Essay: Disarmament and the Dark Age

This started as an overly long comment by User:Tumult&Travail on the Sarna Discord, written midway through morning coffee. It has been edited and expanded since then, but is still pretty informal and loose. Consistent references might get added one day.

One major area of confusion around the Dark Age is the legendary disarmament leading up to it. Fans glance over the setting, read some of the material, and come away with a pile of questions and misconceptions. It's not surprising - the era is hard to work one's way through, to say the least. The following is one user's best understanding of what happened.

A Note on Sources

Making sense of the Republic era disarmament/drawdown process is difficult for a number of reasons.

• Core Dark Age sources were written over two decades, under two companies, under changing leadership within those two companies. To an extent, 3132-3134, 3135-3138, 3139-3145, and 3146-3150 are each distinct sub-eras, each with its own lead developers, tone, and aim. The first two matter most here:
  • 3132-3134 was MechWarrior: Dark Age at WizKids, with Weisman's love of the original 'Mad Max with giant robots' BattleTech coming through. Local separatists with battered gear, IndustrialMechs, and even rare BattleMechs skirmish over the Republic.
  • By mid-2004/3134, the plot's moving towards more real House forces than angry nationalist-separatist rebels. MechWarrior: Dark Age has a new lead from Falcon's Prey on, heading into its second edition. 3135-3138ish is MechWarrior: Age of Destruction. Industrials stick around in the fiction a bit, but they're not game pieces WizKids is trying to sell.
• Dark Age sources play very loose with the boundaries between various disarmament policies and efforts. For instance, some imply that the Republic’s Military Materiel Redemption Program was Sphere-wide; more dedicated coverage is clear that other states merely imitated it, though there were more wide-ranging treaties involved.
• We see the Republic era and Dark Age mostly from a Republic perspective, and most sources that detail the Republic era disarmament – whether early MWDA overviews or the after-the-fact Field Manual: 3085 – are very Republic-biased and pro-Stone, even propagandistic. These tend to imply far greater success and breadth than is shown, and they tend to assign an overwhelming share of credit to Stone himself.
• One major exception is flagrantly biased in its own way: an early web article from 2003 that, for this essay's purposes, will be called the Archangel statement. Found in Dark Age: 3132-3134 INN, pages 246-249, it is a pro-Republic INN op-ed hacked by someone calling themself Archangel to add much more Republic-skeptical counter-commentary. It adds large amounts of detail on the disarmament/drawdown process. It is also a weird anonymous hacker’s rant. It is a vital source, and also must be taken with a substantial grain of salt.

In short, take much of this with a grain of salt - the era is hard.

The Drawdown

In the wake of the Jihad, everyone was exhausted and battered. Across the board, armies and industry alike were devastated. What was left, IS and Clan alike, was armies full of RetroTech and empty spaces, and few fully operational factories to rearm them. This drove an early drawdown across the board, backed by a number of treaties: paper armies got carved down, factories didn’t have to rebuild quite as much, manufacturing could refocus on other areas, and states could spend a lot less of their much-needed resources on militaries. A peace dividend could be claimed.

Stone played a role here, campaigning for drawdown, encouraging a cutback in arms, encouraging a swords-to-plowshares mentality, propagandizing leaders and publics alike, but to an extent he was pushing for what needed to happen anyway. The status quo was untenable. Perhaps without his extensive campaigning, however – and almost certainly without his war with the Capellans to drive them into the Treaty of Tikonov – there would have been no formal treaties mandating arms reduction.

Even the Clans, cut off from the Homeworlds, needed to carve back, tightening their warrior criteria and focusing a while on building infrastructure to keep the occupation zones from breaking down. The Archangel statement says Stone encouraged this by buttering them up hard, appealing to their elitism and saying his Republic was following in their footsteps as a society where only the finest would pilot BattleMechs.

The Private Disarmament

Meanwhile, the Republic launched its arms buyback/private disarmament program, the Military Materiel Redemption Program. Stone wanted to break the back of the nobility, Stone wanted to centralize control of arms, and Stone believed in grand ideals of disarmament. The MMRP took now semi-criminalized privately owned arms from Republic residents and gave back citizenship, money, loans, and land. An RAF enforcement arm, soon aided by mercenary repo men, dealt with harder cases.

Some of the equipment taken via the MMRP was handed to state forces, easing the burden on factories. Some ended up in junkyards. Much of the gear was melted down, turned into peace medals sold to fill the Republic’s coffers. Meanwhile, the Republic used rewards, particularly loans, to refocus the economy away from military production. The Republic took this process seriously, but a lot of gear was hidden from them and some manufacturers snuck unauthorized, state-unknown BattleMech production past them later on, private rearmament without the state’s awareness.

