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GWOT VI - Dog's Breakfast
Feb. 13th, 2020 08:45 pmGWOT VI - Dog's Breakfast
Well, that particular gambit neatly took over a quarter of the enemy forces off the board at a stroke. Not really off the board, more like flipped over waving their little paws in the air - I had to remember that Army of God forces could be given new orders at any time.
The problem was all the rest of the Xtian militias, paramilitaries, local defense organizations, volunteers and ragtag aspiring bandits.
Genocide is a game. The name of the game is separation. You take people out of their homes, one way or another - disaster, usually manmade, sometimes natural. You move them around, a shell game. And, most important, you keep handing them off from nice people to not so nice people to really awful people. Then the machetes come out, and the infamous political motto, "No person? No problem!"
To unplay the game, to fight genocide, I had to combine and unify. Get refugees away from dangerous people and unsafe areas. But once concentrated, they were made even more vulnerable.
That's where the tactics of genocide and the tactics of war intersect.
In war, you concentrate your forces and you smash your enemy's weaker forces. Old as Sun Tzu.
There had been wrinkles over the centuries. The disciplined career professionals of the Roman Legions had killed ten times their numbers in an afternoon of javelin throwing and gladius stabbing. Less than a century later, auxiliary cavalry and near-naked barbarians in makeup literally cut them to bits. That tension, between the part-time soldier ("minuteman," so named because he had sixty seconds to get his musket and roll out) and the career professional ("Do ye futter all in a line, too, lads?") continued to this day.
Everyone I was up against in Iowa so far was militia. But there are militia and militia. Army of God had their act together - most of their officers were trained military officers, they had their own officer training program (!), they had a strong NCO corps made up almost entirely of American military veterans, and modern equipment. Their major oddity is being organized on church, parish, stake and ward lines (similar to other paramilitary Christian organizations such as the Salvation Army and the Church of Latter Day Saints, both of which thank God were sitting this one out).
Local defense militia tended to coalesce around their own local churches or their local governments, particularly the county sheriff's departments. Some of them were great, what little was left of law and order in Iowa. Others were bandits with badges, who wouldn't kill your daughter and eat your sheep. They'd sell your daughter, rape your sheep and eat _you_.
Then there were the preachers. Any asshole with a loud voice, commanding personality, and the ability to puzzle out words in a Bible (or, increasingly, use some combination of an electronic Bible and YouTube) could put together their own following. And many, many had. Before the Firecracker, there had been an American biker who'd found God, started getting called the Machine Gun Preacher, opened a mission in Uganda, Africa - and found himself heavily engaged against genocidaires. By himself. Crazy bastard, but I'd read his book and made his movie mandatory watching by my soldiers.
We'd run the numbers. Of the half million combatants, about half were of the crazy preacher sort. Some were little better than refugees themselves, adopting protective coloration with crucifix and collar. Others were just the lawless types that follow around any war to pick at the edges.
To be fair, the food situation was not quite that dire that cannibalism was a threat. Yet. Soldiers, like farmers and fishermen, need to keep a eye to the seasons, the weather and the harvest. We were early summer. Not a bad time to campaign. But if we didn't end this soon, a lot of food would rot in the fields, and the next winter would pure suck for the survivors. One way or another, we wouldn't be around by then.
If the bulk of the Gs were going to become a government, and therefore defend themselves, they needed time to get organized. They also needed help from political action cadre, civil affairs groups, and/or actual Special Operations A-teams. America had all three, but they were busy everywhere else. California didn't have any of the above - our Bear Force taught insurgency, which is how to break shit as opposed to how to run shit.
Even if I again grossly exceeded my orders and turned my hand to full time civil affairs work, it would take me and my handful of qualified staff several months to get the Gs up to snuff. We were busy and no one had that much time.
So the best I could do was to smile and point, try to figure out which area(s) would end up under G control, and try to put my handful of California soldiers in between.
A word about where they fell on the career vs. citizen model. Every California Republic soldier was a volunteer for this mission, but about a third were not volunteers for California Republic service. Our effort to reintegrate our own Homeland, California native genocidaires, and National Guard troops who'd allied with America had required that, after trials and executions (ahem, me, at Alviso), we Do Something with those who either hadn't been charged (the majority) or those who had been found not guilty. What we did was draft them. Eight years of service in the California Republic forces, atoning for their sins. Those two hundred could in theory defect. I knew them; some of them knew me from Alviso as their Warden. They'd rather die first. What was left of their self esteem and their self image depended on fixing what had been broken, doing their utmost, and regaining their honor. My problem was trying to keep them reined in - and with the scout troops sent forward to the camps I couldn't protect, I'd failed.
