entire global population into docile, compliant citizens of a techno-socialist utopia. As these revelations escaped the occupied territories, the will to resist in the few surviving free societies calcified into a grim determination. Early in the war, Western populations unused to the burdens of conflict after decades of peaceful, relatively easy living, had been strongly opposed to measures such as conscription, and placing the economy on a full wartime footing. Now, most of these oppositions were dropped. The West was preparing for total war for the first time since 1945.
Countries outside of the direct Chinese sphere of influence that had remained neutral up to that point began petitioning to join the Global Democratic Alliance, including Mexico and Brazil. Venezuela and Argentina, with closer ties to China, remained neutral, as did the African Union, vulnerable as it was to invasion from the new Axis power base in Europe.
The AU correctly gambled that given the Axis had bigger things to worry about for a few years yet, they might leave Africa alone; even so, the AU’s leadership recognized that given their megalomaniac ambitions, it was only a matter of time until the CCP and PLA turned their attentions south. Preparations were made to resist an invasion, or to join the GDA in the event the Allies turned the tide in the war.
The stakes for the world were now clear, the lines drawn between authoritarianism and freedom—not just politically, but in the human soul.
By the dawn of the new year, 2055, Earth was eighteen months into its Third World War. The Global Democratic Alliance had suffered a dizzying string of strategic defeats. Nearly all the cornerstones of US-led foreign policy and military contingency for the past century had been toppled—Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, and Ukraine. Security guarantees to Indonesia and the alliance with the Philippines had become impossible to fulfill after the fall of Japan; both countries made deals with the CCP, surrendering their sovereignty to the techno-communist world order.
Of the Eurasian Allied powers, only the UK still held out, under near-constant long-range attack. With Russo-Chinese forces firmly in control of the continental Channel coast, and the Chinese Navy freed up from amphibious operations in the Pacific for the time being, the British hunkered down and waited for a full scale invasion they knew they would have little hope of defeating. Similarly, Australia and New Zealand now sat firmly under the shadow of the burgeoning Chinese Pacific Empire.
While the United States, Canada, and the other GDA members in the Americas still seemed safe from invasion, no-one could say how long that safety would last. Indeed, the North American Allies were already under assault: Chinese and Russian cyberattacks constantly targeted US and Canadian infrastructure, industry, and energy grids; Allied cyberwarfare AIs attempted to fend them off in a constant, invisible battle. Long range PLA drones periodically penetrated NORAD air defenses and struck targets at random, spreading fear and anger across Canada, the US, and Mexico.
Nonetheless, the European governments-in-exile relocated from the UK to Canada and the United States in late 2054, as the best of a series of bad options. Most of their exiled military forces relocated there as well, to reorganize, reequip, and take on new volunteers from among their refugee and recent emigrant populations.
As devastating as the loss of Continental Europe had been, it was defeat in Japan that had caused the most violent strategic earthquake. American planners had been preparing to defend the large island nation for a century; it had been host to a string of major US military bases, while Japan itself had one of the best trained, most technologically advanced—and cybernetically augmented—militaries in the world. The conquest of Taiwan had presented its own challenges, but that island was a fraction the combined size of the Japanese home islands, and a mere hundred miles from the Chinese mainland.
That Japan could have been lost so quickly was a contingency no-one in the Allied cabinets and high commands had foreseen, even after defeat in Europe. If the Chinese, with Russian and North Korean support, had been able to launch such a massive and complex amphibious invasion so quickly—and succeed—it begged the question: was anywhere in the world truly safe from the totalitarian onslaught?
By February 2055, the remaining free Allied powers were the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, the UK, and Israel—which, shockingly, had defeated the initial Iranian-Syrian invasion, and had become a signatory to the Global Democratic Alliance at the end of 2054. The GDA now announced that it would integrate the military commands and wartime economies of its member states to an unprecedented degree, with the sole goal of continuing the war against the Axis to victory, or death.
Death was easy enough to imagine; how victory would be achieved was unclear. At the strategic level, it was clear that massive campaigns of liberation would eventually be necessary, as they had been in the last world war. The enemy would have to be pushed from Europe, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Land invasions of both Russia and China would also likely be necessary.
But, again: how? So far, Allied militaries had not even been able to hold back the enemy tide. Conducting counter-invasions of two of the world’s greatest land powers seemed like a suicidal pipe dream. Before any such plans could be entertained, the GDA needed to do one thing: survive.
To that end, the Allies decided on what became known as Fortress Doctrine. By refusing to even respond to Chinese peace proposals—all of which included the same surrender of sovereignty via cybernetic implantation that conquered nations had been subjected to—the Allies gave their enemy no choice but to continue their world-spanning offensives, or else give up on their dream of utopian global dominion. The Axis, by their actions, made it clear which path they had chosen.
