The British perception of security is little changed from the pre-Collapse view. Police provide internal security, upholding the law and protecting civilians from each other, and the military provides external security, protecting the country from external threats. The only thing that has really changed is that there is only one external threat, the New World Order. Within the New World Order, however, the perception of security has significantly evolved over time. The NWO inherited a world view identical to our own, but from the beginning, ideologically, it has denied the notion of an 'external' threat, and increasingly as its rivals fell and were absorbed, its reality has come closer to matching its ideology. However, its institutions have been more attuned to practical reality and have struggled in some sense to fully adapt. In particular, it has struggled to manage the contradiction implicit in the continued existence of the New World Army as a powerful institution without the acknowledged existence of an external threat to justify its important role in NWO society.

This article will look primarily at the current security situation in the New World Order and not its historical development.

New World Order Security Apparatus

There is a natural human tendency to want to see the New World Order as a monolithic organisation with a sense of conscious self-awareness and cohesive purpose, its actions undertaken rationally in pursuit of an intentional strategy. Certainly, the NWO is in some ways like a conspiracy come to life. However, this view of the NWO does not reflect its lived reality and only leads to an inaccurate understanding of the reasons why things happen in the Order. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the state security apparatus.

The New World Order global security apparatus is divided into multiple agencies containing innumerable subdivisions, power centres and factions, sometimes working cooperatively towards common goals but often working at cross purposes towards incompatible goals. Careerism, institutional interests, rivalries and personal pet projects abound, as well as much garden-variety corruption in these sprawling institutions. In this section we will take a decidedly non-exhaustive tour of the major institutional players in the New World Order security apparatus - there are many more minor or specialised units, especially in Global Safety.

State Security Forces

Each individual State has its own security forces responsible for maintaining control over its territory and enforcing the law. State security forces include paramilitary forces responsible for tasks like taking on well armed and organised trols and criminal gangs, especially in the remoter regions of a given State, but the main function of State security is policing. State forces include state-wide institutions as well as municipal police, and their duties can include investigating smaller-scale political crimes.

Na Ulua Paratcasyn na Onpas Aspe - The Ministry of Global Safety

The Minister of Global Safety (na Ulua Paratca na Onpas Aspe) is responsible for the entire global security apparatus other than the New World Army, including global policing and intelligence gathering. They are typically a senior Senator from a powerful State, as this is among the most powerful positions in the government. Reporting to them is a Ministry bureaucracy responsible for serving the Minister and coordinating Global Safety activities, and individual Agencies headed by Directors (Paratca) who are themselves members of the elite class and enormously powerful individuals in their own right.

Na Ulua Paratcasyn na Mawacasyn - The Ministry of Defence

The Ministry of Defence is responsible for the operation of the New World Army. Like the Minister of Global Safety, the Minister of Defence is one of the most powerful figures in the Global Government and the role is generally filled by a very senior Senator from a powerful State. Reporting to the Minister is a bureaucracy that serves the Minister themselves, and the Chiefs of Staff, the council of generals who run the New World Army itself.

The division between Global Safety and Defence ensures that all this power is not concentrated in a single department and ultimately a single minister. One result of this division is a huge amount of duplication of effort, inefficiency and occasional working at cross-purposes, as each department seeks to maximise its options to act on its own. Global Safety specialises in policing and intelligence, but also has paramilitary forces. Defence specialises in military operations but has intelligence and policing capabilities.

That is not to overstate the rivalry between Defence and Global Safety. They each have their strengths and specialities, and they do also often share intelligence and cooperate. It is to say, however, that the NWO security apparatus as a whole is not always the well-oiled machine you might expect.

Na Onpas Aspesyn - The Global Police

The Global Police are responsible for investigation and law enforcement involving interstate crimes, significant political crimes, and especially high-profile cases (e.g., cases involving members of the elite). They are part of Global Safety. They are more highly trained and better resourced than the State police, although they do not have nearly the same boots on the ground as state forces in any given area. They have total jurisdiction and can involve themselves in or take over any case.

