Thinking a bit about the USN...
 

I'm kind of in the "there's no way it could have been destroyed to that extent" and making that fit in a "canon" T2k (1.0) setting sticks in my bridgework a bit, but one justification sprang to mind: maybe the ships themselves weren't destroyed - there's plenty of ships left, but what of willing crews, what of maintenance (even nuclear ships require POL for moving parts), and indeed what of supplies? Kinda hard to pack up for a six month patrol when everyone in your home port city is scratching by on 800 calories per day.

Just sort of a random thought.

Navy personnel could have been seconded to the Army and the Marine Corps in increasing numbers to replace combat losses in Technical fields. Those require months to train let alone just finding healthy replacements. The fact that the training bases themselves along with the instructors are nuclear fallout.

Naval personnel and to some extent Air Force personnel are going to become redundant with a decreasing number of airframes and less of the larger seaworthy vessels. Honestly, I think that the Sailors and Airmen are going to replace the Army and Marine Corps support service personnel with the trained Army and Marine Corps personnel trickling out to the Combat Theaters worldwide, almost completely within CONUS. This exempts active combat in the SW and Alaska.

It's a good thought. I think naval T2K canon can make sense if we take a holistic view. I agree that attrition of personnel with technical expertise could lead to vessel attrition through accident and wear (or unmanned vessels sitting in port for lack of a competent crew). Also, undermanned vessels are more likely to succumb to enemy action. Take out a few naval port facilities with nukes, and damaged/worn out ships can't be repaired and returned to service quickly.

It's not mentioned either way in canon, but an additional explanation for the sorry state of the USN late in the war is the use of tactical nuclear weapons at sea. Even a near miss or nuclear-armed SSM intercepted relatively close to a carrier battle group could do enough damage to put vessels out of commision for a while, and a direct hit could destroy most, if not all, of a CBG.

Put these all together and add in the inevitable conventional battle losses and you have a skeleton fleet c. 2000.

Yeah, exactly. New York is basically a vertical version of The Road Warrior, so forget landing there. Lots and lots of other deepwater ports are gone, and even if they're intact what infrastructure exists to get stuff to and from the ships (roads/highways to the ports).

don't forget the example of the Red Fleet following the fall, within two years of few trained personnel, no spare parts and little maintenance, most of the fleet was inoperable and rusting alongside piers.

I think the authors wanted to portray a last man standing narrative hence almost no ships left. In reality I think there would be dozens of ships left even if they are just frigates and destroyers. However by 2000 there's no oil, boil electricity, nothing in any significant numbers anyway to keep a capital ship in fighting trim.

Bigger ships like carriers and cruisers probably all fell to tactical nukes or masses Ssm attacks. Any that are left are probably sitting in port.

I welcome discussions on this topic, though I fear it can be a major point of contention in our little online community. Wherever possible I like to find ways to make things described in the published books make sense, rather than just throw out large parts of the designers' alternate history.

I'm among those who feel that most of the USN's fleets are gone not because of total destruction of ships but because most of the remaining ships are inoperable for a variety of reasons.

I'll be reading further responses to this thread with great interest as this topic aligns nicely with the way I like to explain things in my campaigns.

The casualties have go to be high if ships meet in engagements in the North Sea, The Baltic, The Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the North Pacific, and the Bering Strait.

• Confined maneuver room
• An operational area compact enough for shore based anti ship air patrols
• Operationally in effective range of shore based intermediate range nuclear missiles
• Supply only by Munitions and tankers. Shore based depots will be denied.

Additionally only the port facilities of neutral or strategically unimportant (in the first years) port and ship building facilities are going to be spared several nuclear strikes.

No drydocks, no mooring berths, no repair facilities, based on land are going to survive for the NATO or Pact fleets. No spare parts or the technicians to make them. To return to.

Maybe there is a Fleet Tender out there somewhere but, without GLONASS, LORAN, the GPS constellation, or communications satellites of any kind surviving Admiralty of either side can't make use of one.

First off the canon isnt exactly the most reliable thing as to USN strength

1) The USN has one nuclear submarine left - and its implied very very much that they were lost to enemy action, not to maintenance issues.

Sorry but that means that all the Permits, Sturgeons, Los Angeles (except Corpus Christi), Tridents, etc.. are gone - basically no chance of that at all - it would take the Russians, British, French, Chinese and every one else in the world to hit the USN that bad - and remember a bunch of USN bases didnt get hit in the nuclear exchange so those bases would have spare parts, etc.. available to repair ships

2) The whole "last battle of the Virginia" is completely unrealistic - read it and then try to have it make sense with any weapon the Russians ever mounted on a ship

3) The fleet in the Persian Gulf that supposedly has been supporting Marine landings is way too small to land any kind of Marine force - you are talking two full divisions and all their support ships and all thats left is two ships? And we know that Frank Frey missed ships when he did his module because he forgot the whole French task force in the area.

