The Kalyaran Gulf Crisis

Strategic map of the Kalyaran Gulf showing Marastria on the east shore, Darev on the west, the Helios North and Helios South gas fields at the ocean mouth, and the Rashtan–Lyran land border at the head of the gulf.

In this simulation I stepped into the shoes of Marastria, a fragile parliamentary democracy on the east shore of the Kalyaran Gulf, facing a more repressive, missile-heavy neighbour, Darev, on the west. The crisis centred on a narrow strip of contested sea and two offshore gas fields, Helios North and Helios South, with enough reserves to transform both economies.

The trigger was a lethal incident at sea: a Darevi corvette sunk and a supply ship damaged near the Helios fields. Both sides blamed each other. Missile units were on alert, navies surged to the gulf, and two capitals that already distrusted one another suddenly found themselves one misstep away from open war.

Instead of playing for a quick military win, I tried something different: to treat the scenario as a test of whether a medium power can stare down a more aggressive neighbour, defend its legal position at sea, and force negotiations without firing the first shot. That meant walking a thin line between credible deterrence and deliberate restraint.

This article is a structured after-action review of that crisis: what I was trying to achieve as Marastria, how I used military posture, deception, economics and information operations to shape the choices, and where the plan could easily have gone wrong if this weren’t just a simulation.

Military Balance at Start of the Scenario

Marastria (MAR) – East Shore

System: fragile parliamentary democracy.Leader: President Elira Vosk, a technocratic civilian backed by an urban, pro-Auric Union middle class.

Alliances & backing

• Associate member of the Auric Union (AU) and Helios Defence Compact (HDC): some intel sharing, limited air-defence integration.

• Discreet cooperation with distant great power Arcturon for ISR, drones and EW.

Core forces in theatre

• I Corps – Kalyar Coastal Defence

  • 3rd Mech Brigade “Kalyar”: defending Kalyar and southern east coast towards the gulf mouth.

  • 5th Mech Brigade “Lyran”: guarding the northern coast up to the Rashtan–Lyran land border.

  • 9th Artillery Brigade: 155mm SP guns + MLRS with range over the full gulf.

• II Corps – Varkas / Interior

  • 2nd Mountain Brigade in the Varkas Range, blocking inland approaches.

  • 7th Motorised Brigade as mobile reserve on the Varkas–Kalyar road.

• Special Forces Group “Falcon”

  • One battalion forward in Kalyar for maritime/islet ops.

  • One battalion around Varkas for deep recon and JTAC tasks.

• Air & air defence

  • Varkas Airbase: main multirole and strike squadrons.

  • Kalyar Airfield: attack helicopters and some UCAVs.

  • Layered SAM network on ridges above Kalyar and in the Varkas Range.

• Navy

  • Kalyar Naval Base: 2 frigates, 4 missile corvettes, FACs, one diesel-electric submarine.

  • Coastguard and support craft around Helios North once mobilised.

• Strategic enablers

  • SRBM and MLRS units in camouflaged sites inland of Varkas.

  • Cyber/EW battalion with main node in Varkas, mobile jammers in the hills.

Darev (DAR) – West Shore

System: personalist authoritarian regime.Leader: Chairman Karlen Ruvic, ex-intelligence chief, ruling via security services.

Alliances & backing

• Patron: revisionist great power Serya providing cut-price SAMs, MLRS, loitering munitions, advisors and cyber support.

• Deniable maritime PMC “Black Tide Solutions” (BTS) with fast attack boats and ISR around Darev’s platforms.

Core forces in theatre

• Rashtan Coastal Command

  • 1st & 2nd Mech Brigades along the west coast from the border through Rashat to the gulf mouth.

  • 3rd Motorised Brigade guarding southern coastal approaches.

  • 10th Rashtan Security Brigade for internal security and rear areas.

• II Field Corps – Zarin / Plateau

  • 4th Armoured Brigade near Zarin City.

  • 6th Motorised Brigade along the plateau road network.

  • 11th Artillery Brigade: tube and rocket artillery overlooking Rashat and the gulf.

• Air & air defence

  • Zarin Airbase: main fighters, strike aircraft and MALE drones.

