Jack of Harts

One historical note of relevance is that the American federal government never truly dissolved. There was always someone claiming the Presidency, though historians do not typically recognize the non-elected Presidents of the time. There was a Congress, though its majority was selected via proven widespread voter fraud and there was widespread protests against the Impeachments of the final elected Presidents. And there was a Supreme Court, though the Post-Impeachment Presidents packed it with friendly judges to secure friendly rulings. The important point is that there was always a federal government claiming legitimacy in Washington D.C. But both a majority of Americans and the American States considered it illegitimate, and when it lost the power of the purse that federal spending had once guaranteed, it fell into irrelevancy. The bureaucracies and federal law enforcement agencies came apart without funding and the willingness of local jurisdictions to work with them. And when the non-elected Presidents attempted to mobilize a military whose funding they had already looted to fund their social goals, they found little remained of the once vast American military machine that would still answer their call.

Fort Bliss, Holloman Air Force Base, and the other military reservations around White Sands housed some of the smartest and brightest of minds in the world, gathered from all over America. They were ambitious and capable, intelligent and relentless in the pursuit of their duty. They fought the enemies of America, researched new methods of doing so, and trained America’s allies in the furtherance of that goal. Those strengths made them one of the premiere American military bases in the Continental United States. And when the American federal government collapsed under the weight of its own debt, those strengths became weaknesses. The only thing the intelligent and ambitious soldiers who performed their jobs so well asked was that the government give them enough money to support their families. The federal government failed to do that.

Fort Bliss was one of three major United States Army Forts in Texas when the Second Great Depression began. It spread out from its headquarters in El Paso into New Mexico to the White Sands Missile Range where the first nuclear bomb was tested, which linked it with Holloman Air Force Base. It was a massive complex of interconnected military reservations just north of the Mexico border that housed an entire combined arms armored division, multiple fighter wings, a joint task force devoted to fighting drug cartels and terrorists, military research and development programs, and training cadres from all over America and the world. It trained and worked with foreign militaries from as near as Mexico to as far as India, and was a vital cog in the machine that ran and oversaw the Mexican-American border. And when the federal governments on both sides of that border collapsed, everyone looked to it for support in troubled times.