The following is a transcript of ARM military tribunal #7285611074, dated 8-2-29
ARMAND: For the purposes of the recording, will all present please identify themselves.
BRENNAN: This is Vice-Chairman Brennan, for the Recovery/Assessment Commission.
PRUITT: I’m Julia Pruitt from the Civilian Advisory Board
TIRSEN: Kent Tirsen, special advisor. I’m supposed to be some sort of adjutant, but mostly I’m just here for the coffee.
(chuckles from Brennan, Pruitt, Sheedy)
bin HASSAN: I’m Rear Admiral Kurt bin Hassan, Allied Rimworld Military, SpecForce coordinator and interim logistics supervisor.
SHEEDY: Lietenant-Commander Alice Sheedy, ARM SpecForces.
ARMAND: And I am Director-General Tcheky Armand, Commander-In-Chief of ARM. The matter we have convened to discuss is Lieutenant-Commander Sheedy’s conduct in the field in yesterday’s action,Now, if you’ll turn to page 18 of your briefs, you’ll find-
TIRSEN: Hold on. Julia, you’re director of the civvy-ad board, right?
PRUITT: Yes.
TIRSEN: So why didn’t you say that?
PRUITT: I don’t know. It just… didn’t occur to me.
TIRSEN: And Admiral, aren’t you in charge of all SpecOps now? You’re not just a coordinator anymore?
bin HASSAN: That’s right. Old habits die hard, I guess.
TIRSEN: But you’ve been in charge of SpecOps for two months now, right?
bin HASSAN: Yes, but I don’t-
ARMAND: Are you quite done, Mr. Tirsen?
TIRSEN: Yes. Sorry.
ARMAND: As I was saying, if you’ll turn to page 18 of your briefs, you will see an annotated list of major events in yesterday’s military action at Stockholm. At fourteen-twenty-eight hours local time, Lt. Cmdr. Sheedy issued an order to Lance Captain Overmars to retreat back to the northwest ridge whilst his tank lance was in battle, storming the CoRE encampment and assembly plant. Why?
SHEEDY: The battle was progressing poorly, sir. Our Flashes were getting shot to (slight pause) shot to bits by a laser battery on the far side of their air field and there was no room for the Bulldog to maneuver.
PRUITT: Excuse me, a Bulldog?
ARMAND: It’s a tank, Madame Director, of which the Lieutenant Commander had several.
SHEEDY: One, sir.
ARMAND: What?
SHEEDY: We had one M-Four-Sixty-Seven, sir. The rest weren’t ready yet.
ARMAND: One? What did the rest of your forward column consist of?
SHEEDY: (sigh) A mixed batch, really. We had some Thirty-Sevens, a few One-Oh-Sixes, like I said, and a One-Sixty-Five or two. The main assault force was M-One-Nineteens-
BRENNAN: Why did you not have any more of these… Bulldogs, Lieutenant-Commander?
SHEEDY: They were still being nanolathed at the northwest plant. We have two different models of ground vehicle prefabrication plants, Mr. Brendan. The Six-Twenty and the Nineteen-Eighty-Four; we call them Veeps and Veepees for short-
BRENNAN: It’s Brennan, not Brendan… ‘for short?’
ARMAND: They’re acronyms. Why did you attack when your assault force wasn’t prepared?
SHEEDY: We were led to believe time was of the essence.
ARMAND: Lightning assaults are something of a… specialty of yours, am I right? You took the mountaintop base on Titan in a matter of hours, and your record of commendations is as long as my leg-
SHEEDY: I can see what you’re getting at sir, but we weren’t prepared for the configuration of the CoRE base. They had positioned a missile turret centrally amidst the manufacturing plants, an M-Sixty-Seven. We had to single it out as a target if we were going to proceed, but taking it out put my light supports within range of another battery, most likely an M-Five-Eighty-Nine Gaat Gun. It tore the Thirty-Sevens and the Oh-Sixes to pieces.
TIRSEN: Uh, sorry, but you said ‘most likely’ a Five-Eight-Nine… this was never confirmed?
