Metacrisis: 2052 - 2053

The Interstellar Age, S01E02

The crises that precipitated the First and Second World Wars were intended to do nothing of the kind.

The assassination of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian nationalist in 1914 was meant to do nothing more than provoke an uprising in the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Balkan territories. When Austria invaded Serbia weeks later, they knew that they were most likely triggering a general European war, but had no conception of the global calamity that would ensue.

Similarly, the only objective of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 was to conquer Poland. Hitler’s ideology held that great wars against the Western powers and the Soviet Union would be necessary to ensure Germany’s continental dominion and world hegemony - eventually. But even after receiving their ultimatum, he believed - right up until the moment they declared war - that Britain and France would not fight over Poland.

Even after the war began, Hitler and the Nazis held out hope that it would remain regional, and short - a hope buoyed by the surrender of France in 1940, then dashed by Britain’s refusal to give in later that year. Only after they similarly failed to defeat the Soviet Union in 1941, and after the United States entered the war, did they realize the full extent of the conflagration they had unleashed upon the world.

In 2029, the Chinese Communist Party attempted their own quick play for dominance. The Sino-American War that followed had remained short, and regional, and failed utterly to achieve the CCP’s goals. Their subsequent wait-and-see approach had also failed to achieve a decision, after the West’s surprising resurgence in the 2040’s. By the end of that decade, it was clear that if the CCP wanted to achieve its objectives, a new strategy was needed - particularly as those objectives had only grown more ambitious with time.

The CCP’s integration of genetics and cybernetics into every facet of Chinese society had succeeded beyond all expectations. It seemed now that the direct, totalitarian control the CCP had long coveted over its own population was within reach. If that was the case, perhaps the Communists could hope to do more than simply ensure Chinese dominion over Asia, or even a global hegemony such as the United States had enjoyed through the early part of the century.

Perhaps, as they and their forefathers had long dared only to dream, the entire world could be remade in their image. Down to the level of every human heart.

A goal of such stunning ambition could not be achieved by mere diplomacy, economic influence, or military brinkmanship. A collective West awakened to the threat posed by a transhuman CCP had already closed off many of the covert, cultural, and economic paths the PRC had hoped to follow to victory. Now, only an all-out, global conflict of unprecedented scale could force the chaotic, free societies of the world to submit, or be destroyed.

Either way, they would have to be swept aside, if a true global utopia was to be brought into being.

Thus, the crises that precipitated the Third World War broke the pattern established by the first two. They were instigated with the express purpose of bringing about the apocalyptic showdown that would follow.

The task of initiating the first crisis fell to one of China’s Axis partners–though Pakistan did not understand that this was to be its role. Instead, the Chairman of the CCP, Shang Lian, simply assured the Pakistanis, bolstered by last-generation versions of GeneTech and EnHuman’s military and social control technologies, that he would support a move to claim territory long disputed between Pakistan and their Indian rivals.

In the tinderbox international environment of the early 2050’s, this was all that was required. Augmented units of the Pakistani Army moved into Kashmir, brushing aside Indian border guards and claiming the entire region for the Islamic Republic. Predictably, the Indian military responded; but the much larger, conventionally better equipped Indian Army struggled against the augmented Pakistanis.

Meanwhile, the PLA’s Western Theater Command mobilized along the border with India, pinning down large Indian forces there by a threat to invade unless India recognized Pakistan’s sovereignty over the disputed region. Furious at the unprovoked invasion, the Indian government appealed to the United Nations to take action. Though India was not yet a signatory to the Global Democratic Alliance, its member nations, including the United States and the EU, vocally supported the resolutions tabled by the Indians.

Unfortunately, the CCP’s influence over the UN had by now become insurmountable. The General Assembly voted against even a non-binding condemnation of Pakistan’s invasion, while China and Russia both vetoed a Security Council resolution sanctioning the Pakistani regime and threatening action if the invasion was not ended.

