Prepared by General Staff
Precis: Summary analysis of tactical and strategic Resistance options regarding operations on or involving the LMC Darkside Base on the moon.
TACTICAL SITUATION
PASSIVE RESISTANCE
ACTIVE RESISTANCE
LONG RANGE STRATEGY
OPTION 1: MAINTENANCE AND READINESS
OPTION 2: TAKEOVER
OPTION 3: DEMOLITION
The Lunar Mining Base in the Mare Nubium crater, aka “Darkside Station”, has been in operation for more than a century. The original base was constructed in 2091 as a joint project of several multi-national manufacturing concerns. (This alliance, usually referred to simply as “The Lunar Partnership”, has been regarded as an important predecessor to the WEC.) Originally, the Darkside mines were largely engaged in producing raw materials for the new Orbiting Production Platforms, first providing construction materials, then later producing raw materials for the orbital stations’ manufacturing operations. Shipping raw materials up from Luna and finished goods down to Earth was, in the long term, a far more economically efficient model than a closed earth-to-orbit loop, since the Luna-orbit-earth model minimized the economic impact of overcoming earth’s powerful gravity well.
Even at its inception, however, the LMB site was selected because of the high concentration of the radioactive compound di-coreallium. Even if the eventual economic dependence on Di-Cor was not foreseen, its potential usefulness as a power source and catalyst was obvious from the very beginning.
Lunar Di-Cor mining, however, proved to be an economically problematic endeavor, and the problem was not so much the logistics of spaceflight, but the human element. Because of the hazards of the lunar environment, particularly the high radioactivity of Di-Cor, prospective Lunar miners demanded and received extravagantly high wages and radical (and expensive) safety precautions. This extremely high overhead kept Di-Cor prices inflated, which in turn kept the demand for Di-Cor low, which kept production at a trickle. Although the scientific community was constantly discovering new applications for Di-Cor power, that potential remained largely theoretical, until the rise of the WEC and the creation of the cartel system.
In 2152 the original Lunar Mining Commission (the predecessor of the Lunar Mining Cartel) was established with the mission of fully exploiting Lunar resources; Di-Cor is explicitly named in the Commission’s charter as its highest priority. By 2176, when the Cartel system was introduced, the LMC and the Security Cartel were ready to move immediately on a previously negotiated co-operative venture. SecCart would allow the LMC virtual carte blanche to select “conscripts” from among SecCart prisoners to serve as lunar Di-Cor miners. In return for the use of the conscripts, and for providing personnel to guard the new lunar penal colony, SecCart would receive a flat 20% of LMC gross Di-Cor revenues. The advantages of conscript labor were obvious. In addition to massive savings on wages (most conscripts receive nothing whatsoever; a few senior prisoners receive a minuscule wage for the purchase of small luxuries), the WEC could also cut down radically on safety precautions. The pre-WEC, highly efficient safety devices were reserved for the use of supervisors and guards, while conscripts were issued vastly inferior protective measures.
Immediately, the lunar mining operation expanded from a large industrial site to humanity’s first non-terrestrial city. Not only did the importation of the conscripts cause the population to balloon, but the non-conscript citizen/partner population also expanded. By 2189 there were almost 10 conscripts and three citizen/partners for every pre-Cartel lunar resident.
The death toll among Di-Cor miners also soared. The Resistance estimates that 25% to 40% of LMC conscripts die of Di-Cor related injury or illness, with an additional 15% to 25% suffering permanently incapacitating injury or illness (official public WEC estimates are 7% death, 5% injury).
The current director of the LMC, and the de facto chief executive of Darkside Station, is Judith Leach. Leach was appointed director in 2192, and immediately began work on an administrative program that combined a zero-tolerance policy for conscripts with a series of improvements, upgrades and amenities for lunar citizen/partners. Although her strict policies toward conscripts have not wavered, the reforms for citizen/partners have constantly lagged far behind projections, and have recently slowed to a halt, as ever-increasing WEC demand for more raw Di-Cor has forced the LMC to devote all its energies to increasing production.
PASSIVE RESISTANCE
The Resistance estimates that 70% of all prisoners currently detained by the WEC are imprisoned for political (as opposed to felonious) activity. The penal colony on Luna reflects these proportions. Furthermore, even those prisoners who were convicted for crimes against person or property have little reason to be loyal to the WEC. Since, as has been pointed out above, the Lunar conscripts outnumber Lunar citizen/partners by more than three to one, it is obvious that the Resistance has a tremendous pool of potential recruits on Luna.
Unfortunately, the Security Cartel is not inefficient in its task of controlling prisoners. There have been prisoner riots both in the mines and in the conscript barracks - at least three in the last five years have been confirmed by Resistance intelligence. The Security Cartel is quite merciless in controlling such outbursts. In the three known incidents, one was controlled by simple force of arms, while the other two (one in the barracks, one in the mines) were controlled by sealing off the area, then withholding life support. In all three cases prisoner casualties were at or near 100% in the area.
