2nd Civil War Theorycrafting Thread, Peaches Free

  • Thread starter Deleted member 88
  • Start date

The Immortal Watch Dog

Well-known member
Hetman
To quote a Klingon, everything is a weapon :) If your wife and kids are starving you'll find a way even if you go and Mad Max it. Even if you fortify towns can you fortify ten thousand acres of wheat field when desperate people trample it robbing your town of its future supply?

In Argentina during 10 of our twenty Civil wars land owners amassed private armies larger than the actual Federal Army. One of these guys took on England, France and Brazil twice and won once.

The way these Caudillos starved out the cities and kept urbanites from fleeing as refugees was good ol fashion mass crucifixion and mass slaughtering the children of the desperate in retaliation for attempting to flee.

It worked until I didn't.

And I think a Second ACW would look a lot less like North vs South and a lot more like La Plata and Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile in the 60s and 70s.

IE loads and loads of vigilantism by both sides and an Oklahoma City Bombing of Federal buildings every other week.

None of that is particularly pleasant and it tends to involve the regular people believing themselves to be in a state of siege and abandoning any sense of decency they may have had.

A lot of immigrants have fought and or survived this kind of war before as well. They would be heavily involved in dictating how things play out.

None of this is good. A second ACW would be a nightmare scenario.

Question how would we stop them getting food and supply shipments by sea, assuming that the Navy isn’t on our side to some level or other?
The moment a scenario like this happens the whole global economy crashes.

What food by sea? When all your currency is worthless and your trade partners are busy eating each other?
 
Last edited:

Harlock

I should have expected that really
The most effective fighters in the Syrian war are foreign volunteers, ex-Nato soldiers on one side, Chechens on the other. I'd expect similar units here and they'd do a good job bridging the quality gap between different factions.
Maybe trouble with the cartels too if border security is weakened.
 

PsihoKekec

Swashbuckling Accountant
The most effective fighters in the Syrian war are foreign volunteers, ex-Nato soldiers on one side, Chechens on the other.
Don't forget the Uighurs, while Chechens fought exclusively as light infantry, Uighurs did combined arms warfare, spearheading numerous Al-Kaida assaults, until they were attrited to oblivion in the Aleppo battles. However some local units were quite effective as well, until they were attrited earlier in the war and this is often problem in chaotic civil wars, best units are thrown from one crisis point to another, without respite, until attrition grinds them down. Hell, in American Civil War, there are multiple examples of once crack units being whittled down by combination of casualties and expired enlistments, with green replacements not living up to the standards of the predecessors.

The greatest advantage of foreign fighters is that they are not regionally tied, giving you a centrally controlled mobile reserve as in chaotic civil wars, most forces are regionaly tied and can't be redeployed, even coordination for unity of action can be difficult.
 

JagerIV

Well-known member
I think the left's advantage is is this is either

A) quick, or
B) Slow rolling

If its quick, like a couple weeks or months, the left is advantaged because they are more organized, more tied into the power structure, and have the immediate manpower advantage.

The FBI can quickly lock things down, police can arrest people, BLM can pressure people into compliance, Facebook can quickly track down everyone and direct people to it. Any economic problems can be papered over by the ability to borrow infinite amounts of money.

At a slow roll, the government can deal with small things coming up here and there. Organized government power can deal with a crisis every 3-4 months.

Where the right can have a window of opportunity is something that lasts more than 6 months and less than, say, 6 years. That gives time for the right to actually organize a meaningful resistance, and after 6 months or so the Lefts ability to print infinite money becomes more questionable. However, the longer it goes, the more foreign assistance can be built up, and eventually replace domestic production and stockpiles.

Though, the idea that formal military can trivially destroy insurgents is, well, not born out by facts. Lets take the Iraq War, 2003-2011.

So, at the basic level, that war was about 26,000 insurgent dead vs about 5,000 coalition dead. So, that's about 5-1 casualty ratios. So, favorable, not not necesarily favorable to the degree some are suggesting here. However, that isn't really the whole story, is it? That's missing a huge chunk of the actual military force deployed, the Iraqi security forces. Those suffered about 18,000 dead. So, total counter insurgency casualties were actually about 23,000 vs 26,000 casualties. So, actual military casualties for the entire counter insurgency operation were 1.13 to 1.