SHEEDY: (sigh) No, we… none of the light supports returned for their cameras to be analyzed.
bin HASSAN: None of them made it back? Not one?
SHEEDY: No sir. Zero.
ARMAND: But why were these ‘light supports,’ as you call them, leading your attack?
SHEEDY: The One-Nineteens couldn’t keep up; the base was too tightly constructed for them. Besides, I’ve used Oh-Sixes to storm bases before, and their speed makes up for their-
ARMAND: Then why didn’t it work this time?
SHEEDY: The base was squeezed onto a narrow embankment, under the drop-off of what I assume must have been continental-shelf seabed until the war.
BRENNAN: During Oresund, the wreckage pile-up on the seabed was so bad that the Atlantic was totally cut off from the Baltic for months. The nukes dried up a lot of the water. The Baltic’s still eighty feet below sea level.
TIRSEN: Jesus.
bin HASSAN: If the roads in the base were too constrictive for medium and large armor, was the base only defended by fixed emplacements?
SHEEDY: No, aircraft.
TIRSEN: Aircraft?
SHEEDY: Yes sir, gunships and heavy bombers.
bin HASSAN: The heavy bombers were performing strikes against moving units in-base?
SHEEDY: Not exactly, sir. The M-Two-Twenty Hurricane-type bomber has a small dorsal-mounted anti-infantry laser battery, much like our own M-Two-Oh-Nines. They were performing medium-altitude strafing runs over the embankment. Most of the time, they’re a nuisance compared to the Two-Twenty’s main payload, but they proved a sufficient deterrent for the light armor. We took most of the heat from the gunships, though. Those M-Two-Ninety-Fours pack a real wallop.
bin HASSAN: The CoRE commander was not hesitant to send in aircraft, even though you had a SAM blanket from the One-Nineteens?
SHEEDY: Apparently not, sir.
PRUITT: You saw all this?
SHEEDY: We have fairly reliable footage from the surviving vees, plus I was less than a klick away in my Em-See-See at the forward command post.
ARMAND: You should have pulled the lights back and cordoned off the base with the Samsons, and used artillery to take out those guns.
SHEEDY: It was a battle, sir. Structured approaches don’t always occur to you when your men are dying.
ARMAND: You forget yourself, Lieutenant-Commander. I am a combat leader as well, and am fully aware of what it feels like to be in battle. This was not a battle, it was an unqualified disaster.
TIRSEN: That’s… a bit of an armchair-general thing to say, Tcheky-
ARMAND: Tirsen! This is not your place to intervene. (pause) Moving on, once your retreat was issued, you also issued a halt-construction order on an M-Ten-Ten Retaliator-type nuclear missile launcher at Fourteen-Thirty-Three hours. Why? A low-yield nuclear assault would have certainly spared the lives of your men.
SHEEDY: We were having a resource-management problem. The generator wasn’t up-and-running quite yet, we were still reliant on solar power at the time, plus metal was tied up in nanolathing the armor. I realized during the assault that the embankment on which the CoRE base was constructed was narrow enough for the whole base to be well within big-gun range for our ships, definitely the Conqueror- and ¬Millennium-class cruisers and possibly even the smaller Enforcers as well.
ARMAND: Explain what happened next, please.
SHEEDY: After reviewing some locations, I decided to place a shipyard between our end of the north embankment and a small island. There was a limited approach for enemy ships, plus air cover from the Samsons and M-Seventy-Nines at the forward base. I did most of the grunt work myself in the Em-See-See, as well as laying the keels for the first couple of ships.
ARMAND: But again you came under attack from CoRE aircraft.
SHEEDY: Yes, Two-Twentys and Two-Nine-Fours again. They hit us hard, taking out two Enforcers, the Davids and the Syzygy, which were lost with a total of eighteen casualties. We had no real air support, as the AA on the Skeeters is piss-poor, especially in the low visibility we had.
