Outer Colonies Conflict

The Outer Colonies Conflict, or Rebellion, is the name given to an undeclared civil war fought between Earth's primary military, scientific, and exploratory agency, the United Space Command and various loosely organized groups of rebels, collectively known as the revolutionaries, over control of the Outer Colonies, which began in the year 2697.
Originally, the breakaway movements started as disquiet against the Colonial Administration Council's oversight of the Outer Colonies, with the colonists tired of the organization's often overbearing bureaucracy. It first started as peaceful protests, and after years of frustrating negotiations, some groups began to use more forceful methods, eventually abandoning diplomacy in favor of terrorist tactics.
Initially confined to a few systems, the fighting spread across human-controlled space in only several years; as the conflict escalated further, even some Inner Colonies, as inwards as the Warden system, Armstrong system and even the Sol system itself, were targeted by rebel militants and terrorists. What had once been widespread support for the revolutionaries quickly dried up at the outbreak of violence. Though they started out targeting only military and Colonial Administration targets, as the USC counterinsurgency operations began, more and more innocent people were caught in the crossfire.
The Rebellion claimed millions of lives between the late 2690s and 2720. The various of rebel groups had become extremely adept at creating improvised explosive devices difficult for the USC to detect, and therefore stop, and had struck many high-profile targets, in orbit above Harmony and even Earth itself. Some opponents of the war believed the simplest solution is to simply give the rebels their autonomy - for the USC to pull out, and let the rebels have their independence. However, the value of the colonies make them simply too important to abandon, as it would bankrupt the Inner Colonies.

Previous: Jovian Conflicts of 2687
Concurrent: Second Energy War, Arabic Republic War
Next: Human-Hivivian War
Date: 2697 to 2730
Location: Various systems in UNF, and New USSR-controlled space
Outcome: The outer colonies, home to the revolutionaries, are massacred by the Hivivian