Last Stand at Shanxi (Mass Effect AU)

Shanxi was the Turians Okinawa, or perhaps one of the other small islands in WW2 for the US military was: It convinced their higher-ups that traditional storming-in tactics would result in disproportionate casualties, -unexceptable- casualties, should they try to go for a harder nut to crack, IE: Earth.

They might still have pressed forward, but they would have been -far- more cautious about it, and would -definitely- have used orbital bombardment to soften up "centers of resistance" (cities) prior to starving them out and finally going in with boots on the ground. Even so, I don't doubt that humanity would have thrown -EVERYTHING- at them to prevent them even reaching Earth Orbit, up to and including civilian asteroid miners throwing rocks at them and following up by ramming. And using several dozen meters of ablative armor (an asteroid) to shield the asteroid tug from point-defense fire until it's too late might be a viable method of attacking turian starships.

Not to mention that there's a -bloody reason- why most hard-SF books I've read use nukes in space: they might need to get relatively close to the target to deal damage, but the radiant energy output can literally vaporize the hull of a starship, which in ME is -really fucking bad news-, since 1) kinetic barriers do jack-all to stop that sort of weapon, short of keeping it from going off in contact with the hull, and 2) they tend to use KBs in place of redonkulously thick hull-armor, which you'd -need- to have the ship survive a nearby nuke going off and avoid getting mission-killed because the crew is now dead, due to either explosive decompression, flash-cooking, or extreme radiation poisoning causing rapid organ failure.

And even in the mid 22nd century, I have a feeling there's still a lot of nukes on Earth, especially with the turians spurring massive re-armament. Hell, there's thousands of nukes on earth -right now-, and hundreds of times more than enough to trigger a nuclear apocalypse, should Humanity decide to 'take the invaders with them'.

 

You're both right in different regards.

By the time the Asari intervened, the Turians had effectively won the invasion of Shanxi - the operation was well into the mopping-up phase with the remaining resistance well down into double figures and the defenders' position having been untenable for weeks. The planet was rendered effectively uncolonised during the course of the war. The population at the end of the war was down to a level far, far below what they'd have needed to sustain themselves without outside support, while the infrastructure already in place was largely destroyed: Humanity was indeed effectively starting over from scratch on Shanxi at the end of the war.

The ground invasion began due to the Turian commanders on the scene realising that this could not possibly be the Human homeworld - this conclusion was arrived at on orbit when they realised that the dearth of mass-effect systems their sensors had detected from the edge of the system did not indicate very recent acquisition of such technologies, with the primary proof the small and densely-concentrated population. It's not a big leap of reasoning to realise you're looking at someone's colony when a planet's infrastructure and population are focused around a single city on a single continent without any telltale signs that you're looking at a post-apocalyptic world: at that point the Turian priority became gaining an idea of what they were dealing with, and that meant boots on the ground and a search for intel - the intel they were looking for (anything that could guide them back to the newcomer's homeworld and/or give them a handle on the military strength they were looking at) was deliberately destroyed by General Williams' staff in the first few days of the invasion.

The war became a point of pride for the Turian command structure quite early on as they continued to underestimate human technological levels throughout the war, largely due to total failure to grasp the significant differences between Human and Turian society; it was considered politically unacceptable to let a bunch of primitive screw-heads who thought a pre-mass-effect rifle was a suitable home guard weapon drive Turian soldiers back into space, with the Turians not realising that the guns in use by the defenders had not been intended for what a Turian family would keep guns for until after the end of the war. In hindsight, this was probably the single worst decision made by Heirarchy top brass in centuries.