So, Iraq, despite our immense material advantage, ended in a final casualties of about 1-1. Which is, well, terrible. Especially considering that, on top of immense material superiority, we had an immense numerical superiority. The insurgency apparently at its peak consisted of about 80,000 people. Against them were 120,000 coalition troops, 600,000 Iraqi troops, 200,000 police, and 500,000 militiamen.

So, numerically the insurgents were outnumbered 18-1. And inflicted 1-1 casualties. That is a truly impressive performance. Or dismally poor performance on the American side.

Air power and space power require relatively safe areas to operate out of. They operate fairly infrequently. Pushing fighters to do more than 1 sortie a day is difficult. Airstrikes take quite a while to actually attrition out an enemy. Remember after all that destroying ISIS took 3-4 years to carry out by airstrike. Meanwhile, with trucks, anywhere can be attacked anywhere else in the US in a couple of hours, maybe a couple of days.

Like, to use the earlier example of Nellis air force base, lets say you were using it to do, something. Its really not in a great location to hit anything: bombing ranges for most fighters are still I think in the 600 km ish range, so you can reach out to about Tuscon, Salt Lake, San Diego, or Fresno. So, we'll say its doing bombing missions against Mormon rebels.

So, you launch a bombing mission against Salt lake. How long does it take the Salt Lake Rebels to respond? About six hours by highway. At marching pace, about 20 days. So, you need a blocking force. Your most basic mortar has about a 1-2 km range, so you need to try and keep people at least that far away. Given the airbase itself is about 10 km wide, your talking about a defensive perimeter about 40 km long. For a single airbase. Realistically, the Achilles heal of the base is Las Vegas: you either want to infiltrate the city (suburbs come almost right up the the airfield, so a good place for mortar or rocket attack) or just to cut off necessary supplies.

So, holding the air base is really about holding a Los Angeles to Las Vegas corridor. Which is committing to an about 1,000 km defensive corridor, which is about equivalent to the entire area of insurgency in the Iraq war between Bagdad, Mosul, and Ramadi.

So, I would not be surprised if defending this area involved the order of 100,000 men, to hold it very weakly. This would be in line with expectations of previous missions to hold such large areas.

But, it is true, Air Power can be very devastating. If you have a million men defending the airfields. Los Angeles Metro does have the raw population to do so: 10% conscription gets you to some 1.3 million raised from the city, while Utah at a similar mobilization can only manage about 300,000. Of course, if we can manage to beat the Mormon militia while requiring only half the numerical superiority we enjoyed against the Iraqi insurrection, so only 10-1 numerical superiority, well, that implies the pacification of Utah only requires about 3 million troops. Maybe a million will be able to manage. But, it also seems here that at Utah were reaching the edge of Los Angeles capability for power projection on its own resources. At least as long as the flanks remain unsecured.

Of course, securing Arizona and up to Northern California stretches out the front line more, to about 2,000 km. And moves more front lines so that you can't, at least easily, operate all your air power out of Nellis to cover your fronts. You need to spread out, eye balling it, to about 6 front line airbases. Which makes massing air power on any one front more difficult. And this anaysis of front length assumes the Mexican and ocean facing boarders are inherently secure. Securing the coastline and Mexican Boarder as well adds some 2,000 km more frontage. Where probably talking here then about 4 million men needing to be mobilized to hold everything securely, between naval forces, air forces, border patrol, response armies, police, etcetera.

Which is, well, actually doable with California's population. 40 million people, 10% mobilization, 4 million soldiers. Assuming costs of about $40,000 per soldier per year, about $160 billion in personnel costs. Probably a trillion dollars a year to equip to a reasonablish degree and maintain some reasonablish tempo of operational activity. About 30% GDP.

So, its not unreasonable to figure California could project power out to about Utah and its northern boarder. At which point, the population of the neighboring states is about 15 million, so can potentially raise about 1 million against California. Which puts them at a 4-1 disadvantage, but that's probably more like a 2-1 advantage on the actual front with logistical and occupational limits. This might not be enough superiority to really launch agressive offenses, which generally perfer local superiority of at least 3-1, and ideally more like 10-1 or 20-1.