PRUITT: I was lead to understand there were specific ships to counter aircraft, (papers being shifted) the, uh, Ranger- and Archer-class…
SHEEDY: They were unavailable to us, Ma’am, due to the complexity of their propulsion and weapons calibration systems. The Em-See-See has so much surveillance and sensory equipment crammed into it that there’s simply no space for advanced engineers; there’s only combat personnel in them, and all the naval crews are vessel-dedicated; the engineers only know the specifics of their own ships. Navy regs also state that the engineer double as a weapons technician when in a combat scenario, so I couldn’t pull anyone off the crews anyway. The Valks flew in some warship engineers later on, but at that point it was pretty much all over.
ARMAND: What had happened?
SHEEDY: Well, what had happened was that the Enforcers saved the day, really. They’re slow, but they’re relatively cheap and those Eight-Ninety-Eights on their stern have better range and power than I gave them credit for. They took out all the CoRE emplacements on the central island. In the end, we didn’t really need the big cruisers.
ARMAND: But what was your purpose in sending in the subs?
SHEEDY: The subs?
bin HASSAN: The report shows that at Fourteen-Forty hours, you began sending Lurker-class submarines north-east in the direction of the CoRE base, and that you constructed a sonar station on the route, which was destroyed and relocated several times, most likely by aircraft or long-range artillery, and that an entire squadron of six subs went down with all hands on board – that’s two hundred and twenty two lives, by the way – and that, after all that, you sent in another two subs-
SHEEDY: Sir, I sent those subs in to clear the channel between the central island and the north embankment. What happened was… an unlucky accident, sir.
bin HASSAN: An unlucky accident?
SHEEDY: Yes, sir. As I surmised, the enemy regiment was attempting to construct a fleet and readying naval defenses in the channel. I decided to clear the channel step-by-step; the clearance on both sides of the channel was so slim that it would be like shooting fish in a barrel, once I’d taken out the defenses.
PRUITT: But this did not go according to plan, I take it.
SHEEDY: No ma’am. The sub squadron encountered an enemy Em-See-See on the bottom of the channel. I ordered them to retreat.
PRUITT: Why?
SHEEDY: Nuclear fallout.
PRUITT: Excuse me?
TIRSEN: All Em-See-Sees run on nuclear power. You light one up, it’s like setting off a low-yield nuke in your face.
bin HASSAN: The design is by necessity quite volatile; it’s what enables Em-See-Sees to construct entire bases in a matter of minutes. The blast radius can be up to a kilometer wide.
ARMAND: What happened next?
SHEEDY: The subs retreated alright, but bumping into an Em-See-See on an armed recon must have put the fear of God into those sub commanders: they let loose with everything they had on the way out. The Eye-Eff-Sat records show nineteen independent torpedo trails in the last frame before the nuke whitewashed the imm.
bin HASSAN: Show some respect, Lieutenant-Commander. Commodore Jarvis was a friend of mine.
SHEEDY: No disrespect intended, Admiral. I’d probably crap myself and launch twenty torps at anything that moved if the same thing happened to me.
(Tirsen chuckles)
ARMAND: That is not the point. The point is that your ineptitude got a lot of people killed on what should have been an in-and-out mission. I understand that these are desperate times, and that if Commander Katanga were still with us, he would still be in command and could possibly have avoided this series of unfortunate… incidents, but the fact of the matter is that he is not, and we need someone competent in command of our SpecForce unit, and you are obviously not it.
PRUITT: The base was destroyed, Tcheky, and four complete manufacturing centers captured intact.
BRENNAN: Cut the woman some slack. When was the last time you sat on a nuke for three weeks, or won a battle that someone didn’t die in?
ARMAND: The assault was handled haphazardly and clumsily and while they might tolerate such ineptitude in the Initiative military, I will certainly not have it in mine. I move that Lieutenant-Commander Sheedy be removed from command of Special Forces, effective immediately.
SHEEDY: (sighs) Who would be given command?
ARMAND: That is not for you to decide or know. You are dismissed, and you are to turn in your commander’s stripes to me immediately.
SHEEDY: You’re demoting me as well?
