Salarian Union: Political and Threat Analysis

History and Culture

Despite being one of the two first Council members and having shaped both galactic history and the fate of several major species, the Salarian Union is only rarely thought of as being one of the faces of the Council, and their military is often undersold even by the salarians themselves. This suits the salarians just fine, as foes underestimating them in a moment of conflict traditionally leads to lopsided exchanges in their favor. Something to bear in mind while reading this report.

The salarians are a race of bipedal amphibians notable for their incredibly powerful metabolism and problem solving skills. They are haploid-diploid egg layers, but are fortunately rather selective and restrained in their breeding practices (well, until the post-Great War.) Fertilized eggs becomes females, unfertilized eggs become males. Females are prized far more than males, and traditionally 90% of all salarian eggs go unfertilized, meaning males make up the majority of the salarian race.

While the salarians only live a total of forty years on average, the average salarian only sleeps an hour a day, meaning they can accomplish just as much (if not more) than their longer-lived contemporaries. This also means that salarian societies, technologies, and policies are subject to swift, sometimes violent change as each generation replaces the last with dizzying speed. In the last six years in particular, the Salarian Union has experienced a great deal of upheaval.

The Salarian Union is the principal government of the salarians, and has remained so for over a thousand years. Considering the short-lived and naturally ambitious nature of the salarians, this is a feat far greater than it might initially seem, especially in light of the sometimes volatile relationships between salarian dynasties.

The Union consists of about 85% of all major salarian families, all of which are constantly vying with one another for power, be it another promising male accepted into STG, breeding contracts with their betters, or the patent for the newest egg hatchery technology. Each family wields a considerable amount of power within the Union, to the degree that any of them, if unopposed, could likely topple the standing federal government … but they would never go unopposed.

The salarians thrive on conflict and creative problem solving, perhaps to an unhealthy degree. While they find inter-species violence distasteful (indeed, it is considered the mark of a "lesser" family to resort to anything so crude, desperate, and uncreative as armed conflict) they find great pleasure in bankrupting one another, screwing each other (sometimes literally) out of breeding contracts, or casually leaking incriminating documents to the dalatrass that reveal involvement with the Batarian Hegemony or someone else equally unpleasant.

While the Salarian Union's natural state of being is that of constant flux (at least to outsiders,) the salarians have shown a remarkable resiliency when it has historically come to matters of open war. Despite whatever the families might say about one another, they are at least children of Sur'Kesh. Other species meddling in their affairs are typically casually backhanded away by a flurry of leaked documents, videos, and "secret" weapons projects that the lizards had kept on hand just in case of a rainy day such as this … unless of course the race in question was undeterred by threats of this nature.

The first race to truly test the Salarian Union was the rachni. Initially, the salarians sought to probe for any weakness of technology, only to find that the rachni's simplistic but effective ships were immune to the kind of cyberwarfare the salarians had practiced against the asari and each other. This led to brief controversy as the lesser, "thuggish" families had their day, fielding simple cruisers, dreadnoughts, and marines against the insectoid menace. To the credit of these oft-dismissed soldiers, they held the line alongside the asari with admirable persistence, from what the records say. Unfortunately, it can perhaps be slightly attributed to this slight, this solitary salarian situation in which brawn overruled brain, leading to the salarians' first major miscalculation in their history.

They found the krogan, brutish and primitive, wandering about the radioactive rubbish heap called Tuchanka. Observing the staggering birth rate and natural ruggedness of this hardy people, the salarians opted to uplift them in an attempt to use them as a backbone in their war effort against the rachni. To be fair to the salarians, this was not the worst idea; their own attempts to create an anti-rachni bioweapon had so far been stalled by the bugs' own tendency to adapt against such microbial threats, and the rachni nests were incredibly hostile environments that demanded beings both naturally resistant to toxins and hordes of rachni. The krogan, lumbering about and bashing each other with spiked clubs, looked promising.

Herein demonstrates the logical shortcomings of salarian thinking. Being bound to live only forty years, they are destined to experience at least two major cultural upheavals in their time (it is considered healthy to them) and then die before they see the long term consequences of their own endeavors. Why should they care if bankrupting another family could lead to a weakened Union down the line? They will be dead. Similarly: why should we worry about the race of chuckling war turtles once the war is over? Without their help, we will die!