An enraged India formally withdrew from the United Nations the same day as the Security Council vetoes. In a pre-planned move, the delegates from all the nations of the Global Democratic Alliance, plus Ukraine and Israel, walked out of the General Assembly. Their governments formally withdrew from the UN over the coming week. This was the last straw for the old, fatally flawed, but once well-intentioned international institution. While the UN would shamble on for the next seven years, it would do so as a mouthpiece for the CCP and the Authoritarian Axis, with its headquarters relocated to Shanghai.

On the international diplomacy front, the die had now effectively been cast. But the West was still unprepared for war. The GDA urged India to accept an armistice, even if only to bide their time until a more opportune moment.

But India could not accept defeat at the hands of their old and hated foes. Accepting that India could not be swayed, its Western partners rushed conventional military ammunition and equipment in to resupply them–keeping more advanced systems back in case of a general war. They would have taken too long to integrate with the Indian military regardless, as events would soon prove.

As the war dragged on through 2052, the Pakistani augmechs–the new term for heavily augmented, mechanized forces–began to run out of steam. The augmechs were as resource hungry as they were advanced, and their complex systems required more maintenance. Over time, and at heavy cost, the Indians began to wear them down in the rough, mountainous Kashmiri terrain. Soon, the Pakistanis were pushed back out of Kashmir. At the crisis point, their Chinese allies abandoned them, keeping their border forces mobilized, but refusing to either invade India, or supply Pakistan with the advanced equipment and cybernetics they would need to stave off defeat.

Facing military collapse by the end of the year, Pakistan deployed tactical nuclear weapons against advancing Indian forces.

The mushroom clouds over Kashmir sent shockwaves around the world. Western nations called on India to seek a negotiated peace, even as they angrily condemned Pakistan; China withdrew the remainder of their support from the Islamic Republic, along with their forces from the Indian border.

The enraged Indians responded with small-yield nukes of their own. The world held its breath, waiting for the full exchange of the strategic nuclear weapons that each side possessed, and the global devastation that might result therefrom.

It never came. The low-yield exchanges continued into early 2053, spreading radiation across the region and virtually annihilating both militaries in the field - but at the point when the remnants of the Indian Army were advancing toward Islamabad, when the government, it was later learned, was about to order the full-scale launch, a China-backed coup toppled the leaders who had ordered the disastrous war. The new leadership surrendered to India rather than face annihilation.

Despite their victory, the Indian Army had been shattered. Most of Kashmir, Northeastern Pakistan, and Northwestern India had been irradiated. Millions were already dead, and millions more would die in the weeks that followed, succumbing to radiation poisoning and starvation. The scale of the humanitarian catastrophe nearly caused the Indian government to collapse, and paralyzed the great nation.

All according to Chairman Shang’s plan.

With India neutralized and the West distracted, the CCP could move to the next crisis. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2053, launched before the coup that ended the Fifth Indo-Pakistani War, was calculated to force NATO into an impossible situation.

The Russians were more cognizant of their role in the Chinese plan than the Pakistanis had been, and were eager to play the part. The treaty that ended the First Russo-Ukrainian War in 2027 had, as most do, left both sides unhappy. While Ukraine regained much of its lost and threatened territory, acquired security guarantees from NATO, and built up one of the largest and best-trained conventional armies in the world, it had been necessary to sacrifice Crimea and some parts of the eastern Donbas region to Russia in exchange for peace. Most of the Russian commanders and politicians who had been complicit in war crimes escaped justice.

The conquests Russia had held on to, most importantly Crimea, had allowed President Putin to claim victory. But the reputation of Russia’s military never recovered from the disasters it had suffered early in the war, particularly as it had only partially turned the tide later on by relying on incredibly costly human wave tactics supported by masses of WWII-style artillery. This, and the fact that “mighty” Russia had failed to defeat smaller, poorly prepared Ukraine, meant that the war remained a humiliation for Russia, territorial acquisitions or no. One they remained eager to redress, even long after Putin’s death. President Viktor Lavrov, who secured election in 2048, did so on a platform of returning Russia to greatness, not-so-subtly implying that the road there led through Kyiv. The goal was a popular one in Russia, even if Lavrov’s election had been bought–and even if the silver used to purchase it had come, as it was rumored, from Chairman Shang.

