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

I ACCUSE WORKERS IN IU610 OF PRODUCING AND SUPPLYING DRUGS OF UNLAWFUL SUSTENANCE AND PLEASURE FOR THE PURPOSES OF PROFIT WHO WILL SPEAK FOR MPOIUGP-9UGUBPY*)&FRD068R4%)F^D)*B +++ATH0NOCARRIER
 
Because We Live Here (1990)
Because We Live Here (1990)

The events of 1989 had undoubtedly extracted a significant toll on the overall operational capability of the insurgents: that the effects felt were on individual insurgent cells were deeply uneven was becoming clear by the spring of 1990. In general, those insurgent groups which had been most visible during the first two years of the Insurgency, the roving biker gangs levying tolls on all transport throughout Northwest Montana and the local militias formed to defend their hometowns during the collapse of public order, were most vulnerable to counter-insurgency tactics. Even within the heartland of the insurgency, most of these groups had been destroyed or frightened into a surly compliance within the first few months of Operation Mountain Lion. Similarly, the larger Northwest Front cells – numbering up to thirty men on occasion – discovered too late their logistical dependence on a network of sympathisers who could be detained or ‘turned’, and their vulnerability to the long-range helicopter patrols which were, for the moment, virtually impossible to counter.

Conversely, the counter-insurgency had had almost no effect on the small, paranoid cells of NWF insurgents within the larger towns in the region or those capable of living off the land almost indefinitely. Provided with a plethora of highly visible targets, these groups were able to inflict a limited but steady stream of casualties on government forces almost without loss. Within a year of the beginning of Operation Mountain Lion, the NWF was smaller and more geographically limited but, in general, far more competent and fanatical than it had been in early 1989: while much of this transformation was simply due to the Darwinian logic of the counter-insurgency, which neutralised the arrogant, foolhardy and incompetent while leaving the others unmolested, the first half of 1990 saw the rise within the NWF’s echelons of a commander later to become associated indelibly with the overall successes of the insurgency.

James Gordon Gritz was born in 1939 in Oklahoma: on the establishment of the Sequoyah CSR, he was resettled along with his parents in Grangeland, where his father was provided with a job at a Kalispell logging camp. Enlisting in the Army of the Combined Syndicates on graduation from high school, he served with distinction in the CSA’s “military advisory mission” to the People’s Republic of the Honduras during the Centroamerican Wars of the early 1960s, before volunteering as part of the first intake for the CSA’s nascent Ranger Corps in 1964. In contrast to the CSA’s fairly militarily conventional interventions in the affairs of its immediate neighbours in the first two decades of its existence, the Rangers were intended to fill the CSA military’s need for assets capable of the asymmetrical warfare that was an increasing feature of the limited proxy wars in Africa, Asia and South America which would come to define the foreign policy of the late 1960s and early 1970s: airdropped into territory de facto controlled by sympathetic rebels, they were trained to mould existing insurgencies into an effective and dangerous force virtually single-handedly and with extremely limited external support.

The precise extent of Gritz’s deployments in this period must remain unknown until his military record is declassified in 2035: his claims to a deep involvement in the (ultimately successful) Afrosyndicalist insurgencies in Angola from 1967-1971, the CSA’s attempts to create a similar insurgency in the Bophuthatswana Autonomous State in the early 1970s and the creation of the (still ongoing) Sendero Luminoso insurgency in the Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation in the late 1970s notwithstanding, the militaries of the CSA and the Federated States of America have refused to confirm his presence in any of these theatres. Nevertheless, if even half of his claims are true, he must have been, on his 1985 retirement from active service to Kalispell, one of the dozen or so individuals in the CSA best qualified to manage a homegrown insurgency.

This qualification was not lost on the civilian authorities: Gritz was placed under surveillance by plainclothes People’s Militia units from 1987 onwards. This backfired catastrophically when Gritz, tipped off to the operation by a careless Militiaman and forced to choose between awaiting an imminent arrest and fleeing to insurgent-held territory, chose the latter course of action in late 1988. Moving from safehouse to safehouse in remote northwest Montana, his experience with insurgency warfare allowed him to accrue more and more influence among what formal command structure the NWF had at this point: although the precise point at which he secured overall responsibility with the tactical direction of the insurgency is unclear, it was certainly no later than early 1990 – his hand was almost certainly strengthened enormously by SATPO’s rapid series of victories in the second half of 1989)

The reforms that Gritz made to the NWF’s operational structure were significant, wide-ranging and effective. In place of the loose confederation of sizeable local militias, calling on each other for mutual support where required, Gritz established an array of insurgent cells, each intended to operate entirely separately from the others: these cells, limited in size to the greatest extent possible (a cell embedded in an urban area would typically have three members, while one covering a larger rural region could have up to six active members at any one time) were required to be more or less self-sufficient. A minimal command staff, responsible for the general direction of NWF activity, supplying each cell with experts and materiel if necessary, was established for each larger region. As far as possible, information on insurgent operations would be restricted to a need-to-know basis: an individual insurgent, if captured, would not be able to incriminate more than half a dozen or so others.

Gritz’s assumption of command heralded a change in strategy almost as great as that to the NWF’s organisational structure. For the first two years of the insurgency, the insurgents and the counter-insurgents had flailed ineffectively and directionlessly against each other: NWF and People’s Militia units alike had chosen their targets based on a combination of personal score-settling, out-of-date or inaccurate intelligence and (at times) the desire for plunder. Henceforth, the NWF’s every action would need to advance at least one of its two aims: making SATPO’s continued operation in northwest Montana too politically and financially costly to be sustained, and ensuring that SATPO and the area’s civilian populations distrusted each other to the greatest extent possible. Within these broad parameters, the NWF’s regional commanders were given a great deal of tactical and operational leeway.