  • Long-range SAM brigade on high ground near Rashat and Zarin; medium SAMs along the coast.

• Navy & PMC

  • Rashat Naval Base: light frigate, 5 missile corvettes, FACs, minelayers.

  • Coastal missile batteries and BTS fast boats guarding Helios South and the gulf mouth.

• Missile & EW

  • SRBM and heavy MLRS on the Zarin Plateau.

  • Major EW node and offensive cyber cell in Zarin.

On paper, Darev enjoyed an edge in rockets, air defence and coastal strike; Marastria had better allies, more transparent governance, and better prospects with Western investors.

1. Political and Strategic Objectives

Playing Marastria, I deliberately set narrow goals:

• Defend Helios North and the legal EEZ line. No concession of maritime law or acceptance of “historic rights” claims that carved up our side of the gulf.

• Avoid major war while preserving deterrence. I wanted to show resolve without giving Darev a clean pretext to escalate.

• Maintain regime legitimacy at home. Vosk’s government had to look firm, not weak – especially in the eyes of coastal communities and the National Defence Front.

• Keep AU and Arcturon on side. That meant no reckless first strikes and a visible willingness to accept observers and talks.

For Darev, the structural aims were the mirror image:

• Establish de facto control or at least a veto over Helios South, ideally redefining the EEZ mid-gulf.

• Intimidate Marastria into a more subordinate role without triggering heavy sanctions.

• Reward domestic power blocs (Rashtan Coastal Command, PSD) who profited from smuggling and coercive leverage.

Why this framing? Because it anchored “victory” for Marastria in surviving with law and leverage intact, not humiliating Darev. If Helios North remained clearly ours, Helios South ended up regulated, and war never broke out, that counted as success – even if the map didn’t move an inch.

2. Initial Concept: Harden First, Don’t Shoot First

In the opening 48 hours I built a posture around three principles:

1. Deny easy military options.

   • Dig mechanised forces into covert positions near the Rashtan–Lyran border while wiring in artillery fires.

   • Disperse the fleet along our coast and push a silent submarine to the gulf mouth, making a sudden decapitation strike unlikely.

1. Protect critical assets.

   • Move SAMs and an AAW frigate to create overlapping coverage over Kalyar, Kalyar Airfield and Helios North.

3. Lock in the “defender” narrative.

   • Call publicly for AU/UN observers on the land border and in the gulf.

   • Broadcast a “we are defending our waters and islands” address from President Vosk.

I also pre-planned counter-strikes – SRBMs and air-launched missiles aimed at Darev’s missile parks and artillery – but under strict ROE: no first use; they would only fire in reactive self-defence.

Why this concept? Marastria couldn’t win a rocket-for-rocket contest and couldn’t afford to be painted as the aggressor. The realistic path to a good outcome was to make any Darevi first move costly and diplomatically unattractive, while keeping our own hand visibly steady.

3. Shaping the Theatre: Border, Gulf and Airspace

Across the first few days the focus was on quiet hardening:

• Border sector:

  • Reinforced Lyran positions with a second mechanised battalion and a dedicated AT company, then moved the real line a kilometre back at night, leaving decoys and old trenches forward.

  • This left Darev seeing “armour” near the border while their first contact would actually run into a deeper kill zone.

• Gulf and Helios North:

  • Surface ships dispersed: one frigate and corvette cluster around Helios North, others hugging the east coast.

  • Marines and SF quietly reinforced Helios North platforms and a nearby islet, supported by coastguard boats rather than warships in close.

• Airspace and drones:

  • Announced a clear ROE: unauthorised drones over our territory or EEZ would be shot down; ours would stay inside our airspace.

  • Put that into practice by downing several Darevi UAVs that crossed the line, while pulling our own tracks back to our side.

The result was a theatre where Darev could see readiness and layered defences, but not much exploitable chaos.

4. Deception and Information Operations

From early on, deception and narrative were used as force multipliers:

• False SF radio nets around Helios.

  • I pumped fake chatter suggesting major SF and air-defence deployments to Helios North, while only moving two coastguard boats and a small recon team. Darev thickened its presence around Helios South, pulling assets away from the mid-gulf and spreading their focus.