4) No USN ships on the Pacific Coast at all - sorry but no way -

And we do know that there are USN ships left active in the US on the East Coast which is where most of the naval fighting that is mentioned in the canon happened - there are three destroyers plus the John Hancock at Norfolk and NJ according to Challenge Magazine - they dont have much in the way of fuel but they are still active duty ships - along with a sailing ships, several smaller ships and even a few aircraft

so if there are survivors there, there are survivors on the Pacific Coast

5) Maintenance - ships do take a lot of maintenance that is true - but it takes a lot to make a ship so out of whack its useless - your radar might not be working and your engines may only be able to put out half power but you still have a ship that can kick butt

6) Fuel - you can run a ship on oil that is about as bottom barrel as it gets - gunk that would ruin the engines on a tank or jet works just fine in a ship. Heck in a pinch you can run on unrefined oil if you have to on most ships - you wont get max efficiency or range but it will work

A lot of USN ships may be out of fuel in places like Hawaii, Korea, etc.. - but all they need is oil and they would be operational again - and as long as the US has ships in the Persian Gulf and access to oil there they can bring those ships back into operation

7) Armaments

Lack of armaments could make many naval ships not as effective as they used to be. I.e. if you are out of torpedoes then your sub isnt going to do much but recon or maybe be able to lay mines. However there is a lot of ammo out there for the guns the USN has. And even if all they have left is their guns that makes them a lot more effective than a jury rigged gun on a sailing boat or cabin cruiser.

My GM showed this with the Corpus Christi. He took the writeup in the Gateway to the Spanish Main that the Christi sunk that Bulgarian freighter in 2000 with dud torpedoes to mean that her fire control system was screwed and she was out of torps. Thus if the Christi was under US control in late 2000 she couldnt be under civilian control a couple of months later.

So he changed the Last Submarine from a search for a submarine to a search for fire control parts and torpedoes and Harpoon missiles that were needed to restore the Christi and several of her sister ships back into fighting trim.


Its very obvious that the original authors either didnt have any naval expertise or wanted to simplify the game as much as possible so they just killed off the USN to make it easier to write for it. Similar to what they did with air power in the Gulf - they mentioned air strikes and the like in the RDF sourcebook but only in Challenge Magazine did they put the rules in so you could actually do them.

There are maintenance facilities left - they cant take aircraft carriers or battleships but there are lots of places you can repair destroyers, cruisers and destroyers.

For instance they never hit the sub base in Connecticut that is part and parcel of Last Submarine. If they hit every USN maintenance facility that base would have been nothing but a crater filled with water.

But they didnt - so that means that not every base got hit. They hit Norfolk and they hit the sub bases in South Carolina - but that doesnt mean they hit everywhere. And even Norfolk got hit with one nuke only - and one that wasnt big enough to take out the whole base - there have to be docks left for instance. There are ships based there that operate out of Norfolk - and you dont operate out of a ruined base with no fueling or dock capability - so that means even a nuked base is still operational.

Meh, I am not going to worry about Canon so much. The game was written with the Cold War as very much a reality. 20+ years later we can take it for granted pulled from all manner of open source material. Fact is it was classified then, and much of what is current is classified now.
In all fairness to the authors we can’t be smug about what we know now about the US Navy of the 80s and 90s, while pretending we are privy to the numbers and capabilities of what is afloat today.
Convenient. I think that would be called plot. If we are going to assume anything, it would be this is the sole KNOWN and OPERATIONAL nuclear submarine.
I don’t think I would waste a nuclear weapon on the dockyard in the hope that valuable ships are there. The warehouses and the ammunition magazines necessary for those ships to operate isn’t going to evade a strike. A nuclear weapon could strike the dockyards but, both sides realize that is a temporary measure. Drydocks will be repaired and gantry or cranes erected again. Deny the enemy the spare parts and it is as good as taking the ships out of the fight.
I was Army. I don’t have the experience to regard it either way. Probably just a plot point and an explanation to placate those that want an explanation.
Can also be taken to mean those are the ships that remain. The others sailed on to Bremerhaven or were lost in action around the Straits of Hormuz. Is there a mention of civilian sealift or merchant marine?
Really? In the vastly larger Pacific ocean, the North Pacific closer to the Kamchatka peninsula puts vessels in range of Soviet radar and shore based anti ship patrols. However the US Navy has Bremerton, San Francisco, and San Diego, as well as Pearl Harbor, Guam, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. This is versus the Soviets in Korea and ported in Vladivostok and Petropavlosk.
If I was a betting man I would say that the remnants of the US Navy are in the southern or equatorial waters of the Pacific. Away from everything Soviet but a surviving reconnaissance satellite, as it would simply be out of operational range without a WW2 scale island campaign. The North Atlantic and the Med, as well as the Persian Gulf are all in the operational range of Soviet Bombers, especially Backfires.
Surviving vessels but, operational? Are they worth diverting the resources? Do they have the parts, do they have the crew, can the ammunition and the rations be spared for them to venture out into blue water for even a coastal cruise?
I concur, far more likely. However, I am sure the operational ships on the east coast are there to support the “Going Home” module. It’s a plot point and necessary. No ships, No Omega. So it takes some writing and probably some fudging just to justify.
Blind and limping on one leg? What would a Captain do? Take it to a Port before it was lost. Can’t see the enemy, and do not have the speed to catch them or run away from them. That’s a wounded beast waiting for the predator to kill it. That is not a ship that would go into a fight, unless there was no choice but to fight.
Maintenance is the Achilles heel and it takes a large industrial base to keep a Navy afloat and operational. One that does not exist after the nuclear exchange and a division of the United States into Milgov and Civgov.

