Rebuilding the U.S. after the mad max has fizzled out.

Free-Stater 101

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Okay, the anarchy is settling down, the 'x' event which completely decapitated most of the federal and state governments and resulted in the grid going down is finally behind us, millions of Americans were killed over this three year long period and millions more replaced.

Now the questions before us are "How do we Rebuild?" and "What is best way to reunite the country?" Or even "Is putting the country back together even a necessity anymore?"

What say the rest of you TS?
 
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Val the Moofia Boss

Well-known member
Best outcome is that local governments assert themselves as small countries. You won't have super elites in Washington dictating how people in a small town in Illinois live their lives. People will move to the country that they have the most in common with in regards to their values. The Midwest countries will assert their independence from the big blue cities as the Midwest is where most crop product in the US was located and the people of the cities are too domesticated to willingly fight the Midwest to try to secure the farmland. If the big blue cities actually do try to do that, they're in for a rude awakening. American countries that border Mexico will fiercely crack down on drugs and the cartels.

The real question is what happens to the rest of the world. With the collapse of the American Empire (and the US military probably having dissolved, with soldiers defending their preferred American country), the rest of the world is free real-estate for Russia and China. I guess that would be Israel's, Britain's, France's, and Spain's opportunity to try to become superpowers.
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
The important question is, did whatever unspecified apocalypse happened also reduce the rest of the world to mad maxhood or was that just an American thing? Because unless the rest of the world was busy with their own comparable problems, everyone else would be taking advantage of the opportunity to set up puppet regimes and the proxy war would never end. Forget some Red Dawn technothriller nonsense about uniting to fight off invaders, they'd be fucking invited by their local allies. On all sides. Not just some survivalist fantasies about red-blooded Real Americans shooting UN Blue Helmets invading on behalf of the Democratic Deep State, I've got my eye on you, DocSolarisReich.
 

Val the Moofia Boss

Well-known member
Forget some Red Dawn technothriller nonsense about uniting to fight off invaders, they'd be fucking invited by their local allies. On all sides. Not just some survivalist fantasies about red-blooded Real Americans shooting UN Blue Helmets invading on behalf of the Democratic Deep State, I've got my eye on you, DocSolarisReich.

No one would invade the US. If the US brokedown, Canada and Mexico don't have the resources to spare to invade, and don't want to invade. If anything, they would want to keep any possible refugees out, perhaps try to keep any American countries that are eyeing their water supplies or other resources away. Russia and China aren't going to launch overseas invasions of the US mainland (at most, Russia will go for Alaska to secure the oil reserves that are easy pickings, and that's it). Why bother? It would take a herculean effort to transport an army to the US mainland large enough to occupy any decent area of land or anything worthwhile, and you'd have a long supply train that could easily be disrupted by the British/French/Spanish/Israelis/Japanese/whatever. Everyone else in the world has way higher priorities and are probably fighting each other to assert their global supremacy.

EDIT: I suppose Japan and China might also try to fight the Russians over the Alaskan oil wells. And maybe Canada. Could make for an interesting story: Russians vs Chinese vs Japanese vs American resistance in Alaska vs Canadians.
 
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BlackDragon98

Freikorps Kommandant
Banned - Politics
No one would invade the US. If the US brokedown, Canada and Mexico don't have the resources to spare to invade, and don't want to invade. If anything, they would want to keep any possible refugees out, perhaps try to keep any American countries that are eyeing their water supplies or other resources away. Russia and China aren't going to launch overseas invasions of the US mainland (at most, Russia will go for Alaska to secure the oil reserves that are easy pickings, and that's it). Why bother? It would take a herculean effort to transport an army to the US mainland large enough to occupy any decent area of land or anything worthwhile, and you'd have a long supply train that could easily be disrupted by the British/French/Spanish/Israelis/Japanese/whatever. Everyone else in the world has way higher priorities and are probably fighting each other to assert their global supremacy.

