Charnean Army
| Charnean Army | |
|---|---|
| ⵉⵖⵔⵓⴷⴰⵏ ⵞⴰⵔⵏⴰⵏ ⴰⵊⵁⴰⵏⴰⵏ Iɤrudan Charnan Ajhanan | |
 Flag of the Charnean Army | |
| Founded | 1 October 1921 |
| Current form | 2023 |
| Service branches | Central Army Ranger Corps Air Corps Civil Guard |
| Headquarters | Agnannet |
| Leadership | |
| Commander-in-chief | Khyar Aziouel |
| Chief-of-Staff | General Rezkou Goma |
| Manpower | |
| Military age | 16 |
| Conscription | None |
| Active personnel |
|
| Reserve personnel |
|
| Expenditures | |
| Budget | $30 billion (2023) |
| Percent of GDP | 5% (2023) |
| Industry | |
| Foreign suppliers | Mutul Elatia Onekawa-Nukanoa |
| Related articles | |
| Ranks | See Ranks |
The Charnean Army (Tamashek: ⵉⵖⵔⵓⴷⴰⵏ ⵞⴰⵔⵏⴰⵏ ⴰⵊⵁⴰⵏⴰⵏ, Iɤrudan Charnan Ajhanan, ICA) is the combined military force of the Charnean state comprising both ground-based and aerial armed forces. Chief of State Khyar Aziouel serves as the formal commander-in-chief of the ICA, while its day to day operations are overseen by Chief of the General Staff Rezkou Goma. The current structure of the ICA is the result of a series of sweeping military reforms that took place following the death of its former supreme commander Martuf Lamine in May of 2023 and the ensuing political turmoil which took place within the Army and the broader state defense apparatus. Reforms included a reorganization of the ICA general staff and high command from the ground up, a significant reduction of the officer corps and a consolidation of forces into more centralized command and logistics structures. The reformed ICA has a three-pronged structure for its combat arms, made up of the Central Army which comprises the maneuver warfare elements of the Army, the Ranger Corps which encompasses its special forces and asymmetric warfare capabilities, and the Air Corps which acts as the air wing of the ICA. Recent reforms within the civilian government saw a push to disband many of the civilian law enforcement organs which had operated in most parts of Charnea for decades, replacing them with a fourth branch of the Army to be known as the Allon Arraxmat Ajhan or Civil Guard which is to double as a reservist force for the rest of the military to draw upon in times of crisis. The recently reconstituted General Staff, the newly established AAA, and many other organs of the ICA are expected to suffer in the short and mid-term thanks to inexperienced officers and the disorganization which follows blanket military and police reforms. Nevertheless, national leaders remain confident that the ICA's strength, which they believe lies with its experienced non-commissioned officers, has been kept intact despite the reorganization.
History
Agala War
The Agala War (1945-1947) was a seminal conflict for the Charnean Army, serving as its first true test on the field of battle. Planners in the preceding decades had largely organized and equipped the ICA to fight a defensive war in the desert, using mobility and many time tested battle tactics of the Tenerian nomads to interdict and frustrate any attempt to invade the desert country by an foreign power. The Agala conflict, which involved the secession of the Zarma people of southern Charnea from the country, forced this military body organized for an elastic defense against an outside invasion to redeploy the units at its disposal in improvises offensive strategies to defeat the forces of the Agala Republic and prevent the breakaway state from asserting its independence. The war allowed the ICA to field many of its modern weapon systems, including ground-attack aircraft, a rail-supported motorized logistics system and the then cutting edge A45 Torka armored car which would become the star of the Agala campaign. The Charnean Army acquitted itself well in conventional combat early on but soon proved vulnerable to the asymmetric warfare tactics of the Zarma partisans formed from the survivors of the Agala Republic's defeated military forces.
