The 2nd Corp War

Military: War

SovOil and Petrochem fail to negotiate with each other over newly discovered oil fields in the South China Sea and begin blowing each other up instead. Even cynical observers are shocked at the level of violence.

The Second Corporate War began as a misunderstanding between the oil giants Petrochem and SovOil. Relations began to sour between the two firms when a merger deal fell through at the eleventh hour. A huge drilling rig accident at a Petrochem platform then brought the two companies to blows in a conflict the likes of which the Pacific Rim had not seen since World War Two.   Initially, SovOil enjoyed a string of military victories, although both sides had severely crippled each other's oil facilities within a few weeks. Petrochem fought back hard, expending untold millions to regain the upper hand, at the cost of thousands of lives. Petrochem's success peaked with their surprise capture of the Spratly Island chain, and their assassination of SovOil founder and CEO Anatoly Novikovo. But it was still not enough. SovOil easily repelled Petrochem's follow-up offensive of October 2009, reducing Petrochem's forces in the Pacific to impotency. There was no formal surrender, but the war effectively ended with SovOil victorious.   The Second Corporate War had several ramifications. First, the war shocked the hell out of analysts and the public in general who believed that Corporate conflict could never elevate past the point the first war had reached. Second, this war marked the first time that a multinational firm actually publicly defied national governments. SovOil completely ignored international sanctions and did whatever it wished. Both sides used the smaller PacRim nations as extensions of their own armed forces, actively replacing administrations in some cases and installing friendlier ones. In fact, Petrochem's assassination of Novikovo was carried out with a squadron of modified Mirage 111 fighters on loan from Malaysia.   Worst of all, because of constant raiding by both sides against each other's oil refineries, drilling facilities, and pipelines, the war left most of the southern Pacific Rim badly polluted. The South China Sea, the focus of the conflict, became a lifeless chemical stew, all but uninhabitable for several decades. Entire national economies were ruined, and although SovOil was forced to pay reparations, no amount of money would ever undo the damage.