Most ships run on bunker fuel, oil that is one step above tar. Still consumes thousands of gallons. Quality is not the problem, it is supply. The same infrastructure required to keep the Navy operational is the industrial base needed to support an oil drilling, pumping, and refining industry. Are oil fields pumping, are the refineries running, are there shortages of the people needed to run them?
Probably are ships out there, but after a few years with no fuel, no food, and no parts. Probably with crew transferred out……. It is going to take a while to get them going again.
The oil in the gulf is probably of no use to anyone as it is still in the ground. Every bit of oil industry infrastructure is in the range of bombers and theater ballistic missiles. That being a strategic asset it is in the interest of both sides to deny it to the other.

Probably not a lot, if nukes were going to be used the magazines would be certainly be a priority. Add in the factories that once made ammunition for WW2 canon have long since been dismantled. The US has been relying on surplus munitions well into today.
A departure from Canon but, not an illogical one, personally I think it more likely that a surviving submarine would be diesel electric than nuclear.
More likely they just wanted to simplify. As they were writing a game about ground combat in Europe, besides who would want to compete with the success of Harpoon.
So GM fiat, hand waving, the Navies of the World are dead, let’s get on with combat in Europe with the remnants of the NATO and Warsaw pact forces as that is more plausible for a role playing game with a small party of 1-8 players.

They needed a Sub base for “Last Submarine” so plot point. As for civilian ports, they could repair a lot, except for spares that would be specific to a warship.
As for operational bases, no fuel, no parts, no support personnel, no food for the people, make one just a place to park.

That is what it means. Put another way, in the T2K universe, the Soviet naval threat + attrition + anything else (bad luck, whatever) is such that the Soviets inflicted pretty brutal losses on the USN (while being largely exterminated themselves).

That's the plot and backstory in the game. It's also pretty unrealistic, knowing what we know now, to think that the Soviets could have sustained massive conventional warfare on two fronts for a couple years without economic collapse. And we now know they didn't have any plans for war in Europe that didn't involve plastering NATO forces from the get go with nuclear weapons.

In short, it's an alternate universe, where things didn't work out the way they did in real life.

Agreed. Quality of later T2K supplements was not nearly as good as the early ones in a lot of ways.

The ships that are there are what's left -- and it's just as bare bones as heavy divisions with a couple dozen tanks and all the other familiar trappings of T2K orders of battle for land forces.

The combined naval forces available to the US and Canada in the T2K universe are inadequate to prevent the Soviets having an amphibious romp through southern/south eastern Alaska and down Canada's Pacific coast. That implies some serious casualties -- doesn't mean every last ship in the Pacific is gone but it implies very serious losses.

Who does the work? Besides expenditures of spares and degradation or destruction of facilities, you also have to factor in the death or displacement of skilled labor.

So you've got an intact maintenance facility -- so what? How are you going to power it? Are you just going to ring up the work force who've fled the area looking for food and tell them their jobs are back on? How do you feed them once you consolidate them, assuming that works out.

The reality is that modern naval ships and their support infrastructure are very complex systems with numerous failure points in the mix. T2K assumes pretty much a worst case scenario where complex, modern systems of various sorts have failed.

Where does it come from and how do you get it to where the vessels are located?

And, maybe a bigger question, why do you bother? It's not just the USN that is nearly extinct, but everybody else's navies as well. In a world of extremely limited resources, would you bother wasting fuel on a destroyer or save it for an alternative like barges or freighters to move around personnel and supplies -- or just to provide heat to make it through the winter?

On the other hand, a cargo ship with a couple jury rigged autocannons and heavy machineguns is going to be a better asset for what you need a ship for in T2K than an ASW frigate or Aegis cruiser. If you only have the resources to keep either a warship or a cargo ship working, the best use of resources is going to be for the cargo ship given the minimal naval threat above the level of what real life Somali pirates can manage and the destruction of infrastructure and need to be able to move cargo and people around.

From a gaming POV, most T2K GMs really don't need/want complicated, "realistic" naval orbats because most campaigns (based on the modules) don't involve naval warfare.

From a world-building POV, a relatively large, highly functioning naval force doesn't really "fit" the T2K setting.

It all comes down to whether one can suspend disbelief or not. I think that there are enough strong and compelling arguments (outlined in several of the preceding posts) supporting the canonical view that I am comfortable working with it more or less as-is.

GMs can tailor their T2KU for their own preferences and sensibilities (and/or for their players).

Not everyone is going to be convinced either way and that's fine. Good honest, intellectual debate is healthy, but let's all make sure that we keep it civil.

Might mean for me. I can be blunt and undiplomatic, even when I am not meaning to be confrontational.

I have not yet lacked for an opinion, for good or ill.

I feel kinda bad for even starting the thread; I didn't realize there was this much past acrimony...if it helps (and it may not) my thoughts are that while a not-insignificant portion of the USN probably still exists (10-20%) it is, as noted, in very poor shape. A lot of it may be run aground in ports too shallow to have supported the ships in the first place, as acts of desperation by captains trying to get badly damaged ships home and not having a home port to moor at. Some of it may have made it to adequate port facilities and a possibly depleted crew suddenly finding themselves facing the ire of civilians who'd seen their city suffer because of the war in general. Again, as I said in the OP, some of it may be serviceable, but without fuel, POL, food for the crew, armaments or depleted crews, those ships are effectively "beached" until further notice.

