Headscratchers / Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)

• If the events of the original Modern Warfare timeline play out in this one (and it's strongly implied they will), will they have some major deviations?
  • Most likely. If we pay attention to the ending, it is established that Imran Zakhaev himself was killed in the assassination attempt in Pripyat in 1996 (different from his original incarnation), and his son Victor Zakhaev is taking the helm, so there might be some different ways on how Victor organizes the Ultranationalists' tactics and strategies in the upcoming games.
  • Given Price's age, it is also likely the Pripyat mission happened much later than 1996, as that is 23 years before the events of the main game, and Price would be in his late 40s or early 50s in 2019, while he looks like he's in his late 20s/early 30s in 2009. The Pripyat mission may have happened sometime in the 2000s in this timeline.
• How did Farah contact Price or even the SAS in general while in prison, and why would he be given the OK to rescue her, when that would likely put them into engagement with Russia, something Alex was trying to avoid in the very first mission?
  • She seemed pretty crafty when it came to breaking out during the prison mission, it's possible that that wasn't her first time. She may have been able to contact someone via radio, or she may have gotten the word out while being forced to do labor. 10 years in prison gives you a lot of time to find the cracks in their defenses.
  • As for the SAS attacking the Russian held prison complex personally, in the eyes of the public, as long as they aren't identified and reported it's as if they weren't even there. That is the nature of covert operations. Of course, the covert operations of Bravo 6 would be a lot less risky if they didn't display the Union Jack on their chests and wear the SAS emblem on their sleeves. In reality, it's common worldwide for Special Forces to avoid wearing name, unit, or national identifiers specifically so their actions can't be tied to their host divisions. The SAS has even been known to go so far as keeping their faces concealed while in public.
  • It's also well-established in the game that Barkov is a Kurtz-esque renegade whose actions are not sanctioned by the Russian leadership. While he seems to have enough domestic support to supply his occupation and maintain some semblance of legitimacy, it's possible that the Russian government proper wouldn't want an open conflict with the West over a "mad dog" they have little control over. Compare this to the Syrian Civil War, where there have been open clashes between Western troops and Russian mercenaries.
• Why is Price constantly introducing himself by name? Isn't the SAS supposed to be one of those highly classified Special Ops groups whose members' identities are meant to stay a secret?
  • I think at least in Farah's case, he was the one who was keeping in contact with her in the prison, so when he finally rescued her, he felt obligated to put a face to his name. Considering that they casually greet each other at the Consulate, it wouldn't be surprising if they are in constant contact afterward too.
  • I think the SAS are more special forces than *secret* forces; obviously there's a lot they want to keep on the down-low, but the identities of individual members aren't kept secret IRL as far as I'm aware. About half the nation's supply of lowbrow Airport Novels is hacked out by former SAS men who make it no secret of their former profession.
    • Most of the former-SAS authors write using pseudonyms - Chris Ryan and Andy McNab are not their real names, which were kept secret for quite a long time even after they left the military. It's difficult to find an official policy, but by all accounts members are not explicitly forbidden from revealing their own identities, but it's widely considered a sensible idea and adhered to by most. Being cavalier with one's membership of a unit that engages in covert operations can put lives at risk - yours, your fellow soldiers, and possibly others as well. Photographs of Regiment operators are usually doctored to blur or hide identifying information - as much to hide the fact that the SAS were active in a specific theatre as to protect the identities of the soldiers.
      So, Cpt Price casually announcing his unit to all and sundry is a bit of a blunder on his part. Letting Farah know when rescuing her was probably a judgement call, as she was clearly a valuable enough asset to send the SAS in for to begin with. But barging into the US Embassy and yelling his rank, last name and SAS for any and all to hear was a bit stupid, and probably not what would be advised.
• Why put the Wolf in a lightly-defended embassy building while waiting for him to be extracted? Why not just hold him in whatever military base the Marines are rolling out of?
