In the previous installment I began setting up the next set of lore dumps for my take on pre-war Cybertron. Now we get into some specifics of each of the early grouping put together by Primus’ first 13 “Prime” Transformers: the military, or as I called them in the overview the “Cybertron Defense Force”.
One of the things I want to do with this series is utilize the toys and their gimmicks and play styles. I feel official media has not really taken advantage of anything beyond “they transform into things” when it comes to many of the toy characters. In this case it’s explaining why so many of the Decepticons are war machines and few “civilian” forms, while the Autobots are the opposite. It wasn’t some anti-military move on Hasbro and Marvel’s part; they already were collaborating on G.I. Joe’s story, and that was heavy into the military in the 1980s, battling a terrorist organization and using a discarded plan for Nick Fury and his old Howling Commandos. Instead, they wanted the Decepticons to be the warriors while the Autobots were civilians forced into war to protect their home.
In the comics, the first issue explains that Megatron grabbed a bunch of guys to conquer a planet he found too peaceful. In the cartoon it was eventually revealed he was the latest in the line of Decepticon leaders, “descendants” of the Quintessons’ war machines and so just wanted war because that was their nature. We’ve had other origins but this series is a long ways off from Megatron’s backstory and the forming of the Decepticons. However, this must be taken into consideration when discussing the backstory of the Cybertron military and their eventual fall. The focus here is on the military’s history, it’s ties to the liberation of Cybertron from the Quintessons, and how they factored into the early days of Autobot life. I think I’ll let our chronicler take over from here and explain the details.
After our overview in the last report, it’s time to go into specific aspects of life on Cybertron. The military is not where one usually starts civilization. Early lifeforms learn to protect themselves before forming communities. Tribes will have their hunters and their warriors, but a full on military comes with the forming of a nation, usually a long way into their cultural evolution. In the case of Cybertron’s Autobot population the situation is different. They already had a community, and had just chased off the Quintessons to, pardon the term, transform that community into their own.
During the liberation of Cybertron, the military robots took center stage. As mentioned previously, the Quintessons would sell weapons to both sides of a war, a few of which they caused but they would also take advantage of an existing war. When the war was starting to wind down, rather than try to keep it going and potentially have it backfire, they would simply sell the means to rebuild their societies. If a new war could be used to continue the cycle, and thus their profits, they took it. Otherwise they moved to the next suckers…I mean customers.
The 13 took advantage of so many war machines to give those transforming robots sparks, bringing them to life. (See the previous entry about sparks in one of the Cybertronian life reports.) These warrior robots did all the fighting. All other groups were therefore working in service to them, though they would later take on the role of changing the factory and experiment world into a living habitat for machine life. At that time the warriors would be the most important group of the newly alive autonomous robots. Keep this in mind for later.
“For some reason my shoulders hurt.”
The other was the worry that the Quintessons’ former customers would demand their money or the things they paid for, and a few did. The Quintessons took the former with them and the latter were not willing to be enslaved by another race after shaking off their creators. Of course those customers didn’t always accept the Autobots were fellow lifeforms, and how many of them found excuses to enslave other races, and in some cases members of their own race? A strong defense chased them off until they decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Should they return, the Warriors of the Cybertronian Defense Force would be prepared to receive them, and send them away the hard way.
What about internal threats? The Quintessons left other experiments behind, some more dangerous than the Transformers, and some different uses of the Cybertonium to create different forms of Transformers that didn’t have the sparks. In a later report I’ll go into more specifics about those groups, but you had the dragon-like Predacons, another Transformer experiment, and one who became the namesake not only for a famous group of Decepticon hunters but the Beast Warriors “descended” from the Decepticons. There were also scraplets, little mechanical creatures that ate energon and wouldn’t hesitate to attack a living Cybertronian to get it, or the scrapmetal, insect-like creatures that swarmed their prey for fuel and metal to rebuild themselves. There were more rumored experiments like the Trans-Organics, an experiment that pre-dated Transformers, combining cybernetics with vat-grown monsters. That one didn’t go well, and wouldn’t be revealed as anything more than rumor and “urban myth” until centuries later. A few random Sharkticons and many other failed experiments were also a threat. So even without the Quintessons their legacy remained and without the organic races coming for them the Warriors were still rather busy.
The initial Autobot military structure was rather different from other worlds. We’ll use Earth’s military as an example, specifically the area known as the United States Of America. (In deference to the site hosting these reports, whose “webmaster” comes from that region. He’s also selecting the images from…somewhere.) Earth militaries used a “title” based ranking system while Cybertron warriors were ranked numerically, with 10 being the top of field commanders and “top brass” types at 11. Naturally rank 1 were the rookies and grunts.
The US military is split up into different branches: Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines, Air Force, National Guard, and more recently Space Force, with NASA tending to pull from the Air Force despite being a non-military science and exploration agency. And yet, the Navy maintains an air force despite being primarily a sea-based branch, while the National Guard, which is supposed to protect the nation from the ground while the Coast Guard serves as law enforcement as well as sea-based defense, has gone to war overseas. That’s not counting the joint military special mission force G.I. Joe which has elements of all those groups. Frankly, it’s kind of confusing.
