Jay Allan - The Cost of Victory

The Confederacy was struggling for its very survival when the other superpowers began sending expeditions through the newly discovered warp gates. By the time the RIC made it into space in significant force, many of the choke point systems were occupied, and the Russians were compelled to fight hard to assemble a small collection of colonies.

When the world economy began to collapse, the nations of South America suffered catastrophic depressions followed by mass starvation and revolution. Warfare erupted throughout the continent, as nations and shattered remnants of nations fought each other savagely for a dwindling pool of resources.

Eventually, a brilliant Venezuelan warlord named Gabriel de Santos conquered most of the northeastern portion of the continent. The formation of the Western Alliance, and the resulting increase in U.S. military power created a fear that South America would fall under Alliance domination. Fanning these fears, de Santos was able to unite about half of the continent under his rule, and he declared himself emperor. Several decades of war were required to subdue the rest of the South America.

The newly formed empire was in ruins and economically prostrate, and it was left to the conqueror's son, Gabriel II, to rebuild the shattered realm and attain true superpower status. By the time this reconstruction was sufficiently complete to support a program of space exploration, the other powers had sewn up all the lucrative systems. The SAE has the smallest collection of colonies, and this cluster has no known warp gates leading to unclaimed space. The empire cannot expand in space without taking someone else's real estate, and they lack sufficient force to do so alone. As a result, the SAE strategy has been to seek opportunities to align with stronger powers to attain its goals.

SAE space forces consist of quasi-irregulars supplemented by a very few elite Imperial Guard units. SAE worlds are owned and operated by major corporations, which field their own private armies. It is common for these forces to be hired out as mercenaries to any power that can pay and not unheard of for SAE troops to be fighting on both sides of a war.

In the years just before the start of the Unification Wars, several small U.S. colonies were established on the surface of Mars, followed by similar settlements from China, Russia, Japan, and the U.K. While the nations of Earth fought decade after decade of increasingly savage and destructive war, these colonies survived, prospered, and grew.

Millions wished to escape from the cataclysm occurring on Earth, and the Martian colonies had their pick of immigrants. Consisting almost entirely of the highly skilled and educated, the Martian Exodus, as it was called, created somewhat of a "brain-drain" on Earth, but fueled the expansion and prosperity of the Mars colonies.

When the Treaty of Paris was signed and the nations of Earth again focused on space exploration, they found that the Martians, as they called themselves, felt they were independent of any Earth authority. They banded together into a loose confederation and demonstrated that Mars was quite capable of defending itself, possessing what was at the time the largest fleet of spacecraft of any nation.

While the population of Mars was tiny compared to that of the superpowers, it was almost entirely comprised of productive elements. Where the superpowers had crime ridden, poverty stricken, and useless cities, the Martians had a well ordered and highly educated society. Where the powers of Earth were devastated, exhausted by war, and plagued by crumbling infrastructure, Mars was a high-tech and productive society. The superpowers had no viable choice but to accept the Confederation as an independent power.

By far the smallest of the powers, the Confederation relies upon small, well-trained, and superbly equipped ground units to maintain its position in the interstellar race. The Confederation is the least expansionist of the powers, and while it dominates the moons and asteroids of the Sol system, it has a very small group of interstellar colonies. Mars rarely intervenes in the wars between the other powers, preferring to maintain a policy of armed neutrality.