I'd imagine a good portion of the rest of the world's navies are in just as bad a shape.

The sortie of the John Hancock to support OpOrd Omega may well have been a mighty, mighty push by the USN to scrape together one crew, enough POL for one ship, and get them to and from continental Europe (plus a stopover in England). I don't have a mind for an "America triumphs over all" vision, that's not what I'm getting at. But just as there is some armor remaining in just about every nation's military, and just as there are some flyable combat a/c and fuel for same left in every nation's military (see the RDF sourcebook), there's some ships, too.

My thoughts were more broadly speculative than an insistence that the USN be this mighty, world-shaking force - by 2015 or 2020, there may well be an operable blue water USN of not inconsiderable (comparatively speaking) ability, if nothing else to stave off pirates and commerce raiders while reestablishing vital, vital trade lines.

That's all, that's all I meant. I wasn't saying anything like there should still be destroyers providing off shore fire support in everyone's campaigns or a gaggle of operational carriers and a/c and you're doing it wrong if you don't have that, or whatever.

I guess I might have simplified a bit just by saying that "world navies should have slightly more operable ships they can scrape together during the post-war construction period, 2001ish onward."

Sorry for any drama.

I would suspect that the general scenario shown in Satellite Down isn't an isolated event in T2K regarding various naval forces. With home ports often nuked, other major ports maybe nuked and/or in total anarchy, and national command authorities of increasingly dubious validity and increasingly unable to support the forces they claim to own . . . there's got to be a strong argument for tucking your ship or even your small task force into some relatively isolated bay or harbor and striking up some sort of deal with the locals.

This doesn't mean slews of naval officers mutinying against their national governments -- just means they fall into that T2K category of "loyal but ignoring orders to move" and such. Going forward past Y2K, I'd think that there'd be a interesting effort by the French government to purchase a lot of those ships to help augment their own overstretched fleets. Some may say no (for reasons of patriotism or other motives), but I bet some would say yes if the French offered a good enough deal.

Probably some interesting, and murky, adventure ideas in there, with PCs acting as anything from agents for other national governments sent out to scuttle negotiations (or just scuttle) for a ship transfer to them ending up as some sort of advanced team or something for a French diplomatic mission (and some or all may still be agents for the owning nation, other nations, or other armed groups).

In my opinion, the debate here in this thread has so far been very civil. My admonition to keep it civil was not intended for any one person. I just wanted remind everyone to continue to keep things civil here as diverging viewpoints become apparent. In other words, keep up the good work.

I’m not having a go at those that want to work out the fate of every single vessel (or unit or tank or aircraft) but it’s always struck me as a restrictive thing to do as a GM. Personally I would rather not have the fate of every single USN vessel (or whatever) decided because by keeping the fate of some of them vague it gives you a tool as a GM to introduce one if necessary. Listing out the fate of everything runs the risk of a player saying “well that’s wrong because X was sunk in 1998 according to the expanded Canon” and causing disruption in the game as the GM explains what parts of Canon and expanded Canon they use.

In my opinion Canon provides a framework for a GM's campaign and almost every GM will start diverging from Canon the moment they start running their campaign, often as a result of PCs actions. For example if you run Black Madonnna as presented you need to ensure that certain things occur if you want to stay true to the Canon presented in White Eagle (which is set about a year later) and that might actually be contrary to what your PCs are actually doing. What happens to Canon if the PCs try to kill General Julian Filipowitz before he becomes King Julian of Silesia? Do you fudge things as a GM or force the players to do something else? The vast majority of GMs will simply accept the PCs actions and then adapt their campaign accordingly and therefore diverge from Canon in the process.

Lastly it's also worth noting that discrepancies in OOBs and ship lists might well occur anyway due to inaccuracies in reporting. No one apart from a GM with a God like view of the world is going to know the fate of every single ship or unit or whatever so why tie yourself as a GM to something that has been "expanded from existing Canon". Retaining flexibility as a GM seems to be a much better idea to me.

But that's just my opinion so ignore me if you disagree! :D

I have made room at Alameda, CA for multiple USN vessels in my sketches for the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm mostly focused on Blue Two [2nd Naval Infantry Battalion]. However, Blue Two operates on the waters of the Bay and the Delta under the command of the USN, so it's impossible to avoid giving some attention to the Navy.

Fuel is going to be the elephant in the room, though plenty more problems rear their ugly heads. The value of the electricity the nuke boats can generate may surpass the value of their patrols under most circumstances. For this reason, I see Alameda as a very secure, very densely populated sweatshop.

Careful, there. You don't want to run afoul of the ORBAT Mafia.

(For what it's worth, I agree with you. I'd rather have story hooks than a catalog.)

- C.

Just my own musings....

The Soviet primary targets would by the SSBNs and the carriers as they ships, at the time would carry nuclear weapons that could be used against Russia. I think it would be a fairly safe assumption that the carriers would either be sunk or damaged to a degree that they are no longer operational.

The SSBNs, especially the Ohios, would have been difficult for the Soviets to track, let alone sink. My own guess is that once they have fired their missiles, they may have returned to port, trying to get reloaded, and either fell prey to nuke strikes or Soviet mining activities, most likely they are tied up alongside a pier, providing electrical power to any remaining bases.

