The Stars at War II — David Weber; Steve White

The Shiva Option:
The war wasn't going well. The alien Arachnids were an enemy whose like no civilized race had ever confronted, overrunning planet after planet. The ?Bugs? regarded any sentient species as a handy protein source. Defeat was not an option. The Grand Alliance of Humans and other races has been driven to the wall. Whatever they do, the Bugs just keep coming.

Reluctantly, they now must reactivate General Directive 18, however horrible it may be. Because when the only possible outcomes are victory or racial extermination, only one option is acceptable: The Shiva Option.

Insurrection:
And peace isn't always wonderful. Once the enemy was defeated, the central governments of the Inner Worlds were anything but willing to relinquish their wartime powers. To insure that their grip on the reins of power remained firm, the establishment plans to allow the non-human beings of the Khanate to join the Federation, thus reducing the Fringe Worlds voting bloc to impotent minority status.

The ruthless bureaucrats of the Corporate Worlds are smugly confident that this power play will keep the colonial upstarts in their place. But the Fringers have only one answer to that: Insurrection