These changes took some months to percolate through the ranks of the NWF and were never universally adopted, but proved almost immediately effective where deployed. Over the summer of 1990, the series of small-scale attacks by NWF cells on known informants, the logistical network underpinning SATPO’s forward bases, and any civilian suspected of fraternizing with SATPO operatives had begun to visibly blunt SATPO’s capabilities. The reactivation of NWF cells in areas believed pacified fuelled the developing paranoia of SATPO’s high command: SATPO’s ‘retaliation raids’ on communities believed to harbour NWF members in turn fuelled civilian hostility to SATPO. Prior to 1990, northwest Montana’s civilians had broadly seen the NWF either as a temporary nuisance or an intensely local phenomenon: as the year wore on, people were increasingly forced to pick a side between the insurgents and central government. By December 1990, SATPO high command (Brennan in particular) were beginning to believe that a comprehensive change in direction was needed for Operation Mountain Lion.
 
Go West, Young Man (1990-1991)
Go West, Young Man (1990-1991)

Formulated between Kanne and Brennan over Christmas 1990, Phase Two of Operation Mountain Lion recognised that the forces available to SATPO were no longer appropriate or sufficient to assume a role which had undergone a subtle but inexorable change over the preceding eighteen months. Two airborne brigades, a mechanised brigade and limited air support were more than enough to decisively defeat insurgent forces in any conventional engagement: assuming sole responsibility for the policing of an area which had expanded to eighteen thousand square miles by late 1990 was entirely beyond their capabilities.

Bringing his experience in South American counterinsurgency warfare to bear, Brennan proposed two material alterations to Operation Mountain Lion, augmented by a host of smaller changes to the Operation’s structure and rules of engagement.

Firstly, those People’s Militia units still functioning in Mountain Lion’s zone of operation were finally and irrevocably dissolved on 1 January 1991 (over the protests of Governor Baucus, this was effected by the decree of the Chicago Congress, further deepening the rift between the respective governments of the Grangeland CSR and the CSA as a whole). Over the last three years, they had proved hopelessly incompetent, corrupt and (in places) riddled with NWF sympathizers: while many individual Militiamen, given less than a week’s notice of impending dismissal, decided to throw their lot in wholeheartedly with the NWF rather than await reassignment to civilian jobs (and an ever-present threat of reprisal for prior acts by insurgent cells) Kanne’s diaries for the period suggest a general feeling of relief among Mountain Lion’s high command that SATPO was no longer dependent in any way on a deeply unreliable “ally”.

Those policing duties previously conduced by the People’s Militia, and many of the less skilled and risky logistical support roles under the purview of the Mechanised Brigade, were to pass into the hands of the newly-formed SATPO Irregular Division, intended to report directly to Brennan. This element of the restructuring of Operation Mountain Lion, although grudgingly approved “off-record” by Alexander Haig, was never submitted to the rest of the CSA’s military high command for comment, nor was a funding request for the Irregulars made through official channels. Instead, Brennan’s close working relationship with Mark Felt, the Director of the Bureau of Internal Security, allowed him to draw on funds controlled by the Bureau to cover all of the costs associated with the division. In practice, this gave Brennan almost complete freedom of action where the Irregulars were concerned: although his position within Operation Mountain Lion remained, sensu stricto, a purely consultative one, Kanne’s diaries note an increasing number of disagreements between him and Brennan as the latter took on a progressively larger active role in Mountain Lion’s operations, at times countermanding Kanne’s direct orders.

Like many “black projects” of the period, all of the records of the Bureau’s funding off the Irregular Division were officially destroyed along with the Alger Hiss building during the 1994 Battle of Chicago, so most of the information on the Division in the public domain has been reconstructed from eyewitness testimonies by northwest Montana’s civilian population and regular soldiers within SATPO. It is clear, in any case, that Brennan’s initial vision of a fifteen thousand-strong peacekeeping and policing force drawn from Montana locals, its leadership comprised of the more competent former People’s Militia officers, failed to materialise: local enlistment rates were derisory, due to a combination of local hostility to SATPO and a genuine fear of insurgent attacks on the families of the Irregulars. To plug this gap in manpower, Brennan was forced to resort to more and more unorthodox methods: recruitment standards were lowered to the point where people who’d failed the aptitude tests for the People’s Militia or who’d been dishonourably discharged from the CSA’s regular military were recruited, recruitment offices were opened in the more economically depressed areas of other CSRs and petty criminals sentenced to hard labour terms of up to twelve months were offered a remission of their sentence in exchange for enlistment.

Northwest Montana’s civilian population had held the People’s Militia in mild contempt, and had feared SATPO’s regular troops: they loathed the Irregulars from the beginning. This loathing, reciprocated wholeheartedly by most of the Irregulars, progressively damaged the capabilities of Operation Mountain Lion, as the Irregulars took up a larger and larger proportion of the routine work associated with Mountain Lion. Despite Kanne’s objections, the first “mixed patrols”, consisting of a combination of regular and irregular troops, were underway by the autumn of 1991.

The second alteration to Operation Mountain Lion was never fully instituted, but represents a more radical departure from the Operation’s initial scope than the first. Brennan proposed a wholesale uprooting of the civilian population of northwest Montana: the inhabitants of the small towns and hamlets which dotted the area would be assembled and “processed” by SATPO’s intelligence arm, with those civilians deemed to pose a threat to peaceful governance in the region to be reassigned to another CSR: the remainder would be installed in purpose-built and military defensible “civilian facilities” consisting of multiple new apartment blocks and amenities. To ensure continued pacification of the population, a civilian SATPO informant would be embedded on each floor of each apartment block.