To resist the coming onslaughts, Allied naval and air forces would be held back to contest the sea routes to the Americas and Australia, and do what they could to defend the skies over the British Isles. Outside of special forces raids, no major operations against enemy territory would be attempted in the near term. Instead, Allied land forces would do whatever they could to fortify their remaining free territory against invasion, hoping that when it finally came, it could be broken like water against rocks, and then—hopefully—rolled back into the sea.
Under the dire circumstances they faced, this strategy was sound—but achieving it required a massive military reorganization at the operational and tactical levels. Battles against the PLA over the last eighteen months had shown decisively that once-dominant NATO pattern forces, based on highly trained, well-equipped mobile units with precision reconnaissance-strike complexes, were obsolescent at best. Layered positional defenses supported by advanced drone systems, developed during the First Russo-Ukrainian War, had also proved brittle, shattering under state-of-the-art augmech assaults.
Heavily-augmented Chinese forces in particular had proven impossible for the Allies to deal with. Their speed, accuracy, reaction times, and ability to instantly incorporate massive intelligence data with advanced predictive algorithms simply could not be matched by anything in the Allied arsenals at the start of the war. The augmented PLA infantry’s seeming obliviousness to morale effects and casualties meant that even when the Allies were able to inflict serious losses upon them, such as in the Battles of Hiroshima and the Fulda Gap, it had barely slowed their relentless advance.
Moreover, AI-driven Chinese missile and point defenses had proved able to blast anything the Allies threw at them out of the sky. Only huge numbers of projectiles, drones, and missiles had been able to overwhelm PLA defenses in specific areas, achieving a cost-per-kill ratio that was completely unsustainable for even ramped-up Western military economies, given the high cost of precision munitions. Conversely, the PLA’s own AI-driven drones and missiles—in many cases forming a linked system with MMI-equipped operators—were able to defeat even laser-based missile and point defenses with substantially fewer weapons. It was a ratio that, if maintained, would lose the Allies the war.
Programs to advance Allied cybernetics had been underway since the mid-2040’s, but by 2055 it was obvious that they had no chance of overcoming the Chinese lead—particularly under wartime pressures. GeneTech and EnHuman continued to churn out new technologies and programs for their CCP masters at a rate of advance the Allies could barely match, let alone exceed.
After the internal reorganization, the GDA made the final decision to concentrate all of its cybertech efforts in expanded special forces units and air combat arms. Allied special forces had seen some successes early in the war, including a daring raid by SAS operators against Russian submarine pens at Plolyarny in August 2053, and a similar raid by US Navy Seals against the North Korean port of Nampo in June 2054. While these raids did not change the outcome of those campaigns, they did showcase what fully-equipped, next-generation augmented special operators might be capable of in the future.
At the same time, Allied loss of air dominance in the skies over Europe and Japan had been one of the most decisive factors in their defeats there. If the West could not regain at least parity in the air and in space, they would have no chance of victory.
Given these factors, the redirection of limited next-gen resources to the most crucial and effective branches made sense—but it did leave the other two branches somewhat in the lurch. Of these, the Allied navies were best able to weather the storm. The major Allied fleets had already undergone significant reorganization in the 2030’s in response to their rough handling in the Sino-American War of 2029. Now, they relied less on large, traditional carrier battlegroups, instead adopting a more distributed model, with larger numbers of smaller ships and vast fleets of drones for both offense and defense. So far, these navies had shown by far the best performance relative to their opponents, defeating a Russian fleet at the Battle of Dogger Bank in 2053 during Operation Dynamo II, and successfully protecting evacuations from South Korea and Japan against the PLAN in 2054.
It was Allied ground forces, then, that would see the greatest changes. Despite their demonstrated skill and courage, they had suffered defeat after crushing defeat in the battles across Eurasia. Bereft of even the minimal cybertech they had begun to employ at the start of the war, they would have to completely rethink their approach to combat if they were to stand up to the hyper-advanced, transhuman PLA.
To do this, they looked backward. If smaller numbers of highly mobile forces firing expensive high-precision weapons was no longer viable, only one option remained: mass numbers, and mass firepower.
To some, this seemed insane. How could the GDA hope to match, let alone exceed, the sheer population numbers and manufacturing capacity of the Axis? But several factors made the prospect much more realistic than it at first appeared. For one, the population disparity between the two sides was not what it had once been. Even deprived of continental Europe and friendly Asian countries, the combined population of the GDA was roughly equal to that of China, Russia, Iran, and their minor partners. While birth rates had declined in both the West and China in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, they had more rapidly leveled in the United States by mid-century, while immigration had continued to contribute to population growth in a way that could not be replicated in the totalitarian states.
