United States

"The truth is much more complicated than you think."

This article is written from a Lore perspective. It contains spoilers and different reference materials might be contradictory.

The United States of America is a country of North America, which secured a globally important position in the world balance in the modern era. After World War Two, they had engaged in an arms race with the Soviet Union over the control of powerful relics technology, often to devastating results. Like all of the world's major powers, they were significantly weakened during World War Three, and after by a new American Civil War.

While important in the background of the Girls' Frontline series, the United States are conspicuously absent from main stories. Daybreak Squad and Martha Meitner are the only main American characters in the story.

History

Technological tardiness

After World War II, the United States initially focused their military research on conventional weaponry: heavy bombers such as the G-36, aircraft carriers such as the United-States class, and ballistic missiles such as the Redstone and Jupiter. However, the discovery of the Soviet research on Relic Technology threatened to render new American weapons useless faster than they could develop them: the hundreds of kilometers of ranges of US missiles were useless against the Relic-powered anti-air defenses of the Soviet. The instability caused by the birth of the Warsaw Pact in 1955 gave the US the opportunity to infiltrate spies in the Soviet Union and make up for their tardiness, helped by the discovery of their own relic on American soil, the D-1 site. Eventually, after losing several U2 planes to Soviet SA-2 missiles, the Americans discovered the Tabasar-B Starfish and the terrible Moron weapons produced within. The White House pressured their European allies to stage Thor and Jupiter missiles within their borders, and forced the Congress to allow the funding of a dedicated Relics research organization: the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In response, the Soviets boosted Tabasar-B's budget and founded their own Relics research agency, the 16th Directorate of the KGB.

1961 was the year of escalation between the two sides of the Cold War. The CIA sent mercenaries to destabilize Cuba, the Vietnam War escalated, the Vostok program conducted the first successful crewed spaceflight, the Apollo program was announced, the Checkpoint Charlie standoff occurred in Berlin and the Soviets conducted an unprecedented amount of nuclear tests. At the October Revolution Parade that year, Khrushchev officially revealed the Pikes, to great effect: Kennedy announced the very next day the cancellation of the Apollo program to focus on Relic Technology. In the second half of 1962, the Soviets successfully pressured the US, still unsure of the true capabilities of Relics, into removing their nuclear warheads from European countries in exchange for Soviet removal of their anti-air missiles, new fighters and Moron units from Cuba, in what became known as the Cuban Moron Crisis. The successful Soviet move caused North European countries to leave NATO in the following years, and caused the US to invest even more into Relic Technology.

Relics experiments

Most American Relics were aircraft wrecks which enabled Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works to develop advanced propulsion engines. The Collapse Fluid found in the D-9 Beta-Zuma relics in November 1967 were tested by ARPA for 9 months before the Pentagon convinced the President to use it in North Vietnam, sending roughly 250 cubic meters of fluid to the USS Enterprise. On 5 July 1969, Thunderbolt planes launched from the USS Enterprise conducted the first "Relic Gas Bombing", dropping canisters containing 50 to 60 cubic meters of gas set to detonate at 300 meters from the ground. The ionizing radiations from the detonation were so powerful that they affected even the camera film of the surveillance planes 2 kilometers above the bombing site. 12 hours later, it was reported that the bombing had left a 500-meters wide band and 3000 hectares of scorched earth and vehicle wrecks, glazed ground minerals and weapons warped by heat over 1000°C. Demonstrating the effect of the ignited gas on organic matter, the wooden components of the guns had completely disappeared. Collapse Fluid bombardments would later cause over 10,000 more deaths due to ELID contamination.

As the Soviets were slowly learning to control the Morons, Skunk Works fully reverse-engineered one of the relic wreckage in 1964, leading to the production of the J64 turbojet engine in 1965 and of the high-altitude surveillance plane using it, the SR-71A, in 1967. They also developed the first magnetohydrodynamic engine capable of silently propelling destroyers and nuclear submarines in 1969 after studying Relic D-51. Their next goal was the High-Altitude High-Speed Strategic Bomber Project.