The proposal, considered expensive and impractical even by SATPO’s largest institutional supporters within the CSA’s power structure, never fully got off the ground: however, a test scheme was approved for Beaverhead County in mid-1991. The first town subject to “processing” was Dillon, the county seat: of its roughly five thousand residents, two hundred and fifty were deported to the Gulf CSR, with the remainder being relocated to the nearby Dillon Civilian Facility, a series of prefabricated buildings intended as a temporary measure until new apartment blocks could be constructed. To replace the deportees, Brennan and his allies in the Bureau of Internal Security had reached a tacit agreement with the Governor of the Appalachia CSR, whose own restructurings to the CSR’s bloated and uncompetitive coal mining industry was creating a pool of unemployed civilians: advertised as a “town of the future” carrying guaranteed employment opportunities, the Dillon Civilian Facility’s two hundred and fifty vacancies received over eight thousand applications within weeks.

The (carefully politically vetted) incomers rapidly discovered the truth of their situation: resented by the locals and living in cold and unsanitary conditions (the NWF had made it clear that any collective supplying goods or manpower to construct these Civilian Facilities would be targeted for reprisals, so Dillon’s apartments were still unfinished at the advent of winter), they were only allowed to leave the Facility as part of an armed convoy driven to one of several nearby agricultural collectives. These virtual prisoners would remain in these conditions, in some cases, until 1994.

Despite these teething problems, Brennan’s reforms were broadly successful in returning some of the initiative to SATPO. By December 1991, he could point to an overall 65% reduction in visible insurgent activity near Dillion as evidence for the value of the Civilian Facility Scheme: though there was still definite friction between SATPO’s regular and irregular troops, the sheer influx of manpower had given Operation Mountain Lion a wider and more permanent reach in its area of operation. Going into 1992, there was only slight cause for doubt among Operation Mountain Lion’s upper echelons, and that at present a speck on the horizon: in the preceding few months, the NWF had opened up a new and irritatingly public front of attack against SATPO.
 
Prison battalions and strategic hamlets? I'm sure those strategies won't go wrong!

A small note, though: I've recently been reading about Soviet prison policy, and after the Stalin era, 'hard labor' sentences weren't really applied to 'petty' criminals. In fact, during the late Soviet period you seem to be paralleling, there was a distinctive move towards more non-custodial sentencing. While offering enlistment in the irregulars is in line with that policy, the alternative should be a simple stint in the labor colonies, not actual 'hard labor'. I know the latter term is often used colloquially, but here it'd have a specific meaning.
 
Prison battalions and strategic hamlets? I'm sure those strategies won't go wrong!

A small note, though: I've recently been reading about Soviet prison policy, and after the Stalin era, 'hard labor' sentences weren't really applied to 'petty' criminals. In fact, during the late Soviet period you seem to be paralleling, there was a distinctive move towards more non-custodial sentencing. While offering enlistment in the irregulars is in line with that policy, the alternative should be a simple stint in the labor colonies, not actual 'hard labor'. I know the latter term is often used colloquially, but here it'd have a specific meaning.

An entirely reasonable criticism on your part, entirely due to my lexical slackness. I'll tweak the wording of the 'hard labor' section to make it clear that for most of the inductees to the Irregulars, they've been asked to choose between spending six months stamping license plates for eight hours a day or being given a gun and a civilian population to police/tacitly extort.

I should have made it clearer that the petty criminals were never a significant element of the Irregular Division: to the extent that it has forerunners in OTL, I intended to base it off McNamara's brilliant idea to drop the IQ floor for draftees in Vietnam. The ensuing soldiers, popularly nicknamed "McNamara's Morons" ended up performing a good deal worse during the war and afterwards than the normal Vietnam draftees on pretty much every metric you'd suspect, and a fair few that you wouldn't (most notably "likelihood to participate in an action which breaches international law during their term of service", which is going to shortly become quite relevant to TTL).
 
The Widening Gyre (1991-1992)
The Widening Gyre (1991-1992)

However rooted they may be in local conflicts and issues, at least initially, insurgencies are seldom entirely confined by national boundaries, as the CSA’s Western neighbour, the Pacific States of America, was beginning to discover by early 1992.

Through the 1980s, the PSA’s interest in the developing Northwest Montana Insurgency was entirely academic, at least from the perspective of the state’s diplomatic and intelligence departments. Relations with the CSA had been minimal for the entirety of the PSA’s existence (the border between the two states was technically a ‘frozen conflict zone’ until a broad peace treaty, the McNamara-Church Agreement, was signed in 1961), and the Pacific States, buffeted by the commodity shocks of the early 80s which had so crippled the CSA, its diplomatic attentions consumed by an effort to balance its status as a semi-detached member of the Commonwealth of Nations and its growing economic intertwinement with the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, simply didn’t have an interest in paying more than cursory attention to the actions of the Northwest Front. Insofar as the situation was monitored at all, it was treated as a mildly embarrassing domestic issue for the CSA.

The Northwest Montana Insurgency, as it happened, had begun to coalesce into a serious fighting force at a period of particularly fraught relations between the PSA’s central government and its Eastern frontier. The end of the 80s saw an unusually bad flareup of the ongoing conflict between the Bureau of Land Management and the ranchers and farmers who were permitted to work state-owned land. Just one of many faultiness in the society of the Pacific States from the 70s onwards, this conflict, generally dubbed the “Sagebrush Rebellion”, pitted an increasingly urban and environmentally-conscious coastal population and the bureaucratic apparatus of the PSA against Western rural interests, backed by a loose and ideologically-heterogenous coalition of elected officials, ranging from Orrin Hatch to Mo Udall, who believed in the devolution of decisions on land use to state or local level.

