TBntG-3 Chpt 12

=The Bull and the Genie=
==Chapter 12 - Book III - The Clan Invasion==
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==Interlude: the Quiet Before the Storm==
===The butchers bill of the Clan Trap===
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Frederick Ghost Bear's plans very nearly succeeded. While one can say the Inner Sphere would never have surrendered, in the aftermath of Operation Liberation, the Federated Commonwealth, ComGuards and Draconis Combine had lost roughly 80 percent of their frontline units, 75 percent of their combat DropShips, and those units that had survived in many cases, did so by abandoning much of their equipment. Many units were mousetrapped and destroyed as they hurried forward to take advantage of the Clan's retreat. The TDF, previously the premier navy in the Inner Sphere, was rendered almost completely combat ineffective, while the ComGuards' performance against Snow Raven ships was… poor. 
 
The Clans victory was compared to Hannibal at Cannae or the disaster of the Teutoburg Forest. 
 
But a few things mitigated the loss. For one thing was the work of General Cheng, who had been more or less sidelined in a rear position (to be fair, she was not unhappy with her duty), and managed to bring out a truly impressive number of militia units and personnel from the cauldron escaping to Terra with the core of what would become the United Military Command. 
 
For another, was the fact that Frederick's plans were not followed to the letter, and the decision of the Diamond Sharks and Nova Cats to focus on their own objectives reduced his reliable forces. The Ice Hellions, moved forward to replace the Nova Cats proved to be fundamentally unwilling to abide by Frederick's plan, becoming tied up with militia units which although almost always losing, slowed the attack. Jade Falcon and Smoke Jaguar troops also had difficulties abiding by his plan, which simply put, meant striking hard, fast—but if the resistance was too great, withdrawing and moving on to the next objective, while focusing on logistics and transport units. 
 
The strategy, while responsible for much of the Clans' success, wore on warriors, who craved honorable battles, not attacking Inner Sphere militarizes at a two to one local superiority, or smashing supply points. Many warriors found an excuse to squander that superiority, although few outright defied the ban on bidding. While they won (usually), this meant that there was more damage, more strain on the logistics network. Sometimes, they were surprised, and reserve forces were deployed to assist them, instead of leapfrogging to keep to the timetable. Worst of all, the more traditionalist clans often sidelined freebirth units, further slowing the operational tempo.
 
While the evacuation to Terra was an immense feat, conducted over dozens of worlds, it, and the withdrawal of other units to safe lines, was also the product of what seemed, to Inner Sphere generals, a strange focus on what seemed to be side goals. 
 
But it was the offensive against the capitals that ultimately proved the most damaging. Frederick's master stroke was to destroy the morale of the Inner Sphere, but not to be a serious attempt to occupy more than a small part of the worlds, and that only until it became too costly. As far as he was concerned, after the defending units were shattered, the military industry packed up or destroyed, and the point made to every spheroid that their governments were helpless, the utility of the worlds themselves was strictly limited, at least in comparison to using their forces elsewhere. 
 
This plan was changed by ilKhan Leo Showers and many of the other Khans. Tharkad and New Avalon would be made fortresses, and brought into the Clan way. The Wolves and Ghost Bears declined to follow that line of reasoning, withdrawing from Luthien in the face of general opposition. It must also be said that the Wolves and Ghost Bears were… timid in their advances, due to focusing on shoring up their defenses against the counter strike their khans were certain would arrive. Ironically, the two Clans, hostile in the homeworlds, had both listened to Frederick and counted the factories and population of the Inner Sphere. It should be noted that they made more, and more effective use of Freebirth regiments from the Republic and other worlds in their zones, many of which had been recruited due to their hostility or fear of the Draconis Combine. (In an unusual event, in the aftermath of the Black Dragons coup the remains of the 1st Genyosha would find their way to the Clan lines and became one of the premier units in the Ghost Bear Touman).
 
But on the whole and despite the destruction they had wreaked on the Inner Sphere, the Clans started to find themselves confronting the IS in more set-piece battles, and while they won many of the battles, those who could count rifles soon realized that on a percentage basis the Inner Sphere could lose more men. While congratulating themselves on victory, the most rigid of the crusader clans were entering the one type of conflict that Frederick had dreaded above all others. 
 
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===The Occupation Zone===
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When Frederick was "honored" with a demotion to overall command of the occupational zone, he found it staffed with eclipsed warriors, disgraced Freebirths and generally anyone who didn't make the cut for the honor of the front lines. The only thing saving the Clans from a general uprising ws that they were too few in number to occupy every world. 
 
In the two years after his arrival, Frederick survived ten trials, and executed over 1,000 warriors, both free and trueborn, for crimes against the locals. The somewhat ruthless housecleaning didn't win him many friends in high places, but it got results. He also dealt with their lack of equipment, liberally appropriating captured stocks of "obsolete" cutting edge Inner Sphere weapons and Battlemechs, while using his limited access to Clan CNC manufacturing systems to bring damaged factories online. 
 
During this period, he started to form Freebirth units, and the Inner Sphere had cause to greatly rue their treatment of some worlds. The Lyrans had many worlds run by nobles as their personal piggy banks and from the dispossessed who never saw Tharkad as anything other than a distant landlord, enforcing taxes with mechs, and from the unproductives on captured Combine worlds, Frederick quickly formed new units, at first infantry (trained by Solahma Clansmen), then later powered infantry (using the PAL factories set up to support the Inner Sphere offensive), and lastly armored units, using old Inner Sphere salvage and new production of "antique" mechs. Oddly, rather than traditional Clan tactics, they were trained using the old SLDF manuals still kept by the Clans. 
 
The Clans didn't care, at least most of them, since Frederick kept attacks low. They didn't notice that in most cases he did so by avoiding rebellions, not seeking them out. Military production had long been a small percentage of the total industrial production of the Inner Sphere, and Frederick would "occupy" a world by controlling the space port, power plants, and the factories he needed. Attacks were driven off, but not pursued, and in another note that led to more trials, Frederick ordered that there be no attempt to convert the hundreds of billions of people they were "occupying" to the Clan way. He did however, purge some of the most predatory nobles and local rulers his intelligence staff found—when one "general" who had utilized Zeus Assault Battlemechs against striking workers was executed by a firing squad of captured Zeus mechs, a persistent rumor claimed that Clan guards in the Throne Room of occupied Tharkad heard the laughter of the Ghost of Katrina Steiner. But for many, only seeing the power of the Clan Juggernaut, and the fact that the wealth's wealth had not protected them, saw little reason to not join up. And if their numbers were tiny in absolute terms, even a tenth of a percent of the population represented more potential recruits than any military could absorb. 
 
One of his Merchant Caste associates did deflect criticism, by presenting some of the Khans with the immense cost of printing out pamphlets, banking on the large numbers to fool some of the Khans as to just what a small expenditure that was compared to the size of the occupational zone. 
 
With the assistance of the Nova Cats, Diamond Sharks, Snow Ravens, Ghost Bears and Wolf clan, Frederick managed to keep the size of his "light security" forces more or less hidden from both Inner Sphere and Clan enemies. 
 
While less advanced, in some cases more lightly equipped, and definitely more scruffy around the edges, when the crusader clans reluctantly realized that they were now losing the attrition battle and recalled Frederick to recover the disaster, they were shocked and a little worried to realize that gathered together, his "security forces" were now personally loyal to him and roughly the size of a reinforced Star League corps…From: The Quiet Before the Storm: The Midpoint of the Clan Invasion, New Avalon Press, 3140.
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