ARMAND: Temporarily, until we can find a suitable place for you. Until then, report to Lieutenant-Colonel Foerster for your unit assignment. Now, dismissed.
(footsteps, door opens, closes)
ARMAND: I further move that SpecForces are temporarily disbanded and its personnel reassigned to combat attrition in civil defense and the Earth strike force. I’m sorry, Kurt, but I’m merging you with Gottfried’s corps in Madagascar.
bin HASSAN: It’s understandable. Maybe someday, when this is all over, I can take personal command of SpecForces myself.
ARMAND: Maybe. I seem to remember-
TIRSEN: Whoa, whoa, whoa, you’re disbanding SpecForces? Over this?
ARMAND: It’s not permanent, Jack, and no, it’s not ‘over this,’ it’s because I don’t trust Sheedy to lead a combat unit. She’s just not ready.
TIRSEN: We need a fast response unit. You think Blake and Wurth are just gonna sit around in Europe waiting for the rad to blow away? They’re gonna come at you from all sides with raids and hit-and-runs and when that comes, you’re gonna need Sheedy and her bunch. All those lightning raids you were talking about-
ARMAND:…were conducted when the unit was under Katanga. She’s lost without him. You heard her, Jack, ‘weren’t prepared for the configuration of the CoRE base…’ she’s a hack. The woman has no imagination and I cannot trust the lives of my men, our soldiers, to someone who cannot think on her feet.
(pause)
TIRSEN: And you all are just gonna sit there and take this?
PRUITT: I don’t see any other option, really.
BRENNAN: It’s a military call, Jack. This doesn’t change anything for my people. It’s not my problem. And as long as we’re still committed to taking back Earth, then it’s not even anyone’s problem. Not even yours, Jack.
(chuckles from Pruitt, Armand)
bin HASSAN: Well, if this is all over, some of us would like to get back to work.
ARMAND: Quite. Your concerns are noted, Mr. Tirsen. Perhaps when the time is right, your views on military organization will prove very well-founded, but now, I’m afraid, we must put such experimental thoughts on the back-burner. I move to adjourn.
End transcript.
ARMAND: For the purposes of the recording, will all present please identify themselves.
BRENNAN: This is Vice-Chairman Brennan, for the Recovery/Assessment Commission.
PRUITT: I’m Julia Pruitt from the Civilian Advisory Board
TIRSEN: Kent Tirsen, special advisor. I’m supposed to be some sort of adjutant, but mostly I’m just here for the coffee.
(chuckles from Brennan, Pruitt, Sheedy)
bin HASSAN: I’m Rear Admiral Kurt bin Hassan, Allied Rimworld Military, SpecForce coordinator and interim logistics supervisor.
SHEEDY: Lietenant-Commander Alice Sheedy, ARM SpecForces.
ARMAND: And I am Director-General Tcheky Armand, Commander-In-Chief of ARM. The matter we have convened to discuss is Lieutenant-Commander Sheedy’s conduct in the field in yesterday’s action,Now, if you’ll turn to page 18 of your briefs, you’ll find-
TIRSEN: Hold on. Julia, you’re director of the civvy-ad board, right?
PRUITT: Yes.
TIRSEN: So why didn’t you say that?
PRUITT: I don’t know. It just… didn’t occur to me.
TIRSEN: And Admiral, aren’t you in charge of all SpecOps now? You’re not just a coordinator anymore?
bin HASSAN: That’s right. Old habits die hard, I guess.
TIRSEN: But you’ve been in charge of SpecOps for two months now, right?
bin HASSAN: Yes, but I don’t-
ARMAND: Are you quite done, Mr. Tirsen?
TIRSEN: Yes. Sorry.
ARMAND: As I was saying, if you’ll turn to page 18 of your briefs, you will see an annotated list of major events in yesterday’s military action at Stockholm. At fourteen-twenty-eight hours local time, Lt. Cmdr. Sheedy issued an order to Lance Captain Overmars to retreat back to the northwest ridge whilst his tank lance was in battle, storming the CoRE encampment and assembly plant. Why?