"Naz Zeul," Na Paratcasyn na Zritysyn - 'The Eyes', The Directorate of Intelligence

Nicknamed 'naz Zeul', 'the Eyes', the Directorate of Intelligence is part of Global Safety. They have significant overlap with the Global Police in many respects, and the two Agencies are frequent rivals, as the Eyes see themselves as above the Global Police, which the Global Police resent. The Eyes operate many secret facilities including prisons and research facilities, and specialise in covert operations, in particular, investigating and neutralising threats to the Global state itself.

As such, the Eyes are on the lookout for potential dissent, especially any kind of organised dissent. The Eyes are the ones that the AIs that monitor online communication alert when they detect something potentially problematic. As well, they along with New World Army military intelligence are the ones tasked with monitoring the Free States and any would-be independent actors in the Protectorates.

Na Lufis Onpa Mawacasyn (LOM) - The New World Army (NWA)

The New World Army was formed from the original, independent militaries of its pre-Order component states. As such, it is part of a military tradition going back to antiquity, but it is also something of a Frankenstein's monster institution, formed from a number of disparate State militaries blended together within a revolutionary movement. Circumstances globally had the be very desperate for such an institution to be able to come into existence, and they were. It was not an easy or happy fusion, and this surely impeded the NWA's overall effectiveness, as many of the transformations that took place in founding the Order set society back in a multitude of ways. Nevertheless, the NWA is easily the most physically powerful institution on Earth, having the power to easily crush any of the Free States in purely conventional combat.

The NWA is a sprawling organisation with many functions and capabilities. It does not have the pre-Collapse tradition of separate land, sea and air commands with their own separate systems of rank, although it has all the expected army, navy, air force and marine functions. It is divided into regional commands, and like the NWO itself is designed to work as an oligarchy, ruled by a council of generals who are career military people and all members in good standing of the elite class. The NWA has various business interests, ostensibly in service of ensuring it is properly supplied, that support the wealth of the generals, although the NWA as a whole is not even remotely self-funding and is a significant expense for the NWO.

Saying the NWA is a sprawling institution, though, is not to imply that any vestige of its former national constituent structures remain. The early NWO and NWA leadership ruthlessly stomped that out over the years at a price to be paid in early operational effectiveness. The modern divisions within the organisation are power-based rivalries and operational structure. Culturally, it has become remarkably uniform over the more the half a century since its founding.

The NWA has massive stockpiles of hydrocarbon fuels. In its early days, it got first access to fossil fuel derived fuels, and in modern times, it takes a massive share of all production of photofermentation-derived fuels. This is necessary in order to ensure that its bloated fleets of tanks, lighter military land vehicles, fighter jets and naval ships are able to be operated periodically and that their troops can train, and that the NWA can actually sustain a significant combat operation against a Free State.

The New World Army has a presence in every State in the world, but its forces are concentrated around the Free States and in the Protectorates, and the heavy weaponry designed for fighting comparable armed forces is overwhelmingly concentrated around the Free States where it might ostensibly be needed. New World Army forces in other areas are primarily equipped to fight insurgencies, raiders and criminal gangs, quell rebellion and civil unrest, and respond to disasters, although they also have access to some heavy weaponry, especially air power.

The NWA does not rise to the level of the old United States military in sheer hardware. It actually inherited much of that old hardware and that of other nation-states as well, albeit in poor condition, but did not have the resources to maintain and replace all of it over time. The reduced wealth of the post-Collapse world as a whole forced a downsizing. However, a military-industrial complex is maintained, which may seem insane given the nature of the threats the NWO actually faces. These vested interests pose a major obstacle in shrinking the size, cost and political influence of the security state, including the military.

Threats

Nar Suz Ikrowéteras Sifysyn - The Five Free States

The Free States are the major military and strategic threat remaining in the world. To be clear, we are not a large threat to the Order, as we are isolated from each other, and the Order is massively larger and richer than any of us. But for the possession of nuclear weapons, which the Order is not willing to risk being used again, they could crush us all like bugs without much effort. That is not to say that the Order does not face real threats from us or disregards us, particularly given how that threat justifies the existence of a number of important actors within the Order. Some examples of the problems we pose the Order:

• The threat of nuclear attack.
• Attempted invasion or incursion of Free State forces into areas controlled by the NWO.
• Conventional espionage - intelligence gathering, theft of valuable economic and technological secrets, subversion and sabotage.
• Cyber attacks:
  • Spying
  • Data loss, especially critical security data
  • Compromise or corruption of computer systems which are key to internal security or economic systems
  • Sabotage of physical facilities by compromising computerised controllers, with potentially extreme consequences to the economy and public safety
  • Theft/extortion
  • Releasing viruses and malware to cause more randomised damage
• Bypassing the embargoes and trading outside their borders.
• Smuggling of forbidden products, general bypassing of control of commerce.
• Providing shelter to criminals, both regular and political (trols)
• Actively sponsoring and supporting, or passively enabling trols
• Actively sponsoring and supporting, or passively enabling raiders
• Nuclear proliferation - providing nuclear materials and know how to trols
• Potential psychological operations/propaganda directed against the NWO population, either physical via conventional espionage operations or cyber attacks.
• The embarrassment and messaging cost of their very existence as a contradiction to the NWO's claim of sole, global sovereignty.
• Possible threat of introducing pandemic due to Global Public Health's lack of access and control in the territories.
• Possible threat of deliberately-introduced infectious disease (biowarfare)
• Failure of environmental stewardship
  • Failure to control greenhouse gas emissions, requiring the NWO to bear the cost of offsetting the additional emissions
  • Strain on fisheries and other global resources and ecosystems
  • Failure to control emission of other pollution into the land, air and water, requiring neighbouring territories under NWO control to bear environmental costs.
• Overuse of upstream fresh water

That last point deserves some attention. Disputes over fresh water, or efforts to secure control over whole watersheds and especially headwaters were major sources of conflict and war in the twenty-first century. However, when it comes to the Free States, this concern has become much diminished.

Britain and Japan are islands and fully control their watersheds. South Korea does have some rivers flowing from the North which are potential flashpoints but controls almost all of the headwaters of its watersheds. Israel is even more mysterious than Japan, but as far as we can tell, there is no significant year-round running water remaining in its territory, and we hypothesise that nuclear-powered desalinisation may be its main source of fresh water for its small population.

The most significant strategic water conflicts involve Québec. Québec and the NWO have tensions over the Ottawa River and tributaries to the river controlled by both sides, but other than that Québec has few headwaters of rivers flowing into NWO territory, and conversely wholly controls immense watersheds. The NWO does control significant water flows into Québec, including the St. Lawrence River and a significant part of the South Shore, which is a source of anxiety and hostility within Québec towards the NWO.

When it comes to the Free States, the New World Army is the dominant security apparatus dealing with these threats. The Global Police are only involved in countering operations undertaken by the Free States against the civilian population and infrastructure of the Order, and even then, most of this type of work is ceded to naz Zeul. NWO intelligence and other covert operations within the Free States is to a large degree the province of the New World Army's intelligence division, with the Eyes maintaining a significant presence in this area as well.

The New World Army has a major presence in New York, Canada, and Epekwit to counter Québec, in France, Ireland and Norway to counter Britain, and in North China, Vladivostok and especially North Korea to counter Japan and South Korea. Israel is essentially surrounded on all sides by NWA forces in the bordering Protectorate of na Pasra (Basra) and State of na Masyr (Egypt).

The Embargoes

The New World Order's signature security policy towards the Free States is total economic embargo. It is illegal for any product to pass in or out of a 'Noncompliant State', even for humanitarian reasons, and also illegal for anyone to enter a Free State other than on official NWO business - people are free to leave, and of course since the NWO doesn't acknowledge the legitimacy or even the existence of other sovereign entities, it regards citizens the Free State to already be NWO citizens, with a right to movement between non-restricted areas of the NWO. They can just never return as long as the state remains noncompliant.

The NWO considers the embargoes to be a key security necessity as the best strategy to bring these dangerous, nuclear-armed States eventually to heel. The embargo also acts as a deterrent against noncompliance for existing states, all of which at one time were not integrated into the NWO and which even today have differing levels of integration.