EDIT: I suppose Japan and China might also try to fight the Russians over the Alaskan oil wells. And maybe Canada. Could make for an interesting story: Russians vs Chinese vs Japanese vs American resistance in Alaska vs Canadians.
The only part of Alaska Canada could possible hold is the southern archipelago of islands that borders BC.

And it's the only part Canada would bother with.

As for mainland USA, maybe Maine, probably Washington State after the leftists there have been exterminated.

More likely however, is a Canada wide civil war after the Left and Right in the US start fighting. With the Canadian Right probably winning.
 

Harlock

I should have expected that really
Nato might help try keep the East coast with aid and safe havens, but China is taking the west. It won't be invasion it'll be colonisation with a couple hundred million people who will displace or destroy any locals.
No doubt it'll start as aid workers and builders to fix the damage, but it will end up with them taking over through demographics, organisation and mass. Just like the last time :p

Nato will probably go home in the end and I'd expect the East and middle to be a new variation on the US forced to work together to face the influx from the west coast.
 

Sailor.X

Cold War Veteran
Founder
The US Navy for the most part would be pretty much intact. The Battle plan back when I was in was for the Fleets to scatter across the various oceans. Atlantic, Pacific and Indian. So after the nukes are done hitting targets. The Fleets would head to the nearest US territory when safe.
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
The US Navy for the most part would be pretty much intact. The Battle plan back when I was in was for the Fleets to scatter across the various oceans. Atlantic, Pacific and Indian. So after the nukes are done hitting targets. The Fleets would head to the nearest US territory when safe.
Which leaves the questions of, 'who's in charge now' and 'how are we resupplying'. Best bet, the crew of each ship find themselves a coastal community, in the former US or otherwise, which was sized such that they had enough people to sustain agriculture but not too many that they needed more than local agriculture to feed themselves and makes some kind of neofeudal alliance deal. The locals provide food, the navy crewmen lay anchor offshore and run extension cords from the reactors of their ship or submarine to provide electricity and protect their fiefdom from any Lord Humungus types who show up via their remaining arsenal. The system lasts however long it takes enough irreplaceable equipment to wear out to make it impractical.
 

Sailor.X

Cold War Veteran
Founder
Which leaves the questions of, 'who's in charge now' and 'how are we resupplying'. Best bet, the crew of each ship find themselves a coastal community, in the former US or otherwise, which was sized such that they had enough people to sustain agriculture but not too many that they needed more than local agriculture to feed themselves and makes some kind of neofeudal alliance deal. The locals provide food, the navy crewmen lay anchor offshore and run extension cords from the reactors of their ship or submarine to provide electricity and protect their fiefdom from any Lord Humungus types who show up via their remaining arsenal. The system lasts however long it takes enough irreplaceable equipment to wear out to make it impractical.
Well since the Joint Chiefs would be in a secure bunker somewhere. I would expect that sooner or later they will make contact with the Fleets and things will progress from there. Not every country on the planet would have been hit. And those countries is where supplies and resources would be gathered to start the initial rebuilding process for parts of the US.
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
Well since the Joint Chiefs would be in a secure bunker somewhere. I would expect that sooner or later they will make contact with the Fleets and things will progress from there.
Why on earth would you listen to whatever they had to say? They just directly caused the deaths of all your friends and family, the destruction of your nation and they have no means of enforcing their will upon you. They should be lucky if your response isn't a nuclear bunker-buster missile on general principles.
Not every country on the planet would have been hit. And those countries is where supplies and resources would be gathered to start the initial rebuilding process for parts of the US.
So you want to become pirates/oceanic immortan joe, stealing the supplies of foreigners?
 

Sailor.X

Cold War Veteran
Founder
Why on earth would you listen to whatever they had to say? They just directly caused the deaths of all your friends and family, the destruction of your nation and they have no means of enforcing their will upon you. They should be lucky if your response isn't a nuclear bunker-buster missile on general principles.