What appeared to be a quick victory for the better trained and equipped Charnean Army evolved into a protracted counterinsurgency in the Agala highlands in which the Zarma partisans often matched the ICA in mobility and tactical flexibility, moving with the support of Zarma tribesmen through the hills and valleys of the region and frequently outpacing their Charnean adversary attempting to pursue them. Humiliated by the victories of lightly armed tribesmen over the recently reformed and well equipped Charnean forces, the ICA leadership resorted to widespread depredations against the general Zarma populace of the Agala. In particular, the ICA culled the herds of livestock which served as the main livelihood for much of the Zarma people, creating a famine which gripped the Agala region. The military largely pulled out of the hills where they faced frequent insurgent attacks, returning to their bases in fortified towns, urban centers and army camps where they established refugee and famine relief centers, offering the Zarma people the choice between entering military custody voluntarily or facing the starvation which the ICA had engineered. Now stripped of their support network and facing food shortages themselves, the Zarma partisans were drawn out to fight in increasingly one sided engagements against the Charnean Army. The actions of the ICA aimed at defeating the partisans no matter the human cost are remembered today as the Zarma genocide, in which the culture and ancestral way of life of the Zarma people was systematically targeted and largely destroyed by Charnean soldiers throughout the course of the war.
The aftermath of the Agala War would prove highly consequential for the future of Charnea and its armed forces. Many soldiers and officers of the Charnean Army had ordered or themselves perpetrated serious offenses against the Army's own code of conduct, some of which were internationally recognized war crimes. While some individuals of the Charnean Army received international sanctions as a result of their actions, the overwhelming majority of Charnean war criminals received full pardons from the Charnean government. Extensive records of the wartime Charnean Army were classified or destroyed after the war, frustrating any subsequent efforts to uncover the true extent of Charnean war crimes in the Agala War. Following the end of the war, the Charnean government funded a resettlement program which relocated hundreds of thousands of Zarma refugees from their ancestral homeland to the major Charnea cities, especially Agnannet, where they would become a part of the industrial workforce of the nascent Charnean manufacturing and processing sectors. Alienated from their traditions and many important elements of their culture, the urbanized Zarma partially assimilated into the culture of these Tenerian cities, with less than 2,000 known speakers of the Zarma language remaining in modern Charnea. The wartime actions of the Charnean Army and the Charnean government's tacit endorsement of the measures deemed justified in the name of victory fundamentally changed the nature of the Charnean Army as an institution to an increasingly insular, more opaque body with the unconditional support of the Charnean civilian government.
Interwar Years
Ninvite War
Defense doctrine
As a desert nation entirely engulfed within the expanse of the Ninva, Charnea's production and population statistics face ever-present downward pressures due to the inter-related bottlenecks of water scarcity and insufficient production of foodstuffs which impose an upper limit on the size of the population and industrial base the Charnean economy can support. Although a savvy development scheme has proven capable of extending Charnea's limits, the persistent economic constraints the nation faces have made it unfeasible for it to raise the massive military force that would be necessary to actively patrol and defend the 12,000 kilometers of external frontiers against Charnea's many neighbors. However, the landscape of Charnea forces the population and the national industry to concentrate in six relatively compact regions scattered across the country, interlinked by the Great Backbone railway. Defending these six urban-industrial zones separated by hundreds of kilometers of desert is a challenging proposition but one that is more manageable than defending the entire de jure territory of Charnea. The Charnean national defense state has been built around a strategy of deep defense, prioritizing the capacity to delay the enemy, inflict casualties and threaten enemy logistics over holding ground or carrying out breakthrough operations.
The modern Charnean Army, however, is first and foremost a counter-insurgency force. Drawing from the lessons of Charnea's 20th century wars, the defense state has recognized that the threat to Charnean national integrity does not necessarily take the form of the conventional military force of a rival nation but rather the capacity of neighboring states to influence the minority groups which inhabit the Charnean periphery. Separatist movements have indeed proven to be the single greatest foe of the Charnean Army in terms of the number of battles and conflicts fought against such forces, while the prospect of a direct invasion by a foreign enemy seeking to cut off or capture the Charnea core regions remains a dire but unlikely possibility. Air mobility and reconnaissance have been the key capabilities on which the Charnean Army has placed emphasis when it comes to its counter-insurgency operations, which have been built around the Charnean vertical envelopment tactic known as Ahoyy. Another adaptation of the Charnean Army to the difficulties of counter-insurgency has been to adopt the asymmetric warfare tactics of their enemies, giving rise to the Desert Ranger Corps which serves as an independent hybrid intelligence-covert action arm of the ICA focused on combating insurgent forces.