Likewise, the flow of information and goods in and out of the conscript population is effectively controlled. This does not mean that there is no access to the prisoners whatsoever - every large-scale prison in human history has succeeded in evolving some sort of black market with the outside, regardless of all security precautions. However, SecCart is normally able to keep such exchanges well below the threshold necessary for effective, organized operations. A few operations have been successfully coordinated through the prison population, but logistics and intelligence factors make such operations difficult to coordinate and unacceptably risky, except in the most extreme necessity.
The Resistance is, however, far from dead among the conscripts. There is a highly efficient, if subtle, “passive resistance” dedicated to undermining WEC authority and productivity. This conscript effort is largely coordinated independently of the external Resistance effort, due to the logistical difficulties noted above.
The informal conscript resistance can and does undertake minor industrial sabotage and even occasional anti-personnel actions against specific security cartel targets. However, the primary function of the passive resistance is to simply ensure that cooperation and production among the conscripts remains at the absolute minimum possible without arousing active LMC retaliation. Although precise estimates of the passive resistance’s efforts are extremely difficult to derive from available data, a tentative estimate of a 10% to 20% reduction in productivity has been calculated. This means that, without the passive resistance, the WEC’s current “Di-Cor crisis,” (a 7.9% deficiency in worldwide Di-Cor demand) would probably not exist.
ACTIVE RESISTANCE
The organization of a traditional, active Resistance cell on Luna has been a slow and dangerous process, but the beachhead has been established, and there is every reason to expect more rapid growth of our movement in the future.
When Darkside Station was first established as a penal colony, Resistance recruitment was difficult to the point of impossibility. All lunar citizens were gainfully employed, carefully screened WEC professionals - traditionally not the most fertile ground for fifth-column operations. The discontented majority among the Conscript population was inaccessible.
In time, however, this equation became much less clear cut, and therefore Lunar operations have become a much more attractive Resistance prospect.
Despite the health hazards of the mines and draconian WEC sentences, many conscripts have managed to complete their sentences and be released. As has been the case in penal colonies throughout history, many of the recently released choose to remain on Luna and work for the LMC, rather than return home and face social and professional ostracism as malcontents. The LMC, for its part, is often content to allow former prisoners to stay on, because of their experience and willingness to take on more dangerous assignments than most citizen/partners. Although this population of released prisoners is small (about 3% of all non-Conscript personnel) they already form a crucial recruiting base for the Resistance, and their numbers are expected to continue to swell over the next several years.
Also, and perhaps more significant in the long run, intelligence indicates a dramatic downward shift in morale among the lunar citizen/partners over the last few years. Since the establishment of the LMC, earthside demand for Di-Cor has risen steadily and quotas have increased dramatically. At the same time, on Luna, wages have remained largely static, workloads have shot up, and improvements in the Lunar quality of life have been negligible. In short, the free population of Luna started out as a WEC elite, but is now well on the way to becoming yet another population victimized by the WEC, and ripe for Resistance influence.
At present the full-time Resistance garrison on the moon remains tiny, with only one officer who does not also maintain a full-time WEC cover identity. Nonetheless, operations are efficient and effective given the current personnel situation. There is a small unit of guerrilla forces trained, active and on-call at all times. There is also a large and extremely efficient intelligence network. (There is presently, however, a significant flaw in the Lunar Resistance intelligence operation, in that the absence of secure communications between earth and the moon require that intelligence reports either be smuggled to Central by hand, or encrypted and sent over public information networks. For the moment, there seems to be no obvious solution to this problem.)
Immediate goals for the Lunar Resistance cell, in addition to general readiness and crisis management, include enhanced recruiting with an eye to augmenting available guerrilla forces, and cultivation of deep sleeper operatives in the LMC leadership hierarchy. Logistics are, for the moment, not a problem, as sufficient stockpiles of munitions and provisions exist to support an operation up to five times the current force, for a full year.
Staff has identified three possible strategic options for the Lunar Resistance. Lunar command should ready its forces for any one of these options, depending on the strategic situation as it develops earthside.
Note that two of the options below place Luna as a cornerstone of Resistance strategy in “all-or-nothing” gambits designed to decisively end the conflict with the WEC. This makes Luna one of the five most important Resistance operations, in the long term.
OPTION 1: MAINTENANCE AND READINESS
In this plan, Darkside Station is treated just like any other urban center in the ongoing struggle. Recruiting and training are prioritized, and activist operations are kept small-scale and infrequent, in order to maximize operational security. The long-range goal for Luna is to become one more link in the chain of resistance, so that at a pre-arranged time the Lunar Resistance can rise in concert with cells all over Earth, and simultaneously end or disrupt WEC control in each individual locality, compelling the Consortium to enact sweeping democratic reforms. This is the default strategy for all Resistance operations. In this plan, control of the moon becomes a strategically significant objective (because of the necessity of ongoing Di-Cor production after the action). Lunar Command should prepare contingency plans not only for military and propaganda operations during the action, but also for sustaining mining operations throughout the re-organization period to follow.