At last, American Relic tech had caught up with the Soviets thanks to the more efficient development method propelled by cooperating companies, compared to the bulkier KGB bureaucracy. But the Soviets still held the advantage in terms of active Relic weapons: as the US were entering negotiations with China and the USSR regarding withdrawal from Vietnam, the Kremlin provided an extra push by displaying 32 Pikes during the 1972 October Revolution Parade, much more than expected by ARPA. The next year of 1973, the Vietnam Peace Treaty was signed and the US withdrew from the country. While 1973 marked the defeat of the US in Vietnam, it also marked the first successful test of the Aurora bomber produced by the High-Altitude High-Speed Strategic Bomber Project. In 1974, Aurora demonstrated its full capabilities by taking off from Yukon and flying over the entire Soviet Union, passing over Moscow on May 1st.

The American and Soviet grand strategy would however change after the shocking development and end of the Vietnam War: starting January 1975, despite being much better equipped, demoralized and uncoordinated South Vietnam troops folded in a handful of months before the determination of North Vietnam. Both sides of the bilateral world order started divesting their investments into weapons towards C2 and information capabilities instead. ARPA conceptualized the distributed and resilient ARPANET in 1975, leaving the Department of Defense to implement it while ARPA focused on evolving it into an autonomous control system for the Aurora. In 1978, ARPA also tested the first magnetohydrodynamic nuclear submarines, and deployed three such submarines by 1981.

At some point during the Cold War, the US and NATO built the Berlin Ground Station on a mountain nicknamed Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) near West Berlin in order to monitor and alter radio traffic in the Warsaw Pact. The German signals research unit 90Wunsch and signals specialists of the Soviet KGB infiltrated the station, feeding false intel to NATO for the rest of the Cold War. Full control over what Washington heard was crucial to the reunification of Germany in 1985, as the US would have been much less cooperative had they knew of East Germany's true economic situation.

Détente

In early 1976, the Americans discovered a major hurdle to further Relic Technology development: during the "Lady liberty" (自由女神) Relic experiments, a test subject died of ELID for the first time. The Soviets also realized the implications of Collapse contamination after deploying Pikes in Afghanistan in January 1981. As it became clear that maintenance and usage of Relic weapons was already causing health issues at massive scales, the US and the Soviet Union entered talks to prevent Relic weapons escalation.

Americans and Soviets signed the Relic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1981, disclosing all of their Relic weapon stockpiles and promising to destroy or decommission the Relic weapons they had amassed. With bilateral talks now opened by the threat of assured mutual destruction, Yuri Andropov and Ronald Reagan signed the Geneva Convention (日内瓦公报) on 1st July 1983, officially putting an end to 35 years of Russo-American conflict.

Down spiral to War

In the days following the Beilan Island Incident of 2030, the United States heavily influenced East Asian politics. US troops participated in disaster response in South Korea, but on the order of the American President, they also ensured a complete lockdown of the North Korean border, preventing any North Korean citizen from seeking refuge beyond the 38th Parallel unless their government accessed to particularly harsh political demands. The country responded by hiding its population underground. In the early hours of March 3rd, the North Korean military crossed the DMZ and started the Second Korean War. Having noticed the early signs of the attack, the US garrison in South Korea had already begun retreating to Japan, and left the peninsula to be engulfed by the war caused by their blackmail. On 16 March 2030, the 13th Air Force carried a bombardment on the Korean Peninsula called Operation Hammerfall, which had neither the US Congress nor the President's approval. The actions of the US military were only made public during hearings at the Congress in 2032.

In May 2030, the US pushed to maintain their presence in East Asia via a garrison in Hokkaido, in northern Japan, which reduced the available space for refugees from the rest of the country. In order to prevent the United Nations from demanding they leave the country, the United States Pacific Command supported a coup by Japanese politicians opposed to taking in survivors. In the night of the 24th to 25th of May, the US military forcibly evacuated remaining United Nations staff from the Tokyo Protected Zone before their 3rd Fleet started blocking any transit through the Tsugaru Strait, abandoning the rest of the population to the Collapse radiations. In July, Raeder Rossartre of the United Nations Relics Agency (UNRA) warned that the Collapse catastrophe would soon reach the American continent, but he was not heard due to his suspicious trip to Russia.

