///From the author: although it follows close on the heels of the Mars-Titan War which capped off the 23rd century, the Jovian Civil War has often been referred to as the jumping off point for the various crises of the 24th. The virus of Draconism spawned on Callisto soon spread across the Jovian sector, and then to the rest of the outer solar system, ultimately taking millions of lives in its slow spiral toward defeat. This is the story of the war in Jovian space...
The Jovian Civil War
Part of the Draconist Wars | Concurrent with the Zharan Purges
Information:
Date: 16 October 2324 - 9 August 2341 (16 years, 9 months, 24 days)
Location: Jovian sector of Solar Space (primarily Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa)
Result: Inconclusive (DRAC driven from Callisto by 2341 and took more than 40% casualties in Jovian Space but remained active throughout the outer solar system for another twenty years)
Belligerents (BLUFOR):
Galilean Union
Interplanetary Cooperative Administration (after 2331)
Belligerents (OPFOR):
Divisão Revolucionária da Assembleia de Callisto
Partido Popular Unido (after 2334)
Commanders & Leaders (BLUFOR):
Rufus Spratly (Galilean Union, 2324-2328)
Brittany Veracruz (Galilean Union, 2328-2336)
Tara Ibanez (Galilean Union, 2336-2341)
Isaac Powers (ICA, 2331-2334)
Bryson Caldwell (ICA, 2334-2339)
Luanna Resendez (ICA, 2339-2341)
Tyrone Ybarra (OSSF, 2324-2329)
Walton Jansky (OSSF, 2329-2331)
Samira Walczynski (OSSF, 2331-2338) ✝
Raimundo Avedon (OSSF, 2338-2341)
Frederick Kellogg (IDC, 2331-2334)
Erin Calderon (2334-2337)
Cameron Powell (IDC, 2337-2341)
Commanders & Leaders (OPFOR):
Pavel Kucharski (DRAC, 2324-2327) ✝
Harald Gunnarsson (DRAC, 2327-2334) POW
Petr Cesare (DRAC, 2334-2338) DOW
Fennec Itokawa (DRAC, 2338-2341) SUR
Jerald Lusaka (PPU, 2334-2337) ✝
Erick Velasquez (PPU, 2337-2341) SUR
Units Involved (BLUFOR):
Outer System Security Force
Interplanetary Defense Corps (after 2331)
Pro-ICA militias
Units Involved (OPFOR):
DRAC militias
Anti-ICA militias
PPU militias (after 2334)
Strength (BLUFOR):
~2,200,000 at max (2336)
~12,500,000 total
OSSF:
1,080,000 at max
6,300,000 total
IDC:
620,000 at max
3,500,000 total
Militias:
500,000 at max
2,700,000 total
Strength (OPFOR):
~1,200,000 at max (2332)
~5,000,000 total
DRAC:
Approx. 900,000 at max
Approx. 3,700,000 total
Militias/PPU:
Approx. 300,000 at max
Approx. 1,300,000 total
Casualties & Losses (BLUFOR):
OSSF:
68,972 KIA
289,683 WIA
6,411 MIA
IDC:
36,146 KIA
148,564 WIA
1,385 MIA
Militias:
30,829 KIA
131,372 WIA
3,941 MIA
Total:
135,947 KIA
569,619 WIA
11,737 MIA
Casualties & Losses (OPFOR):
DRAC:
327,264 KIA
Approx. 1,200,000 WIA
Militias/PPU:
116,382 KIA
Approx. 420,000 WIA
Total:
443,646 KIA
Approx. 1.6 mil WIA
Summary:
Approximately 580 thousand military KIA and 2.2 million WIA ● Approximately 1.9 million civilians killed between 2324 and 2341 (1.6 percent of the prewar population), approximately 8-10 million wounded, and 10-15 million displaced ● Total casualties: 2.5 million killed and 10-12 million wounded
Historical Notes
The Dark Years (2317-2329):
In 2283, scientists discovered half a billion-year-old alien ruins on Titan. When the Harrison Accords were signed in 2299, on the heels of the Mars-Titan War, a stipulation was written in mandating that elements of the Spacer Corps and the new Outer System Security Force would be permanently stationed in the outer solar system to maintain order. Officially this was done to provide security for the population, but it was interpreted easily enough as a show of force. A warning to would-be radicals in the frontier that if they stepped out of line, the weight of the ICA would fall squarely on their necks. In short, it was a big stick, meant to help incentivize taking the carrot of peaceful cooperation with inner system economic interests.
