The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[CaptainChewbacca]

If I were a Chinese military strategist, I would be looking at some hard numbers: with a population of 1.3 billion, the statistical likelihood suggests that I should have huge untapped portal specialist resources at my command, if I can only identify them. This gives me not only an important weapon against Heaven, but an important strategic asset for the balance of power on Earth after the conclusion of any such campaign against Heaven.

Just saying ...

That assumes that Nephelim are evenly distributed throughout the human population, and they don't skew more to certain races. Have we ever heard what percentage of the population is capable of opening portals? Are they ALL (at least in the US) working for the government, or have some become private contractors? Does North Korea have four people strapped to chairs and coerced by threats against their families?

[MarshalPurnell]

Well, Michael does seem to realize that fighting humans is a very bad idea and strongly desires to avoid any direct conflict with them. Going along with Yahweh's war plans to disrupt human mobilization to find a way to invade Heaven is reasonable enough under this scenario, but I expect he would also very much like to avoid enraging the world into a "take no prisoners" approach to the angels. That is much easier if nothing too drastic is actually allowed to succeed, which at this point would just require Michael to not volunteer his understanding of the human world. If he can later claim to have thwarted Yahweh's most despicable efforts it would certainly enhance his ability to present himself as an ally to the humans, whether as the new master of Heaven or as an Abigor-like puppet ruler.

It is a fine balance, of course. If Yahweh does manage to make things look desperate for the human world then their governments will be less likely to look a gift horse in the mouth if Michael seizes power in a coup and stops the attacks. A humanity that retains its sense of unequaled superiority and contempt for Heaven might very well just make note of the coup and then readdress the demand for Yahweh's unconditional surrender to Michael.

Master plan to rule over Heaven, Hell, and Earth? That's a bit unrealistically ambitious for Michael as he's been presented thus far. His plan seems to be to build up a support base that will side with him against Yahweh, inspired by the humans and desiring to end the war. Once he has control of Heaven, then the task becomes ending the war with the humans and keeping everything in one piece. Anything more would likely be "play it by ear" since it will be difficult enough to remove Yahweh and then to placate the humans.

[erik_t]

We're quite willing to deal with Abigor, who only quit fighting humans when he got his ass kicked. Michael has become sympathetic with, if not enamored to, human though processes. And I'm supposed to think we're going to fight him to the death?

Come on. He's all that we can want (in the short term) from Heaven.

[Hawkwings]

Michael is not like Abigor. Abigor got thrashed, conceded defeat, and then was introduced to human culture and technology. Michael has already been in contact with humans, understands them (or at least he thinks so) and is apparently savvy enough to hatch and execute audacious schemes. He's far more dangerous to Earth than Abigor ever was, and if it were up to me, he'd be first under the grinding treads of those tank armies.

Of course, I'm hoping that he gets outmaneuvered by another angel. Uriel would be interesting for this role. Ooh, now that's something I want to see. Uriel goes off and gets "killed," Michael checks that problem off his list, and then later on down the line, the nightclub suddenly gets a new supplier of goods. Either that, or Michael's organization gets taken apart in some sort of well-researched and plotted operation, culminating with angel vs angel combat when Uriel returns to personally take his revenge against Michael. Even better if he's being helped by humans in this endeavor, but still fully intending to go back and slaughter them all for their insolence later.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Let's not forget, after the 1st Battle of the Portal (how history will remember it) Abigor had a fundamental change in his character. He began feeling compassion for his men, for the wounded and for the families of his soldiers.

We have yet to see that level of humanity from Michael. So far he's just a hedonist who knows how to play both sides.

[Darth Yoshi]

I think that's due to the abruptness of Abigor's introduction to modern warfare. It was pretty much a OCP for him, and he muses after the first skirmish that there really isn't anything that he can threaten to do to his subordinates which would top getting ground into the dirt by the human armies. The gauntlet back to the Hellmouth would only reinforce his revelations.

Michael, in contrast, is already familiar with human military might, so I doubt he'll have any sudden epiphanies other than the one that got him thinking for himself and plotting his coup.

[Stuart]

It's just that the politicians and military strategists seem to be a bit too focused on such matters and not sufficiently alarmed about their complete inability to strike back at the enemy. For example, the Brits are annoyed about not having independent command of military forces, but they don't seem concerned at all about the fact that they appear to have no independent research effort ongoing about portals, locating Heaven, and countermeasures against angel attacks. The entire world seems to have happily ceded that initiative to the Americans, and after a year, I would have thought that each nation would be attempting to develop its own portal research program. This is an enormously important technology, after all. I would tend to think that progress on this front would be item #1 in any briefing, before proceeding to other matters such as procurement of tanks and planes, and I just can't see other nations not attempting to develop their own portal research groups by now.

