Excerpt from The Agincourt is Engaged: Forgotten Battles in the Alliance's Anti-Piracy Campaigns, 2160-2178, by: Donald Bercuson.

© Westerlund News, 2185 C.E.

In 2183, not long after Lieutenant Commander Jane Shepard was named humanity's first Spectre, Donald Bercuson published a popular history account of the Alliance's anti-piracy raids. Many battles that Shepard was personally involved in were included.

In light of recent information about Commander Shepard, we at Westerlund news think it prudent to republish an excerpt from Bercuson's book. It, more than any sanctioned press-releases from Shepard's friends, might help better frame the ongoing discussion. If nothing else, we at Westerlund believe you, the public, have a right to know all the facts—no matter how unsavoury they might be.

Chapter 34: Torfan

2. CIMIC By The Seat of Our Pants

As we saw in the previous chapter, in 2176 a fleet of pirates, slavers, Terminus Systems warlords, and more than a handful of batarian Special Intervention Unit (SIU) commandos attacked the human colony Elysium, kicking off what would eventually be known as the Skyllian Blitz. Despite being outnumbered and caught completely off guard, the Alliance pushed the attackers back into the Terminus System—and a particular someone ended up with the Star of Terra for her actions, alongside half a dozen other awards and an N7 designation to boot. The Alliance had proven to the wider galaxy that the Defense of Shanxi was not just luck, or even the result of a badly managed turian offensive. Indeed, it marked the beginning of a new era in Alliance Defense Policy: Cautious Hand was replaced by Confident Frontier.

Multiple events converged on the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Elysium and the beginning of the Skyllian Blitz. What military analysts would eventually christen "The Revolt of the Admirals" would be completed a year later, with voluminous scholarship connecting humanity's new war hero, her engagement with the local population, the fluid and ad hoc command structure she set up, and the complete inability for a pirate forced trained to the latest standards of the Turian Military to adapt to local conditions, to the final death of restricted and unrestricted line officers, the adoption of the "Sense, Act, Shield, Sustain, and Generate" (SASS-G) staff system, to the anachronistically-named "Revolt's" success. The then-Staff Commander Shepard's role in changing the culture of the Alliance Military may sometimes be greatly exaggerated (Colonel John Boyd was treated messianically by Jon Grissom long before the Alliance Navy even existed, and many of the "Revolt's" co-conspirators were as influenced by him as Shepard), but it has never been precisely zero, either.

Also year later, the Alliance wanted revenge. A few months after that and the pieces were in place to get their revenge. With Citadel backing, the Alliance launched one of the largest anti-piracy raids in modern galactic history. It would eventually come out that more Alliance ships were engaged in combat during these raids than the First Contact War. It was also here that otherwise skeptical and conservative military planners, politicians, and defense analysts were forced to eat a significant amount of crow. Alliance Task Forces were able to penetrate deep into the Terminus System largely by mirroring the proactive Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) tactics employed by Shepard on Elysium. Rather than neutering, distracting, or (in more explicit language) "pussifying" (Wexler, 2176: 23)* the military, it allowed Alliance frontline units to collect important intelligence on pirate, mercenary, and batarian troop or ship movements. It also enabled then Rear-Admirals Steven Hackett and Ines Lindholm to famously encircle a notorious "Marauder Fleet" while it was in the midst of discharging its FTL drives, resulting in a decisive strategic victory that saw 10,000 pirates, 300 SIU commandoes, twelve frigates, two cruisers "of unknown origin," and four supply ships captured, with no Alliance losses and only a pirate corvette being destroyed. The flexible command structure allowed two well-known and well-regarded Admirals—who, we might recall, have seen eye-to-eye on merely two major Alliance operations, with this being one of them and the "Revolt" being the other—to harmoniously share ultimate Command Authority, a far cry from the backstabbing and knife-fighting that slowed the Alliance's response to Elysium and nearly torpedoed the first Shanxi counterattack. For all intents and purposes, the new Alliance Navy—with CIMIC responsibility now a core component of all SASS-G staffing—was well-positioned to emerge as the most comprehensive unification of high tech, high maneuverability, and commitment to "moral warfare" (as originally defined by Boyd and expanded upon by subsequent theorists) in the galaxy.

The Battle of Torfan very nearly scuttled those plans.

Torfan was (and, indeed, was is an important word in this sentence) a moon that was nearly big enough to be a dwarf planet, with enough of an atmosphere to support life. The ecosystem that sprouted up was not particularly lush or diverse, but for a scared and hungry colonist, escaped slave, or a batarian trying to flee the Hegemony's iron fist, whatever was growing on the moon was good enough for you to call home. This was especially true if you were an escaped slave or a fleeing batarian.

As a result of its location and its (albeit barely) hospitable surface, a good-sized colony had developed on that moon. Half the population had once been enslaved by Terminus System gangs, being fully aware that the Batarian Hegemony covertly funded most of those gangs, while the other half were escapees from batarian space, who were all fully aware that a lot of former slaves didn't trust batarians as far as they could throw them.

To quote turian military historian and commentator Auvus Quilius:

"Then 2178 rolled around and a whole box of lit matches were dropped on that particular powder keg (Quilius, 2177: 344)."