The BLM’s five-yearly reapportionment of permits in 1991, which mandated an across-the-board 20% cut in land use quotas, was expected to set off a chorus of complaints from the West similar to those following the 1981 and 1986 reapportionments: the government of the PSA was unprepared for the nastier edge which resistance to the reapportionment took. For many of the smaller-scale ranchers, this permit reduction, coming at a time of widespread inflation, would render their operations unviable – desperate for assistance from any quarter whatsoever, several in southern Idaho and northern Utah began to look across the border with the CSA.

On 28 August 1991, a vehicle containing two BLM enforcement rangers on a routine patrol south of Bruneau, Idaho triggered an IED: both were killed instantly. Investigation of the remnants of the IED suggested that its components had been primarily sourced from those territories across the border under the de facto control of the NWF. Two weeks later, a sheriff serving a warrant on a non-compliant small rancher was killed in an ambush clearly modelled on the NWF’s small-unit operations. Investigations by the PSA’s Federal Bureau of Investigation ran into a wall of silence (among local law enforcement and politicians as well as among ranchers and farmers in the area): faced with a unified front of opposition, their investigative efforts petered out without any arrests being made. With an increasingly large proportion of officials at town and county level being more or less openly noncompliant with the BLM and increasing rumbles of discontent from Western delegates to the Congress of the Pacific States, Sacramento decided to cut its losses as gracefully as possible: the proposed reapportionment was cancelled, and a bill, signed into law by President Robert Stack in January 1992, devolved most land management issues to the constituent states of the PSA. Although the damage caused to the PSA’s government’s prestige and legitimacy by this episode was minimal in the grand scheme of things, many senior figures had been alerted to the danger that an unstable region on the PSA’s border could pose.

Other oddities soon followed. The single largest story covered by the PSA’s mass media over the summer of 1991 was a series of particularly daring bank robberies conducted in small towns across Idaho and eastern Washington and Oregon by two heavily-armed individuals wearing Earl Warren and Richard Nixon masks and a getaway driver. As the robbers slipped through local law enforcement’s frankly lackadaisical attempts at capture again and again, public interest mounted still further: by October 1991, the Federal Bureau of Investigation considered it advisable to establish a “flying squadron” modelled on Frank Hamer’s efforts to apprehend Bonnie and Clyde to deal with the problem. On 15 December 1991, a four-man team was ultimately able to intercept the bank robbers on a stretch of highway outside Coeur D’Alene: in the ensuing firefight, two FBI agents, one of the bank robbers and the getaway driver were killed. the survivor, a young Idaho native called Scott Stedeford, turned out to harbour deep links with Ben Klassen’s White supremacist Church of the Creator: the bank robberies had been intended as a source of funding to other Klassenites who had crossed over from Idaho into NWF-held territory and, by late 1991, formed a key element of the insurgents’ combat arm. Exactly how much money was channelled to the NWF in this manner is unknown: given that the bank robberies had netted several hundred thousand dollars, of which less than two thousand was ultimately recovered, the sum is likely to have been significant.

These events, which brought the insurgency to the attention of the PSA’s government, fuelled a growing interest in the NWF in the wider world’s media. While Canadian journalists had been quietly smuggling themselves across the border to report on the varying fortunes of Operation Mountain Lion on the ground (in two cases being killed in the process) since early 1990, journalistic interest in the insurgency was spurred significantly in 1991 when Edward Pitts, a Pacifican photojournalist, was killed in Thompson Falls while attempting to secure an interview with a NWF commander. Paradoxically, the sheer danger involved in reporting on Operation Mountain Lion acted as a lure to war correspondents rather than a deterrent – by early 1992, multiple journalists were operating in Northwest Montana at any one time.

Gritz lost no time on capitalising on this sudden uptick in interest: carefully vetted journalists were encouraged to join NWF long range patrols, and were granted interviews with senior insurgent commanders and protection by dedicated NWF insurgent teams during their stay in NWF-controlled areas (on the understanding that they would speak highly of the NWF’s fight for freedom). SATPO’s response was less sure-footed, vacillating between announcing Operation Mountain Lion’s Area of Operations as an exclusion zone (and threatening the detention of any journalists in the area on espionage charges) and granting special clearance to reliably Syndicalist journalists (mostly from Centroamerica and Brazil) to take part in conducted tours of the more functional and pleasant Civilian Facilities.

In the first half of 1992, Kanne’s diaries reflect a very real sense among SATPO’s high command that the CSA was slowly but surely losing the public relations war to the insurgents on an international level: while frustrating, there was little which could be done for the time being other than policing the Canadian and Pacifican borders while the pacification campaign continued. The increased presence of journalists in the area notwithstanding, Operation Mountain Lion continued to operate virtually unchanged from 1991 as summer approached.

As it happened, war correspondents played little role in the public promulgation of SATPO’s greatest error: the events of 22 June 1992, with which Operation Mountain Lion is today indelibly associated in the public mind, was publicised almost by accident.

cUugPP9.png
 
Last edited:
While yielding to the rancher's demands may have been a bitter pill to swallow, so long as this doesn't set a precedent,* the PSA government is definitely better off having ceded the point before the matter could escalate out of hand. Fighting an insurgency in the area of the Great Divide would be nightmarish.

*Hopefully PSA's other political movements don't end up thinking they can easily get what they want through violence and intimidation.
 
While yielding to the rancher's demands may have been a bitter pill to swallow, so long as this doesn't set a precedent,* the PSA government is definitely better off having ceded the point before the matter could escalate out of hand. Fighting an insurgency in the area of the Great Divide would be nightmarish.

*Hopefully PSA's other political movements don't end up thinking they can easily get what they want through violence and intimidation.