  • This actually does bring up an interesting plot point. If the Marines were on a mission to capture the leader of a dangerous terrorist organization, they would have had a plan in place to extract the HVT to be immediately extradited into the hands of the U.S. government to be prosecuted for his crimes. Of course, since the true purpose of his capture was to interrogate him for answers in regard to the missing poison gas, it's possible that the CIA threw a speed bump in the way so that they could question him personally and find the gas before it started a war between Russia and the U.S...
  • Still, you'd think that the CIA would have a nice basement somewhere further away from the terrorist's friends than the city where they all live.
• The above leads to the question, why is there a U.S. Embassy in Urzikstan at all? Is there some form of government in the country that was never mentioned?
  • There's probably a skeleton regime in place to give Barkov's rule some legitimacy, though we never see it in the game. It's quite puzzling, of course, that the Embassy is still open as US troops are fighting large-scale ground operations in the country without the government's approval. For some historical comparison, the US Embassy in Afghanistan stayed open throughout the '80s alongside an extensive (but still covert) CIA support operation for the Mujahideen, while the US Embassy in Syria closed years before the open deployment of ground troops in the country's northeast.
• Why is Price working for the CIA? More specifically, why does Kate Laswell jump the pond with her "compartmentalized" information and hand it over to a member of a foreign military? Doesn't the CIA already have an in-house special forces unit intended for situations just like the one she asks Price to handle? ...is Price secretly an American spy?
  • The US and the UK are members of the Five Eyes alliance, wherein intel is freely shared between members. And insofar as having Price conduct the CIA's missions, from a national security point of view, if you can get someone else to do the work for you, all the better.
• If Al-Qatala is a nationalist organization, then why did they recruit a bunch of "homegrown radical" white Brits?
  • Why? It's the perfect cover - security services would not initially expect native citizens to be agents for a foreign nationalist terror organization of different ethnicity. As for how they recruited them, however, that's another question entirely. Perhaps they found British sympathizers, in the same way European and Japanese terrorists carried out attacks on behalf of the PLO in the 1960s and 1970s.
• If Barkov is a renegade, as some have suggested (and as implied in-game, given that his propaganda emphasizes it is his occupation, as opposed to Russia's), how is he able to obtain troops, vehicles, and other military supplies? Modern militaries are not autonomous and cannot just live off the land in the style of premodern armies; the civilian sector must support them by providing new soldiers and war materiel, which requires the cooperation of the civilian bureaucracy (to induct new soldiers) and the civilian economy (for military production). How is Barkov able to wage his supposedly private war under such conditions of dependence?
  • In the original Modern Warfare trilogy, the Russian Ultranationalists had a powerful above-board political element, so it's possible that they also control significant portions of the Russian military and defense industry in this timeline, supplying Barkov under the table in the same way that the Russian government currently does with separatist forces in the Donbass. Additionally, many of his soldiers are probably ideologically-motivated "volunteers" or mercenaries, recruited independently of the Russian Army proper.
  • He's a "renegade" but not disavowed until the full extent of his war crimes is made public toward the end (and he loses the war).
  • Plausible deniability, maybe? Russia keeps up the pretense they're powerless to control him while really he's been doing their bidding all along.
• How has Russia (or Barkov, or whatever) been able to wage war in Urzikstan for over 20 years (longer than the US has been in Afghanistan, and twice as long as the Soviet war in Afghanistan)? This is an especially confusing question given that Farah's flashback depicts Russian airstrikes in Urzikstan in 1999, at a time when the Russian economy was still recovering from the 1998 financial crisis. Was the Russian post-Soviet transition to capitalism more stable and successful in the Modern Warfare universe than IRL?
  • Might have been the case. Given that the entire Modern Warfare timeline is an alternate history compared to ours, it is possible that Russia had performed a better and more successful transition into a capitalist democracy in the years following the downfall of the Soviet Union, although this information is unfortunately not discussed at all in the game.