A major push against Wyoming, the weakest, need the amassing of about 600,000 troops to do a lighting war against it to get local 10-1 numerical superiority. The push into Wyoming also puts the troops next to states that could potentially have collectively raised an additional 400,000 troops, relatively fresh, to commit to the counter attack. This seems to be setting up for a disaster. Certainly, the last time the US enjoyed less than a 2-1 advantage, Vietnam, where we only enjoyed an in the field numerical advantage of about 1.6-1 advantage.

Vietnam and and Iraq are not really stories of small, advanced, elite armies killing huge numbers of rebels at huge casualty ratios: its the story of huge, advanced, elite armies trading more or less 1-1 casualties against armies a 1/3 their size and a 1/10 as well equipped, and still mostly losing.

Ignoring the allied troops I think gives a completely skewed view of the actual balance of power in these wars, and thus dramatically overstates how effective the US troops actually are.

edit: hopefully this isn't too rambly, this was a "thinking out loud" post.
 
Last edited:

The Immortal Watch Dog

Well-known member
Hetman
Though, the idea that formal military can trivially destroy insurgents is, well, not born out by facts. Lets take the Iraq War, 2003-2011.

We actually have some six thousand years of history arguing that conventional militaries really have a shitty time dealing with militias and insurgencies.

Been awhile since I studied up on the topic but there are really two nations in history that proved an exception to that rule.

The Roman Empire and the Mongol Empire and that was largely because both sides could just destroy the offending civilization and kill so many of them that said regions never really recovered.

Even if those civilizations constituted part of their own sphere of influence or territory. And the reason both were able to do that was because they had huuggeee tracks of farmland and industry and a population base that viewed that kind of fucked up shit as totally reasonable foreign and domestic policy choices and even saw it as a chance at upward mobility.

The US Government doesn't have the mentality and the Bugmen in the cities don't have the cultural animalistic spirit to do that.

But the right sure does. It's got all the food and most of the industry and it's got a sizable chunk of the wealth as much as some users on this site wanna tip their fedoras the only thing that really stops the right from losing its collective shit is their modern quasi secular Christian sense of compassion and naiveté.

Read up on some of the incredibly fucked up shit Allen, Marion and Greene did during the American revolution. While they were insurgent rebels they fought the way the Mongols and the Romans fought and they did this because they learned how to fight like that fighting the East Coast Natives who played that old game pretty damn well.

People wanna act like any civil conflict favors the establishment but it doesn't, the other side is only being held back from true ugliness by a morality that the left constantly vilifies and is slowly convincing them to set aside to confront the great enemy.

It is a really dangerous mindset and a very foolish assumption.
 
Last edited:

Simonbob

Well-known member
People wanna act like any civil conflict favors the establishment but it doesn't, the other side is only being held back from true ugliness by a morality that the left constantly vilifies and is slowly convincing them to set aside to confront the great enemy.

There are already 'Thinkers' on the Right saying "A winning tactic is a winning tactic!" and "If you want to lose with class, you're still a loser."

The thing is, the above, like all of this kind of thing, is admitance that there is a war, and not rivals, but enemies. Not one country, not any more.

That's what the Right has the most trouble with, I think.
 

Val the Moofia Boss

Well-known member
The Roman Empire and the Mongol Empire and that was largely because both sides could just destroy the offending civilization and kill so many of them that said regions never really recovered.

Despite how brutal Rome was, there were constant rebellions. For example, Rome kept having to send legions down to Sicily over and over again to quell the rebellions, and yet Rome just couldn't keep them down. If people hate your guts and want out from under your boot, it doesn't matter how brutal you are. They're going to be a thorn in your side forever and good luck trying to stomp them all out.
 

ATP

Well-known member
There are already 'Thinkers' on the Right saying "A winning tactic is a winning tactic!" and "If you want to lose with class, you're still a loser."

The thing is, the above, like all of this kind of thing, is admitance that there is a war, and not rivals, but enemies. Not one country, not any more.

That's what the Right has the most trouble with, I think.
And Leftist are doing everything they could to persuade normal people,that they are not american.And say that normal american are not american,only their new,lgbt+52 version.
Either they are suicidal,stupid or for some reason sure that they win.Maybe there are really aliens waiting to help USA goverment?/that was joke,i am not mad/

And about cyvil wars - when both sizes have the ame resources,nore cruel would win.But,normal american would be stronger,so they do not need atrocities to win.
 

