The Pale Horse: The Northwest Montana Insurgency and its Aftermath (1987-2002)

Both Canada and the CSA have smallish combat groups (a cruiser plus a half-dozen frigate/corvette picket ships to deal with incoming missiles) based in the Great Lakes, largely to serve as floating anti-aircraft platforms in the event of a war. Both sides consider air dominance over the Great Lakes region to be fundamental to the outcome of any war, and given that both sides pretty much know where their opponent's static air defences are by this point, anything which can add an element of unpredictability is welcome. This won't become relevant to the TL for a fair few updates, but it's worth noting that the Canadian airforce possesses arguably the world's best SEAD capability at this point.

Thinking about it further, the life expectancy of both combat groups would have been measured in hours rather than days in the event of a war. Given the lack of an equivalent in TTL of the Falklands War (the only naval war of note since the Second Weltkrieg has taken place between the Philippines and Indonesia and involved forty-year-old destroyers flailing ineffectually at each other), neither side has much idea about just how effective Exocet equivalents are against even fairly modern ships.
Something like BAE's F2000 corvettes/frigates seem like they'd be be ideal, cheap enough to be considered disposable, small enough to be serviced at the Kingston dry dock, and with non-negligible AA capability.

Any submarines on the great lakes? I imagine there'd at least be some midget subs for special forces insertion.
 
Does the CSA, Canada, and the PSA have blue water navies with Missile Cruisers and Nuclear powered Carriers? Even if all three states are less rich, they will probably spend more moeny on thier military and less military resources on deployments to the Middle East then IOTL.
Given how militarized the Great Lakes are ittl is it safe to assume that the ship builders of Ontario have remained afloat thanks to generous military contracts? Without the constraints of the Lachine canal they would be able to turn out even cruiser sized ships (though I imagine Canadian budgets will mean that they stick to frigates and corvettes).
I'd imagine that Canals leading into and out of the Great Lakes on both sides would be expanded as the St. Lawerence is unusable during War because it sits on the boarder.
 
IIRC, the protests which culminated in Tiananmen Square started off in similar circumstances, with unverified allegations that students in Beijing from China-aligned African countries were sexually harassing Chinese women sparking off a limited demonstration which largely succeeded in its aims and convincing the students that they could push for changes on a slightly larger scale.

That's fascinating; I had no idea that that was a factor. I had assumed it was a reference to an incident in TTL's USSR, but I hadn't heard about any such incident, so I was legitimately unsure.

Glad someone caught it. The Mothman, being an interdimensional being and thus above partisan politics, has remained steadfastly neutral during the May Crisis.

He is, of course, a comrade.

Any submarines on the great lakes? I imagine there'd at least be some midget subs for special forces insertion.

*a midget sub bonks into the Edmund Fitzgerald while on a mission*
 
I'd imagine that Canals leading into and out of the Great Lakes on both sides would be expanded as the St. Lawerence is unusable during War because it sits on the boarder.
So ittl we got the monstrosity?
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edit: actually the most likely fix would just be greater use of the rail lines through Northern Ontario. it would be quite ironic in the largely redundant and unfortunately named NTR proved to be Canada's saviour ittl.
 
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I am on the edge of my seat at this point--great update!

Just one question: where did Stockdale head off to--Canada? That feels like the obvious option but I'm not sure at all.
 
I am on the edge of my seat at this point--great update!

Just one question: where did Stockdale head off to--Canada? That feels like the obvious option but I'm not sure at all.
If New England is still around, which I believe it is, I guess that also might be a good long-term place, although I'm pretty sure, geographically, Canada is the only real option here.
 
If New England is still around, which I believe it is, I guess that also might be a good long-term place, although I'm pretty sure, geographically, Canada is the only real option here.

Gotta navigate all those locks, though. My guess is that he's just staying offshore and hoping that the Jones' CIWS is good enough.
 
I am on the edge of my seat at this point--great update!

Just one question: where did Stockdale head off to--Canada? That feels like the obvious option but I'm not sure at all.

I assume at the moment he is wandering about Lake Michigan and thanks to the Upper Peninsular being strongly pro-Haig he can't get into Lake Huron and thus Canada. Of course we know that the Haig Clique is about to collapse so presumably he will just return to port to a heroes welcome in a day or two.
 
Just caught up with the latest parts, this is definitely one of my favorite stories regarding KR (though definitely thanks to it being quite distanced from the source material), let alone one of my favorite cold war TLs I've read. Excited to see what all this intrigue and internal turmoil develops into. Also, is the unexpected executor of Haig's Clique related to any of the more controversial figures in the CSA - like Duke, Aquino, or Buchanan - or is it an outside force allied to say, the PSA or Canada?

