• OPSAD (Organization for Planetary Security and Defense)
• Effectively a local militia/national guard for 'point defense' of colonies and typically derived from the local population, it usually consists of retired veterans who've settled in the area as officers and SNCOs with conscripts in the 17 to 23 year old range serving a planetary defense service term.
  
  
• IFOR (Invasion Forces)
• The shorthand designation for the forces invading Cascadium through a stable arcanotechnological synthetically generated Einstein-Rosenbridge Wormhole. Consisting of a population similar to the Ottaman Turks, they are currently ruled by a Saddam like strongman and this current campaign is merely another in a string of efforts to acquire wealth through conquest. They have a mixture of technology but akin to a 1950s era Arab army but with a smattering of older equipment and extremely advanced and deadly artifacts from a time before their world's near end a thousand years ago. As said above their goals on Cascadium are simple conquest, enslavement, and wealth through spoils.

• Pre I-Day
• Primary invasion leadership arrives through the portal/wormhole, one General Monham who notes that there are still some needed preperations before the invasion can truly step off from this base. He orders the scout forces to spread out as he pulls more rifle company sized units through the portal along with as many of his engineering units as he could manage to cram into the prepared area. They'll spend the next week clearing trees, laying gravel, and building up the storage infrastructure to support the numerous divisions on the otherside of the gate.
  
  
• I-Day / Day of First Contact 06.08.2789 A.D.
• Roughly a month into these efforts a forward motorized recon element happens upon one of the many small homesteads and unlike other encounters in which the residents were captured and sent back… the troops choose to indulge. A girl manages to get away on a small motorcycle and flees to the town of Dorvan Farms, the closest settlement of any sort. The unit is unaware of this.
  
  
• A response consisting of law enforcement special response units and regular LEOs arrives within the day with light armored vehicles and a VTOL in support. While superior in technology they lack the heavy weapons of the military scout unit and are driven off with some losses but manage to kill nearly half of the recon unit whom pulls back and communicates their situation back to General Monham. The officers are executed upon their return and Monham is forced to up his time table, sending two regiments of motorized infantry and a armored battalion to take the settlement.
  
  
• Within Dorvan Farms a bit of fear has taken hold, some confusion as to whether or not it was merely a small band of brigands that somehow managed to arrive on the surface without being noticed to some form of invasion. The settlement's governor has activited all law enforcement entities under his control as well as the OPSAD garrison battalion technically under his management. Though it is only sixty percent operational when the first air attacks begin during the dawn.
  
  

• I-Day +1 / Beginning of the First Battle of Dorvan Farms
• The IFOR use a strange mixture of propulsion less craft of odd make and propeller craft of odd configurations. While both perform well early in the attack, air defense units belonging to the garrison unit soon begin plucking them from the skies. They soon cease their operations and are replaced with direct tube fired towed artillery. This causes the stream of evacuees to become a torrent, pouring out along the east and west highway routes. The remaining LEOs and the OPSAD battalion have arranged themselves in a line of defense, watching as their allotment of UCAVs display the oncoming force.
  
  
• Monham's goals however isn't the simply taking of a city, he also wants the population and thus as these forces roll in the center elements merely engage and lock the defenders in place as the follow on units move out and to the flanks. Civilians are caught on the raised roadways in the open as indirect and direct fire begins to fall around them. The deployment had left lesser manpower on these flanks assuming the heaviest weight would fall on the settlement itself. Rather than breaking, most of the young men and women being from Dorvan Farms, they hold and fall back as needed. Their weapons, heavier than that of the LEOs, extract heavy losses from the oncoming IFOR. Though sheer numbers force them to fall back.. until both road routes are cut. Those left soon begin moving overland to the north, mostly using farming vehicles built for such as the OPSAD battalion bleeds to hold the gap open as the town is steadily enveloped by a force that outnumbers them 50 to 1.
  