The Immortal Watch Dog

Well-known member
Hetman
Despite how brutal Rome was, there were constant rebellions. For example, Rome kept having to send legions down to Sicily over and over again to quell the rebellions, and yet Rome just couldn't keep them down. If people hate your guts and want out from under your boot, it doesn't matter how brutal you are. They're going to be a thorn in your side forever and good luck trying to stomp them all out.

I'm talking about what Hadrian did to Judea and what was done to Gaul and England specifically.

There are already 'Thinkers' on the Right saying "A winning tactic is a winning tactic!" and "If you want to lose with class, you're still a loser."

The thing is, the above, like all of this kind of thing, is admitance that there is a war, and not rivals, but enemies. Not one country, not any more.

That's what the Right has the most trouble with, I think.

Which is in and of itself a fundamental misunderstanding of conservatism. One that I think is born out of a decades long psyop against the right. See they always quote a variation of Reagans city on a hill to justify their cowardice and refusal to fight dirty.

Forgetting that Reagan deliberately destroyed Ford and Goldwaters presidential campaigns and inflicted a second Kennedy term and a Carter regime on the US specifically to ragepill society

the man salted the earth twice to force people to realize how stupid they were being courting that shit. Or in other words, he cared enough about his shining city to roll up his sleeves and break out the hose and chase out the crackheads by giving them open air baths in the middle of winter.

The father of modern conservatism was a phenomenally ruthless, strategic man. And I think they're finally realizing how much the uniparty has lied to them about their own values.

Biden isn't your president or anyone's if you really care about America you will admit she was stabbed multiple times and gang raped last fall.

How people ultimately choose to address that is where this thread either remains a friendly war game or ends up eerily prescient ten years down the line.
 

Airedale260

Well-known member
I think the biggest thing being overlooked in a hypothetical civil war is that, within two months AT MOST, 90% of us Americans would be dead.

Remember, our economy is centered around just-in-time logistics. It's *hideously* vulnerable to disruptions in supply chains. And it wouldn't be difficult at all for groups (of any political persuasion) to take out key points in the electrical grid and to shut down trucking. It wouldn't require much more than some guys with rifles, either.

No electricity? No refrigeration, which means no modern medicines (at least 25% of the country is on something and they're ALL going cold turkey), and no way to store food. Oh, and if it's in a heat wave or a blizzard? No temperature control. Fresh water? That's a problem. No way to get fuel from point A to point B, so that means transport is out. If truckers are vulnerable to IED attacks, they'll just flat out refuse to go, even if they're given any sort of escort, because even that isn't a guarantee of safety

The military would be in a fight to pull whatever they can out of Sierra Army Depot, but they don't have an unlimited stockpile either. And then what? If things have erupted to this point, I would imagine someone has had the bright idea of trying to purge any politicians they don't like, and now who's in charge?

The 'good' news is that we don't have to worry about any foreign intervention. Of course, the bad news is that that's because they'll be dealing with similar levels of unrest because their economies are linked to ours. The only country that *might* survive intact is actually North Korea because they're not really part of the global economy. But even they aren't actually self-reliant, so who knows.

If another civil war happens in America, I would wager most of us will not live to see the aftermath. That goes for those of us in the U.S. as well as posters outside. And quite frankly, given what would likely follow. I don't think I'd *want* to survive to see such a world...
 

JagerIV

Well-known member
Eh, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. People I think overestimate how quickly things reasonably happen.

Like, take the power issue. There's about 20,000 electric generators in the US with capacity over 1 MW. Here's a map.

us-power-plants-map.jpg


Now, the beauty of being so rich is that there's a lot of room to fall. How much electricerty do we need per person not to die, some food preservation, medication preservation. Lets say its 1,000 Kwh per year. That lets people stay in some degree of comfort, or at least not dying, at about 7% of current annual power production.

And this is before dealing with anyone's home generators or solar panels. We for example seem to have about 1 house with solar panels about on each block. This probably is going to increase as solar panels get cheaper, and if conventional power gets more expensive or unreliable as the system starts falling apart.

