DOC-02 · MILITARY · SECURITY ASSETS · EYES ONLY

TriStar Guards

(formerly the Tennessee Star Guards — the abbreviation, to the lasting grief of intelligence indexers everywhere, did not change)

TriStar Universe — unit profile, Field Manual format. Consolidates the source history and divergence entries D-001 through D-010. Items marked † are proposals pending review.

Origin: The Consolation Prize That Grew Teeth

The Guards began as grief management. After the assassinations of Belasarius and Marlene Starr, the TriStar board and the leadership of the three capital worlds steered the martyrs' son, Tennessee Starr, toward a small mercenary command — the Terran Revengers Company — without ever telling him he was being steered. He proved better at it than anyone planned for. Called home in 3023 and ordered to raise two regiments "with a possible third," he raised three, recruiting on personal charisma amplified through TriStar's media machine.

The name was a joke. Tennessee's own regimental commanders, fond of their colonel and unblinded by his inexperience at scale, suggested "Tennessee Star Guards" as gentle mockery of a man with company-level experience commanding a brigade. The joke became the letterhead. The regiments took the numbers 1st, 3rd, and 7th — counterintelligence theater implying a formation more than twice its size — and the names of the three capital worlds.

The Forging (3023–3030)

The Guards' early weakness was what the jokes said: superb logistics, sound financing, seasoned company-grade officers — and almost no one who had commanded at scale, excepting two colonels, one infantry and one armor, who formed the nascent command staff†. The Galahad II exercises exposed the youth brutally; the response — a flattened command structure and obsessive inter-unit communications — seeded everything the Guards became.

The Fourth Succession War supplied the blooding, the Sarmaxa raid supplied the legend of the 7th, and the black box settlement fixed the one absolute: the Guards are pledged never to operate against Federated Suns troops or territory. Then Tortuga made them (see: D-001): Operation FINAL INVOICE, the 3rd Lackland's sacrifice at Wrecker's Yard, the Ledger Barrage, and the capture of Lady Death transformed a well-funded curiosity into the premier military force of the rimward Periphery March.

Luthien and the Name (3050–3052)

The Clan Invasion ended the Guards' regional era. As the Inner Sphere reeled, the board authorized the largest expansion in unit history — two new line regiments, the 21st Morven Grenadiers (raised in an afternoon from the Grenadier School's own faculty under Colonel Augusta "Gus" Teague) and the 33rd Broken Wheel Cavalry (raised from the Valvo Circuit through the Selection under Colonel Harlan Petty) — alongside the standing supporting formations. And when Luthien's turn came in January 3052, the Guards went — not as mercenaries, which the Coordinator's decree made corpses of, but as the protection clause of a commercial carriage contract executed with the Bureau of Substance on 19 November 3051, the March's lawyers having noticed that the standing pledge said nothing about for whom else and the standard delivery-protection clause (unchanged since 2803) said nothing about how much force. The company deemed three regiments sufficient. Tennessee Starr, sixty years old and never once in his life inclined to send people where he wouldn't go, went with them, down a command circuit of sixty-eight hulls in twenty-two days — the longest run ever scheduled (see: The Longest Run).

He died there, at the neck of the river pocket on the Kado-guchi's southern shoulder, holding the door with his command lance so nine hundred cut-off soldiers could withdraw — in the same battle that immortalized the Wolf's Dragoons and the Kell Hounds. The son of ComStar's victims fell saving the Combine from the Clans; the March's obituaries did not need to write the irony down, and mostly didn't. The campaign's ledger was published in full, because the March would have audited anything less: 3,922 dead of 11,206 embarked — 'only' thirty-five percent, with the quotation marks the March itself insists on — against seventy percent equipment losses, the gap between the numbers being the doctrine priced in steel. The unit came home and took, as its official name, the one that had been true all along: the TriStar Guards — per the founding commander's own map-pocket note ("the freight moves for the living"), which simultaneously forbade the brigade his name and licensed the fleet to carry it (TSS Tennessee Starr, keel of Luthien steel, laid November 3052). The abbreviation — TSG — did not change, was never going to change, and its persistence is officially described in unit documentation as "a savings on stationery."

