GWOT VI - Digging In
Feb. 3rd, 2023 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGWOT VI - Digging In
If I were giving a class at the nascent California War College, I would say that the situation is solidifying nicely.
I'm not. And my odds of ever giving a lecture again approach zero.
If there's one thing Iowa wasn't short of, it was farming equipment. A lot of farming equipment is used to dig soil. Of course, some of it now has a bunch of armor bolted on it and is used to go murder refugees - c.f. killdozer. The one redeeming attribute of a killdozer is that they burn fiercely.
So I was using tractors and bulldozers to move an awful lot of soil.
The fuel had been brought in by truck. Our very own Red Ball Express. Everyone had focused on what a logistician calls the backhaul - wounded and refugees. Every person we put in the back of a truck was one less person for the Xtians to send to God.
What we had forward hauled was far more important.
Barbed wire. Sandbags. Plastic. Lumber, much of it ugly but all of it serviceable. Burlap netting. Parts. Shovels.
The occasional boxes of food or of medical supplies, yes, but that was secondary.
There was of course no way to standardize on weapons or ammunition, as so much of it had been captured from Xtians.
"The existence of silly putty implies the existence of serious putty."
We had lots and lots and lots of serious putty. Also mortar shells, machine gun ammunition, rifle ammunition and grenades.
What we lacked was anti-tank. Our scroungers had somehow managed to get us four Javelins and thirty reloads. I was saving those for command tanks. After that it was a mixed bag of anti tank rockets, recoilless rifles (they really aren't), and what the Russians in a rare outbreak of honesty call anti tank grenades and everyone else calls RPGs.
The gun trucks were now literally worth their weight in gold.
Allow me to quote from the manufacturer's manual for the AM-3 gyrostabilized heavy gun mount system, "California Dreaming" revision.
"The chamber block and barrel of the AM-3 system is interchangeable. This allows the AM-3 gyrostabilization to work with any number of end user weapons systems from many nations and manufacturers. Virtually any mount configuration is possible using the sixfold bracket and the variety of nuts, bolts and wrenches in the standard kit. The servo actuator can be configured to any finger-operated or electronically operated trigger assembly.
"After changing out the mounted weapon, the autocompensation system will recalibrate for weight, barrel length, recoil and thermal characteristics. A selection of estimated settings is available in the Advanced Features menu. The self learning option will provide for maximum accuracy in single shot mode after approximately fifty (50) rounds fired. Burst mode will require approximately fourteen (14) three round bursts to approach nominal accuracy and another seventeen (17) to reach peak accuracy. As previously mentioned, the use of full automatic mode is not recommended except in contingency situations."
So let's say I had captured a French machine gun from World War I, a Chauchat chambered in 8mm Lebel. Or 6.5x54mm Greek. (We had both.) Normally it would be an expensive doorstop.
I could, if I chose, mount that Chauchat to the AM-3 and use as many rounds of 8mm Lebel as I chose to. The Chauchat carries only a 20 round magazine, which you can only really load to 16 because the spring is ass. But mounted to the AM-3, this anemic machine gun allows me to use ALL that lousy 8mm Lebel, which would otherwise have gone to waste.
The other secret of the AM-3 mount was the interchangeable thermal blanket system. It was a pain in the kiester to rig. Not worth it for a Chauchat, it didn't have time to heat up. Worth it for M-249s, M-60s, anything belt fed.
You see, most machine guns heat up when fired. Some heat up a LOT. And the barrels have this tendency under sustained use - like when you're fighting for your life surrounded by a thousand screaming Xtians who want to drink your blood and eat your flesh - to, well, melt.
The thermal blanket system had a fast and a slow mode. In fast mode, you could wrap it quickly around a barrel and it would refrigerate it. In slow mode, you could carefully fit a metal wrap around the barrel, lovingly wind it (which takes about an hour), and you then had to take care not to literally freeze the barrel. It could absorb that much heat, that quick.
The technology saved barrels. It also saved lives. But not the enemy's.
So we'd dug in the gun trucks in such a way that only the tip of the gun mount was showing. One was rigged for emergencies - the California bone standard 12.7mm aka .50 caliber. The other two could be swapped with each other - one hot with whatever obscure machine gun and weird caliber we wanted to finish using up, and the other being swapped out for the next candidate for listing in "Obscure Weapons Of The Second American Civil War - Iowa Campaign."