In February 2053, Lavrov fulfilled his electoral promise. The Russian Army launched a new invasion of Ukraine, nearly identical to the one Putin had ordered thirty years before. Once again, it managed to achieve surprise. The buildup of conventional forces had been detected, but well clear of the international borders. Western and Ukrainian analysts had assumed this meant it was mere posturing. In fact, the invasion was spearheaded by Russia’s new augmech forces, which had been successfully concealed by Chinese stealth technology. These forces leapt forward from Crimea, Belarus, and the Donbas, punching through Ukrainian defensive lines and routing unprepared conventional units.

NATO command was divided on how to respond. Security guarantees had been given to Ukraine, but still no formal alliances existed between them and the Western powers. The new American president, Isaac Hanson, had won a close-run election the previous November on a platform of resistance to the PRC-led Authoritarian Axis, and preparation for war. He had been inaugurated mere weeks before the Russian invasion, and his administration was still finding its feet. Fearful of another nuclear exchange so soon after the Indo-Pakistani disaster–and wary of a potential Chinese attack in another theater–Hanson backed the NATO faction arguing not to send forces into the combat zone to confront the Russians directly. Instead, they would supply the Ukrainian Army, hoping they would be able to hold off the Russians as they had thirty years earlier.

At first, despite initial setbacks, they did. As in Kashmir, the Russian augmech forces ran out of steam after their early breakthroughs, as the more numerous, highly motivated Ukrainian forces adapted to their tactics and capabilities. Conventional Russian forces followed up, but it soon proved that the Russians had poured all their resources into their augmechs, and their conventional army had suffered for it. The Russians again bit off large chunks of Ukrainian territory, but failed to capture Kyiv, Kharkiv, or any other major city. It seemed that the region might be doomed to yet another years-long war of attrition.

Then, in April, another earthquake shook the international order. Syria launched a sudden invasion of Israel, followed immediately by an Iranian invasion of Iraq. Now, President Hanson saw an opportunity to take direct action–but no sooner had the United States dispatched rapid reaction forces to southern Iraq in response to the attack, than the newly augmented Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps cut across the poorly defended north of Iraq to join the Syrian invasion of Israel. With their defenses punctured and their field forces surrounded, the Iraqis informed their American allies that they were intending to surrender. The US RRF quickly re-embarked and headed for Israel to aid its other embattled ally against the now multi-front invasion.

Finally, in June, the hammer blow the West believed they had been waiting for fell. The Chinese military engineered an incident in the Taiwan Strait, a false-flag attack against their own shipping allegedly perpetrated by the Taiwainese. In “response,” the PLA launched a massive assault against the island nation, hammering military, industrial, and infrastructure targets with missiles, drones, and air strikes.

Western commanders believed this could only be a prelude to another full-scale invasion. PLA signals remained impenetrable to Western intelligence, but the level of traffic, as well as the massive aggregation of shipping at Chinese ports, seemed to confirm this assumption. Taiwan’s allies in the region—primarily the United States, Japan, and Australia—assembled large naval battle groups, but held them back out of PLA short-to-medium strike range, intending to throw them into the battle once the PLAN launched the expected amphibious assault.

The air battle was already well underway. Chinese planes and drone squadrons tangled with Taiwanese air defenses, as well as Japanese and US air forces, over the Strait and the South China Sea. Meanwhile, US and allied ground forces moved into staging areas to either reinforce Taiwan, or to contest an expected expansion of the war to the rest of Asia. The PLA, under the direction of General Fang Wenyan, Chief of the Joint Staff, had by now organized its ground and air forces into five army groups, each one drawing from one of the pre-war theater commands. While the Eastern Army Group was preparing for an attack on Taiwan, the Southern and Western Army Groups appeared to be massing forces for an invasion of Vietnam, while the North Korean Army looked ready to cross the DMZ along the 38th Parallel in force.

