Time once again to celebrate one of the biggest displays of balls in science fiction: BattleTech's Battle of Tukayyid, 3052 A.D., when Comstar stopped the Clans.
Despite this being a fictional account of a fictional interstellar war with military logistics and practices that only make sense if you think of this as Dune with Giant Robots, this video makes for a good example of how to write a believable military scenario and how to present it to an audience. War is as much political and moral as it is a literal physical contest, and in this scenario was very much a battle of paradigms manifested into armies and warfleets.
It is no surprise that certain realities of real war and politics also apply by default to fictional ones, and here we see that the more determined and cunning party--the more intolerant one--proved victorious. Comstar won this before an order was issued, nevermind a shot being fired, merely by Knowing Your Enemy and Yourself and devising the perfect battle plan to exploit both mindsets to best effect.
In short, Focht read the Clans like a book and knew that he could goad them into stupid moves that let his army of fanatics crush them under the weight of their own dead while drowning in their blood. Taunting the enemy into place then swamping them with hordes of something--anything--that could harm the enemy was what had to be done, and Focht did it without so much as a shrug. That was what it took to achieve the mission, and he gave no fucks doing it- or in signing the letters to the families of the slain after the fact.
You will find real-world analogs to Focht--Tex mentions Zhukov--in the annals of military history, and you will know them by the reputations they garner; the way others saw Focht applies to these men also. Don't mistake a man like Focht for an inflexible butcher; he wants to win, and if that means efficient manuever warfare that makes him seem like a dancer at a ball, he'll do it. If he needs classic double-envelopment, he'll recreate Cannae in a heartbeat without remorse. He assumes the shape needed to win, and discards it as soon as it is not. Sun Tzu would be proud, and Clauswitz would promote him as an example to follow.
The Clans at this time thought of war as a sport, a bloody sport but a sport nonetheless and few could conceive of a competent force that could win despite not adhering to their sport-like ritual approach to warfare. Tukayyid broke them in large part because they finally got the comeuppance such a delusional disrespect for war inevitably brings, and all of the internal changes in the wake of the Clan defeat are in large part due to Comstar proving that their paradigm was superior to that of the Clans.
And no, many in the Clans did not take that well at all.
While the Clan occupation persisted after this, the existential threat of the Clans to the Inner Sphere died screaming that day and with it the question of whom of Kerensky's heirs would come to inhereit the Star League was settled: Jerome Blake, the founder of Comstar.
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