Elite opinion is very much aware of the violations that occur - the interstate trade between South Korea and Japan, the smuggling, and in particular the more complex and large-scale corruption permitting significant underground trade with Québec. The elite public consensus is that this is a problem that needs to be solved. Therefore, much of what the security apparatus does on a practical, day-to-day basis in regards to the Free States is actually embargo enforcement,

Israel (na Israel)

We don't know a lot about modern Israel, and even today the security situation there is not widely reported or discussed amongst the New World Order elites, and I was not able to find out as much as I wanted to. The Middle East region today is something of an afterthought in the public mind, but there is still a huge amount of antipathy towards Israel, particularly in the NWO States of na Turkije, na Iran and na Hare Paryt (North India), which all scapegoat Israel for the Middle East War.

The country is very much surrounded on all sides by the New World Army, and the NWA uses the bases in the region to train troops destined for other regions on desert warfare, so Israel is treated to the constant spectacle of military exercises on its border. Because of the heavy militarisation of the area, practically everything that occurs there is classified and not even available to ordinary elites, but as far as I can tell, the situation there has settled into a long and miserable stalemate.

South Korea and Japan (na Sela Coson epis na Nippon)

We know genuinely little about what is going on inside these countries, but we can infer that they appear to each be politically unified and technologically adept. They must have undergone much of the same terrible suffering as the rest of the world did during the Collapse and the rise of the Order, but seem to be competent and capable States today, requiring the NWO to take the security risk they pose seriously.

They also seem to practice decent environmental stewardship, with the significant possible exception of fisheries, which are a major flash point. Both sides accuse the other of overfishing and poor stewardship of fisheries in general. Confrontation on the seas between fishing vessels, or between the naval vessels of one side and fishing vessels of the other, is relatively common and has led to more serious naval confrontations. NWA interdiction forces the Japanese and South Korean fishing fleets to fish close to home, which these States view as an egregious violation of their rights. However, the NWO believes South Korea and Japan to be operating in a relatively carbon-neutral way, and there have not been significant problems with pollution originating from these territories impacting neighbouring areas.

Both South Korea and Japan are believed to have large stockpiles of uranium and to be making very extensive use of nuclear power for electrification and synthesis of liquid fuels. Therefore, these countries are seen as a heightened risk in terms of nuclear proliferation, with South Korea providing nuclear materials and devices to bad actors in North Korea being a particular concern.

The Order isn't extremely worried about Japan because of its lack of outside affinities and lack of land borders with NWO-controlled territory, but equally sees little in the way of a useful hook to potentially subvert and absorb Japan. South Korea is a bit of a different story because of their cultural affinities to North Korea, which is seen as a potential threat to public order in the North, and the expanded scope for interactions afforded by the land border. However, that border has been well-fortified for over a century and a half and remains fairly tight. The NWO's success in embargoing South Korea and especially Japan seems about comparable to their success at embargoing Britain, with the exception that the Order is not willing to directly attack merchant convoys protected by Free State naval vessels, so the interdiction of trade between South Korea and Japan is of limited effectiveness.

The New World Army forces tasked to monitor and potentially counter South Korea and Japan are stationed mostly in North Korea (na Hare Coson), North China (na Huapei) and Vladivostok (na Timujen).

Britain (na Pyríttan)

Contrary to what many British people think, the New World Order does not regard Britain as a major threat. The overall security consensus is that Britain is effectively contained, and of all the Free States, it is the most ripe to fall to the Order. However, there are still a number of significant irritants, and the NWO security apparatus takes containing us seriously.

As with Japan and South Korea, there are similar conflicts and accusations in both directions around stewardship of local fisheries, with the British fishing fleet forced to stick close to home where the Royal Navy can protect it.

Many of the biggest irritants are ideological conflicts. Britain is seen to provide comfort and support to the illegal atuinfisa ('humanist') Globalist faction, as well as self-determinationists and nationalists. The inspiration we offer to the still-considerable English-speaking populations in North America, Australia and New Zealand is viewed as genuinely worrying. This interference from us is not mere passive encouragement, as Britain is the most active of the Free States in reaching out to the NWO population to support idealists and foment rebellion, and we provide shelter to refugees from NWO oppression. It has become our national mission in some ways. There are also frequent frictions over fishing rights and smuggling.