But the first major Chinese offensive of the Third World War would not fall upon Asia at all. On July 18, 2053, the People’s Liberation Army Air Forces began striking targets in Eastern Ukraine. Within days, the invasion of Europe began.

The first shots fired between the PLA and the United States in the Third World War were fired into space. In a massive volley of anti-satellite missile launches from the ground, and a corresponding battle in orbit between laser-armed and kamikaze satellites and their unarmed brethren, each side attempted to neutralize the others’ eyes in the sky, while as much as protecting their own.

The result was a silent massacre. The existing fleets of reconnaissance, GPS, and communications satellites of the major combatants were devastated. Within hours, a deadly chain reaction began in low-Earth orbit, as the debris from destroyed satellites turned the entire belt of space into a veritable minefield. Each side was only able to preserve a small number of their satellites by moving them into a higher orbit, out of range of effective ground-based a-sat fire, and putting them into low-power mode to hide from hunter-killers. There, these survivors joined a smaller number of satellites that had already been placed further from Earth in the decade leading up to the war.

But the damage had already been done. GPS and communications went down all over the globe, and what had once been an orbital reconnaissance panopticon became instead a hazy patchwork. General staffs and military theorists had long expected that such an orbital bloodbath might occur in the early phase of a global war; all major militaries had made contingency plans for such an event, for example by introducing alternative precision weapons systems that relied less on GPS, and re-introducing training in orienteering and navigation at the junior ground officer and ship command level, respectively.

Nonetheless, both sides suffered from this sudden reduction in capability—but as the side with the strategic initiative, the Chinese were better poised to take full advantage of the drastically thickened fog of war. The massive blind spots in the reconnaissance picture allowed the PLA to mask the movements of the entire Western and Northern Army Groups through Kazakhstan. Only once these huge troop concentrations reached Russia were they finally spotted by NATO intel; by then there was only time to warn the Ukrainians of what was coming.

The warning did little good. PLA augmech forces caved in Ukrainian lines in multiple locations in the east, while Chinese special forces conducted a seaborne landing in Odessa. The Chinese invasion finally prompted NATO ground forces to enter the war in Europe. NATO battlegroups immediately drove into Western Ukraine from Poland and Romania, while other groups struck into Russia from the Baltics and Finland. Russia’s northern frontier was defended exclusively by conventional forces; these quickly collapsed under the NATO assault, reeling back toward Saint Petersburg.

However, once NATO forces encountered the PLA, the situation changed. The first ground battle between NATO and the PLA occurred at Mykolayiv at the end of July. The German 1st Armored Brigade, backed up by a mechanized company of Polish light infantry, attempted to hold the city against the PLAGF 2nd Special Tasks Mechanized Battlegroup.

The Allied force was obliterated. The Germans’ upgraded Leopard 3 tanks proved no match for PLA augmechs, who later intel revealed took no fatal or out of action casualties in return. Unfortunately, US ground forces fared only a little better when they encountered PLA augmechs in the Battle of Kyiv several days later. The 101st Airborne Division and 155th Armored Brigade Combat Team put up a stubborn defense of the capital, along with Ukrainian National Guard units, inflicting the first confirmed losses against the Chinese augmechs. But it was not enough to hold back the assault. When the city was surrounded, the Americans and Ukrainians refused to surrender until they had already been shattered and ran out of ammunition. The Chinese and Russians would make them pay for their insolence after taking them prisoner.

This last stand only slowed the Axis advance by a day. NATO expeditionary forces were quickly overwhelmed by Chinese and Russians over the next few weeks. Their defeat forced even the more successful northern thrusts into Russia to retreat by the end of August. NATO commanders’ only hope was that after capturing Ukraine, the PLA and their Russian partners would be forced to conduct an operational pause.