This gave me three times as much ammo as I should have, to keep the enemy honest in between dedicated pushes.
There are basically three ways to deal with fortifications. Besiege, reduce, overrun.
The Xtians didn't have the mobility to get past this point. We had two good water sources in North Fork, and had stored tens of thousands of gallons in tanks and blivets. We had plenty of food, if you don't mind rice or beans - and except for the farts, we didn't. (The Canadian troops in Rwanda survived on cases of peanut butter and rancid sardines.) We weren't going anywhere, so no fuel needs. And we had a LOT of ammo. So they could say they were laying siege, but it was just puffery.
To reduce a fortification is to blow it up in sections. To make what the military manuals call a "practicable breach." We were fortifying in hordes of bunkers, all dug in, many couldn't even be seen until we shot at you. Only three contained gun trucks ... but which three? Many had sniper hides. Some had mortar mounts. All had gun ports for rifles and machine guns.
That was what the artillery had frightened me so. With accurate fires, artillery can pound bunkers to scrap. But it takes time and good accuracy and good sighting.
It's really hard to accurately sight where a bunker is when someone is shooting at you. Especially if your head is splashed from _there_ to _there_.
Most military bases were pre-registered down to the centimeter, as they were made from pre-existing construction or had appeared on satellite.
We were building new fortifications in what had been innocent Iowa fields before they were blood soaked by the genocidaires. So no existing data.
The tedious part of digging in had been timing when we broke ground around the satellite passes of the powers that would sell the Xtians the data. There was no dodging America's NRO Keyholes. They were constant. But unless the Xtians had friends at NSA, the Americans would keep it to themselves. Maybe they wouldn't do their jobs and end the genocide themselves, but they weren't so far interfering with our efforts.
Iowa didn't have a satellite capability. The few aircraft the state had left, the Governor had grounded. The fact that we'd shot down several that the Xtians had put into use was part of that; the rest was the side the Governor was on.
The Russians were sluts. They would sell data to anyone, for vodka money. So it was the ancient Russian satellites whose elements we had to dodge, and California Air National Guard kept us constantly updated on same.
Between no satellite data and no ability to precision observe, they could lob artillery at us all day, and mostly miss. Unless they had so much ammunition they could play the child's game of Battleship and hit not just one square, but every single square. Pattern-walk our dug fields and shout "Praise Jesus!" when secondary explosions betrayed that we had lost a bunker.
So fucking with their artillery to prevent that was a priority. That meant artillery duels, hindering their advance, and not letting _them_ dig in. Because once they dug in, they were invulnerable to any fire except our handful of precision weapons.
The third option was an overrun. "Charge!" "Knock 'em down and fuck 'em." "Once more unto the breach, dear friends."
I wanted to tempt the Xtians into that. I wanted my fortifications to look desperate, fragile and weak. I wanted them to attack, attack, attack.
Because that was the way I could pile up the bodies. Attacking prepared defenses with conventional troops requires a ratio of seven attackers to overwhelm one defender. AND YOU LOSE SIX OF THE SEVEN.
I wanted them to lose six of the seven. Over and over and over again. Until the survivors gave up and went home and decided to study war no more.
Go ahead and push. You'll find yourself catching.
This would be the end of the Iowa war. I would break the genocidaires on the anvil of our impromptu fortress, or they would kill us all and proceed to resume destroying the refugees.
Grenades. Satchel charges. My half-trained G troops, in trenches that allowed shotguns and submachine guns and even pistols and bayonets to take their tithe of the attackers. And also kept them from shitting themselves and running away, as any sensible person would do when faced by conditions that make World War I trenches look civilized and humane.
Another thing I had in common with World War I. Just in case. We still had that nerve gas. It had been intended for general war, if the Americans decided to end Californication with split atoms. But if I could tempt the genocidaires into more chemical weapons attacks ... I'd show them. No first use. So yeah, boys, show your mustard and I'll show my Sarin. And we had gas masks for every single Californian and half of the Gs.
We'd done the run and gun. We'd showed the world that Californians know how to fight.
Now we would show the world what else we knew how to do.