  • I think they are alluding to the Second Chechen War, which began around the same time. The problem is that the Chechen war was over quickly and then chechenization took care of any war wearines, which is opposite of what is portrayed for Urzikstan in the game, and raises questions about how Barkov can recieve so much support for twenty years, even if it is covert.
• If Urzikstan has been a failed state and effectively incorporated into Russia for two decades, why does America maintain a sizable, mostly civilian embassy there?
  • Most likely for the same reason there was one in Libya for 4 years despite the Civil War there.
    • Still, though, Libya still existed as a state; Urzikstan seems to have been de facto annexed by Russia for the last twenty years.
    • Maybe only some parts of the country that are under Russian annexation while the others, including the capital, are still relatively free of foreign occupation (except for the dozens of American Marines present in the town of Rammaza). Much like present day Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions in Georgia.
• American vehicles supporting Farah Karim’s resistance are supposed to be unmarked, but in-game they are clearly exclusively used by Americans; the Russians use MD-500 helicopters, but no Apaches or Bradleys.
  • Two words, Plausible Deniability.
  • Deniability kind of goes out the window when the weapons, ammunition, and vehicles used can be clearly traced back to the U.S. and NATO based forces. Those Bradley's are almost completely exclusive to the United States Army with only a handful of them under the control of foreign forces, it's not all that plausible that a foreign militia group on Russia's border would possess one or know how to operate one without American training. Not to mention the AGM-114 Hellfires launched at multiple Russian facilities, as well as the NATO based bullets, grenades, and explosives used in the attacks. The Russian Government already gets hissy whenever they find even the slightest bit of evidence that Terror groups have equipment tracing back to American suppliers using it as means to discourage the U.S. from drawing back their military forces, how do you think they're going to react to a direct attack on a Russian Military base with very obvious American involvement. That AH-64 Apache flew right over that base. Unless Farah killed every last Russian and Civilian witness to that attack before they could communicate it to the wider world, AND scraped up every piece of missile fragment, AND made sure there was no surveillance of the attack left, then there's no way the U.S. would be able to deny their involvement in this attack.
  • It was possible that the high brass of Russian military and government are already gets sick to put up with Barkov's fiasco that nets pretty much nothing but bad reputation for their country but couldn't actually calls him back to Moscow because of political reasons, and thus they deliberately look the other way on the US involvement in Urzikstan, because why bother to remove the annoying pests on your house by yourselves when you could get someone else to do it for you?.
• If Farah is now officially the leader of a Terrorist Organization, why wasn't she detained? Why was she allowed to just walk off a U.S. base under the command of an Officer that now considers her group to be hostile and responsible for the deaths of several U.S. Marines?
  • We get the answer on-screen when Price says he'll violently resist. The thing is that Price is insane enough to actually do it. It's also a note that Colonel Norris is the only one who wants to do it since it's a ridiculous order, especially after Farah just came back from helping them on a mission against her own brother.
    • And for those who doubt Price would do it, I remind you that he nuked the United States with an EMP pulse in the original MW trilogy.
  • Colonel Norris is a (wait for it) Colonel, which puts puts him as the Commanding Officer of whatever Marine Expeditionary Unit happens to be stationed in the fictional country of Urzikstan. The entire task force isn't going to say "screw that" to their C.O. just because one British Commando has threatened to kill him. If anything, that actually gave them due cause to arrest Price along with Farah. At the very least he would have been booted from the Command Room and would have been reported to whatever authority has control of him. The fact that this call goes even further up the chain all the way to Lt Gen Lyons, a freaking department head, would mean that likely the entire Marine Corps would be on board with the whole "they're terrorists" thing. Price having a temper tantrum isn't going to sway an entire branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. So did Farah just slip out before the memo was sent, or did the good Colonel decide to take a nap immediately after his final scene?