The Chinese did not oblige them. The PLA left the Russians to mop up in Ukraine while they pursued NATO into Central Europe. As Western reinforcements began to arrive in France, NATO survivors from Ukraine continued their retreat. The two groups linked up in Germany, and prepared to make a stand against the advancing PLA army groups in the Fulda Gap.

The Chinese split into two prongs. Northern Army Group, under the ambitious, hard-driving general Chang Liao, took the northern flank, while Western Army Group under General Bao Gong took the center. Bao drove straight into NATO defenses in the Battle of the Fulda Gap at the end of September. Having adapted somewhat to Chinese EW defenses, NATO firepower inflicted far heavier losses on the Chinese here than in any previous battle of the war. In particular the US 5th Armored Division, under Major General Titus Langworth, performed well, throwing back several PLA assaults over the course of the battle. Nonetheless, the PLA continued to advance, heedless of their casualties, while their own long range firepower caused similar devastation in NATO lines.

NATO held the gap for three days, until far to the north, Chang’s Northern Army Group crossed the Weser River at Bremen, scattering Western defenders. Fulda would soon be outflanked and rendered untenable. NATO forces retreated toward the Rhine river, hoping to set up another last ditch defense there—but the Chinese were hot on their heels. A successful defense even of that great river barrier seemed unlikely.

At this point, NATO commanders considered for the first time whether to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to slow the enemy advance. Ultimately, even as the positions at Bremen and Fulda, and then at the Rhine, were breached, Western leaders elected not to use the weapons, but to try conclusions conventionally.

The reasons for this decision were threefold: first, Chinese missile and projectile defenses were at least as good, if not better, than US and allied equivalents. Many of the weapons would likely be intercepted. Thus, any nuclear strike would be ineffective, unless significant numbers were deployed, increasing the radiation threat to the allied civilian populations of Germany and France.

Second, It was determined that even successful tactical nuclear strikes against the Northern and Western Army Groups would only slow, not halt, their advances. Opinions differed on how long the PLA would be delayed, and what benefits this extra time might confer to NATO defenses—but there was broad agreement that whatever benefits it brought would not be worth the massive cost.

Finally, with the exception of the Indo-Pakistani War the previous year, the Chinese and their allies had elected not to employ their own nuclear arsenal, yet. By deploying its own, all NATO would do was ensure a nuclear escalation in exchange for questionable operational gains.

So, the nuclear button remained un-pushed, for now, and Chinese forces surged ahead in pursuit of a reeling NATO. Western forces attempted to throw up defenses on the Rhine river—but again, the PLA dashed NATO hopes of an operational pause to prepare for a major river crossing. Chinese augmechs spearheaded an immediate attack against the hastily prepared defenses, blasting allied troops off the river crossings at Wesel, Dusseldorf, and Remagen simultaneously on October 5th. NATO forces destroyed the existing bridges at all three crossing points, but PLA drone and engineer units were able to lay down temporary bridges within hours. Chinese forces streamed across into France virtually unopposed.

At this point, all Allied plans to form another western defensive line collapsed. Few US reinforcements were available, with most ground forces having been diverted to Asia before the war in preparation for the assumed main axis of Chinese advance; while some had been hastily rerouted to Europe starting in July, the rest were now tied down there by another PLA advance in the Pacific. In any case, given the desperate situation in France, NATO high command feared that any further reinforcements would simply be fed into a slaughterhouse.

By October 12, NATO leadership reached a conclusion that would have been unthinkable months ago, but was now inescapable. Their remaining forces in Europe would have to conduct a fighting retreat to the Atlantic coast, and evacuate to the UK. Their only hope for survival was that the English Channel would prove a more formidable barrier to the PLA than the great rivers of Europe had. The continental Allied nations would have to be abandoned to the enemy.