By September 2030, Collapse fluid capsules that had fallen into the Pacific Ocean reached the western coast of North America. Carried by sea breeze, radiations caused the loss of coastal cities from Anchorage to San Diego, including the Cascades region of Oregon. Survivors fleeing east found no relief: private Relic Technology companies illegally recovered some of the capsules and transported them farther inland for study, but their brute-force methods to open them caused massive explosions, leveling cities such as Salt Lake City and Phoenix and causing 100 square mile radius Black Zones. Denver and Kansas were similarly lost, along with areas in Canada. Plans were drawn to manage the evacuation of refugees with help from Rossartre, but they failed due to suspicions from western state governments, rejections of survivors by Green Zone residents and greed. In December, the Pentagon eventually built the New Boundary, a 2300km long exclusion zone stretching from Port Arthur to Winnipeg, cutting North America in two and trapping many survivors west. Rossartre pushed back again the exclusion zone and denounced the US disaster response in his posthumous Beilan Island Incident Investigation Report in 2033, but this only led to the Congress expelling the UNRA from New York, directly causing the organization to split into its Promethean and Beaconist factions.

The territory loss did not deter American interventionism: they crushed the Latin American independence movements, and the prospect of an American-Soviet treaty fell through in September 2032, causing the worldwide deployment of more military troops and the outbreak of the Second Cold War. Growing distrust against the US enabled Western Europe to expand their influence over the Atlantic Ocean until the Northern Lights Incident of 2035 cut their resources short, and the Americas refused to help mitigating their refugees crisis. A short-lived American-Soviet alliance disappeared in 2038, and movements against the New Boundary started appearing in 2041, internally weakening the country. General Dynamics participated in the rise of automated high-mobility heavy vehicles, most notably the first eight-legged all-terrain platform in 2037.

World War Three

After the European governments and the Neo-Soviet Union butted head over the Ukrainian Civil War in 2043, Canada was absorbed into the United States and an independence movement in the Bahamas was crushed. The US were presumably one of the three permanent members of the United Nations who left over aggressive conservative actions, breaking the organization. The late American interference in the 2044 German Civil War further contributed to heightened tensions with the NSU. During the war, mandatory conscription into national military service was reinstated.

Both the United States and the NSU suffered heavy losses during the initial nuclear launch mistakes that were the opening shot of World War Three in 2045. In 2047, the American armies made landfall in Europe, preventing the NSU from completing their conquest of the Old Continent and establishing a long-standing front line. When the American armies made an offensive in Germany in May 2047, the NSU ordered Sangvis Ferri and I.O.P. to produce the first field-capable Tactical Dolls, which successfully crushed the American offensive on Berlin in August.

The American response to troops depletion was the Aurora Experimental Unit, an R&D group installed in South America in 2048 to experiment with ELID bioweapons. Aurora injected Collapse fluid into cheetahs, leopards and bears to produce ELID creatures capable of destroying armored vehicles, but they could not find a way to control these bioweapons. After failed test deployments against left-wing guerillas, the ELID Bioweapon Development Unit instead focused on searching for the cause of the enhanced abilities of ELID infected. They compared the DNA of the creatures with DNA from the Black Lily and White Rose project, and isolated the sequences responsible for their increased strength.

During the war, the Rossartrists believed the spark that would light the way to a better world could not be lit in North America, and made efforts to undermine American influence so it would not come out on top at the end of the war. In the closing years of WW3, the Americans suffered a massive defeat and lost the Asian front. Soviet reports from May 2049 mention their retreat from Guangxi and difficulties against guerillas in Heidelberg, Germany. In March 2050, the Tactical Dolls of the Neo-Soviet Union won a major victory in the Mediterranean with Operation Tradewind. Over the next two months, NATO lost the European front, and both the military reach and domestic situation of the US were rapidly crumbling.