The battle of Shanxi was a costly tactical victory for the Heirarchy, at a very low actual military cost to the Alliance, but became a strategic defeat due to the Turian underestimate of Human military strength and the Asari intervention in the war. The Turian task force's ground compliment was effectively destroyed as a fighting force - their casualty rate pushed well over 200% with most Turians involved in the invasion having become casualties multiple times, with an eventual fatality rate of 45%. Bear in mind that 20% casualties - not fatalities, casualties full stop - is regarded by NATO as sufficient to render a force combat-ineffective for a very good reason. The task force's morale was almost completely destroyed with the majority of their survivors leaving the Turian military post-war and many of them leaving Heirarchy space entirely - morale among the Turian naval elements on the scene was impacted almost as badly, a great many Turians came back from Shanxi with an ingrained distrust of the Heirarchy itself, even amongst the naval personnel who'd never been dirtside.

The primary lesson brought home by Turian high command is indeed a good mirror of Okinawa for the Americans, particularly when coupled with their later research into extant Human guerilla fighting and insurgency methods. Suicide bombing in particular came as an immense shock to the Heirarchy, who prior to the war didn't even have a term for it - coupled to an FTL-capable spacecraft the concept is something that keeps Turian military planners awake at night, as is the common Heirarchy belief that actually winning any future war with the Alliance is going to involve rendering any planet the Humans have settled on, garden worlds included, effectively uninhabitable - and 'politically problematic' isn't a strong enough term there, burning garden worlds is the sort of carry-on that gets the Asari jumping into the war on the other side.

And yes, that was Saren who got more or less vaporised by that truck bomb, and Desolas who just -had to- straighten that -blasted- painting.

Meanwhile the Alliance were left with the bastard child of 9/11 and Stalingrad, and the lesson that limiting civilian-held weaponry on colonies to simple hunting firearms is a BAD IDEA. The common (and probably accurate, see for example canon) Alliance belief, largely taken from what they now know of standard Turian military doctrine, is that the war would not have turned into a meatgrinder if the colony had been armed to anything remotely approximating the level of a Turian colony; the Turians would've sat back in orbit and forced the colony to surrender via targeted bombardment with a resulting much higher survival rate amongst the colonists and far less damage to the planet's infrastructure.

Incidentally, that marks the point of divergence for this fic: pre-war Alliance colonial gun laws.

 

Oh dear...
I bet the Americans back on that version of Earth felt very smug for years to come

 

You bet your ass we would

 

Think about the Swiss reaction for a moment, they'd be throwing their hands up in the air and screaming something about having had the right idea all along.

 

Or Israel

 

Not at all.

Israel gun laws are schizophrenic, cyclic, mostly based on the need to be SEEN to do something by the politicians and very much open to interpretation.
Your ability to get a private gun license very much depends on who you know and how much you're willing to pay.

Of course judging by the number and types of weapons returned to the IDF when they declare an Amnesty period for returning equipment, I'd guess most civilian firearms in Israel are illegal.

 

SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED!!!

 

Not really, our current gun laws are kind of like what was described in the fic. Hunting weapons, but not modern military weapons.
It's easy to get your hands on hunting rifles and shotguns, but military grade weaponry is highly restricted. Even weaponry that is not quite military grade, but would have been in WWII, commonly called "assault weapons" is highly restricted. Semi-automatic rifles with high capacity magazines, especially ones that can be easily converted to fully automatic is regulated since the '90s.
So, there are a lot of restrictions on weapons since the late 1930's, and they were tightened in the early '80s and again in the mid '90s.
I'd explain further, but that would be getting too much into politics and talking about the anti-gun lobby, rather than just stating how things are.

 

To the part about number four sounding like word DEATH.
Isnt that in japanese and not chinese?
Outside of that, nice wlrld building.

 

It's a thing in both.
The number 4 (四, pinyin: sì; Cantonese Yale: sei) is considered an unlucky number in Chinese because it is nearly homophonous to the word "death" (死 pinyin: sǐ; Cantonese Yale: séi).

 

Both, as a matter of fact - I understand the superstition originated in Chinese, in which it is as Arc of the Conclave described. Either way you'll find a lack of floor numbers including the number 4 in a lot of tall buildings all over southeast Asia.

I would have preferred to have had the invasion begin on the fourth day of the fourth month by the traditional Chinese calendar, but was unable to find a calendar converter that went past 2100 AD.