Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Love that there will still be conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans down the line as opposed to the two parties more or less sorting on ideology. Feels like there's some good chances for storytelling if you have two big-ish tent parties last as long as possible.
My question is, who is Jackson's replacement as SecDef? It provides an opportunity for the Carey admin to either pivot to a more dovish defense policy or double down on Scoop's ideas (maybe with one of the "Baby Scoops"?)
I think it can definitely last longer than OTL but it's also important to remember that the earliest signs of polarization were already visible by the 70's (even if not nearly as obvious as they would be later down the line). I'd say it became inevitable sometime between 1974 and 1994 but you can definitely argue when specifically it became inevitable, which could give TTL some wiggle room. Even if it is inevitable, however, you can definitely play around with delaying it as much as humanly possible - there were several specific events IOTL that each amplified the trend of political polarization, which TTL can choose to avoid that sort of event.
US to South Africa: If you want help you are going to reform. Not overnight but there will be some changes.
First, glad I could help. Second, with this R&D, we are going to see even more of the Revolution in Military Affairs than we did historically. AIUI, in the 1980s, the build up allowed a lot of technologies that had started to be developed in the 1970s reach a mature state, but it did slow down some of the further development, and then the 1990s Peace Dividend and twenty years of COIN meant that while the US Military was able to focus on precision of fires, the combination of precision and volume wasn't available.
Once complicating factor is if the Soviets deploy mobile ICBMs (both road and rail mobile units). It was hunting these down that forced the low-altitude penetration role onto the B-2 (Advanced Tactical Bomber). Without the ATB taking priority in 1979/80 over the B-1, the technology there will have a chance to mature, and hopefully get deployed in the 19990s, in something greater than a token silver-bullet force.
Good update! I eagerly await the Henry Jackson death update, seeing that shit stain croak will be so cathartic! It’s a shame Pearle and Wolfowitz can’t be buried alongside their boss though. What’s Kirkpatrick up to? Probably at some think tank, maybe consider her for NS advisor some point down the road because she was a Dem for a while!
Some names:
Sam Nunn
Harold Brown
Stanley Resor
Melvin Price
Adlai Stevenson III (not likely)
Spark Matsunaga
Ted Sorenson
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Cyrus Vance (idk where or if he is in this admin, I’ll check again)
He probably wouldn’t, no.
Jackson was a Hawk but a pragmatic one - not quite a Kissinger realist, but he would probably be very (assuming we’re talking TTL) anti-Ba’ath bloc and be firmly in support of shoring up our friends in Tehran and Cairo for the long haul
maybe? Don’t know enough about it to comment.
They probably won’t be nearly as friendly to Savimbi as Reagan while still supporting him. As for SA, the pressure on Pretoria is going to start rising, dramatically.
Thank you! And I agree.
I… haven’t really decided that yet, to be honest
What I’m reading between the lines here is that the Us tech advantage may be even more overwhelming by 1990 ITTL?
Was mobile ICBM a major piece of Soviet reforms in the 1980s?
Tell me what you really think
So, the US will be ahead technologically, but the deployment of that technology is going to be slowed. The bad news is that means that the 1990s are going to see a need to do replacements of systems rather than bulk retirements of older systems, but those new systems that are bought will be more advanced than OTL (probably three to five years more advanced?). Again, the result of more research, less development. The force that won the Gulf War, and dominated the Balkans will exist, but in smaller numbers, with a bit more of a technological edge.
Yes. The Soviets, starting in the late 1960s, began working on solid fueled ICBMs with an eye toward mobility, which makes the missiles harder to target without missions to actively hunt them down in real-time. This eventually resulted in the deployment of the RT-23 Molodets (NATO SS-24 SCALPEL) and RT-2PM Topol (NATO SS-25 SICKLE). The former was capable of being deployed in a rail garrison, and the later via road-mobile launchers. At the same time, the Soviets are also working on the RSD-10 Pioneer (NATO SS-20 SABER), which was a road mobile IRBM with which they could threaten targets in Europe and China. Mobile ICBMs cost more to maintain due to higher crewing demands, but they present a more complex target for anyone looking to remove them via a counter force strike.
Without the B-2s on the horizon, hunting down the Soviet Mobile ICBMs is going to fall to the B-1 force, which might result in the production line staying open just a bit longer than the 160 or so currently planned.
Haboob - Part I
Haboob - Part I
In the deserts of Arabia, the haboob is a most fearsome phenomenon - the great sandstorms that are miles deep and as tall as a skyscraper, and can hit often with little warning and create absolutely lethal conditions. The haboob is a major piece of both pre-Islamic and Bedouin myth, as much a backbone of the Arab way of life as the oasis and the camel. And in the spring of 1982, while no physical haboob loomed on the horizon of the Middle East, two of them were nonetheless forming and quickly threatening to overwhelm the region as crises spread quickly and suddenly, and the world veered closer to a major conflagration than they would ever understand.