The only downside to this was that the people of the frontier had their own feelings about military occupation, and many of them were less than enthused. By 2314 years old, an undercurrent of violent nationalism had taken root; within three years, this current swelled into a raging torrent. It was in that year that the great drama of the first half of the 24th century finally began to coalesce. From humble origins in the industrial city of Koryak, the Divisão Revolucionária da Assembleia de Callisto (DRAC) swept into power in the radicalized Callisto Federal Assembly in 2324, and immediately embarked on a reign of terror against perceived pro-ICA or otherwise "anti-revolutionary" elements in Callistan society.
From there, the floodgates opened to a tidal wave of violence. By year's end, dozens of local militias were recruiting on Callisto, and the Spacer Corps had begun a blockade aimed at locking down the area until the threat could be dealt with diplomatically. But this was not to be. By 2326, the Jovian Sector was fully ablaze, with civil insurrections, assassinations, bombings, and other forms of organized and disorganized bloodshed spreading from Europa to the far-flung minor moons of the outer Jovian hill sphere.
Over the next five years, the people of Jovian space tore into each other in a civil war that pitted brother against brother to a degree not seen since the wars of Old Earth. Domed cities burned, tunnel settlements were flooded by vindictive militants, and an air of paranoia spread among the populace as rumors of who was and wasn't a Draconist informer spread like wildfire. The worst fighting was contained mostly to Callisto and Ganymede, the two giant worlds of the Jovian sector. On Callisto, where the Draconists nominally held sway through brute force and intimidation, their opponents often resorted to tactics no less draconian than those which earned DRAC its infamous nom de guerre.
On Ganymede, the Draconists dyed the waters of many once-peaceful atoll cities red with the blood of those murdered as reprisal for real or perceived allegiance to the ICA. In this era, referred to by those who endured it as "the Dark Years," it seemed that everywhere you looked, ICA-funded security operatives were being murdered in their homes, or pro-ICA militants were blowing up Draconist hangouts in revenge. By 2331, the whole sector, and much of the outer solar system beyond, was ready to blow. That year, the fuse was lit which would turn the Jovian Civil War into the interplanetary Draconist Wars.
Things Fall Apart (2329-2334):
On 13 July 2331, the Draconists executed a plan by which they would begin to avenge themselves on the ICA for its years of perceived oppression of the frontier. After more than two years of planning, and infiltrating the port with specially trained death squads, they initiated a massive bombing attack on the Edwin Aldrin Memorial Space Tether. The plan was meant to draw the Martians into another costly war in the frontier, one which would afford the Draconist front a chance to slowly bleed them dry.
It only took nineteen DRAC commandos to pull off the deadliest terrorist attack since the end of the Mars-Titan War. At 11:38 a.m. they triggered the bombs they'd planted throughout the spaceport's support structures, leading to a collapse that killed more than fifty-seven hundred people and brought the previously bustling traffic in and out of the Marineris & Chryse region to a standstill.
Before the dust settled, DRAC's leaders made an official declaration claiming responsibility. They also announced an ultimatum: the ICA would withdraw its military forces from the frontier, or else they would face a continuation and escalation of the violence. Needless to say, the warlords of Mars were not about to back down from this flagrant challenge. Whether or not they understood that they were only taking the Draconists' bait is another matter entirely.
The decision took four agonizing days of debate, as the politicians and the generals argued over the appropriate response and level of intervention to apply. On 18 July, the Martian people's calls for blood were answered as the order went out to eradicate the Draconists. The first hammer blow fell on 19 July, six days after the attacks on the Aldrin Memorial Space Tether, At 1300 hours local time, missiles fell upon DRAC strongholds in the Galileo Sea of Ganymede, not far from the regional capital of Alexandria.
By dawn the next morning, missile strikes had fallen on more than a hundred pre-targeted Draconist positions on Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, and a half dozen other worlds of the Jovian system. From 20 to 24 July, the Interplanetary Defense Corps kept up a steady barrage on the Draconist scourge, intending to force as many of their foot soldiers to abandon the cause as possible before Spacer Corps Infantry Command moved in to mop up the stragglers.
But that second phase of the invasion was where AEROCOM's plans started to unravel. Initially, their policy strategists had determined that the ranks of DRAC militias were mostly populated by low-income moisture farmers, miners, and industrial workers from the frontier who had simply grown disillusioned with the ICA and sought a new opportunity among the Draconist revolution.
The reality was far more complex, as many junior Draconists been radicalized both by the propaganda spewed by DRAC cadres and by the harsh realities of seeing their friends and family starve under sanctions leveled by the ICA in retaliation for membership in the Titan Pact. So when the Infantry did move in, they were not greeted as liberators as they had expected. Instead, they were looked upon with mistrust or even hostility by the locals, many of whom were also afraid of showing support for fear of Draconist reprisals.
