At the University of South Florida in Tampa, Dr. Rosanna Weisz had served a relatively quiet and happy life, finally achieving tenure as a humanities and history professor. The university had a greater need for teaching history classes, but it was really the humanities that made her excited to get up in the morning; she loved to pour over books about art history, poetry, and philosophy. She was a simple creature in many ways, finding great happiness in a good cup of coffee, an intellectual conversation or an impressionist painting. Two years ago she had lived out her ultimate dream when she was able to visit Claude Monet’s gardens in France and then backpack through Europe, taking pictures of many of the sites and historical places she had taught about for so many years.
Despite being a history professor, she had more or less stayed out of politics. She did vote, but she was not especially loyal to one party over the other, and she usually made her choices mostly on the basis of personal merit instead of how they aligned to a strict set of ideological standards. However, this war was changing her day by day.
Dr. Weisz had been utterly horrified when Baltimore and New York had been bombed; she immediately donated money to some relief funds and helped organize a blood drive at USF. She wished that she could do more, but she was not trained in any sort of first aid or counseling of any kind, and her skills in French and Latin weren’t going to be especially handy for this situation. She wasn’t exactly a part of any specific religion, but she considered herself to be spiritual, and believed in a higher power (even if she couldn’t quite agree that God was the deity described in the Bible); in her own way, she would pray for all those who were suffering.
When the United States retaliated against the Islamic Republic with nuclear weapons, she was not surprised; however, the scale of the response was beyond anything that she could have imagined. Rosanna was crushed at the sheer loss of human life, and the immense suffering that had become a plague on this planet. She did not believe that evil should beget evil. She began to think of all of the families on the other side of the world that had been crushed by the actions of the U.S. government, and though she was not often the type to cry, she set her head down on her desk and used up a few tissues with her tears.
As she composed herself and pulled her hair back out of her face, she saw an inspirational quote from Gandhi that she kept on her desk, “Be the change that you want to see.” She thought to herself, “What change do I want to bring? ” In that moment, she realized that she needed to work to prevent any future such tragedies from occurring in the world. She wanted to work to create policies that would garner more peace for the nation and the rest of the planet. Dr. Weisz did something in that moment that she had never done before, and decided to become more than just a casual participant in politics. She set to work on plans for a political movement towards peace.
For months now, this meek, normally quiet professor had been working in her downtime to organize marches and demonstrations. A friend of hers helped her to set up a website, and suddenly her thoughts were starting to gain some publicity and some traction. She was very careful to make sure that all of her events were peaceful and civil. Anything else would have defeated the purpose of her efforts. She always started any speech with the same line, “I want to thank you for being here today; I am very grateful to live in a country where we can love our nation and still disagree with our leadership.”
British Situation Room
British Prime Minister Stannis Blair had been monitoring the Chinese advances in Alaska with a bit of concern. The casualties that the Chinese and Americans had been taking were horrendous and frightening. The Americans were fighting with all their grit for their homeland while the Chinese continued to pour more and more soldiers into the meat grinder that was the Alaskan front. Blair knew the mounting casualties in Alaska meant there would be fewer and fewer American resources allocated to Europe, which would make stopping the Russians that much harder.
Stannis was walking down to the Situation Room (located deep under the residence) to meet with his senior military advisors and get an update on the war and the next steps. He signaled for everyone to remain seated as he walked into the room, and made his way to the center of the table to take his seat. He saw General Sir Michael Richards, the British Army Chief of the Defense Staff; he was in charge of the overall British Defense Forces. Admiral Sir Mark West was there as well; he was the First Sea Lord and the man in charge of all naval forces. Seated next to him was General Sir Nick Wall, Chief of the General Staff for the Army, and last but not least was Air Chief Marshal, Sir Andrew Trenchard from the Royal Air Force.
These were the men responsible for the Defense of the British Isles, and for better or worse, most of Europe. Also in attendance were several individuals from the EU defense staff: General Volker Naumann, Chief of Staff of the EU Army, General Dieter Kessler, the senior Field Commander for all EU Military Forces, and their boss, Minister of Defense, André Gouin. The Americans would term this gathering of senior military leaders as a “coming to Jesus” meeting that was long overdue. The level of coordination and cooperation between the EU, British Forces and the Americans was not what it should be, and the war effort was suffering as a consequence.
Blair sat down at the table and looked briefly at his tablet. He nodded towards an aide to bring up the holographic map of the front lines across Europe and the North Sea. “Gentlemen, thank you all for being here and for agreeing to meet with my military commanders. As you all are aware, the Chinese and Russians have launched a massive invasion of the American homeland in Alaska. This means that the Americans will not be prioritizing their war effort in Europe for some time. I spoke with President Stein a few hours ago, and he informed me that they will be playing defense in Europe while they focus on finishing off the IR in the Middle East and attempting to stop the Chinese and Russians from breaking out of Alaska. That means it will be upon us to take the lead in Europe.”
“I have spoken with General Wade, the SACEUR Commander, and he has told me that he has approximately 860,000 US Forces in Europe and does not expect to receive many more forces for the foreseeable future. He has been ordered to defend Germany at all cost, but to limit his offensive operations until things stabilize in Alaska or the IR surrenders. I have spoken with General Sir Richards about our military force, and right now, we have 80,000 new recruits finishing training over the next two weeks and another 80,000 more the following month.” The PM nodded towards General Sir Richards as he continued.
“Tomorrow we will be announcing another military draft; we are going to conscript two million men and women into uniform and will begin training them as quickly as possible. Minister Gouin, what is the EU currently doing as far as troop additions? How soon will the EU be ready to assume a larger military role?”
Gouin was a pragmatic man, and had been arguing for an increase in defense forces for several years now with Chancellor Lowden. Unfortunately, those pleas had fallen on deaf ears until it was too late. Clearing his throat before he responded, Minister Gouin replied, “As of yesterday, Chancellor Lowden issued an emergency draft across the EU member states to raise the size of the EU military, and he has asked all member states to increase the size of their own state-run militaries. Spain has announced that they are drafting 400,000 people immediately, France is drafting 800,000, Germany is drafting 2.2 million, and the Italians are adding 500,000. The EU army will be increased by 600,000 once the draft has been completed. However, it will still be months before these new soldiers will be trained and ready for battle. Under the current military training programs, it will take close to three months for the first batch of soldiers to complete their training. So we are looking at graduating about 210,000 soldiers every four weeks starting in two months.”