Remember this was a military staff meeting that was primarily concerned with force levels and production planning. The British portal science operation would be part of an entirely different chain, one that would be important enough to be discussed at Cabinet level. Spoiler

The way things are working is that there is a de-facto American run joint portal research and development effort that is generating portals etc. That's not unreasonable, remember the USA spends 80 percent of the world's total expenditure on military R&D. But in addition there are indeed national efforts run by all the major governments who see thr area as too important to be left in the hands of the Americans. Some of the results of those meetings go to the joint efforts but others are held closely in-hand.

[Stuart]

Oi, Slade, you forgot the New Zealand Division (4th of 3 NZEF) attached along with the Brits and Aussies. Of course equipment will be an issue...but we do field units far better in fighting effectiveness than their US equivalents.

Well, you Kiwis are such a shy, self-effacing bunch its easy to forget about you.

Equipment is the problem, there just isn't any, the few stockpiles in New Zealand are very old and probably not usable. Creating a large armored formation is going to be a real pain. However, I did allow for the possibility that a New Zealand brigade may be form part of one of the Australian divisions.

The T-34, I can believe - but the KV-1? There's barely 10-20 of them surviving in the whole world. Servicing them would probably be more trouble than the machines are worth

I've got an uneasy belief that the Russian Army has some KVs hidden away somewhere. There's depots all over the place that are full of forgotten "stuff" that a delighted Russian Army will find and bring out of storage. They're not alone in that of course, the US also has a lot of good things stockpiled and forgotten (the US Army for example has no idea how many trucks it owns) but the Russian Army is legendary for the fact it never throws anything away. So the KVs were me being a little tongue-in-cheek. You must admit, its a lovely picture, the inspector goes to a base that's been on care-and-maintenance for a couple of decades, goes to a long-neglected warehouse, cuts off the rusty padlock and inside are 30 or 40 KV-1 (or even better KV-2) tanks. I've no doubt at all that JS-3s and T-10s would make their reappearance.

Oh, and the Philippines actually decides to send a division to the Eastern forces. Oh, man, if they ever end up in the front lines against angelic heavies they're well and truly fucked. The Philippines has NO air-cover other than OV-10 Broncos, Huey gunships, and MG-520 attack choppers. All of its F-5s had to be retired years ago because they just couldn't keep the things flying anymore (hell, they were way older than the pilots). The only jets the PAF even have are a handful of S-11 trainers. It was also mentioned that armor is important in the front lines. The Philippine Army is fucked there as well. Most of the Philippine Army's armored vehicles are only APCs and IFVs. We only have 42 old British FV101 Scorpion light tanks as our heavier armor, and a chink of those are rusting and inoperable after being cannibalized for parts.

Believe me, I appreciate the problems. However, it's not all bad. Air power isn't a problem, its control is centralized at high command level and there would be plenty of it available. Armor, most of the Asian armored units are pretty light, a mix of light tanks, armored cars and APCs. That isn't a bad thing, those units would be pretty valuable for rear area security and gap-filling. Even the heavy armor units in Far Eastern Army have only limited numbers of heavy tanks. The thing is that even light armor gives an enormous advantage over the daemons; heavy armor is nice but the massive armor of the M-1 doesn't actually buy it that much more in this environment over the much lighter armor on, say, an M-41.

In the longer term, what will eventually happen is that the Americans etc will hit a ceiling defined by their available manpower (a hidden factor is that our complex societies need a lot of people to keep them running so the number available for military service is much smaller than was available in WW2) and the equipment production will then get diverted to countries that have available manpower but no equipment. That's far off though, most countries will struggle along with what they have and those that do have large stockpiles in storage will have the edge. At a guess, I would say all the kit that was sold to places like Saudi Arabia and Libya is about to be reclaimed.

[Crayz9000]

They made a big one at Whiteman, they left the bombers out on the parking apron. Saint Curtis would have things to say about that.

I get the feeling that Saint Curtis would have had some very harsh words regarding the idea of keeping your entire advanced bomber force stationed at one airbase, too.

[Mayabird]

We're finally getting hints that we'll be seeing other 'gods' and other bottle-universes other than Heaven and Hell. Maybe we'll see the ones who protected Caesar from getting tortured?

[Beowulf]

They made a big one at Whiteman, they left the bombers out on the parking apron. Saint Curtis would have things to say about that.

I get the feeling that Saint Curtis would have had some very harsh words regarding the idea of keeping your entire advanced bomber force stationed at one airbase, too.