Autobot military didn’t have such strict divisions. Some units would be a combination of ground, air, sea, and/or space vehicles depending on the unit’s particular function, similar to how the aforementioned G.I. Joe force operates with special units for particular missions. A small patrol team may exist as specialists in a given function. For example the Micromasters maintained smaller specialty teams with usually shared alt mode types (ground, air, sea, space, et cetera, though not many beast forms if any). The larger Cybertronian units also had smaller teams made of specific modes or skills, both in a mixed squad and operating as a solo operation. A few might even be a one-bot operation based on requirements, but that was rare and mostly for spies and saboteurs. It was usually easier to group each of these smaller patrols into larger lines of warrior units.
Many smaller teams may derive a shared “gimmick” for lack of a better term. Beast mode groups like the Dinobots or Monsterbots were of a particular animal or animal type (though of course the name “Dinobot” didn’t exist on Cybertron until encountering Earth, and nowadays is its own alt mode type, due to admiration of Earth’s extinct animal species). It could also be based on a shared talent or mission like the Protectobots. The Combiners we know today were created during the Great War, but were reverse engineered from robots that could split into separate alt modes. Others had bodies that could transform quickly between robot and alternate form like the Jumpstarters, or turned into weapons to back up warriors who lost theirs in battle, offering a concentrated energy blast or special ability to make up for one less soldier on the field. (Controlling the wielder was tech that didn’t exist until recently with the “Weaponizer”.) The “(X)masters” of Nebulos are another, but more recent example. Even today the continuing smaller wars and skirmishes tend to follow a particular “gimmick” for active units around whatever the current conflict is over.
Otherwise, the space mode warriors were the first line of defense, and were more likely to have their own units as a result. A more mixed unit benefitted from having space warriors in their ranks but due to their mission they rarely battled alongside the other unit member, often being isolated from the larger unit as a result. Sea warriors had the same problem, but are also the smallest number of alternate modes due to how little liquid there is on Cybertron, most of it just being used to cool the planet. Still, since potential invaders might think to use those coolant rivers like the waterways on purely organic worlds, having a “sea” defense was important.
Air and ground forces tended to operate together as they were the most connected. It’s why the ground based Army and Marines from our Earth example have air units apart from the Air Force. The air units were the second line of defense, with the ground based units as a last line of defense against alien invaders. These two also worked together against the aforementioned left behind Quintesson experiments.
Are you surprised a group that gave us Starscream could be elitist and arrogant?
There were air or ground only teams, most notably the “Seekers” (the colloquial name of the Skyraider patrol team, though “Seeker” was used so often it’s become their official title), the elite guard of the military Air Commander. Sharing a similar body type and alt mode to confuse the enemy as to who was the Air Commander, they also became famous for their name-inspiring “seek and destroy” missions. They could be a bit elitist at times, never mixing with other body types or patrol teams on a regular basis, but there were Transformers who underwent the dangerous method of moving spark and datatrax to a new body just to join their ranks. That’s how special they were seen Seekers also operated in groupings of three, with some solo warriors that boosted the trios when necessary. Usually these were survivors when there were not enough to form a new trio. Occasionally a trio was, again, based on a particular skill, like the “stormbringers” and their use of planetary weather systems or elements. It’s shame that the majority went to the Decepticon side during the war.
I guess we should close this out, despite our timeline not yet crossing into the Great War, to explain why the military warriors ended up joining Megatron’s Decepticon movement. He was one of them, as we’ll get into when the war becomes our topic. Right now we’re focusing on pre-war Cybertron, but this is where the note from earlier comes into play. During the rebellion from the Quintessons, the Warriors were the most important group. All of the other divisions formed–medics, mechanics, transporters, engineers, and others existed to power the “war machine”. Every grouping defaulted to them in order to free their newly encoded race.
After the Quintessons were gone, and it seemed like the organic races were leaving the planet alone, things changed. Cybertron could finally put war behind them and form their own society. The Warriors were reduced to fighting the Quintesson leftovers and staying vigilant in case some new threat rose to attack the planet. Autobot society still respected and admired the warriors but they weren’t priority number one anymore. Many of them resented that, even new robots who found military life less “glamorous” than they heard about the early days of Cybertronian life. Not all of them, as many warriors still remained with the Autobots and were forced to fight former comrades or those they deemed “traitors”, but enough that it explains why Decepticon ranks are primarily military combat vehicles and Autobots primarily civilian modes on bots forced to become warriors.
Could they have altered their modes? Possibly, but in the case of both factions they were hoping they would be the winning faction and needed the forms they had to readjust to Autobot society or continue Decepticon conquest. Others found use for race cars and cargo transporters among other forms in their particular teams, so it seemed a waste of Cybertonium to alter their forms if a more combat-ready alternate mode was not available to their body type and/or without extra programmable metal added to their structures. So they worked with what they had.
Of all the various functions, the military is the most depressing. Recognized as the Cybertronian Defense Force, it became a threat to Autobot life and eventually other planets throughout the galaxy, with Earth and to a lesser extent Nebulos arguably being the hardest hit. Non-military robots were forced to take up arms to defend their way of life alongside those warriors who stayed loyal to the Autobot way of life being developed. It wasn’t even a military coup as traditionally thought of. Many warriors joined Decepticon ranks, but so did criminals, punks, and just robots out for power, glory, violence, conquest, and a few conscripted or reprogrammed soldiers just to show how evil the group could actually get. (Not that we don’t see that among Autobots minus reprogramming but they tend to be the exception, rather than the rule like Decepticons.)
In my next report I was going to get into the government and forming of a “police” force, but going over this again for editing, I kind of feel this is the better time to discuss the various threats the Defense Force was dealing with. So I’ll go over that next time instead.
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