Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base woke up from over two centuries of slumber when the Shang dropped Yosemite Yards onto half of America. They did not care about the strike on the District of Columbia. Those were dirty rotten feds. They had done something to deserve it. Most Texans could come up with examples. Plural. It was the Yosemite Strike that brought the base to action. The Shang had killed Americans and Texans they cared about, so they activated every command affiliated with them in any way. If the units did not have the men to fight effectively, they called up full retirees, the descendents of those who had served on the base, or entirely new volunteers. They needed new blood to go to War, and Fort Worth JRB bustled with new activity and life. They reactivated more units than the base could support and sent them out to do battle throughout the stars. Some served under the American flag, others under a Texas flag, and some flew both. The War had come for Fort Worth JRB, and it would change the base forever.
Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base slept for over two centuries after the Second Great Depression. Soldiers, Airmen, and Marines stopped off there on the way to retirement or other jobs. Daily life went on as normal, clerks monitoring ammunition and weapon checks, or bringing in shipments of food for the weekends. Then a rotating assemblage of units would form up to refresh their skills before going back to their normal lives. It was a quiet life, interrupted only by natural disaster relief missions and basic training. More than one administration even entertained the idea of closing the base, but inertia and history kept it open. No one wanted the black mark of closing a base with Fort Worth JRB’s history on their own records. But they did lower some of the units based there into deep maintenance mode, administrative commanders in place with no men or women to command. Even Contact wasn’t enough to do much more than call up a week’s worth of active duty cleaning and training of those units that still had personnel. The aliens were not going to start anything, so Fort Worth JRB returned to its deep sleep once more.
The Second Great Depression, and the various wars and conflicts that happened during it, changed the world as we knew it. Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base survived them all to become one of many Republic of Texas reserve bases. Some may say the best of them, though others often disagree. But as the reserves generally do when the wars wind down, Fort Worth JRB settled back into a slower routine. Her people went back to their civilian jobs, assuming their companies had survived the chaos, or started a new life with a new job or vocation. Some went to space when America returned to that final frontier. They went to Mars and beyond in the decades that followed, all while maintaining a link to the military community of Fort Worth JRB. Ready to stand in defense of Texas and America should they be called back to duty again.
Not every battlefield Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base’s units fought on was one they expected to face. The Drug Wars were fairly simple. Kill the drug cartels. Texas gave them targets, and they serviced the targets. The Islamic Jihad’s mass use of human shields was a much more difficult challenge, though Texas had less exposure to that conflict than other States. The Cybernetic Wars were particularly complicated, but the reserve units at the base tended to use less technologically advanced weapons that were far more resistant to Rogue AI hacking attempts. The friendly AIs who would later form the AI Council were quick to help defend their most advanced weapons, such as the Cowboys’ F-35s. And when it came time to make a stand against the Chinese, Texas sent the Cowboys to make sure the lesson took. It is perhaps ironic that they ended up flying with the Chinese during the final assaults against the Singapore Collective. Then they returned home to Fort Worth JRB and began acclimating to the new world they had defended and helped create.
Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base housed numerous Army, Air Force, and Marine units, as well as a contingent of the Texas State Guard, when the Second Great Depression arrived. They ranged from normal troops, military police, artillery, cybernetic warfare, drone recon, and fighter and transport aircraft. The venerable C-130s and F-16s were the most numerous manned aircraft on base, but the Marine Corps Cowboys flew the newer F-35s. The joint base trained all of their units to work together, making them one of the best-integrated forces in Texas, even if their training levels were lower than line units. They were a reserve base, their troops spending most of their lives working for a living and only getting together for training and refreshing one weekend a month. But that was enough for them to know each other well, so when Texas decided to move against the Mexican drug cartels, Fort Worth JRB was able to send a combined force that could fight on any battlefield they expected to face.
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