The SSN fleet would have been a bit more active than the boomers and either fell prey to ASW efforts, Soviet subs or the sheer lack of weapons to rearm them with.

The battleships would have been high-priority targets since their Tomahawks could have carried nuke warheads.

The modern cruisers, destroyers, and frigates would have either been sunk/damaged defending the carriers or NATO convoys, used up most if not all of their missile loads, and the survivers, in dire need of repair and maintenance and simply not available for sea duty.

The older destroyers and frigates, would probably be the ships most likely to be used by the USN, I can even see many museum ships pulled back into service "for the duration of the emergency" operating with limited electronics and their crews working to get their old guns back into some kind of working order. Ready for the "The Sullivans" and the "Kidd" to leave their sheltered berths and serve their country yet again, sixty some odd years after having been laid down?

my two cents

That's more-or-less where I was going.

The Challenge mini-module/sourcebook A Rock in Troubled Waters offers some great examples of older destroyers being brought back into service during the Twilight War and ending up being among the few major USN vessels still actively patrolling the CONUS east coast.

I agree. I think most practical patrols could be handled by smaller coast guard cutters. No need for huge capital ships to protect the fishing fleets. A carrier or subs with a live nuke plant would make a good mini plant.

If anyone wants to use the expanded naval material I did: it was on Antenna's site before it went down, be my guest. It was there for folks to use-or not-as one saw fit. Jason and the DC group did make some use of it, before their plans went on indefinite hold.

Personally, more surviving ships does make sense. I, for one, could not understand that there was only one SSN left? And no boomers? Not very likely-and no carriers? My material had four carriers left in port-though two were conventionally powered and short of fuel, and two were CVNs. Not to mention two damaged carriers sitting in various ports that could sail again-if the right parts could be found. And also mention of a couple of the amphibious carriers, the battleships and cruisers, as well as additional SSNs and boomers (including Parche-the PACFLT "special projects" boat).

Reactivating older destroyers-as well as the two Des Moines class cruisers-made a lot of sense as 1996 went into '97. Now, the only place you'll find major USN units doing regular patrols-apart from those SSNs and boomers I mentioned-is in the Persian Gulf.

So we might see a CVN laid up permanently at Alameda with wiring running to the shore. Between the machine shops aboard (would they go ashore?) and the machine shops at the naval base, a lot of work could be done with the power from the nuke plant. I don’t have any figures, but it would be interesting to know how much electricity could be generated if the plant were run at 80% capacity.

Being an island, Alameda would be relatively easy to secure. Bandits might come over in small boats at night, but a halfway decent shore patrol would go a long way towards managing that problem. Checkpoints and machine guns on the bridges would control access. With electricity and order, Alameda would be a haven for anyone with skills to offer in return for food and shelter. I foresee people being jammed in like Tombstone’s Chinatown neighborhood. Pretty soon, new construction would start.

Alameda, then, could be the engine for the Recovery in the San Francisco Bay. There would be a need for food, which would move by water as much as possible. (Blue Two might spend a lot of time escorting riverine convoys down the Sacramento River.) There would be a need for labor and raw materials. Materials could be recovered from the metroplex that encloses the SF Bay. Provided raw materials could be moved to Alameda, ammunition and small arms could be fabricated (or repaired) and traded for more raw materials.

As with every other place in post-Exchange America, bringing food supplies in line with demand would be the first order of business. When this came up in the thread about USAF and USN personnel a couple of years ago, I selected a 40% survival rate for SF Bay residents. Leg suggested having another million survive but migrate. Without mechanized agriculture, the Central Valley is going to need more manpower. For now, at least, I’m going to go with Leg’s suggestion and peg the SF Bay population at 3 million in early 2001. There is the usual dynamic of food being grown in every available plot of land, survivors clustered into communities for self-defense, and the whole pattern we see on Manhattan in Armies of the Night. Some food can some in from outside, like the Central Valley or fishing communities along the coast. Something is going to have to go out, though. I’m thinking that by early 2001, the Navy will have become a broker for the movement of food and goods throughout the region. Alameda, Treasure Island, and Alcatraz are all easily-secured locations to which water-borne goods can be brought for sale and/or redistribution. Obviously, local barter and exchange will continue all around the Bay. But with control over the rich waterways of the region, the Navy will be in a much better position than most Milgov cantonments.

I just had a thought: Sixth US Army is supposed to have control over the Sacramento-Oakland stretch of land. This leaves room for the Navy to control most of the Bay Area and possibly have ownership of the waterways. It seems to me that there is room here for rivalry between the Army and the Navy.

Indeed: the carrier I have at NAS Alameda was Abraham Lincoln. Her surviving aircraft are based ashore there. She's at Alameda due to two AS-4 hits that took out her arresting gear and one of her elevators. Not likely she'd sail again, so make use of those two nuclear reactors. The operational carrier at Alameda is Nimitz with CVW-9, with one CGN (California).

One sub that you can bet could be used to get any party down to Baja for Satellite Down would be Parche. The PACFLT "special projects" boat would be in demand-and likely that kind of operation would be what she would be used for.