About another third of my troops were careerists,. especially my NCOs and officers. The California Military Academy and our own militia and induction programs had a brutal edge to them, even now. We fight to save lives. People are dying every day. What have _you_ done, _today_ to help try to save them? In our domestic politics, the only question about this deployment is why we'd sent troops to Iowa when we badly needed them from Yreka to San Ysidro. I'd explained it; we fight here so we don't have to fight _there_. I wasn't worried about my career troops. If anything they provided a useful backbone to help control the other two groups.
The last third of my troops were California reservists. They had homes and families, they'd signed up for the deployment not the duration. Unlike the other two groups, they actually had something to live for - and most of my technical specialists were concentrated in this group. Armorers, doctors. And Iowa medical professionals I'd drafted, who I had a special obligation to protect from harm.
I hadn't talked about it, but somehow my deployments pushed the eight year folks to the front lines, the careerists in the middle, and the reservists in the rear areas.
That's another thing about the French Foreign Legion. "You have joined the Legion to die, and we will send you where you can die."
California had sent us all where we could die.
"Your job is not to die for your country. It's to make the other poor bastard die for his!"
And thus we circle back to tactics. Concentration of fighting power, decentralization for distributed impact. A mortar platoon could drop hundreds of bombs in minutes, but could be taken out by a single air strike in turn. A mortar truck could be shot up by some kid with a slingshot, but drop twenty bombs and frighten a town - and spread across Iowa, have a combat power all out of proportion to their vulnerability.
"Eggshells armed with sledgehammers."
In the age of nuclear warfare, concentration presented a nuclear target, which could win or lose wars in one shot. Prewar doctrine had called for a swirling mess of units, that would briefly concentrate to deliver a blow, then scatter before nuclear retaliation.
Actual nuclear warfighting in wrecked China had shown that concentration was the only way. Small forces just disappeared; sometimes you found their bodies, more often not. If your larger forces were properly dug in, losses to nukes were minimal - and digging them out required force ratios at ten to one or higher. Advances in the nuclear environment required armor. "In a nuclear hell, you have to put your money on those steel boxes." And armor guzzled fuel and sucked up men and ammunition with ruthless abandon.
That was why I had not brought a single tank. But I had brought what few tank killing weapons I could.
What I really feared were killdozers.
Purpose built military vehicles are the killer app on the battlefield, and in the prewar economies of the world, hundreds of types existed, from motorcycles with machine gun sidecars to long range precision Stealth Bombers at 700 million a pop, up to a billion if you counted munitions, support and crew training.
Nowadays we had cars and trucks and farm and construction equipment.
If you took a pickup truck and put a hard point (gun mount) on the rack on the back, you created what we called a 'technical.' And technicals were eggshells with sledgehammers. Battles between them made ancient chariots look like a bloodless way to fight - they could dish it out but they couldn't take it.
If you took that same technical and put some armor on it, you could get something that could resist some small arms fire, but still wouldn't be proof to a technical's machine guns. It would last longer, but not as long. Our own purpose built gun trucks fell in that category - stabilized heavy machine guns with more range and power than a technical, a little more armor than a technical, but still easily taken out by a RPG or even a Molotov. Great for killing crowds of unarmed or lightly armed people. Our field-built mortar trucks were basically a technical that happened to carry a single mortar.
But if you were a shade tree mechanic and you had some time on your hands, and a lot of scrap, and had some idea of the relationship between ballistics and metallurgy, you could put so much armor on a formerly civilian vehicle that it could barely lurch forward. But lurch forward it could, even if you pounded it with .50 caliber machine gun bullets. That's why tracks as opposed to tires, even really big ones.
That's a killdozer. Not quite a tank, but a hell of a lot more than a technical. And a technical could run away, but a killdozer would eat it for lunch if it didn't. And a technical trying to protect refugees couldn't run away.
The other thing I worried about were anti-tank guns.
You can get them relatively cheaply, or even make them, if you're willing to have them be towable, like a trailer.