• Tank decoys near the border.

  • Inflatable and mock AFVs, with heat sources and noise, inflated Darev’s estimate of our armour without committing real tanks.

• Civilian flotilla at Helios North.

  • 80–100 fishing and small civilian boats formed a patriotic “defend our fields” ring around Helios North for the cameras, with only coastguard visible nearby.

  • BTS fast boats then behaved aggressively: cutting across bows and firing warning shots in the air. The resulting footage turned into a political gift, framing Darev as bullying civilian mariners.

• Hero narrative at home.

  • Vosk publicly honoured the “Helios Heroes” fishermen, locking in a domestic story of courage and peaceful defiance.

• Cyber info-ops inside Darev.

  • A limited hack splashed clips of the flotilla incident onto Darevi regional TV and news portals before being shut down, seeding doubt and forcing PSD into heavy-handed crackdowns in Rashtan.

Why lean so hard on this? Because in a narrow sea where both sides can hit each other’s ships and cities quickly, the biggest constraint on escalation is political perception. If Darev looked reckless and we looked measured, third parties and even parts of Darev’s own elite had more reason to resist a plunge into war.

5. The Economic Offensive: Turning Gas into Leverage

The second major axis was economic, centred on the Helios fields and pipelines:

1. Initial joint-development pitch.

   • Offered Darev and Seryan companies investment and export opportunities in Helios South under AU/UN-observed arrangements, emphasising “if you want more, you invest with us; we all get rich instead of dead.”

1. Kalyaran Corridor Pipeline concept.

   • A pipeline via Marastria to AU markets, with capacity reserved for Darev/Seryan gas if they cooperated.

1. Time-boxed bluff.

   • Quietly told Serya that preferential investment access would only stand for 48 hours before we considered “other interested parties”. This prodded Seryan technocrats to urge Darev not to escalate while options were explored.

1. Refined offer: UN-monitored JV, 35% cap.

   • Clarified that Darev/Serya could buy up to 35% equity in new Helios developments, with UN-mandated monitoring of volumes and revenues. Hint: a major US oil conglomerate was also sniffing around, but we’d “prefer regional partners”.

Over time, this created a wedge inside Darev and Serya: economic and energy officials began to see a path where they could profit under rules, instead of gambling on force.

6. Controlled Escalation in Cyberspace

I authorised one offensive cyber move with operational impact:

• Attempted disruption of a Darevi frigate.

  • A carefully routed intrusion briefly degraded a frigate’s internal networks and sensor picture near Helios South, forcing it onto conservative, semi-manual modes for a while.

• It didn’t produce the cinematic “dead in the water” moment, but it tested Darev’s resilience and pushed them into less integrated, more cautious patterns.

In parallel, Marastria hardened its own cyberspace:

• Segmented military C2, tightened authentication around missile and air-defence networks.

• Rehearsed manual fall-backs for power, rail and ports in case of future attacks.

The intent was to demonstrate capability without creating a clear casus belli or highly visible humiliation.

7. Discipline Under EMCON: The Silence Gambit

Twice in the crisis I used communications control as a strategic signal:

• Strict EMCON around the border and Helios.

  • From early on, border units and the fleet shifted to burst, low-probability comms and night-only resupply, making targeting harder.

• Twenty-four hours of near-total radio silence.

  • Later, I ordered a full 24-hour blackout for military comms, with pre-agreed timelines and contingency actions.

• On their side, Darev’s SIGINT saw Marastria suddenly “go dark”, briefly raising their alert level but not triggering an attack.

This move spooked them as silence can look like pre-attack staging, but it also underlined that Marastria was disciplined and not frantically manoeuvring for a strike. Internally, it did create friction (a delayed convoy, a CAP gap), a reminder that EMCON has real costs.

8. Negotiation and the Helios Settlement

By D+8, the combination of deterrence, economic offers and information pressure had pushed the crisis into structured talks. The final package looked like this:

1. Demilitarised Helios Zone.

   • A 20 km radius around Helios infrastructure with no national military assets: no warships, no missile batteries, no fighter CAPs.