What followed next has already been covered by other sources. The krogan revolted. The salarians developed a bioweapon to suppress their birthrate. The turians deployed it. One race sterilized and one race rendered extinct thanks to salarian "solutions."

It is perhaps due to the Krogan Rebellions that I am glad that the Great War ended as quickly as it did. There really is no telling what the salarians would have done when faced with swift annihilation at the hands of the zerg. They are the type of people that would unleash every weapon at their disposal imaginable, uncaring of whether anyone, including themselves, would survive the barrage. Indeed, there is evidence that while the turians and geth held the line, the salarians were preparing drastic measures to turn the tide; the so-called project "Egg Smasher," headed by famed STG scientist Mordin Solus and rumored to make the Genophage look restrained and humane. While the targets would have been zerg, the uncharacteristic complete salarian silence on the matter suggests that even they were not proud at what they would have tried to do if the bugs had not been halted.

The end of the Great War provided only momentary relief for the salarian people. After the celebrations concluded, they found themselves faced with a belligerent Turian Hierarchy and a toothless partner in the colonials. They were forced to swiftly reevaluate their relationship with the turians, and take measures necessary to preserve their own autonomy as a government.

Fortunately, the salarian fleets were still mostly intact; they stood alone among the Council races in not having lost more than 80% of their ships in any of their fleets, and their chosen method of warfare, while mostly useless against the zerg on the open battlefield, proved adept at keeping the turians on the back foot. No sooner had the turians illegally staked out an eezo claim in non-infested asari space and begun extraction, the entire operation suffered massive mechanical failures in both the ships and equipment. Turian materiel industries suddenly found themselves subject to a series of thefts of schematics and funds in an enormous cyberattack. Turian fleets patrolling aggressively near the salarian border found themselves uncharacteristically prone to communication and navigation failures, infamously culminating in two turian cruisers, Valiance and Imperious, initiating a jump to the exact same coordinates, with predictably messy results. The turians, while perhaps overly prone to linear thinking, are not stupid. They figured out who was behind these "anomalies" very quickly.

The salarians and turians settled in for a lengthy cold war. To the salarians, who have never declared war on anyone, simply settling for brutal first strikes, their goal is simple: enrage and unbalance the turians until they invade in a manner acceptable to the salarians, and then take them apart piecemeal as the inevitable logistical difficulties (chiefly feeding the troops and protecting their space to prevent asari counterattacks or open volus rebellion) set in. While this plan would likely cost a great many salarian lives, it is widely acknowledged (and I myself agree) that it is easily the best outcome; lose perhaps two major planets, and then shatter the Hierarchy's fighting capability once they overextend.

Unfortunately, being the best solution, it is also the most obvious. The turians are determined to remain even-tempered and rational even in the face of the most outrageous actions from the volus, salarians, and batarians. They have thus far managed to restrain themselves from any strenuous fleet action, instead focusing on fortifying volus space and manufacturing additional dreadnoughts while furthering development in the Thanix program, hoping to drown the salarians in raw firepower. To the salarians, this is perhaps the second-worst outcome, after the protoss simply warping in, annihilating everybody, and leaving. (Yes, this possibility has been considered – it is apparently a meme among salarians on the extranet to addend random statements with, "unless of course, the protoss warp in, kill us all, and leave." Attribute the credit to Harris for finding it.)

Salarian Military

Salarians have traditionally always kept their fleet small, but the crippling of the asari left them in the awkward position of facing down the largest Council military superpower while they were still the smallest. Since then, the salarians have begun a massive recruitment drive and even conscripted members of salarian families compromised for "questionable actions" during the Great War. They have also eliminated centuries old legal barriers to allow for rapid reproduction, and a fresh wave of post-Great War salarian adults, raised in the shadow of the Turian Hierarchy, now look skyward.

Military service among salarians has never been popular, for reasons oddly similar (and yet juxtaposed) to the asari; with their lives so short, they find it wasteful to invite opportunities in which it is cut shorter. That being said, salarian ambition has a tendency to drown out salarian reason, and thus there are still salarian soldiers.

Where terrans and turians value acts of physical valor and superb marksmanship, the salarians consider such activities to be secondary to mastering the more technical side of warfare. All salarian soldiers and marines would be considered tech experts or combat engineers by the other races; they can work wonders with their omnitools both on and off the battlefield, and tend to favor nothing heavier than an assault carbine.