In August 2050, the Aurora Unit was pulled back from South America as local left-wing guerillas, bolstered by the political instability in the US, launched massive attacks to retake major cities. The unit never found a way to control ELID bioweapons. In 2051, the US Army Special Warfare Command Rangers deployed Daybreak Squad to capture Martha Meitner, but the operation was a failure. As they retreated, Paradeus called the US “a powder keg” that would soon be engulfed in a new civil war. When the new American Civil War eventually broke out, several Aurora scientists fled to Europe, where plans were drafted to merge the Aurora unit with the German National Special Defense Technology Development Group. This was soon abandoned when the German research group was disbanded. Some experiments were saved from the ordeals, one of which was the Shrike.

A World in anguish

World War Three eventually concluded after no country was left able to wage war. Without food import from the Americas, Europe suffered from famines. Daybreak Squad and the Rangers were disbanded at some point. 42LAB is a firm known to have moved its headquarters from Maryland to Eastern Europe after World War Three. An active and destructive conflict continued in Texas, probably as part of the new American Civil War, where CentaureissiCentaureissi and ClothoClotho served as support Dolls before 2063. One of the parties employed railguns.

On 15 January 2053, “Bob” Hampton, General Secretary of the East Coast American Rossartrism Alliance, made a public speech commemorating the death of Raeder Rossartre and denouncing his supposed murderers at the Center City Hall in Philadelphia. ChelseaChelsea was activated in Baltimore in 2057 and participated in 42LAB's Project Neural Cloud in 2060, along with FlorenceFlorence who hailed from the same city. CascadiaCascadia also worked with Chelsea in Baltimore for the Disaster Management Team after transfer from the Federal Emergency Search and Rescue Agency, and they operated during the 2057 Richmond earthquake in Virginia. Around this time, the US were targeting the Aurora scientists and their German colleagues who had fled to South America to eliminate them, and prevent them from leaking their secrets.

Expunged lore

"A shameful end to our collaboration."

This section concerns lore that was removed from canon for legal reasons. For a complete explanation, read Confidential Files/Expunged.

During the last year of World War Two, the US deployed Alsos teams to plunder the war secrets of the Nazi and the Japanese, especially their research on nuclear, rocket and aircraft technology. On the surface, Alsos teams managed to grab most of the important materiel and personnel before the competing Soviet Trade Federation could, but only after the start of the Cold War did they realize that it was only because the Trade Federation was focusing on relics technology. When the US forces captured Wernher Von Braun at Bleicherode, the understaffed Alsos team prioritized the rocketry equipment and personnel and ignored the local Urkunde-01 relics site, yielding 10 years worth of research to the advancing Red Army's vanguards.

When the Cold War started, the US advantage in the field of nuclear weaponry held only until 1949, when the Soviets matched their capabilities thanks to their own research. When the Soviets finished the “Starfish” installation at the Tabasar-B Proving Grounds, the US had no mean to know if it was an offensive system, and they kept over two bases' worth of strategic nuclear weapons pointed at the site as soon as they developed the necessary intercontinental ballistic missile capability. The West only realized the extent of the technological gap with the Soviets in 1955, during their last deep intelligence mission in Eastern Europe, conducted with Marshall Plan assets before the Warsaw Pact would close the region behind the Iron Curtain.

The US sought to rapidly regain a technological advantage with more experiments on relics site. In 1955, the US established the McMurdo Antarctic surveillance station 1.1km from the recently discovered relics site D1 on the shores of Lake Vostok in the Antarctic Ice Shelf, later nicknamed “Door”. The black budget governmental organization “Big Sieve” was also founded to study relics technology on a tactical level. Between 1955 and 1980, Big Sieve would scramble for relics site in US-controlled territory and discover three more: D2 at Los Alamos in New Mexico, D51 in the Lake Central region of California and D9 at Warren, Wyoming. Big Sieve would collaborate with the military in the relics research and excavation matter. They worked with the Army to hide a research institute in the Redstone Arsenal, and would found Skunk Works with the Air Force and Lockheed-Martin. The mechanical finds at D1 would be transported to the US and Skunk Works would derive the U-2, SR-71, F-117, F-22 and F/A-00 from the research and retroengineering of these relics.