You can put one on a truck. It's stupid but it can work, and if it works it's not stupid.
But if you put one on a bulldozer, and figure out how to armor it, you have what's called a SP gun or Self Propelled gun.
SP guns can kill tanks, especially if well used in the defense.
I didn't have any killdozers or SP guns, and didn't want any.
My latest intelligence report indicated that the Army of God had counted on getting Iowa National Guard armor units to defect to them. That hadn't gone well.
But the irregular militias had built all sorts of shade tree crap.
It would burn, fiercely, if I hit it with the right weapons.
I didn't have enough of them. Concentration versus distribution. And neither the refugees nor their militias had _any_ antitank.
It was all a mess. I had three cheat codes. _RCS Panoptes_. An intelligence network spreading through Iowa like yeast in bread - you don't always see the Bear that gets you. The arrogance to use the enemy's own communications against him, especially lawfare and memetic warfare.
If we were caught scattered, we would be destroyed.
So we had to concentrate for the endgame. There would be no mad dash forward, no swirling raid. I'd taken a huge chance the way I'd hit Council Bluffs - and I'd seen with my own eyes, that it was a trick I could pull once. In a fair fight, the Davenport Police Department could probably hold me off if we attacked the city - or at least buy time for citizens to mobilize and become militia. The fight would be weeks long but the end would be bad for California. And the Army of God sure as hell wouldn't sit _that_ out.
So I had to pick my defensive spot. My Dien Bien Phu. Seven weeks of hell, in which French forces were pounded from all directions by inferior but numerically superior forces until they crumbled, despite airdrops and reinforcements.
If the Army of God had fallen for the DMZ gambit, the spots picked themselves. The General hadn't. He'd picked Highway 24 instead, the most featureless dull road in the entire state. Flat as a pancake.
It therefore had to be a town. Sorry, North Fork.
I had every right to kick the occupants out of their homes and turn them to military purposes. Even if I were still an American, military necessity trumps the Third Amendment. But the fact that the Third Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights reflects directly how much it sucks to have soldiers throw you out of your own home.
So I would have to occupy while the town was still inhabited, and subtly encourage the residents to leave on their own.
You may have noticed. I'm not good at subtle.
I'm more of an eggshell and sledgehammer guy.
Well, that particular gambit neatly took over a quarter of the enemy forces off the board at a stroke. Not really off the board, more like flipped over waving their little paws in the air - I had to remember that Army of God forces could be given new orders at any time.
The problem was all the rest of the Xtian militias, paramilitaries, local defense organizations, volunteers and ragtag aspiring bandits.
Genocide is a game. The name of the game is separation. You take people out of their homes, one way or another - disaster, usually manmade, sometimes natural. You move them around, a shell game. And, most important, you keep handing them off from nice people to not so nice people to really awful people. Then the machetes come out, and the infamous political motto, "No person? No problem!"
To unplay the game, to fight genocide, I had to combine and unify. Get refugees away from dangerous people and unsafe areas. But once concentrated, they were made even more vulnerable.
That's where the tactics of genocide and the tactics of war intersect.
In war, you concentrate your forces and you smash your enemy's weaker forces. Old as Sun Tzu.
There had been wrinkles over the centuries. The disciplined career professionals of the Roman Legions had killed ten times their numbers in an afternoon of javelin throwing and gladius stabbing. Less than a century later, auxiliary cavalry and near-naked barbarians in makeup literally cut them to bits. That tension, between the part-time soldier ("minuteman," so named because he had sixty seconds to get his musket and roll out) and the career professional ("Do ye futter all in a line, too, lads?") continued to this day.
Everyone I was up against in Iowa so far was militia. But there are militia and militia. Army of God had their act together - most of their officers were trained military officers, they had their own officer training program (!), they had a strong NCO corps made up almost entirely of American military veterans, and modern equipment. Their major oddity is being organized on church, parish, stake and ward lines (similar to other paramilitary Christian organizations such as the Salvation Army and the Church of Latter Day Saints, both of which thank God were sitting this one out).
Local defense militia tended to coalesce around their own local churches or their local governments, particularly the county sheriff's departments. Some of them were great, what little was left of law and order in Iowa. Others were bandits with badges, who wouldn't kill your daughter and eat your sheep. They'd sell your daughter, rape your sheep and eat _you_.
