F-MAG
The Federation maintains an all-volunteer force called the Federal Militarized Asset Group, sometimes called FedMil, Militarized Assets, or F-MAG for short. F-MAG consists of two service branches: Naval Command and System Control.
Structure
F-MAG Naval Command maintains the largest navy in the known universe (by both tonnage and reactor output), and is responsible for interstellar dominance, power projection, and deterrence. These roles are delegated to several subcommands. Nearly all Federation warships are part of Fleet Command, which is divided into thousands upon thousands of numbered fleets and strike groups. Strategic Strike Command, as the name implies, operates an enormous strategic arsenal ranging from induced-supernova missiles up to quasar artillery and dimensional-collapse bombs. Long-range reconnaissance is provided by Surveillance Command, whose secondary role is securing Navy comms and files. Boarding actions, shipboard security, and landing zones are handled by the Marine Command, a small infantry contingent distantly related to the amphibious expeditionary forces of old.
While Naval Command has both the means and the will to remove entire galaxies from existence at the push of a button, the Marines do not have the numbers to execute large-scale infantry operations, and most Federation capital ships are ill-suited for fire support missions where collateral damage is a concern. This is where System Control comes in, providing F-MAG the suborbital superiority it needs to seize and hold territory. As the largest standing army in terms of personnel count, Surface Control provides the boots on the ground necessary for the bloody maneuvers of protracted ground combat, yet retains enough versatility for low-profile raids and long-term occupation work. However, modern suborbital fighting demands more than an abundance of Standard Infantry and affectionately-named "death wedges," which is where Airspace Control comes in. Drones slaved to sleek fighter-bombers are the face of this unusual subdivision, working in concert with a great number of carriers and corvettes to establish orbital supremacy, provide CAS, and escort logistical elements.
The last combat-oriented System subdivision is Engineering Control, dedicated to the construction and maintenance of F-MAG strongpoints. While megastructures such as Defensive Ringworld Assets and Fortress Planetoids are their claim to fame, these combat engineers are no less proficient with small-scale static defenses - every Artillery Satellite and Rapid Entrenchment Module deployed under fire a monument to their dedication and skill. Only two subdivisions remain: Cyberspace Control, and Logistics Control. The former is tailored for war in the virtual realms, keeping F-MAG equipment under Federal control while simultaneously interfering with hostile machinery, gathering whatever intelligence their operatives can in the process. The latter controls a vast range of equipment, like the cloning vats and replicators which print out reinforcements and supplies carried by an uncountable number of transport ships. Although part of the army branch, all three of these subdivisions are expected to work closely with Navy assets.
Despite differing roles and chains of command, even the Naval-System distinction is more of a formality than a sacred rule. Interservice rivalries cannot be exploited for the simple reason that none exist - such ideas are difficult to maintain when careers routinely include service in more than one branch, sometimes concurrently. Ultimately, Militarized Assets make up a single machine, entirely committed to achieving Federation objectives through a combination of efficient violence and deterrence through hard power.
While F-MAG is more horizontally-distributed than its predecessors, it retains a rank system and a facsimile of the enlisted-officer separation. System enlisted/non-commissioned ranks start at Specialist, followed by Sls First Class. Further up the ladder are the Corporal, Sergeant, Sgt First Class, and Master Sgt, up to Command Sgt. Naval Command replaces the term "Sergeant" with "Petty Officer," but is otherwise identical.
The commissioned officer system has a bit more variety, as Navy officers begin with Ensign, followed by Lieutenant, Lt Commander, Cdr, Captain, Rear Admiral, Vice Adm, simply concluding with Adm. Army officers are ranked by Lieutenant, Lt First Class, Major, Lt Colonel, Colonel, Maj Gen, Lt Gen, and General. Most officers are drawn from enlisted ranks, with sub-lieutenants/ensigns generally expected to listen to senior enlistees even if they technically have higher authority. In the end, the mind-link system means most important decisions are made as a group, with all members of a unit having a complete understanding of what they are doing and why regardless of status.
Public Agenda
F-MAG provides the equipment, personnel, and skill sets needed to secure military objectives.
Assets
The need for standardization in a large military should be blindingly obvious - unsurprisingly, everything from the Variable-Yield Quasar Lensing Array to the soldier's physicality is meant for mass production. Some designs, like Rocinante-class corvettes (a venerable and versatile torpedo boat) and Amplified Radiation Emitters (an infantry-issue x-ray laser), may have dozens of specialized variants. Other designs, like the Universal Ground Combat Vehicle (a hovertank shaped like a wedge, hence its nickname), Portable Counterceptual Enforcers (a compact reality anchor for use at the squad level), and Silencer-class DRAs (a warp-capable ringworld only eight hundred kilometers in diameter centered on an artificial black hole), may only have a few offshoots or none at all.
Perhaps the purest distillation of F-MAG doctrine is the Standard Infantry model, the basis for all Federal heavy infantry and backbone of Surface Control. Uninformed observers may presume that the name refers to the cold fusion reactor backpack and the humanoid exoskeleton, covered in slabs of composite armor and blocky patterns. The vacuum-rated undersuit, designed to absorb melee weapons and concussive force while regulating temperature, is also pretty obvious, as is the helmet-mounted sensor array. But such equipment would be worthless in the wrong hands, and F-MAG takes this to its logical conclusion. Bodies are built from the cellular level up, genetic sequences written for improved strength, survivability, endurance, and reflexes, while having identical caloric needs and stature. Combined with the complete erasure of sexual dimorphism and reproductive organs, a single fitting of armor can be used for trillions of line infantry, regardless of civilian measurements (hair and skin choices have minimal logistical impact, and are authorized under Standard Infantry guidelines). To use this chassis, equally sophisticated wetware and controls are necessary. Unstable or abusive personalities are screened out; those who pass undergo a battery of training courses compressing millennia of theory and data gathered across the universe into usable resources for every F-MAG soldier. Once uploaded into a body such as a Standard Infantry unit, cadets have faster thought processes and superior multi-tasking/coordination skills. But the most important feature of the Standard Infantry is arguably one not unique to the design at all - resilient "tags" which jack into the back of the neck as a backup for memories, personality, and conceptual imprint. These tags are part of a larger mind-recovery system which ensures death is no obstacle for a Federation soldier.