An evacuation plan was hastily prepared. Operation Dynamo II began on October 24. The burden of the naval operation would fall largely upon the French and Royal Navies, with supporting roles played by the US—most of whose naval assets were already engaged in the Pacific—and the navies of smaller powers like Spain, Italy, and Canada. Given the disastrous performance of the US Navy against the PLAN in 2029, and the hard fight it was at that very time facing in the South China Sea and Western Pacific, Allied planners and populations feared a bloodbath in the North Atlantic. NATO ground forces trapped inside a shrinking perimeter in Northern France and Belgium might be left behind to an uncertain fate.

However, the PLAN was facing a tough fight in the Pacific, too; Chinese forces in Europe were almost exclusively ground and air-based, with their lines of supply running along land routes through Mongolia. While the PLA Air Force would play an important role in attempting to prevent the evacuation, the primary task at sea would of necessity fall to the Russian Navy.

In the lone bright spot amidst this darkest hour, the Russians proved unequal to the task. The paradigm in the Russian Federation’s land forces was repeated at sea. A handful of ultra-modern, elite ships and drone squadrons powered by Chinese cybertech spearheaded the attack, but the main body of the Russian fleet consisted of older, conventional vessels. While their crews were better trained and motivated compared to their counterparts in the army, their ships were at best the equal of NATO vessels.

Even the hyper-capable PLA Air Force, now at the end of very long supply lines, proved incapable of achieving air supremacy over the Channel. With home field advantage, and most of their elite, cyber-augmented squadrons having been held back for just such an emergency, the combined air forces of the UK, France, Sweden, Finland, and several other allied powers now in exile were able to hold their own, keeping the air above the sea lanes contested so the evacuation could commence.

Meanwhile, NATO sea forces won a vital naval victory on October 28. A combined Franco-British fleet under the command of Royal Navy Admiral Preston Shaw defeated a large Russian squadron at the Battle of Dogger Bank, sinking seven capital ships and twelve smaller vessels, for the loss of two ships sunk and seven damaged in return. The stinging defeat convinced the Russians not to attempt another large-scale operation to disrupt the evacuation, relying instead on submarine and drone harassment. While these attacks sank a large number of Allied transport ships, with significant loss of life, they could not stop the operation as a whole.

Dynamo II concluded on November 3. Almost 200,000 NATO troops were evacuated, along with much of their vehicles and heavy weaponry. Despite its success, nothing could conceal the scale of the disaster NATO had suffered on the continent over the preceding three months. The Allies had suffered over 75,000 casualties, and lost massive quantities of materiel, in the retreat from Ukraine to the UK. Dynamo II itself had cost over 15,000 casualties, including naval personnel, and rearguard forces taken prisoner, for a total loss of almost 100,000—one third of all combat forces that had been deployed to Europe at the start of the war. Western armies had not suffered such devastating losses since the last world war ended more than a century earlier.

Moreover, Europe had been lost. Most NATO countries were now, or would soon be, under enemy occupation. France, Germany, and Poland set up governments and militaries-in-exile in the UK, United States, and Canada, vowing to continue the fight. Finland and Sweden would make the same choice in the course of the following months, as they suffered invasion and defeat at the hands of the Russo-Chinese alliance. Spain, Italy, and the remaining NATO governments saw little choice but to surrender to the Axis.

Panic in the remaining Western capitals was barely stanched by the success of Dynamo II. While the victory at Dogger Bank at least showed that the Russian Navy was not capable of ferrying a seemingly invincible PLA invasion force across the Channel, that did not mean that the Allies could sleep easily. A sustained Russo-Chinese missile and drone campaign against the UK began, primarily targeting military and infrastructure sites with conventional munitions.

The situation was even more dire than it had been in the darkest days of 1940. Back then, the British had been able to rely on a Dominion and Empire largely out of reach of the Nazi threat, and on the hope of US and Soviet entry into the war. Now, in 2053, Europe had once again fallen to the enemy—but this time, no ally in the world seemed out of his reach. Indeed, there might be no help coming from any quarter.

For at the height of the battle for Europe, the Chinese launched their long-awaited second invasion of Taiwan. And that was just the beginning.