For what it's worth, though No Easy Day does directly criticize Marcinko the author admits that he and other SEALs basically laughed off Marcinko's public description of ST6 in the days after the UBL raid, the author saying that they had progressed so, so far from the incarnation that existed...
I suppose that it's also because because the pointy end of the hierarchy is supposed to be the POTUS and SECDEF, that's my impression based on the Goldwater–Nichols Act and the Unified Combatant Command system, which the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff/Chiefs of Staff/Joint Staff are...
That's pretty much what the "Lost Cause" mythology was and is about, even when its advocates had accepted the forced return to the Union as a fait accompli or were even advocating loyalty to the post-ACW Union.
That's pretty much the impression I've gotten based on my own readings; the CSA had...
In fairness
Does the OP mean "if bin Laden is killed before September 11, 2011 ITTL, is the plan still attempted on September 11, 2001 according to the IOTL details of said plan?"
Killer300, re: the "Mandate of Heaven" -- think of it as a conditional take on "divine right", that the Mandate could be lost by poor rule and overthrow, though of course ruling dynasties tended not like to the "conditional" part. :p
I'd add that there's a reason that there's a Chinese saying...
Mind you, said multiple states were arguably a de facto thing (at least after Yuan Shikai's death) even after the founding of the Republic of China, and I wasn't anything, just quoting Romance of the Three Kingdoms. :p
In the novel and in history the Han Empire had basically fractured after...
I'm just continually reminded of the opening line of Romance of the Three Kingdoms being "The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide"... you might have to resort to outright ASB if the POD has to be after 1900.
Why would he need to bother "usurping" the shogunate (considering that he'd forced the last Ashikaga shogun to abdicate a few years before) or the empire, when there were the titles of sessho (regent) and kampaku (chief imperial advisor) ready for the taking, and in any case he was the one who...