Still, the MMRP did a pretty decent job in the Republic. Sure, not everything got caught, but it caught a lot of gear, it eased production needs, and the attached loan program helped generate an economic boom. Neighbours imitated policy success, with encouragement from Stone. These imitations helped states rebuild their battered and junk-filled forces to somewhat lower levels than before, turning nicer mercenary and family ‘Mechs into state military ‘Mechs, etc. They eased the burden on factories, and help states focus on building up in other ways. They melted a lot of junk. These imitations were also rather less thorough. It’s amazing what can slip by when it isn’t Stone running the program.

Non-Compliance

As early as Sword of Sedition (chapter 5), MWDA material strongly raised the possibility that everyone other than the Republic – Successor States and Clans alike – had evaded arms limits over the decades. A post-Fortress piece of web material was explicit: "every House and Clan demilitarized in what can most charitably be described as a half-hearted fashion." Later sources, such as Era Report: 3145 and Interstellar Players 3, also confirm this outright for the Successor States. As it was put in Era Report: 3145, "We’ve always known that the Houses skimped on their adherence to Stone’s Military Materiel Redemption Program and its related reforms, using a variety of techniques to hide their non-compliance."

States hid gear away, hid some production over time, skimped at the edges, prepared. MMRP equivalents funneled equipment into caches and surplus equipment produced was mothballed for later. The Cappies did so most of all, a few times as much as other states, but the Cappies were just the most non-compliant of many non-compliant powers.

The Blackout still took the Sphere by surprise. Military manufacturing was still relatively limited - it had been a peacetime economy. Mothballed equipment needed to be brought back out, pilots need training, and the Sphere’s well-developed civilianized economy had to be pulled back to a war footing. The first couple years of war after centered non-state forces, with the exception of the underprepared RAF and the Capellans, and even the Cappies had a lot of gear stuck in ever-building stockpiles when they struck, missing trained operators and probably needing some work to get running right. Even their manufacturing wasn’t ready for Sphere-wide chaos, not immediately. Despite everyone but the Republic having spent the five decades of semi-peace stocking some arms, everyone still had to scramble to rearm to the extent needed.

War and the IndustrialMech

The image of the early Dark Age is that of an IndustrialMech with a gun awkwardly duct-taped on charging into battle. This is a decent representation of warfare in the first years after the Blackout, but not of the average state’s arsenal.

The first forces to exploit the Blackout were not state forces. A few had backing from states or major factions within states, but they were not state forces. The Republic splinter factions mixed stolen/defecting RAF gear with whatever they could scrounge up, taking largely from the gear of the state that had not secretly squirreled away military equipment. These militias, nationalist-separatist groups, and so on faced the weak and relatively underequipped RAF. This was the golden age of IndustrialMech warfare – irregular forces that desperately needed gear grabbed what they could.

Even state forces made some limited use of IndustrialMechs as a stopgap. Republic planetary militias thickened their lines with them. When the Capellans moved to exploit the Republic’s weakness, they also supplemented their forces with MODs - notably, the Maskirovka stirred up local partisan forces, often armed with MODs, to fill out the CCAF's lines; these would become the Tikonov Guards. Other states used IndustrialMech MODs as needed, but by 3136, the golden age of the MOD was over - “they’d always been a desperate compromise while nations rearmed, and now ’Mechs and heavy conventional arms had largely supplanted their use on most worlds.”

In the background, MechWarrior: Dark Age released IndustrialMechs for its first few years, 2002-2004, representing 3132-3134 (the period covered by Era Digest: Dark Age). They were released through the time when all the factions on the field were drawing from the same RAF armouries and whatever they could cobble together in Republic territory. They were also released through the start of the Capellan invasion, they were even released into the start of the Falcon incursion – and past that, when the other Successor States entered the game, none were released.

Recommended Reading

• Field Manual: 3085 is the Republic of the Sphere sourcebook, heavily expanding on the original Dark Age: Republic of the Sphere outline. I recommend it as a Republic starting point in general, and here on the MMRP in particular.
• Dark Age: 3132-3134 INN collects the INN web articles from the first two years of MWDA. Many of these articles lay out the early Republic policies (including the MMRP) and core political faultlines. The Archangel statement is included here – I strongly recommend reading it.
• Empires Aflame gives more detail on the MMRP, its enforcement, and the state of the mercenary industry in the Republic era.
• Notes on how major powers secretly evaded arms restrictions over the Republic era are scattered, unfortunately. Sword of Sedition brings it up momentarily in chapter 5, albeit as Julian Davion’s supposition. Era Report: 3145 and Interstellar Players 3: Interstellar Expeditions give clearer statements that all the Great Houses secretly built up arms over the Republic era. The forgotten Dark Age: Republic of the Sphere post-Fortress expansion is also explicit.
• The Master Unit List helps show just what equipment states decided to let go of over the peace. Watch the number of IntroTech designs in the Inner Sphere go into freefall from the Jihad era to the Dark Age.