Order of Battle (3070)

Line regiments (combined arms):

• 1st Memphis Militia — the flagship; the most professional formation in the March under the most self-deprecating name available. HQ and signals culture, expeditionary first-call, the Guards' public face. Motto†: "Just the Militia."
• 3rd Lackland Regulars — the anvil. Deepwatch veterans and habitat divers; hostile-environment, siege, and endurance specialists. A Mother of the Ocean, rising, on the crest; the Wrecker's Yard dead read yearly at slack tide.
• 7th Sherwood Rangers — the foresters. Jabberwocky School cadre, complex-terrain and information operations, constitutional fire wardens. Sarmaxa taught on New Avalon as PSYOP, on Sherwood as manners.
• 21st Morven Grenadiers — Clan-era heavy assault formation, raised 3050 and built unapologetically around firepower and armor: the Guards' answer to the question "what if talking fails?" Recruits heavily from Morven and the near-Memphis systems; the newest regiment with the oldest average tonnage. Colors: range-flag deep yellow. Motto: GUNS ARE HOT. Blooded at Kado-guchi ("we're not slow, we're inevitable").
• 33rd Broken Wheel Cavalry — Clan-era fast formation: hypermobile 'Mech and hover forces with organic aerospace liaison, doctrine written directly from Clan-front after-action reports — and from the Selection, the founding examination that secretly scored who stopped for the wreck. The Guards' cavalry screen, raiders, and — in the Dominion rotation — the reaction force. Colors: stormbell teal, for the flower that blooms only after the great storms. Motto: DELIVERY REFUSED — stenciled on a Charlie Troop Malevolent's bow by red torchlight the night of the Luthien batchall, quoting the Colonel-General's reply to Clan Smoke Jaguar; the regiment adopted it before the fleet came home, and the original bow armor is in the Memphis museum.

Supporting formations:

• The Memphis Battalion — the sledgehammer: an independent heavy and assault-weight BattleMech battalion built consciously on the model of the Wolf's Dragoons' Zeta Battalion. Where the line regiments talk, the Memphis Battalion arrives, and the conversation is understood to be over. Commanded since the late 3060s by Elizabeth Marlene Starr — see: The Succession — from a Marauder II shaded a defiant royal purple, a color choice filed under the flamboyance-as-camouflage tradition and defended by its owner as "visible commitment."
• The Extraction Companies — a native Guards invention with no Inner Sphere equivalent: each a reinforced BattleMech company with heavy dedicated aerospace support, its own Mule II DropShip, attached recovery vehicles, salvage gear, and a field MASH unit. Their doctrine is written in two sentences: pull the mauled unit out; if necessary, hold its line in its place. Extraction crews are the Guards other units pray to see, and holding-the-line has cost the Companies proportionally more dead than any formation in the brigade — a fact the brigade does not joke about, which in the TSG is the highest honor available.
• 1st and 2nd Security Regiments — mixed infantry and armor, permanently dispersed on asset protection: stations, plants, yards, and the fixed infrastructure of a corporation with sixty-PPC opinions about its property.
• Five independent BattleMech companies — each with a dedicated Union-class DropShip, maintained for outside contracts. These companies keep the Guards' mercenary registration honest, its junior officers blooded, its reputation circulating, and its intelligence take fresh — five self-contained rumors with drop collars.
• Fleet Protection Wing — an extended-regiment-sized aerospace formation dispersed across the JumpShip fleet: fighters aboard the Mule II CV carriers, small-craft flights on the Commerce stations, and escort elements riding the Enterprise hulls. No TriStar convoy travels unwatched; the Wing's squadrons rotate through the Gate and flew half the net at the Gate Run of 3066.

The Succession

Tennessee Starr left the Guards two heirs and no answer. His twin children, Phillip Alexander Starr and Elizabeth Marlene Starr, are both Guards warriors: Phillip held several line commands with credit; "EM" commands the Memphis Battalion from her purple Marauder II. On their father's death at Luthien, internal politics demanded a familial hand on the company as well as the brigade — and Phillip ascended, by board arrangement, to interim Chief Executive Officer of TriStar Interstellar, a title whose first word has now survived considerably longer than anyone pretends is normal.