The PSA has an advantage in dealing with the Sagebrush Rebellion in that the issues fuelling the (fairly low-level) insurgency can be conceded to the insurgents without the PSA facing a crisis of legitimacy - there's a world of difference between delaying a bureacratic reapportionment of land rights for five years and completely reversing decades of governmental policy, as the CSA would have to do to reach an agreement with their insurgents. More broadly, though, the PSA has multiple avenues for deescalation (locally elected law enforcement officials soft-pedalling unpopular legal changes, ranchers lobbying Governors for favourable treatment, Congress passing bills reversing some of BLM's powers etc) which the CSA lacks - thanks to the various bureaucratic reforms established under James Burnham and only somewhat rolled back under his successors, basically any serious disagreement's going to end up in a shooting war.
 
>See also _First_ Northwest Insurgency

I am reminded of “My war gone by, I miss it so.” For what who will be his “Chechens” that will result in him finally shitting himself in fear under a coordinated fire plan? While it is out of scope: journalists who love Sarajevo night life and quick UN jaunts to piles of dead males or camps of starved males found less tantric war deeply confronting.
 
Map: 1992 Pacific States House of Representatives Elections
XLOJktP.png



Major parties in the Pacific States of America

Progressive Democratic Party: Formed in the late 1940s as a merger between the left wing of the Pacific Democratic Party and the Pacific Progressive Party. Historical base of support among the labor movement and among rural smallholders, but has steadily expanded its suburban reach in response to the Long Recession of the 1980s. Broadly socially progressive, protectionist, opposed to immigration, emotionally attached to the PSA's old allies in Canada, New England and the Commonwealth of Nations as a whole. Notable Presidents: Earl Warren, Pat Brown, Frank Church.
Pacific Republican Party: Historically the party of middle-class Pacificans, Eastern and rural interests and Mormons, the Pacific Republican Party is somewhat more socially and fiscally conservative than its main rival. Pro-immigration and increasingly receptive to economic and political overtures from the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Notable Presidents: Frank Merriam, Richard Nixon, Robert Stack.

Minor parties in the Pacific States of America

Pacific Populist Party:
Founded in 1992 in the wake of the "Sagebrush Rebellion", a series of acrimonious disputes over land use between the Pacific Bureau of Land Management and Eastern ranchers. Comprised of an exceptionally broad and ideologically incoherent coalition of groups, ranging from anti-government militias to Native American activists to quasi-Syndicalist communes in rural Nevada, united by little more than a loathing for the Bureau of Land Management in particular and Sacramento in general. Despite this, the right of the party (led by Helen Chenoweth) and its left (led by Ronnie Lupe) are willing to work together, at least for the time being.
Pacific Conservative Party: An artifact of the Republican Party's shift to the left in the early 1960s, the Conservative Party was established by Walter Knott and John G Schmitz in 1964. Its platform of military buildup, uncompromising anti-Syndicalism and Austrian economics has historically found its firmest base of support in Southern California, where it enjoys strong ties to the defense industry, and among Eastern rural interests (although the Populist Party has usurped most of the latter group).
Cascadia Party: The most left-wing party present in the Pacific Congress, the Cascadia Party was formed in the early 1980s to protest logging in the Pacific Northwest. Strongly socially progressive and environmentalist, the Cascadia Party has struggled to expand beyond its Seattle heartlands.
 
Last edited:
thanks to the various bureaucratic reforms established under James Burnham
This is quite intriguing, does this mean a lot of ex-communist household names like Lovestone or Gitlow remain leftists in this TL? Does this lead to a lot conservative theorists in the East Coast to be syndicalist (or whatever flavour of totalism/radsoc this CSA has) theorists and philosophers?

XLOJktP.png



Major parties in the Pacific States of America

Progressive Democratic Party: Formed in the late 1940s as a merger between the left wing of the Pacific Democratic Party and the Pacific Progressive Party. Historical base of support among the labor movement and among rural smallholders, but has steadily expanded its suburban reach in response to the Long Recession of the 1980s. Broadly socially progressive, protectionist, opposed to immigration, emotionally attached to the PSA's old allies in California, New England and the Commonwealth of Nations as a whole. Notable Presidents: Earl Warren, Pat Brown, Frank Church.
Pacific Republican Party: Historically the party of middle-class Pacificans, Eastern and rural interests and Mormons, the Pacific Republican Party is somewhat more socially and fiscally conservative than its main rival. Pro-immigration and increasingly receptive to economic and political overtures from the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Notable Presidents: Frank Merriam, Richard Nixon, Robert Stack.

Minor parties in the Pacific States of America

Pacific Populist Party:
Founded in 1992 in the wake of the "Sagebrush Rebellion", a series of acrimonious disputes over land use between the Pacific Bureau of Land Management and Eastern ranchers. Comprised of an exceptionally broad and ideologically incoherent coalition of groups, ranging from anti-government militias to Native American activists to quasi-Syndicalist communes in rural Nevada, united by little more than a loathing for the Bureau of Land Management in particular and Sacramento in general. Despite this, the right of the party (led by Helen Chenoweth) and its left (led by Ronnie Lupe) are willing to work together, at least for the time being.
Pacific Conservative Party: An artifact of the Republican Party's shift to the left in the early 1960s, the Conservative Party was established by Walter Knott and John G Schmitz in 1964. Its platform of military buildup, uncompromising anti-Syndicalism and Austrian economics has historically found its firmest base of support in Southern California, where it enjoys strong ties to the defense industry, and among Eastern rural interests (although the Populist Party has usurped most of the latter group).
Cascadia Party: The most left-wing party present in the Pacific Congress, the Cascadia Party was formed in the early 1980s to protest logging in the Pacific Northwest. Strongly socially progressive and environmentalist, the Cascadia Party has struggled to expand beyond its Seattle heartlands.