The first few years of the occupation of Jovian space did not go well. IDC forces could barely go on patrol without being greeted by a protest, or worse, by an ambush or a hidden IED. For the fourteen months between September 2332 and October 2333, the Spacer Corps suffered nearly eight thousand killed in action on Callisto alone as they struggled to keep a lid on the situation. The roots of Draconism ran deep, and DRAC still had considerable support in contrast to the ICA. A new strategy was needed.
"A Helluva Gamble" (2334-2336):
By 2334, the military strategy brainiacs at AEROCOM had devised a new strategy for dealing with the Draconist menace. This new strategy was simple, brutal, and nominally effective, as it involved offering bounties for information leading to the capture or elimination of Draconist operatives in Jovian space. These bounties were offered to civilians and Draconist foot soldiers alike, and grew progressively larger as the value of the targets they brought into the Spacer Corps' crosshairs rose.
For a while this strategy seemed to work, as a number of long-suffering citizens proved eager to sell out low-level Draconist bandits in exchange for a financial windfall. The ICA's image may have been tarnished in the eyes of the frontier, but its money was still the lingua franca of Solar Space. The only problem was that this money soon came to be seen as a mark of traitorous behavior on the part of Jovian civilians. In short, as the ICA paid people to name Draconist agents, the Draconists targeted people flaunting newfound wealth for especially wicked retribution.
On oceanic Ganymede, for example, the local Draconist cells took up the habit of scouring the marketplaces undercover to scout for citizens who seemed to have come into money recently. Oftentimes these people, once identified, would simply disappear from their homes, along with their extended families. On the rare occasions that their bodies were found, they were usually in such a poor state that the lesson was clear to their neighbors: do not accept ICA money under any circumstances.
So the ICA had to go back to the drawing board. If they couldn't buy the loyalty of the locals, and if the Draconist fear tactics proved too effective in motivating those locals to avoid showing support in general, then the Spacer Corps and OSSF would have to use the Draconists' tactics against them. An anonymous Major General at the AEROCOM Strategic Planning Center described it thusly: "If we couldn't beat them or join them, we'd have to bluff them."
This bluff involved baiting the Draconists into doing the one thing they enjoyed more than any other: punishing civilians in its territory for perceived loyalty to the hated ICA. By feigning signs of support from the locals, the Spacer Corps and OSSF would trick the Draconists into unloading their unique brand of vicious, draconian violence against the populace, which would in turn motivate the civilians to lose their support for the Draconists.
Another general officer at the SPC said, "It was a helluva gamble. If the locals had caught wind of what we were doing, that we were actually baiting the Draconists into treating them with such harshness simply so that we could then point the finger back at the enemy and say, 'Look at what they did! Wouldn't you rather support us?' then they probably would have chased off Callisto and Ganymede altogether. It was a risk, but it paid off, thank God."
This initiative was given the codename Operation Iridescence, and pay off it did. Between 2334 and 2336, incidences of seemingly wanton Draconist violence against civilians rose by roughly 39 percent, while civilian approval for DRAC forces fell by nearly 44 percent. By the midway point of the ten-year war ICA forces fought in Jovian space, the Spacer Corps and its allies had roughly 2.25 million troops deployed there, and the Draconists were beginning to feel the strain of fighting such an overwhelming force.
It was around this same time that the First Titan Civil War (2334-2342) was breaking out, as well, and the policy there of "Invade, Occupy, Pacify" was already off to a rocky start. But as the tides of war slowly turned in Jovian space, a new type of warfare was taking shape that would inform the destiny of at least three major worlds in Solar space. What the Draconists had begun and the ICA had continued, a new, third faction would soon carry across the finish line.
The Turning Point (2336-2339):
The lessons learned from the first few years of the Jovian and Titanian conflicts led to the development of a new type of soldier for the Spacer Corps. Much as the unconventional and asymmetric wars of the late 20th and early 21st century had necessitated the creation of elite special operations and paramilitary forces, so too did the state of affairs in Jovian and Saturnian space necessitate the formation of a new covert fighting force called SPIRE.
SPIRE, or "Special Purpose Infiltration, Reconnaissance, and Elimination," was the brainchild of two men - SOCOM Colonel Owen Nicholls and AEROCOM strategist Commander Emir Kasara - who envisioned a new way to wage war on the elusive Draconists. SPIRE's concept was also remarkably simple: specially selected IDC commandos would be given additional, rigorous training in espionage, infiltration, observation, and other tactics more well-known to undercover police officers or the elite "Surprise, Kill, Vanish" paramilitaries of the wars on Old Earth.
From 2336 on, SPIRE cells were disseminated among the populations of both Jovian and Saturnian space to gather intelligence on and, if need be, eliminate Draconist command elements. It was bitter, brutal work for all involved, as any SPIRE operative found out by the hostiles they were mingling with was certain to receive a death sentence at the very least. Although official tallies of the casualties these forces faced during the Draconist wars are classified, some unconfirmed leaks attest that some units of SPIRE suffered as much as 70 percent losses.