Scout drones from the 44th Scout Flotilla spotted, according to declassified documents, unusual heat signatures that matched the FTL tails of a pirate flotilla that had had many incursions into Alliance space. At the time, the only available ship was the SSV Kapyong, which unbeknownst (by design) to most planners and decision-makers in the theatre, had been sequestered for a Directive 31 JSOC operation not one week earlier. The Kapyong, with full N7 marine contingent in tow, covertly landed on the south side of Torfan and began long range and special reconnaissance missions to assertain the location of the pirates. What they discovered was, despite the newly christened CIMIC focus, "beyond the pale," to quote an anonymous Alliance source. They had found a struggling, but highly populated, colony of the very mixture that, as mentioned above, would find Torfan welcoming, compared to the life they had just escaped from. The pirates that had been tracked across the FTL tail had already established encampments in the one forest on Torfan's surface. And on the other side of colony, in plain view of the colonists (and, though still hidden at the time, the N7 marines) was a fully functional Hegemony Forward Operating Base. Intercepted SIGNIT intelligence from the Kapyong CIC indicated that the Hegemony was seeking to collect the "escaped convicts" that had fled batarian justice.

Again, quoting a (rather vivid) except from Quilius:

"The Alliance wasn't technically at war with the Hegemony, so an offer was tendered by the batarians for a joint anti-piracy operation, so long as the Hegemony had free reign to reclaim its "criminals." But everyone—everyone—knew that the Hegemony elites were funding the pirates and had terrible, truly awful plans for the so-called "criminals"; more than a few Alliance officers, marines, and the Terra Firma party wanted the Hegemony troops bombed into a fine space-powder. The colonists? They just wanted to go back to the normalcy of worrying about whether your neighbor was going to shoot you without a moment's hesitation (Quilius, 2177: 403-404)."

Some within the Alliance petitioned the Council to intervene. But as Jasmine Gerwig, then-Executive Director of the Lester B. Pearson Centre for Human Diplomacy, would write in her book, Event Horizon: Conflict Resolution in the Council Era:

"The Citadel Council, despite backing the Alliance's initial anti-piracy raids, informed the galactic media (and the Alliance itself, though only indirectly) that it would have to remain neutral and uninvolved, lest it compromise its position as a peacekeeper in future conflicts (Gerwig 2180: 335)."

And, so, neutral and uninvolved the Council remained. Membership in the Terra Firma party has increased annually ever since.

The exact details of the operation will be covered in Section 4,* though most of us know the rest of the story by now. How the Alliance—led by that same, highly decorated soldier from the Skyllian Blitz—attempted to broker a peaceful solution. How that strained relations between the Navy and the Ministry for Intergalactic Affairs and Development, and how relations remain strained to this day. How, for many people, the fact that relations were strained made the military seem all the more legitimate, for at least trying to avoid bloodshed. How Torfan fell and now has more mass graves on it than living people.

...

5. The Public's Imagination (and Horror)

Despite the very public disagreement between the Alliance and the Council, and despite the death count (the full details are in Appendix B*), few today ultimately regard Torfan as a failure. The casualty reports were truly staggering, yes, but the Alliance ultimately trounced the pirate fleets in other engagements. They had won the overall war, regardless of how messy one particular battle ended up being. This meant the psychological scars of the Alliance's brief deployment on Torfan were easy to ignore. In a committee hearing that occurred just before his disappearance, Major Francis Kyle (ret.) would say that:

"…we knew the whole situation—this mess—we knew that there wasn't any way to get out of there without a significant…without a significant number of bodies. What we didn't know at the time was just how many bodies there would be (Standing Committee on Security and Defense, 2179)."

Kyle was very clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and yet the immediate response from politicians and flag officers was to use his testimony as proof that these casualties simply couldn't be avoided. Things could have been handled differently, sure, but it was over now—no need to pay attention to the human cost of the operation.

A different voice seems to have suffered during the immediate aftermath of Torfan as well. Many soldiers had their reputations altered or permanently etched into the public psyche—even if some, like Kyle, have only been recognized recently—but within the military itself, none compare with the reputation earned by the "Butcher of Torfan," then-2nd Lieutenant Kai Leng. Kyle's testimony may have been used to justify the high human cost of the campaign on Torfan, but when it came to the casualties suffered by Leng's unit, the Alliance apparently decided that he had presided over a particularly ruthless and barbaric military engagement.

Forgotten in the passage of time, however, is that Leng defended himself in multiple parliamentary inquiries, and offered up an alternative explanation for Torfan's high casualty rates. In 2179, just before he supposedly was welcomed into the upper echelon's of the Alliance's Interplanetary Combatives Academy, Leng stated that:

"...everyone on the ground was prepared for a bloodbath. Then Shepard showed up and everyone started hoping. Hoping the diplomacy would work. Hoping she'd talk everyone down.

That, right there, is responsible for more deaths than anything I did. Absolutely anything (Westerlund News, 2179: 12)."

Is Leng right? Did then 1st Lieutenant Jane Shepard truly cause more deaths with her attempt at diplomacy and brokerage than any other factor?

Unfortunately, we simply do not have the data to prove this. But it would prove to be an interesting case study in the history of conflict resolution and soft power, if nothing else. But, as we will see, it has generated an overwhelming amount of debate amongst historians regardless.

*Editor's note: Bercuson doesn't mean conservative politics (K.A. al-Jilani)

*Editor's note II: While Bercuson cites a column Wexler wrote for Westerlund, we wish to remind everyone that the views of guest columnists don't necessary represent the views of Westerlund as a whole (K.A. al-Jilani)

*Editor's note III: We don't possess the license to reprint Section 4 (K.A. al-Jilani)

*Editor's note IV: Ditto above (K.A. al-Jilani)