All these parties seem very interesting and well thought-out, it makes me want to see what each of them would do against the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Insurgency if they were more popular and managed to get their party to presidency in an alt-alt-history TL. Also, will conflict start to spread into the Canadian border soon?
 
This is quite intriguing, does this mean a lot of ex-communist household names like Lovestone or Gitlow remain leftists in this TL? Does this lead to a lot conservative theorists in the East Coast to be syndicalist (or whatever flavour of totalism/radsoc this CSA has) theorists and philosophers?

Interesting point. In general, OTL's schisms between Trotskyists and Stalinists at Columbia in the 1930s which led ultimately to neoconservatism never occurred (Trotsky and Stalin being fairly irrelevant), so a lot of intellectuals who drifted to the right in the 1940s remained broadly on the left. It should be noted that the CSA's pretty much syndicalist in name only by the late 50s: its closest analogue to OTL is probably a more authoritarian version of the America of about 1950 to the late 60s, with political and economic governance being centralised in the hands of managerialist experts and trade union leaders. Outside the CSA, those syndicalist states which have survived into the period covered by this timeline have converged on a philosophy similar to those of OTL's "left fascists" such as Edmondo Rossoni and Manuel Hedilla.

All these parties seem very interesting and well thought-out, it makes me want to see what each of them would do against the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Insurgency if they were more popular and managed to get their party to presidency in an alt-alt-history TL. Also, will conflict start to spread into the Canadian border soon?

The Canadian situation's somewhat more stable than the PSA's in the early 90s: the West of the country's enjoying a modest economic boom thanks to the development of economical shale oil extraction about ten years earlier than OTL, with the major faultline in Canadian politics being between the West and the economically stagnating East. There isn't really any appetite for Western secession at this point, although circumstances may change during the 90s.
 
The Plains Massacre (1992)
The Plains Massacre (1992)

The “mixed” SATPO company (comprised of a combination of regular and irregular troops) deployed in southern Sanders county from late April 1992 had enjoyed an exceptionally unpleasant two months, even by the standards of the troops engaged in the slow and grinding counterinsurgency against the Northwest Front. As Operation Mountain Lion ran into a more and more pressing shortage of manpower, SATPO’s forward operating and patrol bases were relieved less and less frequently: three or four months of active operations became the norm for the progressively exhausted infantrymen.

The vast majority of these active operational periods would be spent in a state of at least some combat readiness, the monotony between the occasional “forward sweeps” in search of an enemy which was, by this point in the insurgency, more than capable of blending into the civilian population at the first sign of counterinsurgents, being relieved by an endless series of foot patrols to hunt for the increasingly common and dangerous improvised explosive devices which had slowed industrial and logistic traffic to a standstill in the area and to make SATPO’s presence known to a uniformly hostile local population, and a handful of running battles with SATPO insurgents which, it was felt by the troops, could kill unerringly and melt into the countryside, leaving nothing but shell casings and (occasionally) a dead NWF insurgent in their wake.

As the casualties suffered by the company steadily mounted through April and May (culminating in an IED’s fatal wounding of a popular sergeant while on a routine patrol in early June), the strain began to tell: the mutual distrust between the regulars and irregulars (most of whom were habitual petty criminals recruited from the Appalachia and West Texas CSRs) deepened to the point that fistfights had begun to break out between the two groups. The NCOs and officers, almost exclusively drawn from SATPO’s regular command structure, generally sided with the regulars.

A further fissure had developed in the company by early June, this time in its highest echelons. In accordance with the doctrine formulated by Kanne and Brennan, each company engaged in forward operations was to fall under the overall command of a regular Captain, assisted by an intelligence officer with the rank of Lieutenant whose responsibility was the coordination of local intelligence networks and the provision of advice on the overall scope and direction of the company’s operations. In this case, Captain A and Lieutenant R[1] openly loathed each other by this time: all communications between the two were made via intermediaries, with R taking advantage of the extent to which the powers of the Intelligence Lieutenant were undefined to undercut A at every opportunity, with the Captain in turn threatening a court-martial on their return to Aalto AFB.

The orders ostensibly received by Lt. R in the evening of 21 June 1992 came as something of a relief to the exhausted and paranoid company: on the morning of 22 June, they were to proceed to the small town of Plains (about fifteen miles away from their forward operating base), assemble those locals still remaining there and prepare them for transportation to a new civilian facility, in anticipation of the arrival of a detachment from the SATPO Mechanized Brigade. Unusually, the company would be permitted to use whatever force they deemed necessary to secure the pacification of the locals. In the last two months, the company had lost seven men in and around Plains: the removal of its population would at least allow them some more breathing room.

Virtually all of the events of the subsequent twenty-four hours have been the subject of dispute, the ensuing confusion only being partly unpicked by the findings of the 2007 Commission on the Northwest Montana Insurgency. The first key point of uncertainty lies in the briefings on the operational rules of engagement at platoon level in the early hours of 22 June 1992, which appears to have varied dramatically according to the temperament of the officer or NCO delivering the briefing: in at least one case, troopers were told that every civilian still present in Plains should be considered to be a member of the NWF.

