How the Coalition Holds Land

The Inner Elite of the Coalition States, as noted previously, are a highly-educated caste of psi-active men. They have access to the lore of pre-Rifts Earth, and in addition to making very inside jokes to amuse themselves they also mine it for useful and proven ideas to recycle for their own use. One of these ideas is the granting of land to soldiers upon completing their 25-year term of service.

The common Coalition soldier enters the Army at age 15 as a draftee, serves on active duty for 25 years straight and retires at age 40. This means that those soldiers survived 25 years of campaigning, combat and constant contact with a hierarchy demanding obedience to superiors and (as these men are commonly senior NCOs upon retirement) and compliance from subordinates. The Inner Elite, reading Roman and Chinese accounts of the use of retirees as settlers in contested territory, decided early on to recycle this idea for their own use.

Now it is commonplace for Coalition territory to be held by scores of small farmsteads centered around a small, fortified town. Each of these are the plots awarded to retiring soldiers, who continue their service to the state by acting as the local militia and staffing the local government. The order that they became accustomed to in the Army is the order that they maintain in their small communities, treating their wives and children as subordinates and each other more or less as peers. Since the state automates the farming, the men have plenty of time to patrol their area and play county sheriff; that they retain the Army-issued equipment that they retired with (and still get new stuff, just not as fast) means that would-be raiders often end up facing a militia comprised of some of the toughest that baseline Humanity can make--an entire town of Rambos, Master Chiefs, Sam Fischers, Snakes, etc.--and get wiped out. In a demon-haunted world, this is a necessity for conquest.

Through these means that Coalition government achieves several objectives. They keep old soldiers from causing trouble by giving them all significant rewards for service that are tangible (wives as well as land), puts them into a position of responsibility that they are suited to handle (maintain order over this area and ensure its productivity in all things), and ensures that if the need arises these veterans can be called back while in good shape and familiar with current technology. The land that the government claims is occupied and put to use, secured against raiders and skirmishers and likely to hold long enough for the Army to relieve them if necessary- and this also denies that same land to hostile entities.

(There is a different track for soldiers rendered unable to sire children; they get assigned to the sanctioned watering holes that the government uses to let the Army blow off steam, but that's another post.)