The more I think about it, the more it seems likely that once the food situation can be brought in hand, the Navy is in a position to use the waterways of the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system to put the Recovery on a favorable footing. The Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, along with their tributaries offer access to more than half of the Central Valley. Use of these rivers in their untamed state would require adjustments to barges and other river traffic. Nonetheless, the combined assets of San Francisco Bay’s population and industry, the Central Valley’s food production, and the river highways make central California a natural springboard to recovery of the state and much of the West.

In a very real sense, the Mexicans were right to think that occupying San Francisco would be devastating for the Americans. It’s hard to see how they would have a prayer of reaching so far north, though.

Here’s a question: where is Third US Fleet HQ in 2000? It would seem that the major surviving bases would be in San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound.

SF or Puget Sound is very appropriate; I never placed them in the Naval stuff I did, but did have a CINCPAC HQ relocated to Hilo, HI, along with a floating drydock, and one each destroyer tender and sub tender. In addition, the battleship Wisconsin is there for lack of fuel (and a torpedo hit in the forecastle). Missouri is at Chinhae, ROK, along with Salem's sister ship Des Moines-also for lack of fuel.

The bridges around Alameda could also just be permanently raised since they are drawbridges. I even envisioned a make shift wall around the entire perimeter. Yes, it's a lot of resources but if there is oil from Bakersfield then they should be able to being up a concrete plant and make forms for a smallish wall section. Say 10 feet high and a foot or two thick. Just enough to discourage people and enough to stop small rounds.


I also see the main capital ships being the high endurance coast guard cutters. Anything bigger is too expensive in terms of parts and fuel.

As for population I personally se the bay area far less than 3 million. More like a few hundred thousand but That just my vision

Disclaimer: Nothing of what follows is intended either to initiate or sustain a “canon feud”. Where interpretations of undocumented items, like the number of survivors in California or a specific region of a state, differ I think it’s worthwhile to have a conversation about the thought process leading to the differences of opinion.

Certainly, I would not try to shout down your vision. If “a few hundred thousand” means about 300,000 (often, a few is three), then we’re talking a tenfold difference—rather substantial. I do think that the difference in our numbers is the basis for a conversation.

One of the factors I try to bear in mind when I am doing the creative work of assigning population levels is the total number of survivors as given in Howling Wilderness. The total loss of population through July 2000 is 52%, amounting to 135 million people. The surviving 48% amount to about 125 million. The population will drop even further by early 2001, but I want to focus on the July 2000 population for now.

By the end of 1999—certainly by the beginning of 2000—the food situation will have stabilized a good deal. Locally, there will be shortages. However, the pre-war food largely will be gone or will have reached its expiration date by the end of 1998. There will be exceptions, of course—even important exceptions. By and large, though, the population of 2000 will be living off the 1999 harvest and the means of local production put into place since early 1998. The bulk of the dying from starvation will have happened already. The people still alive in 2000 will have been eating post-Exchange food for at least a year. However one divides and organizes the [American] survivors, in July 2000 there are about 125 million of them eating food grown, hunted, or gathered since the Exchange.

The San Francisco Bay Area (hereafter referred to as the Bay Area) has a pre-war population of about 10 million. Southern California has a population of about 15 million, leaving 6-7 million more Californians scattered throughout the rest of the state (by 1997 population estimates).

From a population estimate standpoint, many big cities have taken massive losses in population. Los Angeles was wiped out. We don’t know about San Diego, but the occupation by Mexico and the almost certain loss of water would have a very detrimental effect on the population level. The other nuclear strikes against targets in southern California, coupled with the disruption to water supplies and the movement of refugees, would have killed millions—quite possibly more than 10 million.

Boston is virtually destroyed by civil unrest following the nuke strikes, even though Boston doesn’t get hit. Manhattan loses about 95% of its population by the end of 2000. Philadelphia is destroyed. I could go on and on.

Somewhere in there, the numbers have to add up to 125 million in July 2000 if one is to go with the pre-drought numbers given in Howling Wilderness. I’m inclined to do so. However, I’ve already assigned some numbers to my own work in addition to or replacing the figures given in Howling Wilderness.

According to Howling Wilderness, South Carolina suffered a 30% reduction in population through 1999. We don’t know how many more have died by July 2000. Call it another 10% of the pre-war population, and South Carolina reaches mid-2000 in slightly better shape than the national average.

Also according to Howling Wilderness, the populations of Vermont and New Hampshire have dropped to pre-colonial levels. I presume this means “pre-colonial” as we were all taught in grade school, not the pre-colonial levels that were so dense there was no room for European colonizing until European diseases had run their course. I have chosen to revise the population estimates upward to about 30% in Vermont, 35% in New Hampshire, and 40% in Maine.

The pre-war population of Rhode Island has dropped by 80%, from about a million to 200k. [Howling Wilderness]. We don’t know what the population of Massachusetts is.

In Arizona, the pre-war population of 4.5 million is reduced by 80% to 900,000 [Thunder Empire]. Of these, 500k live in the area controlled by Fort Huachuca, 100k are scattered throughout greater Phoenix (revised upwards from previous estimates), 75k live in greater Flagstaff, 50k live on Navajo lands, 50k live in Yuma, and about 125k are scattered throughout the rest of the state.

In Nevada, the pre-war population of 1.7 million is reduced by 85% to 255k, which is pretty much the pre-war population of Nevada outside of Las Vegas and Reno [Silver Shogunate]. Las Vegas is a ghost town, but Reno struggles on with a fraction of its pre-war population. Almost everybody else lives along the Humboldt River or in the agricultural area in the south central part of the state.