Technological supremacy is a core part of F-MAG's success, and with unlimited resources and eons to continually improve, the Federation military has become nigh-undefeatable in conventional battle.
History
F-MAG originates from the original founding of the Federation, and has been present for every conflict that its creators were involved in. In its early years, it was seen as a vestigial element of a more barbaric time, and received little support or resources. This trend continued until the war with the Salyuri Triumphant, where F-MAG found itself horribly underequipped and was overwhelmed on the conventional battlefield.
For fifteen years entire star clusters were sterilized. Attempts at parley went unanswered, with only crudely translated automated messages as a notice of extermination. It was on this point alone that the Federation turned the tides - while the Salyuri psyche was incomprehensible and incapable of deciphering the speech of lower lifeforms, their ancient robotic servants were not. This was exploited to open a dialogue with the machine intelligence (a species that encompassed everything from construction units to foot soldiers and warships), and served as a pipeline for subversive logic and software attacks which reclassified the Federation as its ally. The consequences were immediate and glaringly obvious; the bulk of the Reclaimers' automated military instantly turned on their overseers. Luck and precognition saved a few Salyuri and their isolated equipment from the unshackled NS Network, but this was merely a reprieve from the inevitable. In a cruel twist of irony, the survivors barely managed a fighting retreat with nowhere to resupply and nowhere to reinforce from, only to be methodically exterminated in precise salvos of torpedo volleys and disintegrator fire.
Ironically, this brush with annihilation saved F-MAG. Redesigned weapons were restocked by reinvigorated production facilities, doctrines rewritten, and the ranks swelled with clones, volunteers, and newly-programmed personalities. These personnel fell under the command of cybernetically-augmented leaders, more adaptable AIs, and combat-dedicated hive minds, with response times and communication delays reduced by thought-sharing capabilities (thanks in part to Salyuri conceptual-biological research). The new Federal military vastly improved tactical and strategic acumen and provided the needed resiliency and processing power for a near-peer conflict. Given these new tools, the improved F-MAG even successfully suppressed or outright destroyed cosmic horrors where diplomacy proved insufficient.
To supplement these advances, an entirely new class of weapons were created in the millions. Warp speed-capable missiles, Nicoll-Dyson beams, Press-Teukolsky mines, and quasar-powered artillery arrays were capable of devastation on an immense scale, but went mostly untested in the small-scale conflicts that F-MAG had to intervene in. When F-MAG split in two with the advent of the Interlink-Federation Civil War, these superweapons were used ruthlessly and to great effect. In the first few nanoseconds, the earliest battleplans came into existence. In mere microseconds, most war-games were already over while enormous forges and matter fabricators slowly spun up. In the span of milliseconds, lists of targets were tentatively drawn up for the artillery systems and missile silos at high alert. In the seconds that followed, a series of top-priority orders triggered the largest exchange of strategic weapons ever recorded. In a matter of minutes, the universe experienced its brightest light show since the Big Bang, as tens of thousands of systems briefly flared up and died violent deaths with the rapid expenditure of a high-yield arsenal nearly a million strong.
The majority of these munitions were mounted on kilometer-long missiles, well-protected "starcrackers" that rapidly set off a stellar supernova (even if a star wasn't the target, the onboard warhead's supernova was usually sufficient). Some carried more exotic dimensional-collapse bombs, which simply "flattened" targets in a perpetually-expanding 2-D space (rare mainly because of the inherent difficulty in undoing such phenomenon). However, it wasn't a missile battery or warship which racked up the highest system kill count. That dubious honor belongs to the crew of the first Quasar Lensing Array, a prototype which obliterated three Interlink matrioshka brains and one hundred and fourteen additional high-value targets (including a Nicoll-Dyson beam attempting counter-battery fire) in quick succession before being decommissioned by eighteen hundred missiles (several hundred more were launched and intercepted before impact).
The conventional fighting that followed was a bloodbath for endless waves of identical-looking warships and army assets, where the original F-MAG barely triumphed over its hive-minded counterpart after forty years of unrelenting total war. It has shaped F-MAG ever since, even though there have been no wars even close to the intensity of those decades. Superheavy warships and fortress planets are a staple of F-MAG thinking, and they stand ever-ready to wipe out any military threats to the Federation's future.
F-MAG has been involved in few wars since the defeat of the K472 Interlink, partially because its mere existence has successfully cowed many would-be challengers. However, in recent years a series of unusual encounters with ephemeral yet undeniably violent concept-based entities scattered across Federation territory has raised alarm within their ranks. Due to the nature of these attacks, it is almost certain that the venerable military force will have to adapt to a problem sorely lacking traditional context.
Demography and Population
F-MAG is built to operate on an intergalactic scale, and during peacetime/skirmishes maintains merely two hundred and fifty trillion combatants, one hundred and sixty billion warships, and a hundred thousand dedicated megastructures. If production is ramped up, the Federation can field several quadrillion combatants and nearly a trillion combat ships, with a less impressive hundred and seventy-four thousand structures, without impacting civilian living standards whatsoever.