By April of 1982, Israel's Labor government headed by Shimon Peres, returned to power by an extremely narrow margin the previous June, had essentially determined that it needed to respond to Iraqi rhetorical provocations and that the French-built Osirak nuclear reactor was an unacceptable risk if it could produce an Iraqi bomb. The final straw for the Peres cabinet had been the Hama Massacre two months earlier in Syria in which the Assad government purged the Muslim Brotherhood almost entirely from that city and broke its ability to operate inside the country. When paired with the liquidation of the organization by a vengeful Anwar Sadat in Egypt, the Brotherhood had been destroyed in the two countries in which it had the strongest toehold, and it essentially concentrated all the risk of non-state Islamic terrorism onto two groups - the PLO, ensconced in Lebanon and a key piece of its increasingly grim civil war, and the Ikhwan in Saudi Arabia.
Israel's spy agency, the Mossad, had developed an almost legendary reputation over the previous three decades in foreign capitals for its ability to sniff out potential threats and for its utter ruthlessness and disregard for etiquette operating overseas, mostly honed during the reciprocal assassinations of Palestinian members of the Black September organization in the wake of the Munich Massacre, led by its elite Kidon kill squad. Just as important to Israel, however, was the Aman, the military intelligence wing whose role was to keep the Israel Defense Force apprised of foreign threats and how to best counter them. While Mossad and Aman had a slight rivalry, they rarely allowed mission creep and parochialism to effect their assessments, but the Peres cabinet was faced with two very sober and two very different lines of thinking on what seemed like a potentially apocalyptic mix of threats.
Aman was, understandably, primarily concerned not just with Osirak specifically - though it agreed with Mossad's assessment that the reactor was unlikely to reach criticality anytime soon and was probably not sufficient on its own to develop a nuclear bomb based on its civilian, French-engineered design - but with the rapprochement of the Syrians and Iraqis. Syria's armed forces were decent but Iraq's were considered the finest in the Arab world, better perhaps than Egypt's, and Saddam was widely suspected of desiring to find an excuse to use them somewhere, be it against Iran and its contested Shaat-al-Arab waterway, against Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, or most likely Israel as part of the reformed Ba'ath Bloc that sought to finish under Ba'athism what Nasser had started under his own Soviet-inspired vision of Arab nationalism. With the slaughter of the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, the Syrian-Iraqi axis could focus all its attention on tipping the conflict in Lebanon in the favor of the Sunni factions there, who were the dominant opposition to the Maronite forces led largely by the Gemayel family and which had aligned with Israel and Iran in trying to push the PLO out and into Syria or back into Jordan. A third faction in Lebanon, the Shia, were largely disorganized, and Iranian intelligence had less qualms about assassinating Shia radicals in Lebanon - all Arabs and foreigners, after all - to prevent any alignment with ultraconservative clerics in Qom or Najaf, an endeavor in which they had Iraq's tacit support. [1]
Mossad was less convinced and instead rang the alarm bells over the Ikhwan in Saudi Arabia. It was they, after all, who had occupied Islam's holiest site in Mecca, who had blown up Saudia 770, and who since that airline bombing had now quintupled their attacks across the country to the point that it was starting to seriously threaten oil production in the Dammam region and had helped cause a 7% rise in oil prices since the start of the year (prices had spiked briefly in November 1981 over fears of Swedish-Soviet fallout, but come back down quickly again). Saudi output was much less important in 1982 than it had been in 1973, thanks to a massive expansion of Kuwaiti oil production as well as the newly-tapped or expanded fields in the North Sea, Alaska and Mexico, but it was still the world's largest producer and the Ikhwan had taken the remarkably reactionary stance that Saudi Arabia's oil wealth was not a boon but rather a curse, and not just in the "resource curse" sense. Their ideological leaders, disseminating their views via cassette, pamphlet and even rudimentary video tapes that people could watch together in huddled rooms, proclaimed that the Arabian Peninsula, land of Mohammed, had been "unspoiled" by infidels until the discovery of oil in the late 1930s, and that the arrival of "infidel interests," primarily Americans through the creation of Aramco, was at the heart of the challenges facing the Muslim world in the 1980s. Only by "leaving the sinfully black" in the "pure sand" could the clock be turned back and the proper (and invariably Wahhabist) way of life return to the Arabian Peninsula and, in due time, every Muslim country.