Die.
Die hard.
Die gallantly.
If I were giving a class at the nascent California War College, I would say that the situation is solidifying nicely.
I'm not. And my odds of ever giving a lecture again approach zero.
If there's one thing Iowa wasn't short of, it was farming equipment. A lot of farming equipment is used to dig soil. Of course, some of it now has a bunch of armor bolted on it and is used to go murder refugees - c.f. killdozer. The one redeeming attribute of a killdozer is that they burn fiercely.
So I was using tractors and bulldozers to move an awful lot of soil.
The fuel had been brought in by truck. Our very own Red Ball Express. Everyone had focused on what a logistician calls the backhaul - wounded and refugees. Every person we put in the back of a truck was one less person for the Xtians to send to God.
What we had forward hauled was far more important.
Barbed wire. Sandbags. Plastic. Lumber, much of it ugly but all of it serviceable. Burlap netting. Parts. Shovels.
The occasional boxes of food or of medical supplies, yes, but that was secondary.
There was of course no way to standardize on weapons or ammunition, as so much of it had been captured from Xtians.
"The existence of silly putty implies the existence of serious putty."
We had lots and lots and lots of serious putty. Also mortar shells, machine gun ammunition, rifle ammunition and grenades.
What we lacked was anti-tank. Our scroungers had somehow managed to get us four Javelins and thirty reloads. I was saving those for command tanks. After that it was a mixed bag of anti tank rockets, recoilless rifles (they really aren't), and what the Russians in a rare outbreak of honesty call anti tank grenades and everyone else calls RPGs.
The gun trucks were now literally worth their weight in gold.
Allow me to quote from the manufacturer's manual for the AM-3 gyrostabilized heavy gun mount system, "California Dreaming" revision.
"The chamber block and barrel of the AM-3 system is interchangeable. This allows the AM-3 gyrostabilization to work with any number of end user weapons systems from many nations and manufacturers. Virtually any mount configuration is possible using the sixfold bracket and the variety of nuts, bolts and wrenches in the standard kit. The servo actuator can be configured to any finger-operated or electronically operated trigger assembly.
"After changing out the mounted weapon, the autocompensation system will recalibrate for weight, barrel length, recoil and thermal characteristics. A selection of estimated settings is available in the Advanced Features menu. The self learning option will provide for maximum accuracy in single shot mode after approximately fifty (50) rounds fired. Burst mode will require approximately fourteen (14) three round bursts to approach nominal accuracy and another seventeen (17) to reach peak accuracy. As previously mentioned, the use of full automatic mode is not recommended except in contingency situations."
So let's say I had captured a French machine gun from World War I, a Chauchat chambered in 8mm Lebel. Or 6.5x54mm Greek. (We had both.) Normally it would be an expensive doorstop.
I could, if I chose, mount that Chauchat to the AM-3 and use as many rounds of 8mm Lebel as I chose to. The Chauchat carries only a 20 round magazine, which you can only really load to 16 because the spring is ass. But mounted to the AM-3, this anemic machine gun allows me to use ALL that lousy 8mm Lebel, which would otherwise have gone to waste.
The other secret of the AM-3 mount was the interchangeable thermal blanket system. It was a pain in the kiester to rig. Not worth it for a Chauchat, it didn't have time to heat up. Worth it for M-249s, M-60s, anything belt fed.
You see, most machine guns heat up when fired. Some heat up a LOT. And the barrels have this tendency under sustained use - like when you're fighting for your life surrounded by a thousand screaming Xtians who want to drink your blood and eat your flesh - to, well, melt.
The thermal blanket system had a fast and a slow mode. In fast mode, you could wrap it quickly around a barrel and it would refrigerate it. In slow mode, you could carefully fit a metal wrap around the barrel, lovingly wind it (which takes about an hour), and you then had to take care not to literally freeze the barrel. It could absorb that much heat, that quick.
The technology saved barrels. It also saved lives. But not the enemy's.
So we'd dug in the gun trucks in such a way that only the tip of the gun mount was showing. One was rigged for emergencies - the California bone standard 12.7mm aka .50 caliber. The other two could be swapped with each other - one hot with whatever obscure machine gun and weird caliber we wanted to finish using up, and the other being swapped out for the next candidate for listing in "Obscure Weapons Of The Second American Civil War - Iowa Campaign."