He'd also have something to say about there only being 20 of them in existance.

[Simon_Jester]

Note that the R-77 family has a number of different guidance systems: while the angel was able to detect and engage the radar-guided missiles fired by the decoy pair, the IRST-cued missiles by the main pair weren't detected at all.

Yes, but I think that that was a coincidence, not something that depended on the tracking system used by the missiles. Colopatiron (the Colopatiron? not sure) heard the decoy Su-35s coming in,* and was already looking in their direction before they launched their R-77s. In my opinion, the angel spotted and destroyed those missiles using eyesight and hearing alone.

*"He concentrated his power upon his hearing..."

While the angel was clearly aware that he was being pinged by radar, I see no clear evidence of a directional radar-sense reliable enough to act as an effective warning against incoming radar-guided missiles. It's clear that the Russians thought this might be true, but not clear to me that it was true. Had Colopatiron been looking south, it's quite possible that he would have engaged the southern group and that the decoys would have been the ones that got their missiles past his guard.

Finally, fighters don't have 360 degree (much less 4π steradian) awareness.

I was under the impression that while their best radar coverage is directed forward, modern fighters did not have outright blind spots in any direction. Apparently, I am mistaken. Could you explain in more detail?
______

The Bush administration is the one that "came close to canceling them in peacetime"(by cutting the run from 7 to 2), not the Obama administration.

I was referring to this. Secretary Gates announced in April 2009 that DoD was recommending that several advanced weapons programs be dropped or scaled back in fiscal year 2010. Among these announcements, he stated that the DDX program was going to stop at three ships. At the time I heard about this, I believed that this represented a cut, rather than an increase over the planned production run during the late Bush administration.

I probably got mixed up because it was announced along with a lot of things that definitely were cuts, such as the scaling back of the planned F-22 force to 187 aircraft.
______

Is the atmosphere in heaven similar to hell's? It seems like the two dimensions are alike, so the reasons that made hell so dusty, i.e. that dust has nowhere to go, should exist in heaven too. Although there doesn't appear to be as many active volcanoes in heaven spewing grime and ash into the air, heaven's landmass has to come from somewhere . And landmasses usually come from some sort of volcanic eruption right?

Hmm... there could be something about Heaven's climate that tends to cut down the dust, such as heavy rains.
______

The real "trap," so to speak, is that Michael clearly wasn't always the humanophile that he is now. He would have done some very ugly things in the past and undoubtedly has enough blood on his hands to be a first-class genocidal criminal. I am of course reminded by this of the reaction to Hermann Goering from The Big One, and Stuart's thoughts on the character. Michael is not a Nice Guy and his facade of bonhomie covers up a ruthlessly pragmatic personality that has few qualms about killing anyone inconvenient to his plans...

Michael is exceedingly likable in his present incarnation, and easily my favorite character of the story thus far, but he isn't all sweetness and light (or sex, drugs, and rock & roll)... there is something darker about his character that could make him a formidable enemy of humanity.

I would like to point out that the Michael seems to have no problem with addicting his fellow angels to drugs for political advantage, as his treatment of Maion demonstrates. That's not the sign of a particularly ethical person, in my book. Looked at from a misanthropic/anthrophilic point of view, Michael likes humanity... but even if we ignore his past, I'm not sure he'd make a decent human being.
_____

In the longer term, what will eventually happen is that the Americans etc will hit a ceiling defined by their available manpower (a hidden factor is that our complex societies need a lot of people to keep them running so the number available for military service is much smaller than was available in WW2)

I'm a bit skeptical of that. A large fraction of the American population works in service sectors, and in the austere climate of near-total wartime mobilization, a lot of those workers could be spared. Of course, most of them would have to go into the defense plants and the system to run those plants. But if something shook the American economy really hard, I think everyone might be surprised at how much surplus labor would fall out.

But I can't prove that, so I won't insist on it.

[Darth Wong]

Looked at from a misanthropic/anthrophilic point of view, Michael likes humanity... but even if we ignore his past, I'm not sure he'd make a decent human being.

Compared to a typical well-educated western liberal, or to a typical human being? Because the Biblical God and his angels are nothing more than reflections of the character of the people who invented them, and humans have been horribly ruthless throughout most of our history. We continue to be that way in much of the world.

[JN1]

If memory serves the last IS-2Ms were not retired until around 1994, so it's likely that there are plenty of those in storage somewhere in Russia.

[Samuel]

Looked at from a misanthropic/anthrophilic point of view, Michael likes humanity... but even if we ignore his past, I'm not sure he'd make a decent human being.