But it was certainly an effective tactic. As SPIRE matured and its methods developed more nuance, the rate at which Draconist leaders were being identified and eradicated slowly grew to a point at which it was hard for them to maintain unit cohesion. By mid-2338, some Draconists cells on Callisto were in such dire straits that junior lieutenants were running entire field commands. The tides of the war were turning, slowly perhaps, but very much surely.
But another faction was also emerging in Jovian space, one which would decide the fates of millions in the years ahead. As the IDC and OSSF slowly weeded out the Draconist fighting force, some of its more open-minded officers turned to an unexpected source of aid. Beginning in 2334, a subsection of the Jovian population, already fed up with Draconist excesses and unwilling to run back to the ICA for protection, had spearheaded the foundation of the Jovian Revolutionary Council in order to end the war on their terms. Now, the beleaguered Draconists sought to extend an olive branch.
Still, the more hardline factions of DRAC held firm in its beliefs, resolute in their determination that compromise on any front was unacceptable. Between 2336 and 2339, the JRC and its paramilitary wing, the Public Security Commission, fought as the third pole in a three-way war which also included the ICA and the hardline Draconists. This period of the Jovian Civil War is generally referred to as "the Turning Point," wherein the leaders who would shape the future of the new faction faced their trial by fire and the old guard of more conservative Draconists was slowly picked off.
Finally, in 2339, everything came to a head. Former Draconists, JRC members, and operatives from a dozen anti-Draconist and anti-ICA factions met at Syrené on Callisto to discuss the formation of a few state. In late March, representatives from the JRC, the People's Assembly of Ganymede, and the Democratic Republic of Titan signed the Pact of Allegiance, a 317-page document hammered out over the proceeding six months which pledged "peace and unity for the free worlds of the frontier." The Alliance of Free Worlds was born,
A New Era Begins (2339-present):
The war in Jovian space was already beginning to wind down by the time the Alliance emerged on Callisto, but it would be another two years before it finally came to an end. Between 2339 and 2341, the leaders of the new Alliance and the old ICA negotiated the means with which to end the war on terms favorable to both parties. Eventually, the Alliance agreed to a policy called "Monitored Containment" by which they would be responsible for mopping up Draconist forces in Jovian space in exchange for the Spacer Corps pulling its forces out of their territory.
In 2342, roughly a year after the end of the Jovian Civil War, representatives of the ICA and the Alliance met again on Luna, an effective neutral ground for both groups, to discuss the long-term results of the wars on Titan and in Jovian space and elsewhere. They argued over this issue for nearly ten months before the Treaty of Tycho was adopted in March 2343. Among its stipulations was the agreement that Ganymede and Titan would be partitioned and jointly overseen by their two governments.
Although the war in Jovian space was over, the violence there did not simply end overnight. On Ganymede especially there were long-term aftershocks of the war, as stockpiles of arms and ammunition left behind by the ICA and the Draconists fueled periodic gang wars that lasted another ten years. But on Titan the violence would soon erupt into another full-scale civil war, and although the Jovian sector was not dragged in a large number of its citizens did volunteer to serve on Titan or elsewhere in the outer system.
By the time the Spacer Corps initiated Operation Lightning Dagger in 2347, the Alliance of Free Worlds had settled into its new role as the warden of Callisto. Despite the ceasefire with the Draconists, they still had to respond to occasional outbursts of unrest as local cells tried to grab power back. Ultimately, one of the ways the Alliance Central Commission dealt with this problem was by funneling arms and money to the Draconist movement elsewhere in exchange for their leaving Jovian space alone. This tactic had the added benefit of propping the Draconists up as a convenient enemy with which to distract the ICA while the Alliance consolidated power.
Ultimately, by the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Draconists' rise to power, they were a virtual nonentity on Callisto, with most of their forces driven offworld by the Armada or else lured to more lucrative battlefields on Titan where they could continue their crusade against the ICA. As a result, the Alliance was free to channel most of its funding into rebuilding the infrastructure of the worlds it controlled in Jovian space and into making the Armada more formidable.
Eventually the Armada would have to face its great test against the Spacer Corps, but that day was a long ways off. As 2351 dawns and the people of Callisto prepare to celebrate ten years free of their abusive relationship with Draconism, it seems that a new era of peace and prosperity has arrived. Only time will tell whether it lasts, but if there is one thing that can be said about the Alliance and its leaders it is that they will stop at nothing to achieve their goals - even if it means signing a deal with the devil himself.
End Transmission\\\