The Order counters this propaganda risk by weaponising one of their biggest genuine beefs with Britain: our heavy use of coal as a source of energy, which produces air pollution that impacts our European neighbours, and contributes to global warming, forcing the New World Order to offset our emissions as well as their own. They use this to paint us as ecological criminals, which is actually effective propaganda, especially in Ireland and on neighbouring parts of the Continent that are all occasionally impacted by the air pollution we generate

Québec (na Kepék)

Québec is a whole other kettle of fish. The New World Order has a complicated and fraught relationship with Québec. They both covet it and genuinely fear it, and the embargo of Québec is the least effective of all the Free State embargoes, with a comparatively brisk illicit traffic and a high degree of complicity in this commerce from within the New World Order authorities themselves.

Québec has a vast, porous land border with the New World Order, a deliberately poorly monitored 'back door' into the State through their puppet state of Acadia (l'Acadie in French, na Akkati in Common), and thousands of kilometres of shoreline suitable for smuggling by sea. There are close contacts between sophisticated and highly organised gangs on both sides of the border, and entanglements that go up to the elite level both unofficially and officially with perverse incentives to allow trade to be conducted illicitly over the border. The NWA interdicts a significant amount of trade, and the Global Police also intercept shipments to and from Québec, but it can be a losing battle. The unofficial contacts between the two governments are probably also the most frequent and developed of the Free States.

Because of its own vast resources and its comparatively good ability to acquire the things it doesn't possess natively from outside, Québec is the most economically healthy of the Free States, and possesses the least resource-based limitations on its technological options. They have an impressively high level of electrification from hydroelectricity and nuclear power, and they use their surplus of electricity to painstakingly synthesise and stockpile hydrocarbon fuels from captured carbon dioxide, rather than employing the photofermentation approach used by the Order. This gives them significant ability to power a very modern war machine.

All of this makes Quebec a very multi-dimensional threat to the Order. The Order does not regard Québec as an environmental hazard in the way it regards Britain, although there are the familiar tensions around fishing, as Québec is decent at environmental stewardship and works to remain carbon neutral, sparing the Order of needing to offset emissions from Québec. However, there are significant tensions over the use of the Ottawa River, and Québec is often aggrieved at the Order for what it claims is poor stewardship and overuse of headwaters entering the St. Lawrence River and the rivers of the south shore region.

However, in all other categories, including military, the Order views Québec as a significant threat. To be clear, Québec could not come close to winning a conventional war with the Order. But Québec could inflict very heavy damage, and that alone disquiets the political and military elites.

The Order sees mixed opportunities for either subversion or a direct invasion of Québec. On the one hand, the many corrupt contacts between the two polities provide many potential levers for the Order to use. On the other hand, the manipulation runs both ways. Critically, Québec is a xenophobic ethno-fascist dictatorship practising a thin veneer of democracy. It is a deeply religious and intolerant society. And unlike the Order's version of slavery with its fig leaf of labour contracts, Québec practices straight-out race slavery with its roots in the punishment of 'culturally-incompatible illegal immigrants' who entered during the desperate refugee movements of the Global Collapse and the consolidation of the Order. All of these factors make Québec a deeply problematic influence from the point of view of the Order, and create cultural factors that make the subversion approach used to assimilate other NWO States difficult to apply in Québec.

As a Free State, I truly want to cheer for Québec. I've spent a fair bit of time there, and on some level I still love Québec. But having personally and extensively explored the State, I fear that if the Order were ever to fall apart without having succeeded in assimilating Québec, Québec would be able to very seriously threaten its neighbours, and a resurgent Québec could be a very dark force indeed.

Naz Mawakasyn epis Nar Epáliheratkasyn - The Protectorates and the Dependencies

Protectorates are areas of the world that the Order doesn't feel are able to be organised into self-supporting States capable of paying a levy into the Order, either because their state of development is a shambles, their lack of ability to effectively control their territory, or both. At one time there also existed unorganised territories, but today, all of the world that isn't a State is a Protectorate or a Dependency. Dependencies are just like Protectorates except that rather than the NWA supporting a government reporting to the Global Government, a State and its security forces perform that role instead. The Order is losing patience with the continued existence of Dependencies, but there are still a few worldwide.

