TBntG-3 Chpt 37

=The Bull and the Genie=
==Chapter 37 - Book III - The Clan Invasion==
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==Preparing for the Last Battles of the Succession Wars==
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===Two Front Conflict===
When the offensive kicked off against the Combine, it was swiftly noted that there were two separate offensives—the Clan and the UMC.
 
And wise observers noted how those offensives reflected the nature—and changes in the two nations, changes that would have been unbelievable less than a decade earlier.
 
It should be noted that neither Mary Cheng nor Khan Frederick exerted much in the way of direct control over their subordinates. They had set out general plans (although Frederick exerted more operational control, mainly to deal with his problem children among the Crusaders), but perhaps for the first time since the First Succession War, no national or overall military leader directly took the field of battle, save for some Clan Khans and saKhans. The myth of the knightly battlemech-lord had been replaced by spreadsheets and S2s and well trained subordinates. 
 
For the UMC, the offensive was marked by massive combined arms forces, and it must be mentioned very little in the way of "clever" stratagems in combat. UMC forces, backed by an immense industrial machine, in some ways exceeding the Star League's, were not callous or casual with their forces, but they tended to rely on mass and pinning the enemy forces down before destroying them. The Primus' gift of a cup bearing the Emblem of Ulysses S. Grant was soon commented on. 
 
General Cheng arranged her offensive in three waves. The first wave was the most powerful, including massive warship support and the lion's share of the front line infantry, mech and armor units, numbering, if one were to go with the old Star League system, just over five corps, albeit with a larger number of independent regiments. 
 
The Second Wave, following after most opposition had been smashed, was made up of lighter units, mostly infantry and light armor, oriented around clearing out hold outs, and providing security for the third wave forces, mostly made up of humanitarian relief units, units that were needed, especially once the BDS forces started attempting to deny their enemies the fruits of the combing by the expedient of destroying whatever could not be taken in the retreat—and then moving to simply destroying, once the last Combine Jumpships were destroyed or taken prisoner. To use an example, between the revolts against the Combine, Black Dragon reprisals and scorched earth tactics, the world of Algedi, formerly having a population of 1,900,000,000 lost just over 10 percent of the population, and suffered the loss of over 40 percent of civilian housing and industry. 
 
The Third Wave, notably, was heavily supported by Periphery groups, many of whom did not wish to go to war in any capacity in the Inner Sphere, and the Capellan Confederation, which provided outsized humanitarian aid during the conflict. As one example, the Capellan single-family prefab unit soon became known as "Capellan castles" and even today some examples can be found in the former Combine.
 
Another use of the Second and Third Waves was to establish temporary law enforcement bodies, as most Combine LEOs were either dead at the hands of the BDS, the hands of those the BDS had victimized, or were being investigated for war crimes. In this area, Comstar and the Periphery also provided assistance, to avoid the perception of occupation by individuals haling from former enemy states.
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===The Enemy Combatants===
Clan Forces:
 
Frederick's offensives tended to be more "clever" than General Cheng's, using many cases of misdirection and utilizing the individually better equipped and more skilled Clan forces to mousetrap and destroy BDS forces. This was in part due to the fact that Frederick never had the same resources Mary Cheng did and had to deal with forces, especially those from the Homeworlds who craved direct combat. As good as they were in a tactical sense, the stream of Memo's from Frederick's command ship indicated that the frontline Clan units caused him a goodly number of headaches, in addition to the political jockeying of various Clan leaders, many of whom were clinging to the fond dream of restarting operation Revival after the Combine had been eliminated. 
 
Frederick's second and third wave equivalents were continually hamstrung by a lack of resources, as well as the issue of having many Lyran recruits, who in some cases had their own history with the Combine. Frederick found himself fighting a rear guard action against the Crusaders who pointed to the speed of the UMC advance, ignoring the immense logistical advantage it had. In some cases, this caused Frederick's advance problems such as Clan Ice Hellions continual attempts to make their own advances, which did not stop until Clan Ghost Bear and Clan Wolf forced them to, with a rumored threat of a trial of absorption. Nonetheless the issue didn't resolve itself until Asa Taney's life came to the end during an ill conceived raid that cost the Clan most of its frontline warriors, killed by Kuritan suicide fighters over Teniente.
 