In New Mexico, the pre-war population of about 1.7 million has been reduced by about 80%, leaving about 350k people in the state [Roadrunners]. Albuquerque is gone, and most of the other major population centers are deserted or severely depopulated.

With all of these population reductions taken together, some places have to be less hard-hit than others if the US population is to be 125 million in July 2000. This is one reason I haven’t emptied out the Bay Area. I could see, however, moving more people to the periphery of the Bay Area (thus including them in the count or not depending on where you draw the lines). If 60% of the population of the Bay Area is dead, that leaves 4 million to work with. Move a million to the Central Valley (no mean task), and you’re left with 3 million in the Bay Area. The Delta has an abundance of good farmland and a need for labor with the end of mechanized agriculture. If (big if) the needs of the farming community can be filled by the needs of urbanites to move from the paved-over areas of the Bay Area to the Delta, Napa, west Marin, San Jose and areas south, Pacifica (for fishing) and even southern Sonoma and areas north of Salinas, then a lot of lives can be saved. I know I’m asking for a lot. This is why 60% of the population is dead. Moving hundreds of thousands of people 100 miles is no mean feat. The young, the elderly, and the infirm aren’t going to make it.

So I could see reducing the number of people living in the Bay Area itself to 2 million with the proviso that 2 million refugees have survived to trek to the periphery of the Bay Area or the Central Valley as of July 2000, where they provide labor that once was performed by machines. Along the way, as many as 2 million refugees have perished. This leaves 4 million to die in place in the Bay Area—still a staggering number.

A natural question is how all of this is organized. I’d like to get some opinions on this one. For now, my kids are waking up from their naps and need to be changed and fed.

I'd think urban populations would tend to be very hard hit -- either in terms of deaths or refugee flow toward places where population density is more in line with available food production with Y2K resources and technology.

If an urban area has nearby agricultural land in quantity that is not dependent on pre-nuke technology/energy to sustain it (i.e. agro-business style irrigation), this would be a mitigating factor (though it certainly doesn't guarantee survival of large populations in and of itself). If the Bay area can remain organized enough (and quite possibly draconian enough) to enforce refugee resettlement policies, I could see it being survivable.

If the area remains organized, however, a big challenge will be the mass flow of refugees from southern California fleeing the Mexican invasion as well as the collapse of food production and water supplies after EMP, fuel shortages, and combat disrupt the flow of water into the area. There's really no direction refugees can go except north -- though how many of them would make it that far is an open question (not much of a drive, but would be pretty rough for most people to do on foot on short or non-existent rations . . .). Of course, refugees from LA and San Diego only have to make it part of the way to collapse food production in communities on the way, creating second order refugees . . .

Horse, you raise some very legitimate points.

I have dealt with the southern California exodus by killing most of them. The nukes are bad for SoCal: four strikes along the coastal spine of Los Angeles, plus one each at Vandenberg AFB and March AFB. The L.A. strikes and their resulting fire storms pretty much should do it for greater Los Angeles. Northern Orange County probably will get swept up in the firestorm. The hit on March AFB will destroy the Inland Empire. It’s possible that San Bernadino and Fontana will survive the firestorms intact. Vandenberg is pretty isolated from the SoCal metroplex.

San Diego survives, as does Camp Pendleton. Inland Empire municipalities 10 miles or more from March AFB probably won’t be much affected by the firestorm. A lot depends on the topography and moisture. Winter 1997-1998 was an El Nino winter, dumping a lot of rain on California. Therefore, the firestorm might not have been able to jump over the open spaces between densely settled areas.

The effects on SoCal are pretty severe even before the Mexicans invade. One good point is that we might see an effort to move some refugees to the Imperial Valley or the Central Valley before the start of the Second Mexican-American War. I don’t have a good idea how many people we’re talking about, though.

As for draconian measures, I think one option for the government is to offer food for movement. Point out to the folks in the ration line that the stockpiles are going to run out soon. Labor is needed in the Central Valley and elsewhere to grow and bring in more food. Start with volunteers. Once the looting and violence begin, it shouldn’t be hard to find people who are willing to go elsewhere.

All of this leads me to the contingency question. How prepared was the United States for the TDM? In Howling Wilderness, GDW seems to have presumed that the US was basically caught off-guard. I find this unrealistic. As the war escalates, people everywhere are going to start asking what if. Governors are going to ask their Depts of Ag what the effect of an exchange on food production will be. The answer almost always is going to be that production will take a hit without fossil fuels, and distribution will be very difficult. Some of these governors are going to ask whether additional labor can make up for the lack of fossil fuels. From this line of questioning, some are going to think to themselves that it would be best to make some arrangements ahead of time so that there is some idea of how many people are needed where. Obviously, reality is going to overwhelm the best-laid plans.

Now in the best-case scenario, you’re going to get millions of former urban and suburban dwellers living in rural hoovervilles. The effect will be rather similar to the latifundia of late Rome. It’s not hard to see a lot of Americans becoming indentured servants. It’s not hard to see a lot of farm hands overpowering the farmers and redistributing the land. GDW explores this idea in Alleghany Uprising. It’s a bad situation all around. But it may help explain why in mid-2000, 48% of the pre-war population is still alive. Somehow or other, they are growing enough, hunting enough, catching enough, and gathering enough food to keep 125 million people alive, if not in comfort.