Prior to the Insurgency, the small town of Plains had contained a population of around 1,000 people, mostly employed in the agricultural and logging collectives close by. To ensure compliance among the broadly NWF-sympathising population and to secure industrial supply chains, most men of working age had been moved onto these guarded collectives semi-permanently in 1991: by June 1992, the population of Plains had shrunk to slightly fewer than six hundred individuals, almost all women, children or the elderly. These civilians awoke at 0630 to find an entire SATPO company converging on Plains: they (and six exceptionally unlucky truckers who happened to have stopped overnight in Plains) were ordered to assemble in the community’s high school with their identity cards immediately while SATPO conducted a house-to-house sweep for hidden insurgents and weaponry. For this civilians, this was an irritation, but not an unprecedented one: multiple similar sweeps had been conducted in 1991 and the first half of 1992, and while it was rumoured that the population was to be transported to a purpose-built civilian facility, similar rumours had come to nothing in the past. Accordingly, it was in the expectation of several wasted and uncomfortable hours that the civilian population converged on the high school.

The processing of the population was properly underway by 0715: of the five hundred and eighty-three civilians examined at the school, fifty-five (including the truckers, the town’s doctor and two former People’s Militiamen), identified as potential NWF sympathisers or agents, were handed off to a small detachment under the command of Sergeant F to be temporarily held in Plains’ town hall (a multipurpose building which doubled as a grocery store under normal circumstances).

At some point between 0830 and 0845, a SATPO combat team, comprised exclusively of irregulars, which was conducting the door-to-door sweep of Plains heard a series of gunshots from close by: theories on their exact nature have ranged from a concealed NWF unit somewhere within the town attempting to disrupt the sweep to a jumpy member of another combat team firing at shadows to a simple accidental discharge. Whatever the cause, the combat team’s first course of action was to attempt to lay down supressing fire at the approximate source of the gunshots. To those members of the company guarding the civilians in the high school and town hall, it appeared, to all intents and purposes, that the NWF had chosen this moment to attack the overstretched and scattered SATPO troopers.

One of the truckers held in the town hall took the gunfire as an opportunity to try to escape: the first casualty of the Plains Massacre, he was shot by a SATPO trooper as he attempted to open the building’s first floor window. Confronted by what he believed to be a concerted attempt to overpower the badly outnumbered SATPO attachment guarding the high-risk detainees, Sergeant F gave his troopers the orders to open fire indiscriminately on the civilians, radioing the command post in the high school that his troops had been attacked by NWF elements among the detainees.

Demoralised, exhausted, paranoid and deprived for months of the chance for any real response to civilian hostility and NWF attacks, the remainder of the company collectively snapped. Several troopers started to shoot into the mass of civilians immediately, with others taking this as their signal to open fire themselves. Deafened by the firing and utterly unprepared for the rapidity of the company’s slide into anarchy (one eyewitness reported a trooper, who had expended all of his ammunition in the first couple of minutes of the firing, beating an eighty year old woman to death with the butt of his rifle), the officers present were entirely unable to maintain some sort of order, even if willing. Within five minutes of the first shot being fired, the two hundred or so civilians held for further processing in the high school’s gymnasium had been reduced to a mass of dead and severely wounded bodies, through which troopers walked, picking off survivors.

The shooting had spread to other areas of the school, in which civilians who were undergoing processing were held, by the time Captain A (commanding the operation from a vantage point outside Plains) was notified that anything was amiss. He arrived at the high school in time to see the final stages of the massacre: the gunfire had dwindled to a sporadic series of shots as any civilian who had attempted to hide in the high school was found and killed; one of the classrooms, into which about thirty civilians had been herded before a grenade was thrown through the door, was on fire; and several civilians who were attempting to flee were being picked off from a SATPO attachment on the school’s roof.

Captain A’s initial reaction to the scene is uncertain: although he claimed, in front of the 2007 Commission on the Northwest Montana Insurgency, that he was horrified at the events of the day, and immediately insisted that any medical attention available be provided to the handful of badly injured survivors in the high school before the spreading blaze from the classroom forced his men back, this account is badly at odds with the bland report that he and Lieutenant R drafted for the 1st SATPO Airborne Brigade in the afternoon of 22 June that Plains had been pacified, with multiple NWF and some civilian casualties being sustained in the course of a firefight, and that the population would no longer require processing to a civilian facility.

What is indubitably true is that the higher echelons of the company immediately embarked on a course of action designed to conceal the Plains Massacre to the greatest extent possible: bodies outside the high school were hauled into the gymnasium, the fire which ultimately gutted the building was allowed to burn unhindered, and the town hall was quietly demolished prior to the company’s withdrawal from Plains. The company’s casualties from the operation, tallied in the evening of 22 June were absurdly light: aside from persistent tinnitus on the part of the troopers in the gymnasium and one trooper lightly grazed by a stray bullet, the only casualty of note was one missing irregular trooper. Given the lack of serious civilian resistance, it was likely that he had become separated from the rest of his company and would make his own way back to the company’s forward operating base in the next day or so.

The trooper in question was one Paul Allemann: a drifter from the West Texas CSR, he was offered a position in the SATPO Irregular Division as an alternative to a brief prison term for habitual vagrancy. Disliking military discipline enormously, he had decided to desert prior to the Plains Massacre: the events of 22 June convinced him to flee immediately. Shellshocked and disgusted, he deserted his post on the perimeter of the high school and began walking in the vague direction of Idaho. Sleeping in the woods by day and travelling by night, he managed to make the seventy mile journey in three days, crossing the border somewhat north of Mullen. He was almost immediately apprehended by a PSA border patrol: detained for questioning, he proved all too happy to talk about SATPO and its recent actions. It became rapidly clear to the patrol’s commanding officer just how explosive Allemann’s testimony could become in the right hands.

i8Iq1ye.png


[1] The 2007 Commission on the Northwest Montana Insurgency mandated anonymity for those troops who had participated in the Plains Massacre: it is known that Lieutenant R was killed in 1993 when his helicopter was shot down near Kalispell, while it is believed that Captain A was living somewhere in the Gulf Republic under an assumed identity, at least as of 2018.
 