While the Agala War demonstrated that the Charnean Army needed to adapt to face the most immediate threats of internal guerillas rather than foreign militaries, the Ninvite War proved that counter-insurgency could not be disjointed and treated as separate from conventional warfare against an opposing military. The resulting consolidation of counter-insurgency and conventional warfare gave rise to the modern Charnean Hybrid Defense Doctrine. The aim of the modern Charnean Army is to be above all a flexible force, both in the conventional sense of utilizing various platforms to achieve superior mobility and outmaneuver the enemy, and in the broader strategic sense of using every available avenue to apply pressure on the enemy no matter how unconventional. The concrete results of the Hybrid Defense Doctrine have been to reform the post-Ninvite War ICA to seek, to the extent that is practical, to procure equipment and train in tactics which can be put to use regardless of the nature of the opposing forces. In this way, the doctrine directly informs the organizational structure and material characteristics of the Charnean Army.
Manpower
The nature of the manpower available to the military has a profound effect on the military culture of the Charnean Army. Since the industrialization of Charnea over the 1920s, the manpower of the Charnean Army has been overwhelmingly drawn from the rural Tenerian population known as Kel Ajama Tenerians or simply Ajamites. The Ajamites represent a subset of Tenerians who did not take part in the initial urbanization waves and retained the ancestral nomadic customs of the Tenerians, and as a result did not benefit from the increases in standard of living that their urban cousins enjoyed through the success of Charnean industry. Lacking access to education and job opportunities, the Kel Ajama became an economically depressed demographic and as a result have flocked to the Charnean Army as a means to make a decent living and escape poverty. On the other side of the equation, the Charnean Army sought out Ajamite recruits over others as they were both pre-adapted to operations in the desert environment through their nomadic upbringing, and would accept a more modest rate of pay compared to their urban counterparts. Ajamite soldiers also have the tendency to stay in the Army for far longer periods than urban Tenerians as military service is perceived as a career unto itself rather than a temporary step to develop skills or a more lucrative career in the civilian sector. The result has been a general militarization of the Kel Ajama and by the same token the infusion of the austere culture of the nomadic desert-dwellers into the Charnean Army. Ajamites, who make up just 10% of the overall population, account for roughly 75% (aprox. 367,000) of the Army's servicemembers. This figure in turn represents 4 out of every 5 Ajamite males between the ages of 16 and 45.
The quarter of the Charnean Army which is not Ajamite can be further subdivided into a urban Tenerians and a multitude of non-Tenerian minority groups. Urban Tenerians generally fill the more technically demanding specialist roles in the Army which require extensive education and familiarity with specialized technological equipment. These positions normally correspond to low to mid-level officer ranks, making the urban Tenerians on average the highest paid demographic contingent of the Army. On the other end of the spectrum are the non-Tenerians, namely Charnean Gharibs and Deshrians, who fill the lowest paid ranks of paramilitary auxiliary units of the Charnean Army. The Ranger Corps is predominantly composed of non-Tenerian manpower, although it is a relatively small formation of just 7,000 total members.
