TGE RP

I. BELLIGERENTS

Attacker: The Empire of Rinthoria
Defender: The Rinthorian Commune

Neither party is supported by any outside power. No relief came from abroad, and none was available to come.

Ratio 1.95 to 1 in the attacker's favour.

Both sides are the same army. Identical technology, identical training, identical doctrine, drawn from the same academies and equipped from the same yards. Neither holds a qualitative advantage of any kind over the other. This is the first engagement in this simulation in which the belligerents are statistically indistinguishable, and it means the battle turns entirely on what each side brought to Caleera and where it chose to put it.

Neither force employed cyber or electronic warfare assets. A state whose principal industry is information technology, and which has projected one of the largest cyber arms in the region abroad, conducted its own civil war without touching the domain. Whether that is restraint or reluctance is not a question a battle report can answer.

II. PHASE ONE: SEA

Result: Empire, decisive.

The Commune's naval strength at Caleera consists of two coastal defence battleships long past their service life and six escort frigates. They come out anyway, because the alternative is to concede the approaches without a shot.

The action lasts a morning. Forty two hulls against eight, three carriers against none, and the outcome is not in question at any point. The Commune's ships are on the bottom or burning by midday and the Empire holds the water off Caleera for the remainder of the campaign.

III. PHASE TWO: AIR

Result: Empire, decisive.

Three to one in every category, flown by pilots trained to the same standard in aircraft of the same generation. There is no advantage available to either side beyond numbers, and no attempt is made to manufacture one. The Commune's squadrons are worn down across four days and cease to exist as a formation.

With the sky secured, the Empire's capital ships close to range and begin working the shore defences while the fighters hold overhead. Both services perform exactly as intended. Neither is contested.

It is not sufficient, and the reason is arithmetic. Thirteen gun platforms and four hundred aircraft, against one thousand artillery pieces dispersed and dug in across the approaches to a working port, over a period measured in days. The bombardment suppresses. It does not eliminate. A substantial number of the Commune's guns are still firing when the first craft come in.

Nearly a third of the Commune's entire strength at Caleera is in that artillery park. It is the only category in which the defence holds an absolute advantage, and the defence built its battle around it.

IV. PHASE THREE: THE LANDINGS

Result: two beachheads established. They do not link.

The Empire brought no dedicated amphibious shipping. Twenty five thousand marines are to be put onto a defended shore by a force composed of warships, carriers and twenty hovercraft interceptors.

The hover vehicles and amphibious armour are what make this operation possible at all. They swim, they carry their own infantry, and without them the Empire could have put fewer than six thousand men onto that beach. As it is, slightly more than half the assault force crosses in the first effort.

The Commune commits twenty thousand infantry and the whole of its artillery to the shoreline.

An opposed landing wants three to one. The Empire arrives at one to one and a half, against an enemy holding every gun on the field.

The armour is what carries them ashore. Three thousand vehicles coming out of the surf under unbroken air cover and continuous naval gunfire is a weight that infantry cannot hold at the waterline, and the Commune does not hold it. Both landing areas are taken.

The two beachheads never meet. The Empire's design called for them to close on the shipyards from either side. Under fourteen thousand men divided between two separated lodgements gives the Commune the single advantage available to a defender on interior lines: it can shift the weight of a thousand guns from one shallow perimeter to the other without displacing a single battery. The attempt to link up is made across the industrial ground between the beaches and it is stopped there by the artillery the bombardment did not reach.

The Commune breaks contact and falls back into the shipyards. Twenty thousand men from the shoreline join twenty thousand held in reserve, with a thousand tanks, inside a fortified working port complex.

The Empire ends the campaign with under fourteen thousand men ashore in two unconnected perimeters, no artillery of its own, and a second wave that would have to cross against a defence now concentrated at a single point.

The shipyards are not entered.

V. CASUALTIES

The Commune has no aircraft and no ships remaining. Its infantry, armour and guns are substantially intact behind the shipyard perimeter. Caleera's port works are damaged by the bombardment. The shipyards themselves remain operable.

VI. PATRIOTISM

National census patriotism stands at 85.98. The two factions are tracked separately from this engagement forward.

VII. VERDICT

The Empire took the sea, took the sky, and landed an army on a defended coast against artillery. Each of those is a real achievement and two of them were never seriously in doubt.

The objective was the port and the shipyards of Caleera. The shipyards did not change hands.

VIII. CLOSING ASSESSMENT

Two halves of one army, indistinguishable in technology, training and doctrine, fought a battle decided entirely by what each of them chose to bring to it.

The Empire brought the fleet. Three carriers, four hundred aircraft, nineteen hulls, and an amphibious capability improvised out of hover vehicles that worked better than it had any right to. It won everything the fleet could win and then stood on a beach with no guns.

The Commune brought guns. A thousand tubes, nearly a third of everything it had, sited on the approaches to the only objective in the theatre. It lost its navy in a morning and its air force in four days, both of which were foregone, and it kept the thing it came to keep.

The delivery is the part worth remembering. Twenty five thousand marines were committed to an amphibious assault by a force with no amphibious shipping. Thirteen thousand eight hundred reached the sand, and they reached it inside vehicles built to fight rather than to carry. The design called for two beachheads closing on the shipyards from either flank. Under fourteen thousand men do not have two flanks. They have two halves of a force too small to be either.

The Commune's fallback is the better piece of soldiering in this engagement, and it deserves saying. It withdrew rather than counterattacked. It triggered on something the defenders could actually see happening. And it spent the force to hold the objective instead of spending it to retake ground that was never the point.

Caleera holds. The yards are still building. Whoever comes back for them will need artillery.