Then there were the preachers. Any asshole with a loud voice, commanding personality, and the ability to puzzle out words in a Bible (or, increasingly, use some combination of an electronic Bible and YouTube) could put together their own following. And many, many had. Before the Firecracker, there had been an American biker who'd found God, started getting called the Machine Gun Preacher, opened a mission in Uganda, Africa - and found himself heavily engaged against genocidaires. By himself. Crazy bastard, but I'd read his book and made his movie mandatory watching by my soldiers.
We'd run the numbers. Of the half million combatants, about half were of the crazy preacher sort. Some were little better than refugees themselves, adopting protective coloration with crucifix and collar. Others were just the lawless types that follow around any war to pick at the edges.
To be fair, the food situation was not quite that dire that cannibalism was a threat. Yet. Soldiers, like farmers and fishermen, need to keep a eye to the seasons, the weather and the harvest. We were early summer. Not a bad time to campaign. But if we didn't end this soon, a lot of food would rot in the fields, and the next winter would pure suck for the survivors. One way or another, we wouldn't be around by then.
If the bulk of the Gs were going to become a government, and therefore defend themselves, they needed time to get organized. They also needed help from political action cadre, civil affairs groups, and/or actual Special Operations A-teams. America had all three, but they were busy everywhere else. California didn't have any of the above - our Bear Force taught insurgency, which is how to break shit as opposed to how to run shit.
Even if I again grossly exceeded my orders and turned my hand to full time civil affairs work, it would take me and my handful of qualified staff several months to get the Gs up to snuff. We were busy and no one had that much time.
So the best I could do was to smile and point, try to figure out which area(s) would end up under G control, and try to put my handful of California soldiers in between.
A word about where they fell on the career vs. citizen model. Every California Republic soldier was a volunteer for this mission, but about a third were not volunteers for California Republic service. Our effort to reintegrate our own Homeland, California native genocidaires, and National Guard troops who'd allied with America had required that, after trials and executions (ahem, me, at Alviso), we Do Something with those who either hadn't been charged (the majority) or those who had been found not guilty. What we did was draft them. Eight years of service in the California Republic forces, atoning for their sins. Those two hundred could in theory defect. I knew them; some of them knew me from Alviso as their Warden. They'd rather die first. What was left of their self esteem and their self image depended on fixing what had been broken, doing their utmost, and regaining their honor. My problem was trying to keep them reined in - and with the scout troops sent forward to the camps I couldn't protect, I'd failed.
About another third of my troops were careerists,. especially my NCOs and officers. The California Military Academy and our own militia and induction programs had a brutal edge to them, even now. We fight to save lives. People are dying every day. What have _you_ done, _today_ to help try to save them? In our domestic politics, the only question about this deployment is why we'd sent troops to Iowa when we badly needed them from Yreka to San Ysidro. I'd explained it; we fight here so we don't have to fight _there_. I wasn't worried about my career troops. If anything they provided a useful backbone to help control the other two groups.
The last third of my troops were California reservists. They had homes and families, they'd signed up for the deployment not the duration. Unlike the other two groups, they actually had something to live for - and most of my technical specialists were concentrated in this group. Armorers, doctors. And Iowa medical professionals I'd drafted, who I had a special obligation to protect from harm.
I hadn't talked about it, but somehow my deployments pushed the eight year folks to the front lines, the careerists in the middle, and the reservists in the rear areas.
That's another thing about the French Foreign Legion. "You have joined the Legion to die, and we will send you where you can die."
California had sent us all where we could die.
"Your job is not to die for your country. It's to make the other poor bastard die for his!"
And thus we circle back to tactics. Concentration of fighting power, decentralization for distributed impact. A mortar platoon could drop hundreds of bombs in minutes, but could be taken out by a single air strike in turn. A mortar truck could be shot up by some kid with a slingshot, but drop twenty bombs and frighten a town - and spread across Iowa, have a combat power all out of proportion to their vulnerability.
"Eggshells armed with sledgehammers."
In the age of nuclear warfare, concentration presented a nuclear target, which could win or lose wars in one shot. Prewar doctrine had called for a swirling mess of units, that would briefly concentrate to deliver a blow, then scatter before nuclear retaliation.
