Alliance Colonial Defense Program

From FABT

The Alliance Colonial Defense Program (ACDP) was an outreach initiative commissioned by the Systems Alliance Armed Forces to extend Alliance protection and influence over third-wave outer human colonies that was enacted in December 2183 CE following the abductions of two outer colonies, Zion and Cyrene, by an unknown force. Having already wanted to exert further influence over the errant third-wave colonies, which had largely been set up in the Attican Traverse in order to escape Alliance administration, the program was given sufficient pretext with the disappearances of the Zion and Cyrene colonies, with Alliance military officials left puzzled by the abductions and unable to explain them, with all possible options, such as geth and slaver attacks ruled out due to the clean, evidence-free nature of the attacks, showing no signs of battle and meticulous enough to leave no witnesses as to the culprits. As theories were thrown around, the Alliance military received sufficient funding and approval to deploy military advisors to the outer colonies in order to build defenses to fight off attack and train up colonial guard detachments to defend the colonies in lieu of troops being deployed to occupy them, hoping this would satisfy paranoid civilians who were worried of the Alliance government asserting their will over them. Each colony would have a GARDIAN battery built to defend each of their colonies, acting as an anti-aerospace and anti-air defense network to ward off attack, with the colonial guard defending against a surface attack.

For this purpose, detachments of both the Systems Alliance Army and Systems Alliance Marine Corps were sent to each target colony to train these colonial guard units and oversee installation of the GARDIAN network. Colonies such as Horizon, Ferris Fields, Mindoir, Tiptree, Fehl Prime, Fargone and many other outer colony worlds were chosen, and despite resistance from a few, the Alliance were quickly able to train up numerous colonial guard units on every colony, although problems were had with installation of the GARDIANs, especially on lesser developed worlds, as the power requirements for the network were enormous and required large, subterranean generators to be built. Despite what the program attempted to do, this did not have the intended effect, and the abductions would only continue, with planets such as Ferris Fields, Horizon, Tyr, New Canton, Dobrovolski, Fehl Prime, Freedom's Progress and others being taken, with even large swaths of their colonial guard detachments and military advisors being victims as well, most of them taken before the GARDIAN could finish installation. Despite this, the program did not have some middling success, with the Abduction of Horizon foiled by Cerberus' intervention and use of the GARDIAN there to fight off the Collector assault, resulting in only half the colony being abducted, while the Abduction of Fehl Prime resulted in the complete destruction of a Collector cruiser in the process, despite the loss of the whole colony and the survival of only two of the military advisors. By the time the Alliance received confirmation of Collector involvement in the abductions from the survivors of the Fehl Prime attack in 2185 CE, the Normandy Squad had already destroyed the Collector Base, ending the abductions permanently. Despite the abductions being stopped, this was not public knowledge, and the Alliance kept it that way as they continued the program, also helping affected colonies to re-establish themselves after their respective attacks. The program officially ended with the Reaper War in June 2186 CE, with all program funding and resources ceased to be redirected to wartime operations.

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