And then of course taking out all those power plants. A dedicated air campaign to take out those 20,000 major generators would involve some 100,000 sorties. The US Air force with its current inventories of about 2,000 attack aircraft could reasonably do that in, maybe about 50 days. That kind of high tempo operation however is difficult to maintain, they will assumedly have other missions, and that's also the time to actually plan these missions. That can take quite a bit of time. Remember that the lead up to the first gulf war was about 5 months before the air campaign started, followed by a month long air campaign, which then had a 4 day advance over about 200 to 300 km. So, while the army during the offensive managed 50 km per day advance, that was the cumulation of 6 months of work.

1280px-DesertStormMap_v2.svg.png


So, while one could say we advanced 250 km in 4 days, but one could also reasonably say we advanced 250 km in 44 days using the length of the air campaign, which lowers the rate of advance to about 6 km/day. But, that was part of a 6 month prep period. Using that number, advance for the whole period was about 1 km/day.

So, if you had a civil war advancing at the rate of the Iraqi war, DC to Kansas city then down to the Mexican boarder is about 3,000 km. That suggests that campaign takes between 500 to, well, 3,000 days, or about 8 years.

As a point of comparison, Operation Barbarossa took about 120 days and the Germans covered about 1,200 km in that time. So, averagish rate of advance over the whole operation was about 10 km per day. So, the campaign above taking about a year to carry out isn't unreasonable at all.

And, depending on balance of forces, it mostly happening in one week 300 km pulses every 3-6 months would be most in line with preferred planning and prep methods. Operation Barbarosa level advances seems like it might require a much more seat of the pants improvational planning than the US military is comfortable with, and they don't have enough reserves to carry out that kind of operation. Certainly not without grave risk of depleting all their military power and losing in the counter attack.

Stuff doesn't really happen like a zombie apocalypses movie where one day everything is fine and the next everything has fallen apart. The power plant people will keep working, and the grocers will keep working, maybe with more intermittedness, or after a panic week, because they still need to eat themselves, and as they realize even a big battle happening a 100 km south of them does not have any immediate huge effect on things.
 

Airedale260

Well-known member

Actually it's not the plants themselves that would be the targets, but rather the power lines and substations. As we saw with the Northeast Blackout of 2003, even a minor hiccup can cause major failures in the system -and 2003 was an accident.

It's actually a nightmare scenario for Homeland Security et al for some guys with rifles to go and attack key sites. As I understand it, you'd only need a dozen or so such attacks across the country (with three guys to a team) and things will go completely to shit.

Same with it just taking some guys with axes going to the right spots and severing a number of the transoceanic cables at the right spots and destroying the internet.

We saw what happened with the panic buying when COVID started. Now imagine that but a hundred times worse.
 

Simonbob

Well-known member
If truckers are vulnerable to IED attacks, they'll just flat out refuse to go, even if they're given any sort of escort, because even that isn't a guarantee of safety

I went to a talk given by a colonel who'd been in Iraq, doing 'peace keeping'. He said a number of things, but one of them was the problems they had when somebody started taking potshots at garbos.

The rubbish collection just stopped, and they had a hell of a time dealing with that. Dealing with actual opposition was much, much, easier.
 

JagerIV

Well-known member
Actually it's not the plants themselves that would be the targets, but rather the power lines and substations. As we saw with the Northeast Blackout of 2003, even a minor hiccup can cause major failures in the system -and 2003 was an accident.

It's actually a nightmare scenario for Homeland Security et al for some guys with rifles to go and attack key sites. As I understand it, you'd only need a dozen or so such attacks across the country (with three guys to a team) and things will go completely to shit.

Same with it just taking some guys with axes going to the right spots and severing a number of the transoceanic cables at the right spots and destroying the internet.

We saw what happened with the panic buying when COVID started. Now imagine that but a hundred times worse.

Sure, but then look at what actually happened in that blackout: power never went down in some places, with total capacity only falling to about 20%. It shut down about 2.5% of the electric grid. Cuts can certainly degrade things, certainly. It might divide the power up into smaller units. But, well, carrying those out at a large scale is very difficult to coordinate, and most problems can be resolved in a couple of days. And, well, if its a regular problem expect ever more local power generation to be brought online. So, intermittent power loss in local areas with fairly substantial local back ups with problems that get solved in a couple of days, well, don't kill a whole lot of people.

Like, sure, random acts of terrorism are inconvenient, but its not going to collapse civilization. And if someone has enough power in a local area to sustain that level of terrorism, they probably can exert enough control over the area to want to maintain power.