The other problem Frederick had was that working with Clan forces, unlike the OZ, had him dealing with Clan commanders who did not understand or for that matter care to understand the idea of "hearts and minds". While it was difficult to be worse than the Black Dragons, their ignorance and refusal to work with OZ occupational units allowed corruption and civil disorder to endure far longer than it did in the UMC zone, forcing him to keep frontline units on world longer than was military necessary. Frederick and his staff found themselves frantically looking for Combine leaders untainted by association with the BDS, and it was rumored, offered the most troublesome homeworld and crusader Clan leaders the honor of frontline combat—where they died at a statistically higher level. The rumor that Frederick arranged this has never been proven. From his papers, it is known that the demand of some Khan's to join in the fight saw Frederick pausing some offensives, especially when the need arose to have a sufficiently powerful bodyguard to ensure that a reasonable Khan did not die during a fight. 
 
The DCMS: 
 
Matched against these two behemoths was the BDS-and the BDS had savaged the Combine's military forces. The purges after Theodore's death had seen over 40 percent of the total officer corps killed, imprisoned, or fled. Those who replaced them were the politically "loyal" members, many of whom had suffered under Theodore's reforms. Worse, many of the lower social castes were purged, in a savage reestablishment of the old order. In some places, summary executions for disrespect were brought back, while political officers were allowed to countermand any military decision. Furthermore, the "Dragon's Honor" units, which were political units in every way that mattered, continually drew the most resources into their grasp, often led by officers who fought each other more than they did the enemy. In some places, they were known to execute officers who retreated, for any reason. 
 
But executions could not keep the DCMS from collapsing. The destruction of the order Theodore and Takashi had created, and the flight of "Uncle Chandy" saw many industrial concerns looted, while others faced purges when a BDS political supervisor demanded the impossible—and refused to accept it was impossible. Logistics officers were executed (sometimes with their families), when they informed the leadership that there was no way to ship materials to a factory… and their successors told the leadership that the shipments would arrive—and quickly looked around for people to blame when they did not.
 
By the end of the conflict, analysis of the documents flowing into the BDS high command indicated that most reports were pure fantasy. Even if the officer reviewing them was telling the truth, the lies had started long before it got to him. 
 
Because of this, the DCMS soon found itself decaying even before battle was joined. Mechs went into battle with missing armor and low ammunition. Fighters found themselves hanger queens for the lack of spare parts, before the air fields were destroyed by Clan or UMC combat squadrons. Not a single Combine warship survived more than two months—and not a single space battle occurred at anything less than a 5-1 tonnage outmatch. Soon, the Combine was sliced up into individual worlds, each one unable to communicate or support the other. 
 
Because of this, local commanders focused on suicide sleds and fighters, mob attacks and the use of booby traps, including WMD's conjuring images of the Reunification War. For their part, both the UMC and Clans forces focused on the best equipped DCMS units, not simply because they were most dangerous, but because they were often deployed as blocking forces—and once destroyed, the lightly armed, poorly trained, and underfed troops in front of them would often retreat or surrender. 
 
Ironically this resistance did have an impact, but not perhaps the one expected. Rather than slog through dozens of worlds, it was eventually decided to focus on a few worlds, most notably Luthien, and publicize their defeat in the hopes of demoralizing the rest of the Combine's BDS rulers, and it was this operation that saw the first large scale combat deployment of UMC and Clan units in the same planetary theaters as allies. 
 
The press called it an easy victory to bring down the rest of the Combine. But the BDS were to prove to be very difficult to extract from their burrows…
From Götterdämmerung: The Last Battles of the DCMSBritish Imperial War Museum Press: 3120
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