SHEEDY: The battle was progressing poorly, sir. Our Flashes were getting shot to (slight pause) shot to bits by a laser battery on the far side of their air field and there was no room for the Bulldog to maneuver.
PRUITT: Excuse me, a Bulldog?
ARMAND: It’s a tank, Madame Director, of which the Lieutenant Commander had several.
SHEEDY: One, sir.
ARMAND: What?
SHEEDY: We had one M-Four-Sixty-Seven, sir. The rest weren’t ready yet.
ARMAND: One? What did the rest of your forward column consist of?
SHEEDY: (sigh) A mixed batch, really. We had some Thirty-Sevens, a few One-Oh-Sixes, like I said, and a One-Sixty-Five or two. The main assault force was M-One-Nineteens-
BRENNAN: Why did you not have any more of these… Bulldogs, Lieutenant-Commander?
SHEEDY: They were still being nanolathed at the northwest plant. We have two different models of ground vehicle prefabrication plants, Mr. Brendan. The Six-Twenty and the Nineteen-Eighty-Four; we call them Veeps and Veepees for short-
BRENNAN: It’s Brennan, not Brendan… ‘for short?’
ARMAND: They’re acronyms. Why did you attack when your assault force wasn’t prepared?
SHEEDY: We were led to believe time was of the essence.
ARMAND: Lightning assaults are something of a… specialty of yours, am I right? You took the mountaintop base on Titan in a matter of hours, and your record of commendations is as long as my leg-
SHEEDY: I can see what you’re getting at sir, but we weren’t prepared for the configuration of the CoRE base. They had positioned a missile turret centrally amidst the manufacturing plants, an M-Sixty-Seven. We had to single it out as a target if we were going to proceed, but taking it out put my light supports within range of another battery, most likely an M-Five-Eighty-Nine Gaat Gun. It tore the Thirty-Sevens and the Oh-Sixes to pieces.
TIRSEN: Uh, sorry, but you said ‘most likely’ a Five-Eight-Nine… this was never confirmed?
SHEEDY: (sigh) No, we… none of the light supports returned for their cameras to be analyzed.
bin HASSAN: None of them made it back? Not one?
SHEEDY: No sir. Zero.
ARMAND: But why were these ‘light supports,’ as you call them, leading your attack?
SHEEDY: The One-Nineteens couldn’t keep up; the base was too tightly constructed for them. Besides, I’ve used Oh-Sixes to storm bases before, and their speed makes up for their-
ARMAND: Then why didn’t it work this time?
SHEEDY: The base was squeezed onto a narrow embankment, under the drop-off of what I assume must have been continental-shelf seabed until the war.
BRENNAN: During Oresund, the wreckage pile-up on the seabed was so bad that the Atlantic was totally cut off from the Baltic for months. The nukes dried up a lot of the water. The Baltic’s still eighty feet below sea level.
TIRSEN: Jesus.
bin HASSAN: If the roads in the base were too constrictive for medium and large armor, was the base only defended by fixed emplacements?
SHEEDY: No, aircraft.
TIRSEN: Aircraft?
SHEEDY: Yes sir, gunships and heavy bombers.
bin HASSAN: The heavy bombers were performing strikes against moving units in-base?
SHEEDY: Not exactly, sir. The M-Two-Twenty Hurricane-type bomber has a small dorsal-mounted anti-infantry laser battery, much like our own M-Two-Oh-Nines. They were performing medium-altitude strafing runs over the embankment. Most of the time, they’re a nuisance compared to the Two-Twenty’s main payload, but they proved a sufficient deterrent for the light armor. We took most of the heat from the gunships, though. Those M-Two-Ninety-Fours pack a real wallop.
bin HASSAN: The CoRE commander was not hesitant to send in aircraft, even though you had a SAM blanket from the One-Nineteens?
SHEEDY: Apparently not, sir.
PRUITT: You saw all this?
SHEEDY: We have fairly reliable footage from the surviving vees, plus I was less than a klick away in my Em-See-See at the forward command post.