In 1957, when the Soviets launched the first man-made satellite, the US decided to refocus its research structure and Big Sieve's responsibilities became purely governmental, in charge of discovering and protecting US relics, and scouting and destroying enemy relics. Research responsibilities fell in the hands of a new organization proposed by President Eisenhower to Congress: the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), managed by the Secretary of Defence. ARPA was accepted the day it was proposed and had received 5.2 million US dollars in startup funds five day later, totaling 200 million dollars in investment by the time it was officially founded in 1958. ARPA was of great military strategic importance for the US to take back the technological advantage, and all projects had to be completed with no delay. If not, it was handed to a new team and restarted.

At D9, ARPA experimented an anti-organic matter gas found in relics on live subjects. This gas is only known by ARPA's nickname “accelerant”, and of the 130 tons recovered and stored in D9, 3 were deployed to Vietnam for live combat trial in 1968 on orders of President Johnson. Modified F-4 known as Thundercats deployed the gas under direct order of Big Sieve, and by the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, all 3 tons had been used up, sometimes creating 500 meters-wide clearings of burnt earth and vehicles without leaving a bone or a leaf behind. The US were the first to use relics technology in warfare. The “Lady Liberty” experiments conducted at the “Door” studied a teleportation phenomenon between relics D1 and D2 by way of manned and unmanned pocket submarines. Success and survivability of the experiments were erratic, with pilots contracting ELID infection. The infection rate was growing rapidly with the intensity of relics research, and by 1981 the growth rate was deemed dangerous both by the West and the East.

With mediation from the Vatican and World Health Organization, the Relic Arms Limitation Treaty took place in 1981 and were signed on November 3rd. Both parties agreed to stop relics research effort for the time being and work toward a vaccine for ELID, with research debuting on 1983. Relics information were also shared during the Accords, and the Soviet Union had to trade their data on Pikes for the ARPA to recognize the use of relics technology in Vietnam.

The Treaty would later be expanded into international collaboration on relics technology, leading to the formation of the United Nations Relic Science Agency and the GAVIRUL Reproduction Projects.

References

General List of Characters (Minor Characters) · List of Locations · Timeline · Rossartrism · Eurosky Low-Emission Infectious Disease · Epiphyllum · GAVIRUL Technology Assault Artillery · Automaton · Bee Sting · Collapse Technology · Doll · Magrasea · Neural Cloud · Nirvana · OGAS · Parapluie virus · Pike · Purification Project · Relic Technology · Remolding Pattern · Shrike · Weight Bearing Events Beilan Island Incident · Northern Lights Incident · World War Three · Operation Couatl · Incident Zero · Butterfly Incident · Safe House 3 Raid · Plan Parapluie · Great Retreat · Paldiski Incident · Project Valkyrie and Project Cocoon · Fireworks Incident · Battle of the Dead Sea · Battle of Frankfurt · Cloud Crisis · Operation Xyster · First Antarctic War · Second Antarctic War Factions 90wish · Antarctic Union · China · Doll Community · Fox Sisterhood · Germany · Global Rescue Foundation · Griffin & Kryuger · KCCO · Neo-Soviet Union · Pan-European Union · Paradeus · Sangvis Ferri · Underground Brokers · Union of Rossartrist Nations Coalition · United Nations · United States · Varjagers Corporations 16LAB · 42LAB · B.R.I.E.F. · Cyber Media · Galatea Corporation · Girard Group · I.O.P. · Mangi Security Service · Orlog Conglomerate · Svarog Heavy Industries · Sycca Technologies · Ultilife · Universal Anything Services · WAVE