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Knockout 2022

KNOCKOUT 2022


The Brazilian-American conflict had taken a toll on the American war machine. Throughout its duration, a massive amount of ordinance, cash, military hardware and industrial capacity had been expended. The lives of tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers alike littered battlefields across Venezuela and Ecuador, the former being currently reduced to the brink of anarchy, the latter with hundreds of thousands of displaced and terrorized citizens. For the US, the political and financial toll would be far steeper and with deeper consequences than actual military casualties and losses.
At this moment, however, the American war machine was in full gear doing what it does best: annihilating opponents through the night and weight of superior firepower and technology. The Brazilian government, stopped on all advancing fronts, cautiously attempted to bring the US to the negotiating table. They still held large tracts of land and the Americans didn't seem to have the strength on the ground to be able to push the massive Brazilian ground formations back to their homeland. Additionally, thousands of Venezuelan and Ecuadorian citizens living all across the frontlines and rear of the Brazilian army ensured the US and its allies would not use tactical nuclear weapons on Brazilian formations, as they have in the past against the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe. Brazil's most important asset of the war was, unexpectedly, the massive Amazon rainforest. Home to an immeasurable amount of natural wildlife as well as a considerable percentage of the entire world's oxygen-creating trees, the rainforest practically ensured the US would never detonate strategic nuclear weapons on South American soil, as the fallout could easily obliterate large areas of the jungle, considered by many to be one of the few remaining natural treasures of the human race. This same forest was worked extensively by the Brazilians throughout the last century, filling its expanse with secret bases, tunnels and passageways into their hostile neighbors, from which short and medium-ranged cruise missiles, AA missile batteries, and sabotaging special forces emerged deep behind enemy lines to wreak havoc on unsuspecting areas. Due to the forest's canopy, America's vast satellite and spy plane network was practically useless, and they had yet to find an effective counter. For all intents and purposes, at least for the foreseeable future, the South American ground war was a stalemate at best, constantly siphoning a massive percentage of American assets badly needed elsewhere.
Old-school HUMINT sources would prove to be Brazils downfall in the end. The US was hard at work probing Brazilian messages, officer meetings, and military plans, scouring through millions of data sets in hope of finding a weakness in Brazil's strategy. America's elite, goliath information apparatus was able to find just that. American casualties in the air were so far quite low, as American aircraft would strike out together in order to counteract Brazil's seemingly endless supply of fighters. This ensured American jets would have local air superiority and would use this window of opportunity to carry out CAS and deep-strike missions against targets of opportunity. A key discovery was that the Brazilians had, quite literally, no counter for fifth-generation stealth aircraft. Although modern, all their air-search and AEW aircraft and ground radars were ill-equipped to detect stealth planes, and previous American figures of safe non-detection distances were greatly improved. Second, the Brazilian industry was faltering. Many of its factories, industrial sites and mines were operated by manual labor, of which Brazil had plenty. Some key industrial materials, however, including aluminum, high-grade steel, aviation fuel, and micro-electronics were manufactured in massive, automated complexes. These cornerstone materials, if Brazilian production were to take a large hit, could cause a logistical and industrial bottleneck the Brazilians would never recover from. The fact that these complexes were automated would ensure that the expensive and foreign robot machinery would be lost to the Brazilians forever, as trade embargoes and blockades now set would ensure these machines to be irreplaceable.
The combination of these two pieces of valuable information allowed American military leadership to come up with a bold plan that could lead to a quick end to the war, placing the US and its allies in a favorable position in the negotiating table, and without the need of conceding any land to their traitors.
One of the largest and riskiest airstrike missions in history was about to occur, originating from three island bases, three mobile-offshore-bases, and no less than seven American carriers along Brazil's east coast...
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- This is the final mission of the US vs Brazil scenario series of 2022. Make sure you've played through Hell in the Backyard, Political Capital, Throat Punch, Race for the Falklands, Escalation and Stopgap, in that order, before playing this one. All these scenarios can be found on my workshop profile and on the 2022 steam collection.
- This is a massive air-attack scenario, ripe with ASuW (Ground & Naval) and AAW combat opportunities.
- The actual ship and aircraft numbers the US and its allies has in this scenario is staggering. For simplicity's sake, I have excluded all ASW, logistics and other support and minor combat ships, Maritime patrol aircraft, and submarines. Only the carriers, strike aircraft, and regional strategic air-defense ships have been modeled.
- You have an incredible amount of resources at your disposal. Try different tactics and strike patterns as you see fit. Enjoy!
- Due to the scenario's size and complexity, I've decided to make the Triumph/Scenario end score on the low side and easily achievable. Feel free to play on past the Triumph message, or alter the scoring if you like.