ARMAND: You should have pulled the lights back and cordoned off the base with the Samsons, and used artillery to take out those guns.
SHEEDY: It was a battle, sir. Structured approaches don’t always occur to you when your men are dying.
ARMAND: You forget yourself, Lieutenant-Commander. I am a combat leader as well, and am fully aware of what it feels like to be in battle. This was not a battle, it was an unqualified disaster.
TIRSEN: That’s… a bit of an armchair-general thing to say, Tcheky-
ARMAND: Tirsen! This is not your place to intervene. (pause) Moving on, once your retreat was issued, you also issued a halt-construction order on an M-Ten-Ten Retaliator-type nuclear missile launcher at Fourteen-Thirty-Three hours. Why? A low-yield nuclear assault would have certainly spared the lives of your men.
SHEEDY: We were having a resource-management problem. The generator wasn’t up-and-running quite yet, we were still reliant on solar power at the time, plus metal was tied up in nanolathing the armor. I realized during the assault that the embankment on which the CoRE base was constructed was narrow enough for the whole base to be well within big-gun range for our ships, definitely the Conqueror- and ¬Millennium-class cruisers and possibly even the smaller Enforcers as well.
ARMAND: Explain what happened next, please.
SHEEDY: After reviewing some locations, I decided to place a shipyard between our end of the north embankment and a small island. There was a limited approach for enemy ships, plus air cover from the Samsons and M-Seventy-Nines at the forward base. I did most of the grunt work myself in the Em-See-See, as well as laying the keels for the first couple of ships.
ARMAND: But again you came under attack from CoRE aircraft.
SHEEDY: Yes, Two-Twentys and Two-Nine-Fours again. They hit us hard, taking out two Enforcers, the Davids and the Syzygy, which were lost with a total of eighteen casualties. We had no real air support, as the AA on the Skeeters is piss-poor, especially in the low visibility we had.
PRUITT: I was lead to understand there were specific ships to counter aircraft, (papers being shifted) the, uh, Ranger- and Archer-class…
SHEEDY: They were unavailable to us, Ma’am, due to the complexity of their propulsion and weapons calibration systems. The Em-See-See has so much surveillance and sensory equipment crammed into it that there’s simply no space for advanced engineers; there’s only combat personnel in them, and all the naval crews are vessel-dedicated; the engineers only know the specifics of their own ships. Navy regs also state that the engineer double as a weapons technician when in a combat scenario, so I couldn’t pull anyone off the crews anyway. The Valks flew in some warship engineers later on, but at that point it was pretty much all over.
ARMAND: What had happened?
SHEEDY: Well, what had happened was that the Enforcers saved the day, really. They’re slow, but they’re relatively cheap and those Eight-Ninety-Eights on their stern have better range and power than I gave them credit for. They took out all the CoRE emplacements on the central island. In the end, we didn’t really need the big cruisers.
ARMAND: But what was your purpose in sending in the subs?
SHEEDY: The subs?
bin HASSAN: The report shows that at Fourteen-Forty hours, you began sending Lurker-class submarines north-east in the direction of the CoRE base, and that you constructed a sonar station on the route, which was destroyed and relocated several times, most likely by aircraft or long-range artillery, and that an entire squadron of six subs went down with all hands on board – that’s two hundred and twenty two lives, by the way – and that, after all that, you sent in another two subs-
SHEEDY: Sir, I sent those subs in to clear the channel between the central island and the north embankment. What happened was… an unlucky accident, sir.
bin HASSAN: An unlucky accident?
SHEEDY: Yes, sir. As I surmised, the enemy regiment was attempting to construct a fleet and readying naval defenses in the channel. I decided to clear the channel step-by-step; the clearance on both sides of the channel was so slim that it would be like shooting fish in a barrel, once I’d taken out the defenses.
PRUITT: But this did not go according to plan, I take it.
SHEEDY: No ma’am. The sub squadron encountered an enemy Em-See-See on the bottom of the channel. I ordered them to retreat.
PRUITT: Why?
SHEEDY: Nuclear fallout.