This gave me three times as much ammo as I should have, to keep the enemy honest in between dedicated pushes.
There are basically three ways to deal with fortifications. Besiege, reduce, overrun.
The Xtians didn't have the mobility to get past this point. We had two good water sources in North Fork, and had stored tens of thousands of gallons in tanks and blivets. We had plenty of food, if you don't mind rice or beans - and except for the farts, we didn't. (The Canadian troops in Rwanda survived on cases of peanut butter and rancid sardines.) We weren't going anywhere, so no fuel needs. And we had a LOT of ammo. So they could say they were laying siege, but it was just puffery.
To reduce a fortification is to blow it up in sections. To make what the military manuals call a "practicable breach." We were fortifying in hordes of bunkers, all dug in, many couldn't even be seen until we shot at you. Only three contained gun trucks ... but which three? Many had sniper hides. Some had mortar mounts. All had gun ports for rifles and machine guns.
That was what the artillery had frightened me so. With accurate fires, artillery can pound bunkers to scrap. But it takes time and good accuracy and good sighting.
It's really hard to accurately sight where a bunker is when someone is shooting at you. Especially if your head is splashed from _there_ to _there_.
Most military bases were pre-registered down to the centimeter, as they were made from pre-existing construction or had appeared on satellite.
We were building new fortifications in what had been innocent Iowa fields before they were blood soaked by the genocidaires. So no existing data.
The tedious part of digging in had been timing when we broke ground around the satellite passes of the powers that would sell the Xtians the data. There was no dodging America's NRO Keyholes. They were constant. But unless the Xtians had friends at NSA, the Americans would keep it to themselves. Maybe they wouldn't do their jobs and end the genocide themselves, but they weren't so far interfering with our efforts.
Iowa didn't have a satellite capability. The few aircraft the state had left, the Governor had grounded. The fact that we'd shot down several that the Xtians had put into use was part of that; the rest was the side the Governor was on.
The Russians were sluts. They would sell data to anyone, for vodka money. So it was the ancient Russian satellites whose elements we had to dodge, and California Air National Guard kept us constantly updated on same.
Between no satellite data and no ability to precision observe, they could lob artillery at us all day, and mostly miss. Unless they had so much ammunition they could play the child's game of Battleship and hit not just one square, but every single square. Pattern-walk our dug fields and shout "Praise Jesus!" when secondary explosions betrayed that we had lost a bunker.
So fucking with their artillery to prevent that was a priority. That meant artillery duels, hindering their advance, and not letting _them_ dig in. Because once they dug in, they were invulnerable to any fire except our handful of precision weapons.
The third option was an overrun. "Charge!" "Knock 'em down and fuck 'em." "Once more unto the breach, dear friends."
I wanted to tempt the Xtians into that. I wanted my fortifications to look desperate, fragile and weak. I wanted them to attack, attack, attack.
Because that was the way I could pile up the bodies. Attacking prepared defenses with conventional troops requires a ratio of seven attackers to overwhelm one defender. AND YOU LOSE SIX OF THE SEVEN.
I wanted them to lose six of the seven. Over and over and over again. Until the survivors gave up and went home and decided to study war no more.
Go ahead and push. You'll find yourself catching.
This would be the end of the Iowa war. I would break the genocidaires on the anvil of our impromptu fortress, or they would kill us all and proceed to resume destroying the refugees.
Grenades. Satchel charges. My half-trained G troops, in trenches that allowed shotguns and submachine guns and even pistols and bayonets to take their tithe of the attackers. And also kept them from shitting themselves and running away, as any sensible person would do when faced by conditions that make World War I trenches look civilized and humane.
Another thing I had in common with World War I. Just in case. We still had that nerve gas. It had been intended for general war, if the Americans decided to end Californication with split atoms. But if I could tempt the genocidaires into more chemical weapons attacks ... I'd show them. No first use. So yeah, boys, show your mustard and I'll show my Sarin. And we had gas masks for every single Californian and half of the Gs.
We'd done the run and gun. We'd showed the world that Californians know how to fight.
Now we would show the world what else we knew how to do.
Die.
Die hard.
Die gallantly.
