The creation of fictional nations for the sake of training exercises is not a new thing. For my Command exercise scenarios, I have gone one step further from simple “REDFOR” and made several fictional countries, with interesting results.
Suffolkistan
From: SEAL Submarine Exercise.
Suffolkistan is a fictional designation for the real area of Suffolk County, Long Island. It borders the friendly Kingdom of Nassau. The name was purely geographic.
Pomerancovy
From: Better Bullets.
In real exercises, the opponent is frequently known as “Orange”, and I wanted a pun on it, similar to “Red-Land”, aka Krasnovia. Unfortunately, my bungled machine-translated Czech produced an adjective related to “Orange, the fruit” rather than “orange, the color”. Oh well. Romanes they go the house.
Cabotia
From: One Ship, One Country.
Cabotia is a fairly involved country in my other fiction. While in there, it’s something odd and unusual, in the scenario it’s a basic OPFOR state. To be honest, at that point Cabotia was a basic, generic nation at the time, and I hadn’t come up with its idiosyncrasies when I made that scenario.
(Such idiosyncrasies include an army with 8,000 generals in it, but that’s another story).
Turkic Republic
From: Not yet.
The Turkic Republic is an amalgam of Central Asian states meant to represent a post-Soviet OPFOR. The weirdest part is that even though I haven’t actually used the Turkic Republic in a scenario yet, it’s oddly detailed. While these OPFOR punching bags can be anything the situation calls for, the country used in a semi-realistic fashion is an interesting example of technological progress. They start off in the early 1990s, with late-USSR surplus gear, as a peer opponent. As technology moves on, they become a second-rate opponent with the same equipment.
Along with Cabotia, the Turkic Republic has also been developed as a “real” country, being a dictatorial ex-Soviet state whose birth can be traced by a decision to fold many of the Central Asian SSRs into one while the USSR still existed. Depending on my mood, it’s either:
- An aggressive oil-fueled regional power.
- A low-end state walloped by post-Soviet collapse in constant conflict with its bigger rivals to the north and east.
- A crumbled wreck beset upon by civil wars.
And there it comes full circle. For can one not think of viable training scenarios for all three? A conventional conflict against the first, the handling of a dubious ally in the second, and a peacekeeping or other intervention in the third?