As it happened, the Chicago AUZ’s civil unrest response plans had been recently updated , the legacy of a series of student disturbances in 1988, which had started as spontaneous on-campus protests against the lack of police response to alleged sexual assaults by a handful of international students from the Centroamerican Workers’ Federation and had taken on an increasingly radical edge as it snowballed, to the point where order in the AUZ was under genuine threat.
Will this be a foreshadowing of further disenfranchised and nostalgic academians shaking up political stability in the name of restoring the CSA, or is it just a small nod?


The morning’s events, however, had utterly failed to realize the Haig Clique’s longer-term aims: rather than seizing the entire CSR in one fell swoop, the offensive had simply caused a general collapse of order in the area, adding to the supply chain issues beginning to affect day-to-day life in Chicago.
I feel like this is a reference to something, but I can't put my finger on it exactly.
 
Just one question: where did Stockdale head off to--Canada? That feels like the obvious option but I'm not sure at all.
Considering the fact that Debs CSR declared for Traficant by the next day, it doesn't seem out of the question for Stockdale to have just hung out in the middle of the lake for the day and then sailed for Muskegon that evening or the morning of the 14th. Heck, he could have just returned to Milwaukee once it had been retaken.
 
Five Days in May (1994); Part IV - the Battle of Chicago
Five Days in May (1994); Part IV - the Battle of Chicago

Amid both sides’ careful tallying of forces on 11 May, one minor element had been, by chance, completely overlooked. The SATPO Relief Force, consisting of two thousand men under the overall command of Andrew Bacevich, had been established for a purpose which was a long way down anyone’s list of priorities by this point. Virtually confined to a base eighty miles outside Chicago since February by the ongoing dispute within the Army of the CSA’s high command and lightly-armed by comparison to the Chicago People’s Militia, let alone the IntSec guards, they would have been disregarded as an irrelevance by the Haig Clique to the extent that they were considered as a factor in the May Crisis at all.

The SATPO Relief Force’s status as an ancillary unit outside the Army’s command structure had granted Bacevich an unparalleled freedom of action. While he was as happy as anyone else to hedge his bets during the first days of the Crisis, once it was clear that a stalemate had developed, personal considerations as much as anything else propelled him inexorably into the Traficant camp: his mutual enmity with Haig would condemn him, at best, to the liquidation of the Relief Force and a newly-stalled career in the event of the May Crisis being resolved in Chicago’s favour. Bacevich began to sound out his immediate inferiors by the evening of 12 May regarding the Relief Force’s course of action: while there was a general provisional agreement that support should be provided to the Traficant government in the event that the situation deteriorated further, the unexpected invasion of the Haymarket CSR on 13 May and the complete breakdown of communications in the area prevented any decisive movement on the Relief Force’s part for the time being.

Bacevich finally scented an opportunity to fully commit the forces under his control on the evening of 13 May. Flush with success from their advance far into the Haymarket CSR, the IntSec Guards contingent who were aiming for the Heartland CSR’s border decided to continue from Sterling to Davenport overnight, securing Chicago a vital landline to a loyal CSR. Messaging Chicago to that effect, they set out at eleven: as it happened, their route would bring them within five miles of the Relief Force’s base.

In contrast to the contingent of Intsec Guards fighting their way up the Lake Michigan coast, this unit had faced virtually no resistance even when passing through areas believed loyal to Stockdale. It was thus that eight IFVs full of overconfident, underprepared men (half of the vehicles’ main weapons were unloaded) drove unsuspecting into a textbook L-shaped ambush that a forward echelon of the Relief Force had prepared two miles outside Hillsdale.

Officially, the IntSec Guards fought to the last man, their rifles and such heavy weapons as they could bring to bear hopelessly outmatched by the Relief Force’s portable anti-vehicle arms. Rumours have occasionally surfaced (most notably during Bacevich’s ultimately successful run for the Presidency of the Federation of American States in 2006) that the Relief Force, lacking facilities to simultaneously take prisoners and support Stockdale loyalists to the fullest extent possible, systematically shot the fifty or so Guards who surrendered. In the absence of a statement from any of the officers involved, the matter is unlikely to be resolved one way or the other.

The situation with which the Relief Force was confronted on the morning of 14 May was unrecognisable from that of the previous day. From a handful of scattered and easily-overrun People’s Militia detachments, the forces in the Haymarket CSR loyal to Stockdale had managed to establish a coherent defensive line during the night. As the series of stalemates further North, coupled with the vulnerability of their supply lines, convinced the embattled IntSec Guards echelon in possession of Milwaukee to withdraw towards Chicago, Bacevich was finally able to make contact with what passed for a high command among the Stockdale loyalists: by the afternoon, full communications had been established with Stockdale and the John Paul Jones (keeping a holding pattern in the middle of Lake Michigan). As the most senior army officer present, Bacevich was granted overall command of the People’s Militia units in the Haymarket CSR and provided with absolute freedom of action.