Brigade command has been held on an acting basis since 3052 — first by Colonel Ruthanne Pyke, Tennessee's chief of staff, who ran the brigade from beside the deliberately empty chair for over a decade and refused every elevation with the same sentence ("I keep the store; I don't own it"), and since the mid-3060s† by Colonel Grayson Jefferies: second son of Sherwood's House Jefferies, the noble who scandalized Marion by taking a Guards commission over an AFFC one and then spent the Clan wars making the choice unimpeachable (see: Sherwood, D-008a). Jefferies commands five regiments, two security regiments, the Battalion, the Companies, and the Wing while wearing the rank of Colonel, because the rank of Colonel-General is not his to wear — a distinction he maintains with a Sherwoodian precision that tells the entire brigade, daily, what the arrangement is. He is trusted precisely because he cannot be a Starr — and, more simply, because he has earned it: the brigade's confidence in Jefferies is total, and the caretaker has now governed the Guards longer than some permanent commanders ever did.

Here is what the rumor industry refuses to accept: everyone involved is perfectly happy with the arrangement. The twins bear each other no animosity and bear Jefferies none at all — EM has the battalion she wants, Phillip has the company he must, both know that neither is yet fully prepared for their father's chair, and both regard the Colonel's tenure as the reason that honesty costs the March nothing. The rumors fly regardless — that EM refuses the brigade until Phillip's chair loses its adjective, that Phillip wanted the brigade and got the boardroom — and the Guards answer them in the Guards' own register. The definitive statement on the succession, delivered by an anonymous trooper to a New Avalon documentary crew and reproduced on unofficial unit patches within the month:

"Look — the Colonel is the Colonel. If you need to have a Starr up there, we've got a lot of family, and some of them are awful cute…"

The tension of the era is not inside the Guards. It is outside them: a March, a board, and an Inner Sphere full of observers structurally incapable of believing that the two most powerful institutions in the region are held by an adverb and an acting arrangement on purpose, contentedly, by people who will settle the question when they are ready and not one day before. The Guards have made the uncertainty look like doctrine. Increasingly, it is.

Doctrine: Talk First, Talk Constantly

TSG doctrine is communications doctrine — born from Galahad humiliation, improvised from tri-vid rigs and commercial scramblers by techs off DropShip crews led by Solaris VII crew chiefs, and matured into a C3 culture that predates the technology's formal name. Every Guards element talks to every other element, constantly, redundantly, and when useful at the enemy: the nets that coordinate fire also broadcast evacuation routes, surrender terms, and morale-corroding regional humor. The doctrine drove the MON-80 Mongoose selection as Memphis Mech Works' first new-technology platform and shapes procurement still: ears and voices first, guns second, armor a philosophical third — a philosophy the 21st Morven Grenadiers were specifically founded to argue with.

The second pillar is lift: the 130-hull military DropShip fleet, the armed Enterprise JumpShips, and the assumption in every operational plan that the Guards arrive first, supplied best, and talking loudest.

Standing Commitments (3070)

• Dominion defense rotation — continuous since 3030; the senior service of the six worlds (D-002)
• Station marine detachments — including New Gascony Gate (D-005)
• The Jabberwocky School — Sherwood (D-008)
• Jihad posture (3067– ) — home defense, convoy protection, and regional counterintelligence support; the March's lights are still on (D-009)

† Pending review: Jefferies' exact appointment date (mid-3060s); regimental mottos for the 1st, 3rd, and 7th ("Just the Militia" still proposed). RESOLVED by The Longest Run: the acting commander 3052–mid-3060s (Col. Ruthanne Pyke); founding colonels of the 21st and 33rd (Teague, Petty); the 21st's motto (GUNS ARE HOT); the 33rd's motto (DELIVERY REFUSED); regimental colors; the Luthien deployment, mechanism, and casualty return.