On the ground, salarians favor not engaging enemy forces directly. They typically fight by planting mines, automated turrets, and dispatching thousands of simplistic combat drones to engage the enemy. Salarian recon teams will typically keep a close eye on the enemy force at all times, relaying their movements to their command, and occasionally taking potshots at any ranking officers they happen to see. If caught by enemy infantry, the standard operating procedure of any salarian force is to disengage and retreat through the traps they had already set for their enemy. And there are always traps. Other pleasant salarian tactics include the destruction of key bridges (typically while in use of the enemy) and poisoning water sources with incredibly virulent diseases and parasites.

Despite having studied Koprulu technology extensively, the salarians do not make use of heavy infantry, and still have not adopted heavy armor. They regard CMC and HME suits with derision, finding such suits to be loud and unwieldy, even if the weapons they allow the user to bear are decidedly impressive. Salarians traditionally counter their deployment by other forces through the usage of high explosives, incineration tech, and sniper fire in the case of heavy infantry, and outright sabotage on enemy armor; the only known documented case of an armored unit being able to resist salarian shutdown attempts was an Armali Bulwark during a military exercise. The turians and colonials have yet to match the salarians on the field of cyberwarfare.

In space, the salarian doctrine becomes considerably more complicated. Where the turians prefer the all-solving hammer, the salarian doctrine is more comparable to a stiletto or obsidian dagger – brittle, not capable of solving every task, but surgically precise and very capable in its chosen role.

Compared to other vessels, salarian ships are fragile. This stems chiefly from salarian biology and psychology itself; with their lifespans so short, technological breakthroughs are constant, and every ship is in a constant state of flux, much like the salarians themselves. It is not unusual for a cruiser to be 60% refitted after every other patrol, swapping out now "outdated" drives and weapons with the newest cutting edge version. While this means salarian ships are always top of the line and very easy to repair, it also contributes to their fragility in battle and the vast maintenance requirements such ships demand. The newest generation of salarians within the Union is comprised equally of both soldiers and engineers, ready to tackle the next Great War in a massive showcase of salarian ingenuity.

Reports of salarians having outfitted entire fleets with full spectrum cloaking devices are hopefully false, if only because the cost and time to do so does not line up with the reality. In another decade, it is quite likely that the entire salarian military will be seen vanishing at random, much to the horror of the turians (assuming any are left.)

Salarian GARDIANS are three times as effective as their turian and asari counterparts, and their detection systems are very sensitive, rendering terran stealth practices useless. Simulations of Wraiths and Crusaders flying against salarian forces traditionally feature them being cut to pieces very quickly, denying one of the key advantages of the battlecruiser.

Salarian dreadnoughts have been nicknamed "Tyrants" or "Tyrant Vessels" by turian forces. These ships, thankfully few in number, are capable of firing, jumping to a new position, and firing again within the space of between 5-10 seconds. This makes them incredibly difficult to target and, thanks to the salarians' practice of continually updating their weaponry, they also hit obscenely hard and have little chance of breaking down or even slowing. Fortunately, these dreadnoughts are also considerably softer targets than any other races' equivalent, and one hit is likely all the salarian opposition will need.

Unlike the turians, salarians do not continually and obsessively screen their advance. They are already aware of the situation thanks to their intel, and it is only when things become uncertain (such as when against the zerg and protoss) that salarians become more cautious. If a salarian is performing recon against a foe, it could be counted as a sign of respect; the salarians do not feel they could predict their actions.

The salarian cyberwarfare suite is predictably massive, advanced, and frankly terrifying. Ships engaging them in battle can expect them to sabotage LADAR and communications at every opportunity, and word abounds of over-daring turian vessels being completely disabled and left to float lifeless until they finally surrender to the nearby smirking salarians. Unfortunately for us, the salarians were quick to familiarize themselves with colonial computers, and thus will have an avenue to attack us if necessary. Fortunately, the more advanced state of our own computers, coupled with EDI, should prove a deterrent against salarian cyber intruders. Just don't expect the grace period to last long.

Threat Level: Red

They scare me more than the turians, sir. I didn't even get into how they view the majority of accepted ethics systems in the galaxy as a quaint suggestion. I find it extremely likely that, given their extensive probing into the extranet and all of known space, that they are aware of our probes, even if they cannot find the source. Engagement with them is like trying to swat a fly armed with an uzi; maybe there's an off-chance you can predict its movement or catch it off-guard before it has noticed you, but more likely it will just dodge and unload, and then you're done. Firm suggestion not to engage.