The next twenty-four hours would provide ample scope for the Relief Force to put its doctrinal innovations to the test. Their 90-mile overnight advance across open country, bringing them undetected to the Western outskirts of Chicago by dawn of 15 May just as the survivors of the Kenosha and Milwaukee People’s Militia units took up position just south of Waukegan, was exactly the sort of manoeuvre at which their months of training enabled them to excel. An assault on what was anticipated to be an extremely heavily fortified city, involving days of building-to-building fighting, was another matter altogether: for the time being, Bacevich was content to starve Chicago out instead.

Bacevich and Stockdale’s plan had assumed a unity among the Haig Clique which simply didn’t exist by the morning of 15 May. The first fissures in the united front had appeared the previous afternoon, when Mark Felt countermanded direct orders from Haig in order to preserve the IntSec Guards as a fighting force: Haig’s immediate response was to call for his arrest. Felt, in anticipation, had withdrawn to the Alger Hiss Building (the Bureau of Internal Security’s headquarters) by the time the order arrived. Although the disagreement was eventually smoothed over via a humiliating climbdown from Haig (quite apart from anything else, a majority of the dependable forces available to the Haig Clique answered to Felt), the Guards remained under Felt’s direct control.

As the reverses of 14 May mounted, Richard Daley (nominally in charge of the People’s Militia units who, along with the Guards, comprised essentially all of the Haig Clique’s manpower) began to suspect that he’d backed the wrong horse. Haig’s escalating paranoia (in addition to the attempted arrest of Felt, Reno and Kirkland had been removed from their positions on the Committee to Restore Syndicalism in the evening of 14 May and were being held in close confinement alongside Mondale) made flight impossible for Daley: however, he was able to smuggle revised orders to the People’s Militia out of the House of Congress, instructing them to simply retain order in Chicago regardless of the outcome of the May Crisis. These orders were disseminated unevenly and, occasionally, in a garbled form: nevertheless, by the morning of 15 May, a good proportion of the People’s Militiamen on duty either intended to withdraw at the first sign of serious gunfire, were preparing to switch sides altogether or simply abandoned their posts.

Bacevich was first made aware of the gravity of the situation confronting the defenders of Chicago when a series of probing attacks conducted in mid-morning by the Relief Force succeeded beyond anyone’s anticipations: in skirmish after skirmish, the People’s Militiamen either melted away or surrendered, leaving a hard core of Guards who also generally withdrew to pre-prepared positions closer to the Guards’ main defensive line surrounding the Alger Hiss Building. Summary interviews conducted with captured Militiamen confirmed the confusion and abysmal morale of the Haig Clique’s forces. In the course of brief conference between Bacevich and Stockdale, a change of strategy was agreed: even taking into account the possibility that the Chicago Government was setting a trap for its besiegers, it was still probable that a multi-pronged advance could either seize Chicago outright or reduce the area controlled by the Haig Clique to an unsustainable level. Accordingly, at 11:30 on 15 May, the Haymarket People’s Militia units North of Chicago began to push Southwards: the Relief Force advanced ten minutes later.

In a handful of places (either where Daley’s orders hadn’t reached the Chicago People’s Militiamen or where a Guards unit had been ordered to dig in) the defenders of Chicago were able to ensure that the advance was converted into the bloody, building-clearing affair that Bacevich and Stockdale had feared. In Des Plaines, for instance, a platoon of three dozen guards were able to hold off a contingent of People’s Militiamen five times their number for one and a half hours, inflicting forty casualties in the process and only being overrun after their ammunition was entirely expended. Everywhere else, the Chicago government’s forces were routed: by three in the afternoon, the Relief Force had advanced as far as the Guards’ primary defensive position.

Since Felt’s relocation to the Alger Hiss Building, the Guards had been hard at work converting its immediate surroundings to an impregnable set of fortifications: windows on the first, fourth and seventh floors of each of the high-rise buildings commanding all of the entrances into Martyrs’ Plaza (the square where the Alger Hiss Building was situated) had been smashed out, their lower thirds replaced with sandbagged heavy machinegun emplacements, while vehicle barriers had been improvised from commandeered civilian cars, their wheels removed and their body filled with concrete. The Relief Force’s first tentative approaches to these positions were repulsed more bloodily than anything Bacevich’s troops had suffered so far: although they were able to establish a sustained presence just out of the Guards’ range, thirty minutes of heavy fighting left them virtually where they had started.