So you want to become pirates/oceanic immortan joe, stealing the supplies of foreigners?
Drama queening much. Look dude the chain of command exists for a reason. You just don't get to ignore it. And the US Military would never be the ones to launch first. The orders of the day was to launch nukes only if the Soviets launched first. As to being pirates no. The U S government had agreements with various nations in case of a world war 3 scenario. We had supplies forward deployed around the globe.
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
As to being pirates no. The U S government had agreements with various nations in case of a world war 3 scenario. We had supplies forward deployed around the globe.
Why would said nations be willing to share supplies they'd now need, regardless of past agreements?
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
Or even "Is putting the country back together even a necessity anymore?"
It probably won't work. Step one will be the division of the country into lots of factions, right after the apocalypse, along both ideological and 'we don't have enough food, go steal some from the neighbors' lines. Step two is said factions fighting each other, until an equilibrium is reached, by the destruction of all unsuccessful* factions, all remaining factions being essentially indefatigable by each other** and the total population of survivors dropping to a level sustainable without mechanized agriculture and transportation. There's a high chance that some, if not most of these factions might still use terminology from the old world, similar to the linguistic diffusion of Caesar into Tsar and Kaiser, calling their leaders 'president', 'senator' or 'ceo', though the original meaning would be lost or at least, ignored.

The only way the country is getting re-unified is if one faction turns out to be really good at fighting/acquires some Outside Context advantage*** and goes on a forcible conquest spree and even then, the resulting New America probably wouldn't be a democracy, insofar as recently subjugated victims would be unlikely to vote for their subjugators and given that said subjugators would know this, they'd try to keep their victims disenfranchised to maintain their own power.
Because the Russian Fleet is also out there and they won't ask like the US will
I seriously doubt you'd be asking either, at least not after you tried and were told "no" or "fuck off, your nation was involved in blowing up the world" followed by "no".

* Unable to adequately organize agriculture to feed themselves or defend themselves from rivals out to pillage their stuff.
** If Faction 1 goes to war with Faction 2, even if they win, both of them will starve because they were wasting time and labor soldiering rather than tending to the harvest. Then an unrelated nearby Faction 3 comes along and steals both their land while they're weak. And everyone knows this will happen if they start fights.
*** Rebuilding technology faster than their rivals? Foreign assistance? Good leadership?
 
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Sailor.X

Cold War Veteran
Founder
It probably won't work. Step one will be the division of the country into lots of factions, right after the apocalypse, along both ideological and 'we don't have enough food, go steal some from the neighbors' lines. Step two is said factions fighting each other, until an equilibrium is reached, by the destruction of all unsuccessful* factions, all remaining factions being essentially indefatigable by each other** and the total population of survivors dropping to a level sustainable without mechanized agriculture and transportation. There's a high chance that some, if not most of these factions might still use terminology from the old world, similar to the linguistic diffusion of Caesar into Tsar and Kaiser, calling their leaders 'president', 'senator' or 'ceo', though the original meaning would be lost or at least, ignored.

The only way the country is getting re-unified is if one faction turns out to be really good at fighting/acquires some Outside Context advantage*** and goes on a forcible conquest spree and even then, the resulting New America probably wouldn't be a democracy, insofar as recently subjugated victims would be unlikely to vote for their subjugators and given that said subjugators would know this, they'd try to keep their victims disenfranchised to maintain their own power.

I seriously doubt you'd be asking either, at least not after you tried and were told "no" or "fuck off, your nation was involved in blowing up the world" followed by "no".