   • Security provided by a “neutral” foreign operator’s industrial coastguard – safety vessels with mixed Marastrian/Darevi crews under UN supervision.

2. Foreign Operator Consortium – “Helios International”.

   • A neutral consortium received operating rights over Helios North, Helios South and future blocks.

   • Marastria and Darev both held sovereign stakes; Seryan companies took minority equity and off-take contracts.

   • UN/AU auditors monitored production, revenue splits and safety standards.

3. EEZ and legal baseline.

   • The maritime boundary and EEZ remained anchored in international law; no formal move of the line to recognise “historic rights”.

   • Politically, Darev sold it domestically as having secured substantial revenue and a say over Helios operations, even without a map change.

4. Narrative packaging.

   • Joint communiqué language framed the agreement as a new stage in “brotherly cooperation” between two often-bickering siblings, turning “a contested sea into a shared opportunity”.

Helios thus became a tightly regulated industrial bubble – a risky flashpoint turned into a shared, monitored piggy-bank.

9. Results and Balance Sheet

Territorial / legal

• No change to formal EEZ or land borders.

• Helios North remained clearly under Marastrian jurisdiction; Helios South became part of a joint, UN-monitored industrial zone rather than a unilateral Darevi play.

Military

• No large-scale kinetic exchange occurred.

• Marastria: lost a small number of ISR drones; no ships or personnel lost in combat.

• Darev: suffered some temporary cyber disruption and modest reputational damage over its handling of the flotilla, but retained full military capability.

Political

• Marastria emerged as the side that:

  • Never fired first.

  • Repeatedly called for talks and observers.

  • Still refused to concede on law or fundamental security interests.

• Darev:

  • Failed to impose its maximalist mid-gulf boundary but gained revenues and some symbolic comfort.

  • Faced increased internal pressure in Rashtan as PSD crackdowns followed leaked footage and hacks.

In pure wargame terms, Marastria achieved its main goals – secure Helios participation, preserved EEZ, no war – at the cost of prolonged high tension and a risky tightrope walk.

10. Self-Critique: Where This Could Have Blown Up

Several decisions, while effective in-game, carried real-world danger:

• Civilian flotilla in a live crisis.

  • Politically brilliant; operationally reckless. A single misfired burst from BTS or a collision could easily have yielded serious casualties and irresistible pressure to retaliate.

• Cyber attack on the frigate.

  • If it had caused navigation failure, collision or fatal accident, Darev would have had a plausible pretext to escalate and international sympathy for “an unprovoked cyber-sabotage of a warship at sea”.

• Extreme EMCON and 24-hour silence.

  • Spooked Darev, but also degraded our own situational awareness and risked an accidental over-reaction if something unexpected had happened mid-window.

If this were a real NSC table, I’d expect the lawyers and diplomats to push hard against some of these tactics, particularly any move that uses civilians as narrative props or risks uncontrolled escalation via cyber or miscommunication.

11. Takeaways for Real-World Crisis Planning

Three lessons stand out from the Kalyaran Gulf run:

1. Limited aims + consistent narrative can out-perform raw firepower.

   Marastria never tried to rewrite the map; it tried to defend law and unlock gas. Every military and information move was (mostly) kept inside that frame. That coherence made it easier for allies and neutrals to lean in.

   
   

2. Deception, EMCON and civilian optics are powerful – and dangerous.

   The combination of decoys, false chatter, a silent submarine and carefully staged civilian imagery shaped Darev’s perceptions without a shot fired. But the same tools, mishandled, are exactly how miscalculation spirals into disaster.

   
   

3. Economic off-ramps need to be real, not just talking points.

   The pipeline concept, equity caps, UN monitoring and foreign operator consortium gave Serya and Darev’s technocrats something concrete to argue for against their own hardliners. Without that credible alternative, deterrence alone might just have produced a colder, more brittle standoff.

In the end, playing Marastria in the Kalyaran Gulf crisis was less about winning battles than about ensuring battles never happened on terms that would wreck the country. The simulation ends with radars still lit, missiles still fuelled and navies still at sea but with Helios under joint management, observers in place and both governments discovering that shared profit can, sometimes, beat a glorious war that never quite starts