Protectorates all have an NWA presence and some island or islands of order around a capital and NWA bases. Aside from that, though, they are typically both very poor and very dangerous, with standards of living and security levels significantly below the global average. The continued existence of the Protectorates is a testament to the gruelling, painful slowness of the global recovery from the Collapse and subsequent calamities, and the Order's relative impotence compared to its pretensions and ambitions - although it must be said that a number of Protectorates have been converted into States over the years, and the NWO seems to be making progress in extending its control over these territories, slowly but surely.

The threats the Order faces in the Protectorates are qualitatively different than those posed by the Free States. The NWO can project power in the Protectorates, and the NWA is able to operate freely, although occasionally not without resistance. Some warlord or other may declare an independent state in the Protectorates, but they are not able to enforce it or exclude the New World Order, they are simply able to engage in crime and bully the locals. These local gangs, tribes and warlords have complicated relationships with the Order and each other, sometimes rapidly alternating between opposing and collaborating with the Global government.

The Protectorates are not uniformly awful. It is in the Protectorates that you find aboriginal societies still managing to hold on to a sense of identity, and the hiding places of free thinkers, ideological dissidents and rebels - overall, much of the hope for some future free of the New World Order. However, it is also in the Protectorates that you find some more reprehensible forces that make the Order look good, like violent ethno-nationalists and religious extremists as well as brutal raiders and criminal gangs. Local populations are often helpless against these forces, caught between the NWO and its opponents who both expect their support and are prepared to punish villagers for perceived disloyalty.

To the Order, the threat profile in the Protectorates looks something like this:

• Providing shelter to criminals, both regular and political (trols)
• Violent trols attacking the Order, including outside the Protectorate
• Raiders, especially when raiders based in a Protectorate attack populations in a State.
• Violent conflicts between groups that may disrupt NWO economic interests and otherwise necessitate the Order intervening to preserve its credibility.
  • Such conflicts spilling out into related groups in the States.
• The ability of local gangs to impose their will on local populations undermining the credibility of the Order.
• To a much lesser degree than the Free States, cyber attacks originating from the Protectorates can be a concern. These are mainly oriented towards crime and terrorism.
• Smuggling of forbidden products, general bypassing of control of commerce.
• Potential psychological operations/propaganda directed against the NWO population originating with trols hiding in the Protectorates.
• Environmental risks.
• Origin and spread of infectious disease due to inability of Global public health apparatus to reach all inhabitants of the territory and general lack of public health infrastructure.

Naz Sifysyn - The States

There are two ways to look at the contribution of the States themselves to the NWO security picture - for the threats the States contain which are similar in kind to the threats found in the Protectorates but differing in magnitude, and the threat a State itself might pose to the Order if it somehow went rogue.

With regard to the threats the States contain, a basic contractual condition to become and remain a State is that it maintain substantial control over its own territory, but no State on Earth fully achieves this promise. All contain areas of weaker State control where ills similar to those found in the Protectorates can be found. These typically do not reach the levels of openness or the levels of magnitude seen in the Protectorates, more often trying to operate on the down low and entering into corrupt arrangements with the authorities where possible to avoid direct confrontation.

There is also significant underground dissent, ranging from principled dissent to violent trols. Such dissent is found in the hearts of the Order's most wealthy and sophisticated cities. Of course the Order paints ideological criminals like communists and humanists with the same brush as the most vicious white supremacist trols, trying to conflate all dissent with the most unpopular forms of expression in the public eye, and making the Order and the most odious trols objective allies in a certain sense.

The State security forces typically deal with these threats, under the watchful eye of the Global Police, the Eyes and the New World Army, which may be called in or may choose to swoop in if the State is struggling to keep the lawlessness down to a dull roar. If threats such as trol activities cross State boundaries, the Global security apparatus will definitely become involved.

As to the threat the States themselves might pose, either by going rogue or by developing dangerous interstate conflicts, at the moment this is not considered an imminent concern, but that was not always the case and might not always be the case in the future. Russia, a founding State, tried to leave the Order early on, and as new States joined they were regarded with suspicion until they could be fully integrated. The Order moves to insinuate itself and dominate in new States until the local elite is thoroughly mixed into the Global elite and their interests largely beholden to and entwined with those of the Order as a whole. This process has been fairly successful.