* Unable to adequately organize agriculture to feed themselves or defend themselves from rivals out to pillage their stuff.
** If Faction 1 goes to war with Faction 2, even if they win, both of them will starve because they were wasting time and labor soldiering rather than tending to the harvest. Then an unrelated nearby Faction 3 comes along and steals both their land while they're weak. And everyone knows this will happen if they start fights.
*** Rebuilding technology faster than their rivals? Foreign assistance? Good leadership?
Why are you getting upset about actual plans of action made during the Cold War? If you don't like it take it up with those retired Pentagon Officials that might still be alive. I am just the messenger.
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
Why do I hate cold war-era military planners? Have you seen their track record? What disasters that we're dealing with now weren't directly their fault? Forever war against jihadist savages living atop oil supplies? They armed and trained them. China economically beating us? They allowed china into the WTO to compete with us out of some delusional fantasy that making them rich and powerful would make them stop being totalitarian and stopped our two greatest enemies from crippling each other. The military-industry complex and security state? Guess whose Cold War and the perceived need to regularly invade third world countries started all that. Dependency upon foreign oil? Guess who defunded the only practical alternative so they could waste the money on more third world 'peacekeeping'.

Really, 'military planner' has been a refuge for sociopaths since at least the first World War, when they had propaganda departments devoted to lying that things weren't a horrible stalemate, since they knew honest discussion would've led to loss of public support for their war.
Into the Silence: The Great War Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis said:
Sir Francis Younghusband had spent the war as a propagandist, rallying the British public to the cause. His mission began in the heady days of August 1914, when the war still seemed sublime and glorious. The spiritual impulse he had brought away from Lhasa, together with his mystic sense of patriotism, came together in a new calling, service in a national movement called Fight for Right. “For we will fight,” stated the organization’s manifesto, “not for the Highest but for a Higher than the Highest—for the sky beyond the mountain top! We mean to see to it that the code of the gentleman and not the custom of the barbarian shall be the rule among nations.” The country was fighting “the battle of all humanity,” and Younghusband took it upon himself to rouse all men and women for service in the sacred cause, and to sustain those already at arms and ready to die. The intention of the movement, announced a widely circulated pamphlet, was to stage on Sunday afternoons throughout the country a series of meetings “of a definitely spiritual character,” at which time men and women inspired by the Fight for Right would through music, song, and speeches share their inspiration with others and thus buck up the national morale.

Such rallies, the first of which took place on November 7, 1915, in this same Aeolian Hall where the RGS was now gathered, were small comfort for the men returned from France, but they served the needs of a government increasingly concerned about unrest and discontent on the home front. As early as the end of August 1914, the foreign secretary, Edward Grey, and David Lloyd George had established the Secret War Propaganda Bureau, the goal of which was to promote British war aims, both at home and abroad. On September 2 of that year a meeting held at Wellington House, Buckingham Gate, brought together Britain’s most prominent writers, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Masefield, Rudyard Kipling, G. M. Trevelyan, G. K. Chesterton, and J. M. Barrie. The previous day Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, had described the conflict in the Times as a holy war, a conviction heralded in a manifesto that appeared in the newspaper two weeks later, signed by each of these well-known writers. Within months several of them, including Masefield and Conan Doyle, were on the government payroll. Within a year the Propaganda Bureau had produced and distributed 2.5 million copies of books, pamphlets, and speeches. Robert Bridges wrote only three poems during the war; his time went into editing an anthology of English verse, The Spirit of Man, which deliberately avoided the subject of war. Intended to inspire the public after the disasters of 1915, it was poetry as propaganda. Curiously, it was this book that Mallory carried with him to Everest, and from which he read aloud to his companions while camped in the ice and snow at 23,000 feet on the flank of the mountain.

In 1917 the Propaganda Bureau was taken over by the Department of Information. It was headed by John Buchan, who, as a friend of Cecil Rawling’s, Tom Longstaff’s, and Francis Younghusband’s, had been recruited to help with the media and publicity for the proposed 1913–15 Everest expeditions that had been aborted by the outbreak of the war. By 1917, as Prime Minister Lloyd George wrote, the “terrible losses without appreciable results had spread a general sense of disillusionment and

war weariness throughout the nation.” John Buchan’s mandate was to quell and counteract pacifist sentiment and maintain the fantasy that the war remained something honorable, even as serious statesmen in all nations began to call for a negotiated end to the slaughter. “If the people really knew,” Lloyd George told C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian in December 1917, “the war would be stopped tomorrow.”

