15mm Modern Fictional Wars

Regular readers of this blog will know how much I love the modern age as a wargaming period, but at the same time I am extremely uncomfortable in gaming real world conflicts more recent than than (say Vietnam). I've discussed the reasons why in previous posts, so I wont go into them again. But what I'd really like to do next year is assemble and create terrain and armies to let me play out these conflicts.

So, I'm taking a stab at creating a fictional nation (as yet un-named) off the coast of North-East Africa. This means I'll be squarely in the middle of two of the worlds trouble-spots (North East Africa and the Middle East) for wargaming purposes. The idea is to create a nation about the size of Qatar, but to make it an Island nation off the coast of  Somalia, just north of the Seychelles.

Scenario Ideas:
The idea is that although this will be a small nation (with about 11,000 professional soldiers) it's a very professional and well equipped force in a very troubled region. So it's soldiers get around a bit on peace-keeping duties and protecting the national interests. That should give me plenty of room to for creating scenarios such as:

• Raids on pirate bases
• Peacekeeping and peace-enforcement
• Inteverention in local fictional conflicts (such as a religious or socialist coup in the nearby Seychelles or on the mainland).
• Repelling an invasion by a foreign power. Perhaps even those dastardly Franonians?
• Zombie plague outbreaks

Terrain:

This nation will be a former British Colony (independence circa 1971, like many of the former British colonies in Africa) with British style laws, policing and traffic codes but with Middle-Eastern/African/Medeteranean style terrain and buildings. Inspired by cities such as Tel-Aviv and Muskat (at one end of the scale) and Mogadishu on the other, that will mean the following sort of buildings will turn up:

• Generic Middle Eastern/North African villa's, sginel room dwellings and compounds
• Italian/Spanish style tenements
• Les Verrieres style buildings.
• Shanty Towns
• Modern Office buildings and shops.
• Roads, Pavements and 70's style blocks of flats from Scalescenes.co.uk in HO scale. (OO printed at 87%)

Miniatures:

The military of this fictional nation will be relatively well equipped given it's size, with a good portion of it's military recruited from abroad (particularly from Britain, Pakistan and India). However, it's gear will be a mix of legacy equipment inherited from the British Garrison, second hand equipment purchased cheap during the initial formation of the military and newer, better quality equipment as the military attempts to modernise. Although the country will maintain close ties to the UK, it will purchase most of it's equipment from regional powers (such as Israel and South Africa) and the USA.

• Peter Pig IDF soldiers to represent the regulars (painted with ACU style uniforms)
• Flames of War M113's to represent the battle taxis of most units.
• Stryker's (from QRF) and Hummers (from Peter Pig) to represent the AFV's supplied to newer suits
• Peter Pig militia  and Technicals ( to represent african insurgents, pirates and the like)
• Khurasan armed British Police ( to represent the local police)
• Civilians from Peter Pig, Rebel Miniatures and Ground Zero Games
• Zombies from Khurasan and Rebel Miniatures.

And that will be my major project for 2014.