The Global Senate maintains control over the States by appointing a Prefect (na Upánastepka) to oversee compliance in each State and oversee and direct local Global Safety and NWA forces, as well as all other aspects of the Global government operations in the State. The Prefect never comes from the State to which they're assigned. The Prefecture office maintains a watchful eye over the State and intervenes in cases where a State may be drifting into non-compliance, including providing assistance if the State is legitimately struggling with some aspect of its obligations.

In every State, the Prefect has a Global Safety and New World Army presence at their disposal, ensuring that the Order has a high degree of awareness of everything happening in the States and the ability to project power if needed. The Order has developed to a point that it now most heavily depends on the global admixture of the elite population and their critical investiture in global corporations from which they derive much of their wealth and power to prevent out of hand State rivalries or a State potentially going rogue. However, the NWO maintains more overt forces in the States at the ready as a backup. Because of the constitutional nature of the NWO, where the States themselves directly appoint the Global Senate, the States are not going away any time soon as significant and somewhat independent power centres.

Another potential global security worry for the NWO is interstate tensions and conflicts. There are many such rivalries, but today most of these are handled at a purely political level and do not rise to the level of a security threat. The big, perennial exception is conflicts over water, which can quickly escalate to violence between civilian groups within and between states and lead to risk of interstate violence involving governments and their agencies.

The preservation and allocation of all watersheds and freshwater aquifers is under the jurisdiction of the Global Government. Managing rights to scarce potable water and water suitable for irrigation in a way that balances the interests of all the stakeholders capable of upsetting global order is one of the Global government's most prominent responsibilities, and keeping a lid on conflicts over water is one of the Global security apparatus's biggest and hardest jobs. Any move to divert water wholly contained within one State to a needy part of another State or Protectorate can be particularly sensitive.

Na Huin - Space

When talking about space security, there are several different points of view to consider:

• The protection and domination of orbital space as a strategic resource, for both commercial and military purposes, military purposes being both intelligence gathering, including global positioning, and potential weaponisation.
  • This includes the limitation of orbital 'space junk' which limits the security of satellites in useful orbits.
• The ability to expand into the solar system and beyond, both for science and potential resource exploitation and/or settlement.
• The possibility of extraterrestrial threats, both relatively prosaic (asteroid impacts) and more fanciful (alien invasion).

Of these possible angles, the Global elite as a whole only take the first one seriously, and with the large 'gentleman/gentlewoman scholar' elite contingent, there is a lot of sympathy for spending public money on telescopes and robotic exploration to advance science. There is a vocal minority that wants to expand into the cosmos and try to push the limits of physics to develop new space travel technologies, but they are viewed as cranks. With that said, the shocking truth is that the vast majority of information we have about the Solar System and the universe was gathered before the Collapse, and the Order has not yet come close to catching up with the scientific capabilities of the American global order in the exploration of the cosmos.

It's not just that the Order views the idea of manned missions to space as an expensive boondoggle, although that is the dominant view. There is also a certain viewpoint that is actively hostile to the idea of colonies outside Earth, because they believe if colonisation succeeded it would create a disincentive to focus on protecting the Earth for those who may think they have an escape hatch.

The Order's position is that access to Earth orbit is illegal without the express authorisation of the Global Space Agency (na Onpas Paratysyn na Huin, or na OPH). The OPH is separate from both Global Safety and Defence, although it works very closely with both departments. The Free States have no presence in orbit, likely out of lack of ability, which was true for the entire planet before the NWO redeveloped the capability and restored satellite services for the first time in decades. However, I believe with absolute surety that if a Free State started trying to develop such capability they would receive a warning to desist from the Order, and any attempt to access earth orbit by a non-NWO actor would result in an immediate military attack. The presence of an unauthorised entity in orbit is a red line for the Order.

There is also an small elite minority that believes the NWO needs military defences to protect against attacks from extraterrestrial beings. The Order's overwhelming elite opinion is that this is risible nonsense and plainly just a shoddy excuse to pour yet more money into the New World Army. Which, since the Army is a major power centre, appeals to some people, and it is known that there are groups within the New World Army focused on this question.