Buchan’s task was to ensure that they did not know. In this, his closest allies were the Harmsworth brothers, Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Times and the Daily Mail, and Lord Rothermere, who controlled the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Pictorial, and the Glasgow Daily Record. Together they set the tenor of the British media, controlling, as they did, the most important of London’s thirty-seven daily newspapers. Censorship left journalists at the mercy of their imaginations. Anything might be written as long as it vilified the enemy and propped up morale. “So far as Britain is concerned,” recalled Buchan, “the war could not have been fought for one month without its newspapers.” The truth itself became a casualty. “While some patriots went to the battle front and died for their country,” wrote A. R. Buchanan, “others stayed home and lied for it.”
And in this scenario, they blew up the world. Civilization is gone, quite possibly permanently, given that we've already extracted all the oil essential for building technological infrastructure which can be extracted without preexisting technological infrastructure. Humanity will remain trapped on this rock in pretechnological barbarianism until the next cosmological Outside Context Problem finishes us off. And it's all their fault.
 

Sailor.X

Cold War Veteran
Founder
Why do I hate cold war-era military planners? Have you seen their track record? What disasters that we're dealing with now weren't directly their fault? Forever war against jihadist savages living atop oil supplies? They armed and trained them. China economically beating us? They allowed china into the WTO to compete with us out of some delusional fantasy that making them rich and powerful would make them stop being totalitarian and stopped our two greatest enemies from crippling each other. The military-industry complex and security state? Guess whose Cold War and the perceived need to regularly invade third world countries started all that. Dependency upon foreign oil? Guess who defunded the only practical alternative so they could waste the money on more third world 'peacekeeping'.

Really, 'military planner' has been a refuge for sociopaths since at least the first World War, when they had propaganda departments devoted to lying that things weren't a horrible stalemate, since they knew honest discussion would've led to loss of public support for their war.

And in this scenario, they blew up the world. Civilization is gone, quite possibly permanently, given that we've already extracted all the oil essential for building technological infrastructure which can be extracted without preexisting technological infrastructure. Humanity will remain trapped on this rock in pretechnological barbarianism until the next cosmological Outside Context Problem finishes us off. And it's all their fault.
Dude us not being able to rebuild is hyberbolic BS. Humanity literally survived being nearly extinctified to a few hundred people in prehistoric times. And we are at 7 plus Billion now. World War 3 plans were about targeting Warsaw Pact and Nato Assets. If you lived in a country that was not near the exchange you country still had it's infrastructure in place aka Oil drilling assets and mining assets. Civilization while taking a hit will bounce back globally to late 20th Century levels in 50 to 60 years. And fun fact Even a full nuclear exchange would not have been that effective. Baked into the numbers is the fact that many nukes would literally dud out. So take the number of Warheads and shave of 30% of that number and you get how many would have actually worked properly.
 
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Sailor.X

Cold War Veteran
Founder
Humanity hadn't dug up all the oil reachable without sophisticated technologies in prehistoric times.

Unless you're proposing that the Turboslavs and Kangdom expended earth's entire supply of phlebotinum and if we ever get into space, our civilization's technological technology will be the exception to the otherwise universally standard development course of civilizations.
Again not all countries would be hit by nukes. Countries with oil drilling not in the strike zones are unaffected.
 

Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder
Again not all countries would be hit by nukes. Countries with oil drilling not in the strike zones are unaffected.
Russia has a policy of nuking all other major nation capitals if a certain threshold of damage on their soil is reached, IIRC.

A lot of the pre-deployed material would likely be lost if it's anywhere near a major city or military base, unless our ABM shield is expanded quite a bit.

That also doesn't take into account conventional strikes by regional proxies, or just old regional grudges going loud when the big guys are preoccupied killing each other.

In regards to the US going Mad Max then having a slow return to civilization...it completely depends on what the cause was, what the damage is, and what the international situation is.
 

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