    • Yes and he could have pressed it and it would have ended up being something ugly. The thing is, again, Norris chose to back down. Why did he choose to back down? Well, maybe he was a Dirty Coward or maybe he found he didn't want to alienate the Special Forces team that he'd have to work with in the future. This is a highly illegal operation that was engaged in acts of war against the Russian government anyway. Plus, again, everyone in that room knew Farah's group wasn't guilty of terrorist actions save for Hadir. The only reason they were designating her a terrorist group was to cover their asses because nerve gas was used.
    • That and they killed a bunch of U.S. Marines and ran off to bed with the Al-Qaeda expies. Hadir wasn't just some lowly mook who slipped underneath Farah's radar, he's the ULF's second in command. Re-designating the ULF from friendly to hostile isn't entirely political, there would be a serious discussion in whether or not Farah could be trusted. She certainly can't be trusted to control her men. The fact of the matter is Americans were killed, that's going to go on public record, illegal war or no, and I guarantee no Marine is going to want to have anything to do with the group responsible for the deaths of their brothers, and if it ever becomes public that the ULF's leadership has ties to Al-Qatala, a group that just terror attacked London, it would result in a MAJOR backlash within the U.S. with policy makers pushing for a withdrawal of support to the ULF.
    • I'm not sure it would be accurate to say that Farah can't be trusted to control her men when, by all appearances and accounts; the vast majority of her troops support her, are highly devoted to her (from how deeply she cares for them) and followed her orders to the letter. She also made it crystal clear her stance towards the use of chemical weapons to the point that, without exception: if anyone were to use chemical weapons and the tactics Al-Qatala and Barkov uses: you're her enemy. And that also includes either her own at the time allies and even her own people and troops; and has made no secret of this. She draws very clear, distinct and consistent moral and operational lines that she hold herself and others to very firmly. Compared to the rest of her subordinates; Hadir was something of a complicated asset and while he was kept on a leash by his sister; it seems she was only able to keep in squared away for so long. Though given Farah's aforementioned stance: the moment Hadir used that Poison Gas: she promptly rebuked, disowned and disavowed him. It also helps that Price, Garrick and Alex seem to have all vouched for her and putting on record that Hadir went rouge against his sister and her forces. Plus added to the fact that Farah herself almost died in the Gas Attack her brother instigated and also apparently got a considerable number of their fellow freedom fighters killed as well; so those factors combine make Farah and her forces as a whole being re-designated as an outright terrorist group despite their history and established MO; still comes across as a knee jerk reaction made in haste, at best.
    • The lack of real-world knowledge shows. Rank does not always equal authority, and no United States Colonel is going to go toe-to-toe with an SAS Captain. When a Medic or an SF operator tells you to jump, you jump, if you're told to back off and keep your mouth shut, you do it, or you'll find yourself in a very uncomfortable conversation with people who, in fact, outrank someone who's JUST a Three-Star General. The food chain goes much, much higher than that, and the aforementioned conversation would likely include the line "maybe you should consider retirement." Captain Price is the Subject Matter Expert on the ground and knows who to trust and who not to far more than blanket statements of "X group are terrorists." Compare the US government's recent actions in Syria in regards to betraying the Kurds by ordering a withdrawal. Sure, the US military withdrew alright...but what the media didn't show was how we did it. Fun Fact: the planned route went straight threw several major ISIS strongholds that no longer exist. We left a lot of bodies behind. One thing to always consider, especially for NATO forces in general and especially the US Armed Forces, is just how much LATERAL freedom we have, not to mention the ABSOLUTE freedom to disobey illegal or even remotely questionable orders. That Colonel overstepping his boundaries definitely qualifies as his entire command staff would look at him like he's on drugs, especially with CIA officials in the same room.
• Why is Farah initially so distrustful of Captain Price when he shows up to get her cooperation for the final mission?
  • With Hadir captured, she could've easily thought she was next or it was a case of You Have Outlived Your Usefulness and that he was bait for her to let her guard down. Either way, she probably didn't doubt him all that much, seeing as how she later notes in the mission how she knew he could trust him after all.