Office of Frontier Security

The Office of Frontier Security (commonly referred to by its acronym "OFS") is a fictional government agency which appears in David Weber's Honorverse series of military science fiction novels.

Established by the Solarian League as an agency with the mission to promote stability and order in the systems near the borders of the League. To that end, the OFS was empowered to mediate between settled star systems on the outskirts of Solarian space, often dubbed the Verge systems, which were not yet League members. As additional incentives, the OFS was authorized to both offer security guarantees (backed by the League Navy) and special trade concessions to systems which petitioned for OFS services. Another unstated goal of OFS was to facilitate the approach and eventual absorption of single-system nations within the League.

Unfortunately, as the League's representative institutions were incapable of overseeing the League's bureaucracy, the Office of Frontier Security became increasingly corrupt over the centuries. Instead of maintaining peace throughout the League's neighboring space, the OFS became an unscrupulous expansionist entity, to the point that the "protection requests" which prompted its intervention were routinely manufactured by the OFS itself. In other cases, OFS intervened at the "request" of factions which sought "protection" against their own governments, or simply intervened without any request (whether genuine, forced or manufactured) to establish "League Protectorates" with the stated interest of safeguarding human rights, often with the support of the League Gendarmerie.

In that manner, and without any sort of legislative oversight, the Office of Frontier Security developed its own foreign policy, which consisted in absorbing any peripheric small Verge system incapable of standing up to itself, whether their peoples wanted it or not. The unchecked activities of OFS were worsened by its deals with the League's massive multistellar corporations and commercial interests. These corporations aided and supported Frontier Security's activities, in exchange for complete and unsupervised exploitation of newly-acquired worlds under OFS authority and OFS intervention in suppressing any form of dissent. In particular, many leading figures in Frontier Security have established connections with the slaver corporations of Mesa.

Newly-incorporated worlds were placed under the jurisdiction of Frontier Security, which grouped the worlds in sectors administrated by OFS-appointed governors and commissioners, often with strong ties to either Mesa or the League's corporations. Sectors controlled by OFS were policed by the Solarian League Gendarmerie, a special security agency, with the regular League military taking a support role in the event that OFS and the Gendarmerie could not control the situation.

While the abuses of Frontier Security are not a secret, and often are at the forefront of the demands of Solarian reformists, the vast majority of the League's population is often unaware of the Office's activities.

Frontier Security has always regarded the Star Kingdom of Manticore as a threat to its interests (and those of its Mesan partners), particularly after the annexation of the Talbott Cluster into the Star Kingdom -as the Talbott Cluster was in Frontier Security's path. To forestall the annexation, Frontier Security and the Gendarmerie began a plan to arm fringe Cluster groups opposed to annexation, in order to trigger a campaign of violence and terrorism which would have given OFS a pretext to intervene and wrestle the Cluster from Manticoran control.

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