Compared to a typical well-educated western liberal, or to a typical human being? Because the Biblical God and his angels are nothing more than reflections of the character of the people who invented them, and humans have been horribly ruthless throughout most of our history. We continue to be that way in much of the world.

In all due fairness to him, he is ruthless treating other people like pawns to further his plans... but at the same time he is giving those individuals something they never would have been able to experience otherwise. He needs a way to control his followers, one that they know makes them dependent on him unless he wants one to back stab him. It is hard to tell how good or evil he is now because he has such a limited range of possible actions he can take for his goal. He could turn out to be a benevolent despot... or a ruthless sociopath. We haven't seen how he acts when he is in control yet- all his motions so far have been to seize power. The only positive thing we are certain about is that he is open-minded.

Hmm... there could be something about Heaven's climate that tends to cut down the dust, such as heavy rains.

Not having volcanoes would do it as well.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

The real "trap," so to speak, is that Michael clearly wasn't always the humanophile that he is now. He would have done some very ugly things in the past and undoubtedly has enough blood on his hands to be a first-class genocidal criminal. I am of course reminded by this of the reaction to Hermann Goering from The Big One, and Stuart's thoughts on the character. Michael is not a Nice Guy and his facade of bonhomie covers up a ruthlessly pragmatic personality that has few qualms about killing anyone inconvenient to his plans...

Michael is exceedingly likable in his present incarnation, and easily my favorite character of the story thus far, but he isn't all sweetness and light (or sex, drugs, and rock & roll)... there is something darker about his character that could make him a formidable enemy of humanity.

I would like to point out that the Michael seems to have no problem with addicting his fellow angels to drugs for political advantage, as his treatment of Maion demonstrates. That's not the sign of a particularly ethical person, in my book. Looked at from a misanthropic/anthrophilic point of view, Michael likes humanity... but even if we ignore his past, I'm not sure he'd make a decent human being.

A decent human being? No. A great Mob boss, absolutely. I find him likeable because he's someone who is going to turn out to be a fantastic villain. He's quite willing to control people using sex, drugs, and rocks that roll, and maneuver beings inconvenient to his plans into messy deaths. And he's got tens of millennia of life experience . . . he's going to be astonishingly dangerous to humanity simply because while he seems so human, he's fundamentally alien to us at heart. His true motives are unknown to us.

[Simon_Jester]

I partly agree with Terwynn. Michael is great as a character in a novel, because he combines talent and flexibility with the capacity for evil found in really effective villains. But while I think the Michael adds to the story and makes it better, I'm not a fan of the his any more than I'm a fan of, say, Palpatine. Because as I see it, Michael is definitely shaping up to be a bad guy. He's just a bad guy on a different side from the other bad guys.

Compared to a typical well-educated western liberal, or to a typical human being? Because the Biblical God and his angels are nothing more than reflections of the character of the people who invented them, and humans have been horribly ruthless throughout most of our history. We continue to be that way in much of the world.

I'm sure he'd fit in quite well as a drug-dealing warlord, the head of an organized crime syndicate, or as the leader of a politically active personality cult like the Assassins. But even by the standards of cultures that aren't "western liberal," such men were unusually ruthless and amoral.

Of course, they also tended to have most of the power in society, because there wasn't a competing social system strong enough to knock them over. I'm not saying the historical average of human treatment of other humans is good, after all. I'm just saying that I wouldn't hold out much hope for Michael's treatment of humans being good if he had the power to decide how to treat them in the first place.

Which is why the fact that he doesn't have hangups about sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll doesn't strike me as a sign that he's somehow a positive figure. I agree with people like CaptainChewbacca and TheClueless*: the Michael portrayed here should not be trusted by anyone on either side. The fact that someone happens to like your culture does not mean they are your natural ally.

*I love how you can say things like that on Internet forums and not sound completely insane.
_______

In all due fairness to him, he is ruthless treating other people like pawns to further his plans... but at the same time he is giving those individuals something they never would have been able to experience otherwise. He needs a way to control his followers, one that they know makes them dependent on him unless he wants one to back stab him. It is hard to tell how good or evil he is now because he has such a limited range of possible actions he can take for his goal. He could turn out to be a benevolent despot... or a ruthless sociopath. We haven't seen how he acts when he is in control yet- all his motions so far have been to seize power. The only positive thing we are certain about is that he is open-minded.

For me, his exploitation of Maion's heroin addiction crosses the line. Everything else is stuff that could go either way; bringing open-society-grade entertainment to a closed-society environment is neither good nor evil. But extorting favors out of people by hooking them on heroin... that tends to indicate that he's not someone who will use power in a way that makes you glad he's got it.