It was then that the Navy of the CSA made its sole military contribution to the May Crisis. The John Paul Jones had set sail with its usual component of forty Harpoon stand-off missiles: now, in response to a frantic request from Bacevich, two of them were launched. Skimming the surface of Lake Michigan and accelerating to five hundred miles per hour, they covered the thirty miles of water between the missile cruiser and the Chicago shoreline in under five minutes. If anyone was still manning Chicago’s integrated radar and anti-air defence system, they’d have shown up forty-five seconds before arrival: even if someone had picked their presence up, the inability of the CSA’s air defences to aim at a target twelve feet above sea level would have left him unable to do anything but watch impotently. They hit the Alger Hiss Building, within ten seconds of each other, slightly after quarter to four in the afternoon.

The destruction of the Hiss Building marked essentially the end of serious resistance: the almost certain death of Mark Felt and the Guards’ entire high command, coupled with the realization that the John Paul Jones could now pick off fortified positions essentially at will, caused a general collapse in morale. While isolated pockets of Guards (either fighting from an unusual loyalty to Felt or fear of reprisals later) were offering spirited if doomed resistance well into the evening, forward echelons of the Relief Force had reached the House of Congress by five. They were greeted by a delegation of Congressmen headed by Speaker Mondale, who had been released by the People’s Militia contingent who had been dispatched by Daley to seize Haig soon after the destruction of the Alger Hiss building and who was enjoying his first glimpse of the outside world since the evening of 10 May.

In the brief interval between his liberation and his formal meeting with Stockdale (the most senior civilian Traficant loyalist within easy reach), Mondale had drafted what was essentially a variant of the document he’d managed to withhold from Haig for more than four days, dissolving the Congress of the CSA pending further elections and granting Traficant the power to redraft the Constitution of the CSA, subject to a general referendum of the CSA’s citizens.

Multiple formal endpoints to the May Crisis have been proposed. The last fatality associated with the Crisis occurred in the early morning of 17 May, when an Air Militiaman from the Debs CSR broke off from a patrol over Lake Erie in a suicidal attempt to intercept the aircraft returning Traficant to Chicago: he was shot down by a coastal air defence system before he could pose a significant threat to the Chairman. Another possible endpoint occurred on the afternoon of 18 May. The last Congressman whose whereabouts were unaccounted for (the tracking down of whom had been of great concern to Traficant and Haig on 12 May), a junior Congressman from the Tidewater CSR who had been on a two-week fishing vacation with his family, emerged near Richmond only to be placed under temporary arrest. Whenever precisely it ended, the May Crisis marks the final passing of the Combined Syndicates of America.
 
Is there any chance we could get a list of CSA leaders like you did with Britain a while back?
Also, great update! Looking forward to how the CSA finally officially dies.
 
Is there any chance we could get a list of CSA leaders like you did with Britain a while back?
Looks like:

1936-1944: John Reed
1944-1961: William Z Foster
1961-1985: James Burnham
1985-1993: Robert McNamara
1993-1994: de jure James Traficant, de facto contested between Traficant and Alexander Haig
1994-: James Traficant
 
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(most notably during Bacevich’s ultimately successful run for the Presidency of the Federation of American States in 2006)

I guess... not the worst possible option?

The last fatality associated with the Crisis occurred in the early morning of 17 May, when an Air Militiaman from the Debs CSR broke off from a patrol over Lake Erie in a suicidal attempt to intercept the aircraft returning Traficant to Chicago: he was shot down by a coastal air defence system before he could pose a significant threat to the Chairman.

That reminds me, what was the total death toll for the crisis?

the almost certain death of Mark Felt

Should I be hearing the ominous foreshadowing music that I currently am?
 
It was then that the Navy of the CSA made its sole military contribution to the May Crisis. The John Paul Jones had set sail with its usual component of forty Harpoon stand-off missiles: now, in response to a frantic request from Bacevich, two of them were launched. Skimming the surface of Lake Michigan and accelerating to five hundred miles per hour, they covered the thirty miles of water between the missile cruiser and the Chicago shoreline in under five minutes. If anyone was still manning Chicago’s integrated radar and anti-air defence system, they’d have shown up forty-five seconds before arrival: even if someone had picked their presence up, the inability of the CSA’s air defences to aim at a target twelve feet above sea level would have left him unable to do anything but watch impotently. They hit the Alger Hiss Building, within ten seconds of each other, slightly after quarter to four in the afternoon.
Well now we know if the frigates work.
 
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