  
• By the end of the first day the envelopment is complete, two-thirds of the settlement's OPSAD battalion has been spent in a frantic and desperate defense with most of it's survivors having pulled out through the gap covering the rear of what civilians managed to get out. Some remain within the surrounded town however, nightfall and an enemy that seems to lack night fighting equipment allows more to slip out while others fight on.
  
  

• I-Day +2
• Dawn brings the final assault, a heavy force of infantry and tanks directly attack the town. Most armed colonists are killed in their positions, most remembering what happened to those that surrendered to another enemy from a war decades ago. By mid day only a handful of positions are still held, mostly small pockets with the largest being in the central colony administration complex due to it's hardened nature. While those still in contact question 'where is the air support?' they have yet to realize that a device on the hills to the south from the invader's past has been setup. Laser based, it effectively sweeps the skies within line of sight and orbit even with the operators only just understanding how to run the device thats over a thousand years old.
  
  
• By the end of the day some leakers had slipped out through battered hostile encircling formations either by luck or just simple weight of accurate and terrifying fire. But the central admin complex falls and eventually every bit of resistance is collapsed under weight of numbers though at great cost to the IFOR. Nearly six thousand fall into the hands of this force from another world as the looting and celebrating begins. Foreign soldiers and dedicated teams proceed to strip anything of technological (or otherwise) value from the settlement and separate any of those with special knowledge. All are to be shipped back through the portal into a life of servitude.
  
  
• Outside the now fallen town the scattered remains of the OPSAD battalion have reconstituted into what could best be described as a reinforced pair of companies under a retired UASCM (United American Starzone Colonial Marines) Major. However despite being spent, a handful of pre-positioned supply points enable at least a partial munitions restock and this unit carries on fighting a delaying action to allow the train of civilians traveling overland to get away.
  
  General Monham, with his first if very costly victory under his belt soon details a motorized regiment reinforced with a tank battalion and another reserve infantry battalion for an attack on another settlement further down the highway, Del's City. However unlike Dorvan Farms it has had both an alert and the streams of evacuees from Dorvan Farms to confirm that there was indeed a hostile army on the surface of their world. As a result most of its population has spent this day either further evacuating or assisting the settlement's own OPSAD battalion in fortifying the approaches to their town.
  
  

• I-Day +3 Battle of Del's City
• The morning of the third day begins with a spoiling attack by light vehicles with ATGMs against the leading elements of the force advancing on Del's City. The attempt by light aircraft to counter is costly due to the presence of man portable air defense systems and truck mounted SAMs present on the ground. Overall this campaign has not been kind to the IFOR's air forces, their only saving grace being the presence of the weapon at their invasion site.
  
  These attacks really only buy a few hours however, weight of fire driving off these light skirmish colonist vehicles and soon enough the general attack begins in earnest. The first wave comes directly down the road from Dorvan Farms, Cascadium Highway 103. Another comes down from the north following Cascadium Route 1 after traveling on a secondary road and taking a cross roads town to the north. In all, three companies of tanks and a full regiment of infantry attack from two sides. Again the technological edge of the OPSAD defenders and remaining law enforcement pays out and unlike Dorvan Farms they've had two full days to stand up to full strength. On top of fighting from prepared positions they've forced the hostiles to advance over a land prepared for them. Mines, tank traps, and various means to funnel infantry and their supporting vehicles into prepared killing areas. Light artillery, UCAVs, suicide drones, and smart mortars exact their costs before the IFOR formations even get within line of sight of direct fire weapons.
  
  Additionally, coming in at near tree top level to avoid the losses of the first day, the aerospace forces of Cascadium make their presence known with stand off weapons and VTOL gunships begin to stalk the IFOR's flanks, the latter of which is operating from a FOB on the otherside of the river.
  
  Gradually by sundown however the sheer weight of the repeated attacks, and a shift in the use of artillery from only light use to reduce damage to dedicated use to dig out defenders has reduced the OPSAD battalion's situation. This alongside the dedication of a reserve regiment trucked down the road from their invasion site finally pushes things in the favor of Monham's troops. By nightfall IFOR units have penetrated into city limits and the defending battalion is beginning to evacuate with units still in contact on the southern limits of Del's City.