The grid collapsing into 10,000 local grids around the local power station because of unreliability of any long distance power draw becoming unreliable is annoying, produces more work, and lowers the resilience of any one areas power (since if your power station goes down, local power goes away). But, its not end of civilization bad.

Most problems take weeks or months to reach crisis levels: the grid can continue to be repaired until it can't, garbage can be stockpiled for, say, 1-2 months before things start getting really bad, at least in a suburban setting. So, like, if someone does shoot at the Garbage men, you do have about a week to find them before any real disruption occurs from that.

Certainly, things can get bad, and they can even get bad fairly quick, but that generally requires active effort and pressure to get that to happen: you need to break stuff, prevent people from fixing it, and prevent them from creating any alternative to it.

Most people though are going to mostly keep doing their jobs. People in relatively safe areas will want to sell (at highly inflated costs, I'm sure) to dangerous areas. And local power structures will conscript/enslave people to get the work done that free people don't want to do.
 

The Immortal Watch Dog

Well-known member
Hetman
You know, if we do have a second civil war, I don't think the conflict will be restricted to just two sides; there's enough division in this country that I wouldn't be surprised if everything devolves into warring city-states.

It certainly wasn't in Argentina or Chile, which are the closest contemporary example to the social ills and illegal leaders we have in the US today.

It became a total free for all until with every group falling on each other like drunken wolves until strong men showed up and took over and forced everyone else to heel.
 

PeaceMaker 03

Well-known member
We actually have some six thousand years of history arguing that conventional militaries really have a shitty time dealing with militias and insurgencies.

Been awhile since I studied up on the topic but there are really two nations in history that proved an exception to that rule.

The Roman Empire and the Mongol Empire and that was largely because both sides could just destroy the offending civilization and kill so many of them that said regions never really recovered.

Even if those civilizations constituted part of their own sphere of influence or territory. And the reason both were able to do that was because they had huuggeee tracks of farmland and industry and a population base that viewed that kind of fucked up shit as totally reasonable foreign and domestic policy choices and even saw it as a chance at upward mobility.

The US Government doesn't have the mentality and the Bugmen in the cities don't have the cultural animalistic spirit to do that.

But the right sure does. It's got all the food and most of the industry and it's got a sizable chunk of the wealth as much as some users on this site wanna tip their fedoras the only thing that really stops the right from losing its collective shit is their modern quasi secular Christian sense of compassion and naiveté.

Read up on some of the incredibly fucked up shit Allen, Marion and Greene did during the American revolution. While they were insurgent rebels they fought the way the Mongols and the Romans fought and they did this because they learned how to fight like that fighting the East Coast Natives who played that old game pretty damn well.

People wanna act like any civil conflict favors the establishment but it doesn't, the other side is only being held back from true ugliness by a morality that the left constantly vilifies and is slowly convincing them to set aside to confront the great enemy.

It is a really dangerous mindset and a very foolish assumption.

Was thinking about the Holodomor in the Ukraine, the Soviets fixed the anti-communist problem by starving the people to death.

Not completely but enough the A.P.C. ( Ukraine anti-soviet guerrillas) was still actively fighting the Soviets until the UK Intelligence agency leaked the CIA contact information on who was fighting the Soviets in 1949(or 1959).

The Soviet killed off everyone who was part of the APC that
 

The Immortal Watch Dog

Well-known member
Hetman
Have you seen the shitpost on Judea by Dovahatty?

Maybe? I haven't actually sat down to watch any of his shit in ages, I haven't really had the time. I think the last one I saw was the one on Constantine.

Was thinking about the Holodomor in the Ukraine, the Soviets fixed the anti-communist problem by starving the people to death.

Not completely but enough the A.P.C. ( Ukraine anti-soviet guerrillas) was still actively fighting the Soviets until the UK Intelligence agency leaked the CIA contact information on who was fighting the Soviets in 1949(or 1959).

The Soviet killed off everyone who was part of the APC that

Yeah, but the Federal Government doesn't really have the capabilities to do that, especially when the agro people would be the ones actively hostile to them.

Big Agro could try it..but I bet dollars to donuts their lands will get razed by farmbros. The hostility against Gates and the Monsanto crowd is..palpable in the farm belt in the US and really anywhere else on earth.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Top