The general mobilization that accompanied the escalation of the Ninvite War represents the only time in Charnea's modern history that a system of conscription has been put into practice. Under normal conditions, even during a mobilization for counter-insurgency operations, the Charnean Army operates as an effectively volunteer-only force thanks in no small part to the disproportionate numbers of Ajamite volunteers available for service. The 16-45 demographic, considered to be military-aged by the Charnean Army, is nevertheless required to register with the ICA Mobilization Office in case of the need for a mass mobilization in an emergency. However, those inscribed in the Mobilization Officer registers are not required to to preform any compulsory service. Charnean doctrine with regards to mobilization primarily relies on the use of standing police units and paramilitaries as a pool of reserve manpower to get the Army through the initial stages of a conflict and buy time for civilians to be mobilized and receive adequate training before being sent as reinforcements to the Army.
Equipment
Structure
| Charnean Unit | International Equivalent | Troop Numbers | Commander Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data ⴷⴰⵜⴰ |
Army | 100,000 - 200,000 | OF-10 |
| Tifekkawen ⵜⵉⴼⴻⴽⴽⴰⵡⴻⵏ |
Corps | 60,000 | OF-9 OF-8 |
| Tazunt ⵜⴰⵣⵓⵏⵜ |
Division | 15,000 | OF-7 |
| Tirezzag ⵜⵉⵔⴻⵣⴰⴳ |
Brigade | 2,000 - 5,000 | OF-5 |
| Afdan ⴰⴼⴷⴰⵏ |
Regiment | 1,000 | OF-4 |
| Akenasat ⴰⴽⴻⵏⴰⵙⴰⵜ |
Battalion | 500 | OF-3 |
| Taggayt ⵜⴰⴳⴳⴰⵢⵜ |
Company | 100 - 250 | OF-2 OF-1 |
| Abrek ⴰⴱⵔⴻⴽ |
Platoon | 24-50 | OR-9 OR-8 OR-7 |
| Tabedawt ⵜⴰⴱⴻⴷⴰⵡⵜ |
Section | 12-25 | OR-6 OR-5 |
| Hewwa ⵁⴻⵡⵡⴰ |
Squad | 12 | OR-5 |
The main body of the ICA is the Central Army which represents the whole of the standing ground combat forces of Charnea. The Central Army is organized into 17 independent divisions with a nominal strength of 12,000, alongside the 6,000 military and civilian personnel of the Central Command. Logistical, medical, fire support and mobility are fully integrated at the divisional level in order to enable each ICA division to operate independently in the field as needed. This is backed by the Charnean practices of flexible operations and the constant shuffling of all 17 active divisions all across the country to respond to geographically dispersed threats, rotate troops in and out of active combat zones, and as a measure to prevent commanders from forming ties with local figures which could lead to military corruption. This philosophy of autonomous units with integrated support structures continues from the divisional level all the way down to the battalion or even company level, enabling the larger Central Army formations to break up into smaller self-sustaining units as the situation demands. In order to maximize their tactical and operational mobility, the Central Army is primarily equipped with a number of wheeled fighting vehicles ranging from armored cars to wheeled IFVs. Wheeled platforms are preffered due to their lower cost and superior land speed compared to tracked vehicles, despite the latter's better ground pressure and thus superior performance in sandy desert terrain. Unarmored Carryall trucks are also used in large numbers for logistics and fire support roles.
The Central Army is supported by the forces of the Army Air Corps, an equivalent to the independent Air Force branch of other militaries that is subordinated to the Army's command structure. The Air Corps is staffed by 100,000 personnel. The Air Corps is subdivided into Tactical Air Groups, which are attached to the Central Army divisions and exist to provide the necessary airborne fire support and airlift capabilities for their missions, as well as eastern and western Strategic Air Groups which encompass the independent aerial warfare capabilities of the Air Corps, primarily long ranged bomber wings and strategic air defense units. The Tactical Air Groups are primarily equipped with attack helicopters, ground-attack aircraft and logistical support craft including fixed and rotary wing transport aircraft and carry out a combination of close air support, tactical bombing and logistical support missions. Close integration with lower level units of the Central Army has produced the well-known Ahoyy Companies, hybrid counter-insurgency formations specializing in airmobile warfare.
