Ben: Well here we are starting yet another project. I visited Evan recently and he introduced me to Missile Threat.

Evan: To be fair, I’ve had this project going for a while, I just finally found a way to rope Ben in. How one might ask? Well, the wonderful little “Mercenary Air Campaign” supplement for Missile Threat. Ben is a sucker for a good narrative and after he helped me playtest the Adepticon Missile Threat Scenario he was clearly hooked on the game too. It was an easy kill for me…

Ben: Seeing as Evan already has some beautifully painted planes for the Ogaden War after much debate and nerdery we decided it would be the background to our Mercenary Air Campaign.

Evan: The Ogaden War was something I didn’t know a lick about until sometime last summer when I stumbled upon some photos of Somali MiG-21s. That took me down a rabbit hole and soon I had read Tom Cooper’s excellent book on the subject Wings Over Ogaden as well as influenced Blue Falcon Hobbies to release a decal set covering it for their patreon. Realizing it was also covered in the Missile Threat rules (which had been sitting on a shelf for more than a year since I got them) it seemed like the perfect, limited, project to get into Missile Threat. Some MiG-21s, some F-5Es and good to go…..right? Wrong.

When we decided to run a joint Missile Threat event with the Lead Pursuit Podcast for Adepticon I was already halfway through painting my jets for it. I floated it as an option and it was agreeable for everyone so I kicked into gear and knocked out my Mig-21s and F-5Es. Then I thought well hey, the Somali Air Force also operated a lot of MiG-17s, so why not do some of those…..and I probably need some F-5As for the Ethiopians….and maybe a C47…..and the Somali Air Force did have some Il-28 bombers….. So now I have a lot of extra planes at various stages of completeness, which made it seem like a great choice for the setting for our little fictional mercenary campaign.

Ben: I will say I didn’t dissuade you from branching out. It always starts with the little lie “Hey friend, it’s only 6 models.” And it ends like this every single time.

Evan: So, if you’ve made it this far and are asking “yes but what IS this Ogaden War?” let me try to lay out the basics for you quickly. The Ogaden is a semi-arid to arid plateau region of eastern Ethiopia which borders Somalia to the east and south. It is inhabited primarily by groups which are ethnically Somalian but following messy post-colonial border changes after the Second World War it ended up as an Ethiopian territory.

In the years after Ethiopia took control of the Ogaden it became the centerpiece of a dispute with the newly formed Somali Republic. This eventually came to a head in a 1963 rebellion in the Ogaden and the 1964 Ethiopian-Somali Border War, resulting in a demilitarized zone along the border. During the 1970s internal support for self determination in the Ogaden set the two countries on a path to conflict again and on July 13, 1977 Somalia invaded Ethiopia in a bid for the region. The war would last until early 1978, with Ethiopia eventually recovering the territory they lost in the opening weeks.

Ben: Seems like a good place for some air mercenaries to set up shop really.

Evan: Prior to the war Ethiopia had been US-backed while Somalia had been Soviet-backed. However due to internal political turmoil Ethiopian-US relations had broken down. Similarly the Soviet Union disapproved of the Somali actions in the Ogaden and turned their full support to Ethiopia, leaving Somalia high and dry without a backing superpower. However, for most of the conflict the Ethiopian Air Force continued to operate their US aircraft on which they had received extensive training. Meanwhile the Somali Air Force pilots were less well trained, and made do with their MiGs as long as they could. Historically, after the first few months of the war, the Somali Air Force was effectively out of the fight, having been trounced by the superior Ethiopian Air Force.

Ben: It is a good excuse to use lots of western and eastern equipment. Plus that desert/ arid camouflage is hot.

Evan: For our Missile Threat setting we are taking some creative license. Ben’s Soviet backed mercenaries will be flying in support of Ethiopia. A sort of “advanced cadre” of Soviet support before the Soviet equipment and Cuban advisors arrive in December of 1977. My US-backed mercenaries will be operating out of nearby Djibouti in a CIA scheme to hurt the Soviet backed Ethiopians as much as to support Somalia.

Ben: My mercenaries are based in the South Sudan. Ex-Soviets running proxy-wars. Nice.

Evan: The primary aircraft lists we chose from were generated on some modified tables I did up similar to the ones in the Mercenary Air Campaign book but with a little more modern aircraft. However for the two opposing forces we’ll be fighting for/beside we have the following aircraft:

Ethiopian Air Force (ETAF)
-F-5E Tiger II
-F-5A Freedom Fighter
-English Electric Canberra
-C-47 and C-119K transports

Somali Air Force (SAF)
-MiG-21MF
-MiG-17
-IL-28

I think these lists give us a good, yet small base of things to work with as we can do a lot with some fighters and some bombers. Historically there are a few more aircraft types that were in the inventories of the combatants but did not see combat use in the Ogaden. Yet, perhaps with our expanded artistic license I’ll succumb to the desire to paint a flight of ETAF F-86s…..

Ben: I’m going MiG crazy. In the next installments Evan and I will be introducing our Air Mercenaries and their respective founding four members.