Shiny Happy People Holding Hands (1992)
Oddly enough, the first group to react to the Plains Massacre was one which, in theory, should have been shielded from immediate knowledge. The majority of Plains’ men of working age were living in an impromptu civilian facility attached to a sizeable logging compound: patrolled by a small detachment of SATPO irregulars augmented by local volunteers, they ought to have been hermetically sealed from outside information. As usual, however, information spread among the civilian population inexplicably quickly: a relief detachment sent out to investigate the compound (whose CYBERSYN terminal operator had been offline for thirty-six hours by this point) on the evening of 23 June found the compound systematically stripped of all of its vehicles and valuable equipment and abandoned except for the bodies of about twenty civilians and all of the irregulars and volunteers. A cursory examination on the part of the relief detachment determined that any of the irregulars and volunteers (as well as, it was later determined, the two ostensibly civilian intelligence assets connected to Brennan’s intelligence-gathering operations) not lucky enough to be killed during the civilians’ initial rush on the guards had been subjected to extensive torture: the intelligence assets and three of the irregulars had been crucified some hours prior to death. The roughly three hundred and fifty escaped civilians, to a man, joined NWF units in the area: desiring no mercy and offering none to SATPO troopers, they developed a reputation as the most fanatical and unwavering insurgents faced by state forces.

The CSA’s leadership, in contrast, spent the first few days after the Plains Massacre with only Kanne’s reassuringly vague report about the pacification of a town in Sanders County as a point of reference: the series of televised interviews conducted by Trooper Allemann for the Pacific Broadcast Network and picked up (entirely illegally) by virtually every house in the CSA West of the Mississippi with access to a TV was as much of a surprise for the Chicago Congress as it was for the CSA’s civilian population.

By itself, Allemann’s testimony could be, and was, painted as a series of wild fabrications by a petty criminal and deserter desperate to find refuge in the PSA. Subsequent developments made this official line somewhat harder to maintain: Captain A and Lieutenant R, both noting the way the wind was blowing and wishing to ensure that their version of events was taken as indicative for the purposes of any future enquiry, both wrote up unofficial reports exculpating themselves entirely from any responsibility for the massacre and submitted these to the highest reasonable level of authority that they could find (the high command of the Army of the CSA in A’s case, the head of the Bureau of Internal Security in R’s).

The submission of these reports had come at an exceptionally unfortunate time for Alexander Haig: by this time the obvious if unacknowledged successor to an ailing Robert McNamara, he had nevertheless accumulated a large body of enemies both within the civilian and military leaderships of the CSA who saw a chance to clip his wings by tarnishing the military operation with which he was associated. These enemies ensured that both reports were unofficially in widespread circulation by mid-August 1992: by late September, the growing clamour for some sort of serious investigation could no longer be ignored.

The CSA’s official response to the allegations, which vacillated wildly at different times between asserting that no such incident as the Plains Massacre had ever happened, suggesting that any civilians killed during the routine pacification of Plains were victims of the NWF and even (at the urging of Brennan) suggesting to northwest Montana’s civilian population, through SATPO’s intelligence apparatus, that the Plains Massacre was the inevitable consequence of prolonged civilian resistance, did nothing to dampen down discontent at the conduct of SATPO. A series of military leaks to sympathetic Congressmen (in particular, the revelation in mid-October of just how much money had been entirely unofficially diverted from the Bureau of Internal Security’s budget to fund SATPO’s Irregular Division) damaged Haig’s position still further: engaged in a desperate fight to safeguard his political standing, he began to distance himself from SATPO for the first time.

Ultimately, Haig was able to prevent a formal enquiry into the Plains Massacre and, by December, had regained his previously unassailable position as successor-designate to McNamara. This had been achieved, however, by throwing much of SATPO under the bus: the Massacre, by now officially acknowledged by the CSA’s civilian leadership, was ascribed in its entirety to the actions of a handful of improperly-trained irregulars, with Haig announcing an end to recruitment efforts of the Irregular Division and the integration of the better irregulars into SATPO’s regular command structure. Brennan, who managed to escape a court martial largely because neither the Bureau of Internal Security nor the Bureau of External Security were prepared to acknowledge responsibility for him, was relegated to an entirely ancillary and officially powerless role within Operation Mountain Lion: by this time largely ignored by Kanne, North and McChrystal, he was to spend the remainder of the First Northwest Montana Insurgency virtually confined to an AFB outside Butte.

The largest effect of the failed movement to hold an enquiry on the Massacre was to manifest itself most fully in the mid-90s. The attempts in the second half of 1992 to hold Haig to account brought together, for the first time, Governors Dennis Kucinich, James Stockdale and Max Baucus and Congressmen James Traficant and R. Budd Dwyer: these men, each with fairly disparate views, would nevertheless form the nucleus of the unofficial Reform Caucus which would ultimately dissolve the CSA. On a less decisive level, the military side of the movement saw the creation of the working partnership between Colonel Andrew Bacevich and academic military theorist William S. Lind which would pose an increasing threat to Operation Mountain Lion in the last eighteen months of its existence.

Ultimately, all of this was of little interest to SATPO in comparison the dazzling moral and operational reverses of 1992. It had started the year calmly and effectively engaged in the slow strangulation of the NWF and in the anticipation that the insurgency would be reduced into a matter best handled by local police forces by 1993: it had ended it shorn of its most official public benefactor, more undermanned (relatively speaking) than ever before, and facing a civilian population which was by now universally sympathetic to the NWF. Operation Mountain Lion was never to regain the initiative.
 
A Melancholy Long Withdrawing Roar (1992-1994)
6ud1cII.jpg


"It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns
,The immensest theatre, the pillowed porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room."
- Wallace Stevens
 
Last edited:
Top