…

How quaint! This UED already knows of us.

Greetings, United Earth Directorate! Given your intrusion into our affairs, we found it necessary to leave some warning not to interfere beyond the Koprulu Sector lest you incur some unfortunate penalties as a species. While we still do not know the location of your homeworld, it pleases the STG that we now have a source of all of those probes over the past few years. We suspected Cerberus … but it seems that was not the case. Or, if it was, they have been more subtle.

A brief, if accurate, overview of our biology, well done.

"…the average salarian only sleeps an hour a day, meaning they can accomplish just as much (if not more) than their longer-lived contemporaries." We like this! A rare acknowledgement of our hard work as a species. We'll leave it in.

Got the job done in the Rachni War. That's all that matters. Krogan developments were regrettable, but ultimately they made the right call.

And there is no "Egg Smasher" project. There never was.

You grossly underestimate our military, but it was nevertheless a fine attempt.

Is there a level above red? Perhaps we could persuade you to give it to us.

THREAT ANALYSIS: UNITED EARTH DIRECTORATE

Consisting of approximately eight hundred+ vessels and rapidly expanding thanks to conscription, the United Earth Directorate (UED) represents the long-lost homeworld of the terrans, Earth, and the nations that inhabit it. Despite having long been dismissed as a threat by the Terran Dominion due to its sizable cosmic distance, Earthly ambition proved to outstrip any concerns over feasibility.

The UED Armada chiefly consists of two major vessels; the Valkyrie Frigate Mk XVI and the Columbus Battlecruiser. Both are notable for featuring more streamlined and smooth designs than all other known terran spacefaring vessels, as well as their capability for "storing" Yamato charges for periods of up to four hours, shaving precious seconds off firing the weapon, and giving UED battlecruisers an edge against their colonial cousins.

The UED is also notable for its usage of its hyper advanced AI spread throughout the fleet, known as the Enhanced Defense Initiative (EDI – how adorable!) This AI serves as a massive cyberwarfare suite, capable of both defending and attacking enemy ships. Thus far, EDI has proven an insurmountable force multiplier against colonial vessels, and the Terran Dominion is struggling to come up with a countermeasure.

The UED infantry have thus far demonstrated admirable restraint against the colonials, however we suspect that this is for practical and unsavory reasons. UED forces have shown a strange preference for nonlethal weaponry and an outright disdain for resocialization procedures, preferring instead to disable foes wherever possible and either conscript or rehabilitate them once captured. While Dominion patriotism still runs high, the effect of UEN broadcasts steadily overriding the Dominion's own UNN broadcasts has proven demoralizing. The UED advance into the Terran Dominion has only been accelerating, rather than slowing.

UED infantry is notable for being vastly different from the hulking colonial marines; UED marines use much smaller Argent battlesuits, which are stepped into and "fold" around the soldier in question. Said suits only add a foot of height but have demonstrated no loss of strength or protection, as well as a considerable increase of maneuverability. UED firearms are also correspondingly smaller, but have reduced the magazine size of the weapon rather than the caliber. As a result, the UED infantry sticks their rifles on semi-auto or three round burst rather than automatic in all but the most extreme emergencies. They have also demonstrated a much greater fondness for battle rifles than any other terran force.

The UED infantry is supplemented with their medics, which are, to be frank, a marvel. Clad in much larger all white suits marked with the terran's Red Cross and bearing massive shields, the UED medic brings stabilizing nanosutures to the field and can heal their comrades' wounds with astounding efficiency. This nanite cocktail can be expelled an impressive distance of eight feet to any friendly target, patching up their wounds while the medic crouches behind their shield. For self-defense, UED medics wield flashbang launchers loaded with rounds designed to incapacitate even targets in power armor. No UED medics have thus been sighted bearing lethal weaponry into combat.

Disappointingly, there has been no evidence of the UED bringing psychic soldiers to bear. Seeing as this was perhaps the only avenue of warfare in which we ourselves have little understanding of, this is unfortunate. For you.

THREAT LEVEL: GREEN

You keep to your sector and stay out of the Umojan Protectorate, and we'll leave you be. You should be quite safe, unless of course…

…the protoss warp in, kill you all, and leave.

Have a nice day.

…

Salarian Threat Level: Upgraded to BLACK