If things are bad enough in southern California, I can see it playing out that refugee outflow from there doesn't manage to constitute a wave, at least not by the time it would be getting to the San Francisco area. Probably spells the doom of intact communities closer in to the LA/San Diego metroplex that might have, left to their own devices, survived.

I think the biggest foundational impediment to resettlement programs that repurpose surplus labor from urban areas into agricultural field hands will be people wrapping their head around that being the extent of government help. Initially, the logic of insisting the government should provide such assistance as is needed for someone to be able to keep their home, some semblance of their lifestyle, etc., will probably keep voluntary enrollment low. As people get hungry this will change. It's probably not a smooth transition at all, even in places where it works -- I'd expect rioting and turmoil, in suburbs as well as the more stereotypical inner city areas. Maybe even more unrest in the suburbs as members of the middle class with completely irrelevant job skills stare at the prospects of being turned into farm field hands at the bottom of the new pecking order.

At the same time, I expect that many will get onboard with the new scheme of things when the alternative is simply starving and watching their families starve. By 2000, in a lot of places, all this drama will have played out a couple years earlier, during the first post-nuke winter and subsequent planting season.

Out of curiosity (and not having a copy of Howling Wilderness or the US Army Vehicle Guide easily to hand) is Sixth US Army still based in the Presidio of San Francisco in the summer of 2000?

I don't ever recall reading a reference to the location of the headquarters from 2000 onward. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that the headquarters is in Sacramento.

Agreed about Sixth Army being in Sacramento. Since neither Mather AFB (320th BW) nor McClellan AFB (Sacramento Air Logistics Depot) are on the canon target list, either location makes sense for Sixth Army to set up shop.

In my universe the USN has two groupings of basically intact forces with sufficient fuel for operations (at least in the January 2001 time frame) with those being in the Persian Gulf and at Mombasa defending the shipping lanes from the intact oil refineries at Mombasa and Capetown to the Persian Gulf - i.e. one force defends the Gulf and whats left of the oil supplies there, the other defends the two refineries that are still intact and able to process the oil

We know from Frank Frey's RDF sourcebook that the USN has operational forces in the Persian Gulf and his responses to several posters here about Kenya strongly infir a USN force in that area as well for defending the Mombasa refinery. And he meant operational - as in not broken down relics with no ammo - for instance his description of the amphibious attack on Chah Bahar in on June 17th of 2000 clearly depicts the USS Salem providing gunfire support as the US Marines landed. I highly doubt she was firing the last shells she was carrying.

I have most of the rest of the USN that is left is either at Norfolk, Alameda, Australia, near Seattle or in Korea, with many ships low on fuel or weapons or having maintenance issues.

That is why the Persian Gulf and Kenyan ships were so vital in the end - that is how the USN will eventually get its ships home again - with fuel from those areas.

In my opinion I can see that if the game had gone on you may have had a second Omega being a CENTCOM force heading home after the Russians finally pulled out of Iran taking enough oil with them to bring home the US forces in Korea and Yugoslavia and perhaps even the guys left abandoned in northern Poland and Latvia along with their ships so at least they are all brought home.

First and foremost, I agree 100% with the idea that no resettlement program is going to go smoothly. I would go so far as to say that the programs that basically achieve the stated goal(s) with a low 20% casualty rate will be the exceptions. Plenty will go wrong. Plenty. However, where there is a discernible pattern, something can be salvaged from the wreckage. If something can be salvaged from the wreckage, we have a chance of explaining how 125 million Americans are still alive as of 7/00.

You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie. SoCal is largely depopulated by July 2000. Only the Imperial Valley may have something left, because that’s a place worth defending for both the Americans before 6/98 and the Mexicans afterwards. The other cities will have a population ceiling set by the availability of water. The real numbers will almost certainly be somewhat lower.

The government can help this along by bottlenecking the flow of rations. Get people hungry early, and some of them will sign up for relocation. By the same token, tell the farmers that they are going to have to adapt to having a lot of laborers at their farms, or they’ll be replaced by another farmer who will play ball. The farmers will be pissed off, of course. I picture the end of the conversation going something like this:

Farmer: This is my goddamned land! You don’t tell me how to run my farm!

Captain Smith: You have two choices. Get on board or don’t. If you don’t we won’t do anything to you. We’ll stand aside when the inevitable tide of hungry [expletive deleted] rolls through here like a swarm of [expletive deleted] locusts and eats this place down the dirt. We’ll protect your neighbors who play ball and grow food for the survivors. We’ll put up sign posts telling the locusts which way to go to get to your farm. Make your choice.

Damned skippy.

Some SoCal people may be left alive because there will be an early need to evacuate refugee camps in the region. Before people start moving out of the Bay Area in large numbers, they will be leaving SoCal in large numbers by whatever means are available. It’s not hard to imagine refugee camps springing up in and around all of the cities of the Central Valley from 12/97 onward as survivors from SoCal are trucked closer to the stores of food. From there, redistribution of the available labor to the farms will be much easier. People already uprooted will have far less attachment to their temporary quarters. Someone is liable to notice this fact early on and exploit the readiness of refugees to be moved vis-à-vis folks living in intact homes.