Actual nuclear warfighting in wrecked China had shown that concentration was the only way. Small forces just disappeared; sometimes you found their bodies, more often not. If your larger forces were properly dug in, losses to nukes were minimal - and digging them out required force ratios at ten to one or higher. Advances in the nuclear environment required armor. "In a nuclear hell, you have to put your money on those steel boxes." And armor guzzled fuel and sucked up men and ammunition with ruthless abandon.
That was why I had not brought a single tank. But I had brought what few tank killing weapons I could.
What I really feared were killdozers.
Purpose built military vehicles are the killer app on the battlefield, and in the prewar economies of the world, hundreds of types existed, from motorcycles with machine gun sidecars to long range precision Stealth Bombers at 700 million a pop, up to a billion if you counted munitions, support and crew training.
Nowadays we had cars and trucks and farm and construction equipment.
If you took a pickup truck and put a hard point (gun mount) on the rack on the back, you created what we called a 'technical.' And technicals were eggshells with sledgehammers. Battles between them made ancient chariots look like a bloodless way to fight - they could dish it out but they couldn't take it.
If you took that same technical and put some armor on it, you could get something that could resist some small arms fire, but still wouldn't be proof to a technical's machine guns. It would last longer, but not as long. Our own purpose built gun trucks fell in that category - stabilized heavy machine guns with more range and power than a technical, a little more armor than a technical, but still easily taken out by a RPG or even a Molotov. Great for killing crowds of unarmed or lightly armed people. Our field-built mortar trucks were basically a technical that happened to carry a single mortar.
But if you were a shade tree mechanic and you had some time on your hands, and a lot of scrap, and had some idea of the relationship between ballistics and metallurgy, you could put so much armor on a formerly civilian vehicle that it could barely lurch forward. But lurch forward it could, even if you pounded it with .50 caliber machine gun bullets. That's why tracks as opposed to tires, even really big ones.
That's a killdozer. Not quite a tank, but a hell of a lot more than a technical. And a technical could run away, but a killdozer would eat it for lunch if it didn't. And a technical trying to protect refugees couldn't run away.
The other thing I worried about were anti-tank guns.
You can get them relatively cheaply, or even make them, if you're willing to have them be towable, like a trailer.
You can put one on a truck. It's stupid but it can work, and if it works it's not stupid.
But if you put one on a bulldozer, and figure out how to armor it, you have what's called a SP gun or Self Propelled gun.
SP guns can kill tanks, especially if well used in the defense.
I didn't have any killdozers or SP guns, and didn't want any.
My latest intelligence report indicated that the Army of God had counted on getting Iowa National Guard armor units to defect to them. That hadn't gone well.
But the irregular militias had built all sorts of shade tree crap.
It would burn, fiercely, if I hit it with the right weapons.
I didn't have enough of them. Concentration versus distribution. And neither the refugees nor their militias had _any_ antitank.
It was all a mess. I had three cheat codes. _RCS Panoptes_. An intelligence network spreading through Iowa like yeast in bread - you don't always see the Bear that gets you. The arrogance to use the enemy's own communications against him, especially lawfare and memetic warfare.
If we were caught scattered, we would be destroyed.
So we had to concentrate for the endgame. There would be no mad dash forward, no swirling raid. I'd taken a huge chance the way I'd hit Council Bluffs - and I'd seen with my own eyes, that it was a trick I could pull once. In a fair fight, the Davenport Police Department could probably hold me off if we attacked the city - or at least buy time for citizens to mobilize and become militia. The fight would be weeks long but the end would be bad for California. And the Army of God sure as hell wouldn't sit _that_ out.
So I had to pick my defensive spot. My Dien Bien Phu. Seven weeks of hell, in which French forces were pounded from all directions by inferior but numerically superior forces until they crumbled, despite airdrops and reinforcements.
If the Army of God had fallen for the DMZ gambit, the spots picked themselves. The General hadn't. He'd picked Highway 24 instead, the most featureless dull road in the entire state. Flat as a pancake.
It therefore had to be a town. Sorry, North Fork.
I had every right to kick the occupants out of their homes and turn them to military purposes. Even if I were still an American, military necessity trumps the Third Amendment. But the fact that the Third Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights reflects directly how much it sucks to have soldiers throw you out of your own home.
So I would have to occupy while the town was still inhabited, and subtly encourage the residents to leave on their own.
You may have noticed. I'm not good at subtle.
I'm more of an eggshell and sledgehammer guy.