PRUITT: Excuse me?
TIRSEN: All Em-See-Sees run on nuclear power. You light one up, it’s like setting off a low-yield nuke in your face.
bin HASSAN: The design is by necessity quite volatile; it’s what enables Em-See-Sees to construct entire bases in a matter of minutes. The blast radius can be up to a kilometer wide.
ARMAND: What happened next?
SHEEDY: The subs retreated alright, but bumping into an Em-See-See on an armed recon must have put the fear of God into those sub commanders: they let loose with everything they had on the way out. The Eye-Eff-Sat records show nineteen independent torpedo trails in the last frame before the nuke whitewashed the imm.
bin HASSAN: Show some respect, Lieutenant-Commander. Commodore Jarvis was a friend of mine.
SHEEDY: No disrespect intended, Admiral. I’d probably crap myself and launch twenty torps at anything that moved if the same thing happened to me.
(Tirsen chuckles)
ARMAND: That is not the point. The point is that your ineptitude got a lot of people killed on what should have been an in-and-out mission. I understand that these are desperate times, and that if Commander Katanga were still with us, he would still be in command and could possibly have avoided this series of unfortunate… incidents, but the fact of the matter is that he is not, and we need someone competent in command of our SpecForce unit, and you are obviously not it.
PRUITT: The base was destroyed, Tcheky, and four complete manufacturing centers captured intact.
BRENNAN: Cut the woman some slack. When was the last time you sat on a nuke for three weeks, or won a battle that someone didn’t die in?
ARMAND: The assault was handled haphazardly and clumsily and while they might tolerate such ineptitude in the Initiative military, I will certainly not have it in mine. I move that Lieutenant-Commander Sheedy be removed from command of Special Forces, effective immediately.
SHEEDY: (sighs) Who would be given command?
ARMAND: That is not for you to decide or know. You are dismissed, and you are to turn in your commander’s stripes to me immediately.
SHEEDY: You’re demoting me as well?
ARMAND: Temporarily, until we can find a suitable place for you. Until then, report to Lieutenant-Colonel Foerster for your unit assignment. Now, dismissed.
(footsteps, door opens, closes)
ARMAND: I further move that SpecForces are temporarily disbanded and its personnel reassigned to combat attrition in civil defense and the Earth strike force. I’m sorry, Kurt, but I’m merging you with Gottfried’s corps in Madagascar.
bin HASSAN: It’s understandable. Maybe someday, when this is all over, I can take personal command of SpecForces myself.
ARMAND: Maybe. I seem to remember-
TIRSEN: Whoa, whoa, whoa, you’re disbanding SpecForces? Over this?
ARMAND: It’s not permanent, Jack, and no, it’s not ‘over this,’ it’s because I don’t trust Sheedy to lead a combat unit. She’s just not ready.
TIRSEN: We need a fast response unit. You think Blake and Wurth are just gonna sit around in Europe waiting for the rad to blow away? They’re gonna come at you from all sides with raids and hit-and-runs and when that comes, you’re gonna need Sheedy and her bunch. All those lightning raids you were talking about-
ARMAND:…were conducted when the unit was under Katanga. She’s lost without him. You heard her, Jack, ‘weren’t prepared for the configuration of the CoRE base…’ she’s a hack. The woman has no imagination and I cannot trust the lives of my men, our soldiers, to someone who cannot think on her feet.
(pause)
TIRSEN: And you all are just gonna sit there and take this?
PRUITT: I don’t see any other option, really.
BRENNAN: It’s a military call, Jack. This doesn’t change anything for my people. It’s not my problem. And as long as we’re still committed to taking back Earth, then it’s not even anyone’s problem. Not even yours, Jack.
(chuckles from Pruitt, Armand)
bin HASSAN: Well, if this is all over, some of us would like to get back to work.
ARMAND: Quite. Your concerns are noted, Mr. Tirsen. Perhaps when the time is right, your views on military organization will prove very well-founded, but now, I’m afraid, we must put such experimental thoughts on the back-burner. I move to adjourn.
End transcript.