• I-Day +4 Battle of Del's City, Second Day
• More and more IFOR units pour in from the north and the west, their time tables turning as their full force commitments continue to step off from their staging areas. Soon the OPSAD battalion's remnants are driven from the settlement itself and into the countryside to the south.
  Both sides seem to accept a sort of unofficial pause, reorganizing and in the case of IFOR troops in Del's City, mass looting. However with such a concentration of forces in an urban area the decision is made to trade some infrastructure for enemy kills.
  
  Within the hour twenty-five ballistic missiles with a mix of unitary high explosive warheads, cluster payloads with smart munitions, and kinetic rods blanket the city limits. It is estimated that half of the IFOR's equipment and manpower were eliminated in this strike thus forcing them to dig in and hold to wait for more forces to reinforce their situation. All the while the OPSAD unit drives on south toward a more defendable position.

FEBA - Forward Edge of the Battle Area

• I-Day +5 The General Offensive Begins
• With the costly engagement to his east General Monham decides that now is the time to finally exploit what he realizes is his one major advantage over the forces that resist his efforts, numbers. His previous engagements had been employed assuming some parity between his army and the defenders, Dorvan Farms and the technological treasures within ending this illusion. Some of his advisors claim it could simply be a wealthy hamlet like some of those in the Empire to the north with access to old technologies they could no longer make. The siege of the second settlement silenced them as well.
  
  One preplanned operation, the concept of it formed after a mixture of reconnaissance flights (before air defense assets began to pluck them from the sky) and from information gathered from the recently captured Koles. It was a simple equation, if he moved fast enough and with overwhelming numbers he may have a chance at establishing a foothold on this world in such a manner that its residents and the power beyond the skies couldn't respond quick enough. All of it in the hope he could negotiate something of a ceasefire and a ceding of land and population to his nation. As a result a Corps sized element was dispatched to the north, two reinforced divisions to the east and to the west. He held roughly a division and a half in reserve, having them establish themselves in the hills surrounding the 17th Army's basecamp and their only way home.

• General Monham and his surviving formations surrender.

Before the 'push' and to the amazement of most forces that where on the far side of the portal only a handful of minor (company or so) sized efforts had been made to retake the complex from the UAS marines. Their on going ELINT efforts over the few weeks of holding that position however had revealed why, the entire hold of the IFOR forces in the area had been tenuous even before all those divisions had poured through to another world and been smashed. The sudden reduction in occupation troops for what they guessed had been a country that had fallen to a similar operation and one of their main MSRs further in falling to the Marines seemed to have simply pushed their situation over the edge. A night hadn't gone by without flashes on the horizon and streams of troops and civilians moving around the complex, giving it a wide berth even as the Marines watched from UAVs and long range optics. However as the weeks ran into the first month they were withdrawn and replaced by Union Federal Army units, the first wave of engineers and garrison troops, the Marines themselves folded back into their regular units staging to push through the portal themselves.

The month long wait had been spent reorganizing what was left of Cascadium's OPSAD units, receiving Federal Army units, and figuring out were to fit the newly arrived Marine division into the mess. Civilians alive, dead, and missing had also been catalogued and thus the primary motivation for the invasion was discovered in the form of thousands of missing colonists. Their possible fates pulled from countless POWs, some willing and having been pressed into the misadventure… and others who'd been caught committing acts that soon found most on their way to the gallows if not beaten to death by angry OPSAD reservists who's family had died or worse under their care.

Much like the IFOR invasion it was a staged operation, that first relief unit having paved the way in a manner conducive to the mass continuous movement of troops and material from one realm to another. The first few days were simply a select group of units moving through and then out to expand their assigned section of the perimeter. Most of these initial units are recently landed Federal troops with assigned engineers and all waste no time in expanding the compact perimeter around the low mountain side.