It's easy to understand the strategic logic of why he does it. But that's an explanation, not an excuse.

[hongi]

However, I did allow for the possibility that a New Zealand brigade may be form part of one of the Australian divisions.

any hope for the reuse of the ANZAC name of old?

[JN1]

However, I did allow for the possibility that a New Zealand brigade may be form part of one of the Australian divisions.

any hope for the reuse of the ANZAC name of old?

There could certainly be an ANZAC corps, or an ANZAC division within the Commonwealth Army.
I'm presuming that the 11 CW divisions (5 Brit, 2 Oz, 3 Can and 1 CW) would be an army (1st (Commonwealth) Army?).
If I were to be dividing the CW Army up I'd form three corps H.Qs - one Brit, one Australian and one Canadian. We can do from the resources of the ARRC and H.Q Field Army, though I don't know how easy the Australians and Canadians would find it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The first two Nephilim who reinforced kitten in the portal operations were Indian and Chinese. That means that it seems likely that Mike's right, they are evenly distributed, and China does have those resources at hand. The main thing I see is that psychiatric help, such as it is in India and China, is probably so poor that they're even more of basket cases then the American ones and even with the source of their problems revealed they'll have to spend a huge amount of effort and resources in just helping them get stable enough to be useful.

[CaptainChewbacca]

It would be interesting if the largest proportion of India's nephelim were from the Untouchables.

[Rahvin]

The first two Nephilim who reinforced kitten in the portal operations were Indian and Chinese. That means that it seems likely that Mike's right, they are evenly distributed, and China does have those resources at hand. The main thing I see is that psychiatric help, such as it is in India and China, is probably so poor that they're even more of basket cases then the American ones and even with the source of their problems revealed they'll have to spend a huge amount of effort and resources in just helping them get stable enough to be useful.

Is it possible that the constant psychic assault from telepathic demons may have significntly dropped off after the war in Hell? The official surrender of Hell and ongoing efforts of Abigor's new administration to establish a better image to humanity would,I would think, include making such telepathic harassment illegal.

Certainly there would still be some demons still actively tormenting living humans telepathically, but I would still expect such activities to become less frequent.

Assuming that's the case, would the previously tormented Nephilim regain their sanity as the voices disappeared, or would the extreme trauma (not just from the demonic attacks, but also from their treatment by humans in countries with poor psychiatric care) be permanently disabling? So far in the story, we've seen at least one person who was hopelessly insane (was her name Julie?), who managed to "come back" from madness almost immediately when she was given a tinfoil hat.

The Nephilim may not be in such terrible shape mentally as they were when the war in Hell began.

[Pelranius]

I was just thinking back to Micheal's little operation and it struck me how similar it was to Kim Jong Il in his earlier years. Kim Jong Il in a large part, to cut a long story short, maintained a billionaire jet set style lifestyle complete with champagne orgies and the like, and he gradually drew in enough of the Party and military elite into his circle on that account. In the meanwhile he also accumuled more power while Kim Il Sung became more and more delibiated as time went on. Kim Senior eventually figured out something was going on in 1994 when Jimmy Carter sort of gave the game away and according to rumor, went into a shouting match with his son that resulted in a fatal heart attack on his part.

[Sea Skimmer]

I was under the impression that while their best radar coverage is directed forward, modern fighters did not have outright blind spots in any direction. Apparently, I am mistaken. Could you explain in more detail?

The radar antenna on a fighter is in the nose aimed forward. The very best sets can see something like an arc 120 degrees wide, and 120 degrees high, but can’t scan it all of that space at the exact same time. Most fighter radars would have much smaller fields of view, more like 80 x 60 degrees or even less.

They cannot see anything off at a 90+ degree angle to the side, sides or directly above or below or behind, at all. The radar can’t see through the aircraft or through its self, just not physically possible. It has to have a direct LOS from the front of the antenna to the target to function.

Alone among modern fighters and fighter bombers, the Russian Su-34 has a second small radar in the tail to look directly behind it. Certain bombers which still have tail guns such as the Tu-95 also have a rearward looking radar for targeting. The US pulled the guns and tail radars off its B-52s after the Cold War, but you can bet they are being refitted now.

The only planes that actually have 360 degree radar coverage are dedicated AWE planes like the E-3 Sentry and A-50, and those don’t carry weapons. They also simply have much greater radar range, but the radars can only scan the vast volume they can see a couple times per minute.

[LadyTevar]

HALLELUAH, the chapters are being moved to C&C! Now I don't have to go back 2-5 pages of speculation and conversation to find the update!