Conversely, the population of Russia had continued to crater, while Iran’s had stabilized around 100 million by mid-century. China’s birth rate had never recovered following their disastrous one child policy; their increasingly aged population had only avoided complete demographic collapse by the application of widespread genetic modification, cybernetic enhancement, and automation. At the same time, the shift in PLA doctrine away from mass mobilization and toward more elite, well-equipped and augmented fighting forces had so far brought them nothing but victory. Allied planners hoped their enemies would be reluctant to change those doctrines, at least until the GDA had been able to scratch out some crucial victories.
Even then, it was hoped that if the PLA switched to a mass-mobilization strategy, their own implanted, behavior-controlled citizenry would make more effective automatons, but less effective soldiers, than their Western enemies. Evidence so far suggested this might well be the case. The minimally augmented “infantry” divisions—not true foot-sloggers, but similar in equipment to the mechanized infantry divisions of the early 21st century—that made up the bulk of the PLA had been victorious in the first eighteen months of the war, showing themselves all but impervious to morale shocks and heavy losses. But they also showed a stunning lack of initiative in the absence of orders from higher command, and difficulty adapting to changing battlefield conditions. They were better suited to supporting augmechs than fighting on their own, meaning that if it came down to a Second World War style battle of attrition between PLA and GDA mass formations, the latter might well come out on top.
Manufacturing was another matter. While it had begun to rebound in the United States starting in the late 2030’s, and while Mexico and Brazil’s industrial capacities had grown significantly over the same period, there was still a considerable disparity to make up against China. To bridge this gap, US factories began churning out huge numbers of next-generation industrial 3D printers, which were then used to set up semi-automated factories throughout the Americas and Australia. These factories would print tens of millions of newly designed polymer-based small arms and heavy weapons, hundreds of millions of drones, and tens of billions of rounds of semi-polymer ammunition over the next few years. This allowed traditional factories to focus on more complex vehicle and aircraft production.
The Allies’ new massed armies would employ huge quantities of cheap, rapid-firing, and highly accurate tube and rocket artillery in place of precision munitions. Combined with swarms of drones—some kill vehicles, some mobile jamming and deception units—this was the only way GDA forces could hope to overwhelm PLA defenses. Infantry would be equipped with newly-designed man-portable kill systems designed to overcome augmech defensive capabilities using similar methods, writ small: combining infantry launched drones with multi-launch rocket and recoilless rifle systems. These armies would not want for equipment—if they could find the bodies to fill uniforms.
To that end, conscription was reintroduced in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the UK for the first time since the mid-20th century. Volunteers flowed to recruiting offices in the Allied nations after the draft was announced, swelling the ranks of the Western armies in preparation for the next phase of the war. Some were eager to serve their countries; many more feared the consequences of a Chinese victory, and wished to do what they could to stop it; while still others simply hoped to preempt the draft, and choose the form their service would take.
While these huge new armies were being trained and equipped, the Allies poured significant resources into new jamming and other electronic and cyberwarfare technologies, in an effort to mitigate the PLA’s advantages in precision weaponry and reconnaissance, so that their own new massed firepower approach could have a chance at success. This consisted of both high-tech and low-tech solutions, from new cyberwarfare AIs, to next-gen digital camouflage netting, designed to hide Allied weapons and fighting positions from aerial reconnaissance.
By this stage in the war, the “Silent Massacre” in low Earth orbit had already destroyed most of the advanced military satellites used by both sides. New launches to replace these losses proved difficult under wartime conditions, so the satellites that remained were operated in a higher orbit at low-power, activating only for short, randomized intervals in an effort to hide from enemy a-sat weaponry. These reduced capabilities left the contending forces with only 1990’s-era GPS information, forcing both to rely on different methods of navigation and friendly-force tracking. It also, however, made it easier for each side to hide significant forces from the enemy. Operational, and even strategic, surprise had once again become an element of warfare.
Aside from raids, there was little combat over the course of 2055, as the GDA struggled to recover from its defeats and prepare for the next wave of assaults, and the Axis consolidated its hold over massive swathes of occupied territory, all the while preparing for the even larger amphibious invasions to come.
The next year would see the war become an increasingly archaic and bloody affair, the opposing armies clashing on battlefields representing a horrific fusion between those of the 20th and 21st centuries: millions of troops battling one another in mobile and positional warfare in the 20th century model, armed with 21st century weapons even deadlier and faster than anything that had come before.
All the while, a nuclear-tipped sword dangled over the world—yet while each side thought they might achieve victory, or at least survival, by other means, neither proved willing to cut its cord and send it crashing down. The price of that mercy was conventional carnage on an unprecedented scale. Mushroom clouds or no, rivers of blood were about to flow to the as-yet untouched corners of the Earth.