What alarmed the Mossad most was not simply the increasing aggressiveness of the Ikhwan, but how impotent the Saudis had been at dealing with them since the Grand Mosque siege. Mohammed al-Qahtani, the Ikhwan's leader and claimed Mahdi, or heir to Mohammed, was still at large, and had impressed enough that he had managed to persuade Mohammed Qutb, younger brother of the chief intellectual of Salafism, to renounce his support of the Saudi state and flee into exile in Qatar, where he promoted the Ikhwan as a potential force for "renewal." Even pro-Kingdom ulama like Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz, one of the chief muftis of Mecca and the key backer of the Saudis, had softened his support for the House of Saud, even if he still formally endorsed them. While much of this was blamed on the famously inept, corrupt and understaffed Saudi security services and military, there was a gnawing suspicion amongst the Mossad that the skeikhs and princes of the House of Saud had forgotten who buttered their bread domestically as well as internationally and were too assumptive that keeping the oil flowing would keep Western governments onboard. An apocryphal Mossad assessment disseminated to the Peres Cabinet suggested that upon the death of the capable King Khaled, the Saudi state would have about twelve to eighteen months to reform in the face of Ikhwan pressure before potentially collapsing.
Peres was less alarmist about the Ikhwan's millenarianism, however, and instead viewed reinvigorated Ba'athism as the more direct threat. A Saudi collapse would throw the Middle East into chaos temporarily, yes, but a nuclear-armed Saddam was much worse and more existentially an issue for Israel. Peres, who had also served as president of the Socialist International, also had enough connections amongst Western leaders like Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky and now Denis Healey to understand how much Saddam alarmed Western governments with his saber-rattling (though he was also surprised at how little said European governments seemed to understand and appreciate the threat that groups like the Ikhwan posed, even post-Saudia 770). As such, Peres believed that Europe - and, naturally, the United States, now with much more firmly Zionist officials such as Nicholas Katzenbach in charge at the State Department than the friendly but overly analytical George Bush - would tacitly tolerate a preemptive strike against Osirak. Unspoken in this consideration was Peres being entirely persuaded that if he did not push ahead with such a strike, he would be toppled by hawks such as Yitzhak Rabin, and Likud's new bullheaded leader Yitzhak Shamir would certainly carry out such an attack, too. In this line of thinking, Osirak's days were inevitably numbered, and it was best for Peres to "rip off the bandage" now.
The operation had been practiced several times over the Red Sea and the Mediterranean since late March (and training and planning for such an endeavor had begun as early as during Rabin's 1974-77 premiership), but was still not authorized, and so Peres pushed ahead with an affirmative Cabinet vote on April 12th, 1982, to authorize the strike. On April 20th, the last Israeli troops evacuated the Sinai Peninsula under the terms of the Rose Garden Agreement, and as such the peace with Egypt - and, crucially, Israel's western border - were thus secure. And so, on April 30th, 1982, fourteen planes flew out of Israeli airspace, skirting the Jordanian and Saudi border over the deep Arabian desert on their frontier well below radar, and then flew straight towards Osirak on Baghdad's periphery.
The strike was both an operational success, a tactical wash, and a strategic blunder, though Peres would maintain to his deathbed in 2014 that Iraq could have made a bomb and that he defended Israel from a second Shoah. Anti-aircraft batteries and air defense shot down six of the fourteen planes in the Israeli squadron, with three surviving pilots captured, tortured and eventually executed by Saddam rather than be ransomed home. The strikes successfully destroyed Osirak but from then on forced Saddam's weapons programs underground and cemented his determination to develop a more sophisticated arsenal for Iraq.
And, most importantly, it drew a declaration of war against Israel by both Syria and Iraq, who mobilized on May 2nd to retaliate, thus triggering the Fifth Arab-Israeli War and turning the world's attention back to the deserts of the Levant.
[1] The Middle East is complicated, yo.
what about the Franjyieh family? The Gemayel family's Christian rivals? I figure the Chamoun's would also ally with Israel, since they already leaned pro Israel IOTL.
I can imagine he either let's Iraq pass through Jordan, or sends an espeditionary force to block the Israeli counter offensive, like in the Yom Kippur war
That is precisely the problem. However…
This is a solution for Amman, including full use of Jordanian airspace for the Ba’athist coalition, and potentially use of roads to take Iraqi armor and soldiers to Syria.
Great question that I have no answer to since my understanding of the clusterfuck that was Lebanon in the 1980s begins and ends with the Phalange vs the Sunnis vs Hisbullah which TTL for obvious reasons won’t exist
Oh dear.
I'm surprised it's gone so much worse for the IAF this time, Iraq isn't at war meaning if anything the alert levels will be lower and the mission profile more likely to succeed.
Great update as always. Interesting that Shimon Peres died in 2014 TTL, he died in 2016 OTL