The smallest organ of the ICA's combat arms are the Desert Ranger Corps, an independent force comprising roughly 7,000 personnel. Their stated mission is expansive and covers most aspects of asymmetric and irregular warfare as well as covert operations, although they are best defined as a semi-autonomous military intelligence organ of the Charnean Army. The Rangers' organization consists of a main body of intelligence personnel with a focus on human intelligence and infiltration, with a much smaller complimentary force of highly trained special operations troops of acting on key intelligence gathered by their counterparts. Although they are specialized for counter-insurgency operations within Charnea, the Rangers have shown themselves capable in limited foreign deployments and are also earmarked as stay-behind forces in the event of a hostile invasion of Charnean territory.
There are two law enforcement organs under the auspices of the Charnean Army. The first and largest of these are the Civil Guard, which is planned to peak at a strength of 90,000. They function as a military gendarmerie intended to replace civilian police forces in many Charnean municipalities over concerns of corruption and infiltration by criminal elements. These new military law enforcement officers are expected to be drawn from a stock of new recruits trained for civilian policing tasks, although reserve and retired Central Army forces have been employed in these roles as a stopgap measure to make up the necessary numbers of officers as the organization emerges from its infancy. Civil Guards are organized in a similar principle to their combat arms counterparts, forming local units according to the security needs of the area. Their status as military personnel would also allow command staff to frequently shuffle personnel from place to place, a measure which is believed to greatly mitigate the risk of corruption. Deploying law enforcement personnel to areas with which they have no personnel connection is also intended to reduce the risk of corruption or criminal infiltration. Unlike the Civil Guard, the ICA Border Guards are treated as an integrated element of the Central Army rather than a separate service branch. However, they are both intended to function as a reserve manpower pool for the ICA combat arms to draw upon as needed.
Ranks
Commissioned Ranks
| OF-10 | OF-9 | OF-8 | OF-7 | OF-6 | OF-5 | OF-4 | OF-3 | OF-2 | OF-1 | OA | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tifinagh Latin Equivalent |
ⴰⵍⵖⴰⵍⵉⵎ Alɣalim Martial |
ⵣⴻⴳⵔⴻⵜ ⴰⵎⵏⴻⵔ Zegret Amner Major General |
ⵎⵏⴻⵔ Amner General |
ⴰⵎⴰⴷⵀⴰⵍ ⴰⵎⵏⴻⵔ Amadhal Amner Lieutenant General |
See OF-5 | ⴰⵍⴽoⵍⵏⴻⵍ Alkolnel Colonel |
ⴷⴰⵡⴰⵍⴽoⵍⵏⴻⵍ Dawalkolnel Sub-Colonel |
ⵎⴰⵙⵙⵉ ⵏ'ⴰⵍⵍⴰⵖ Massi N'Allaɣ Major |
ⴽⴰⵒⵉⵜⴰⵏ Kapitan Captain |
ⴰⵎⴰⴷⵀⴰⵍ Amadhal Lieutenant |
ⴰⵙⵓⵀⵓ Asuhu Aspirant |
Enlisted Ranks
| OR-9 | OR-8 | OR-7 | OR-6 | OR-5 | OR-4 | OR-3 | OR-2 | OR-1 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tifinagh Latin Equivalent |
ⵣⴻⴳⵔⴻⵜ ⴰⵊⵓⵜⴰⵏ Zegret Ajutan Adjutant-Major |
ⴰⵊⵓⵜⴰⵏ Ajutan Adjutant |
ⴷⴰⵡⴰⵊⵓⵜⴰⵏ Dawajutan Sub-Adjutant |
ⵣⴻⴳⵔⴻⵜ ⴽⵓⵎⴰⵏⴷⵉ Zegret Kumandi Sergeant-Major |
ⴽⵓⵎⴰⵏⴷⵉ Kumandi Sergeant |
ⴻⵖⴰⴼ Eɤaf Corporal |
See OR-1 | See OR-1 | ⵉⵙⴻⵔⴷⵓⵙⵙⴰ Iserdussa Soldier |