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Old 11-14-2012, 02:07 PM
HorseSoldier HorseSoldier is offline
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By 2000, the cantonment system in most places is most likely an essentially feudal situation where the local populace are raising food to support the military garrison that keeps marauders and other armed groups at bay. I would expect that this also includes the military side of the equation using things like engineering assets to repair or expand things like irrigation systems or otherwise provide improvements to help with food production.

I'd also suspect that given what the T2K has to say about agricultural productivity by 2000 that in most places the system is barely allowing people to get by and what little surplus is produced is oftentimes needed for fuel production. (In the CENTCOM AOR the access to petroleum probably offsets the comparative complexity and difficulty of farming, for something like no net gain compared to Europe or the US.)

What this means, among other things, is that offensive action that requires a unit to pull up stakes and leave their cantonments is extremely difficult to organize. The NATO summer offensive in 2000 and the WP counter attack both probably required some minor miracles of logistics and planning and even then also most likely mean cantonments for other units got stripped of resources to the point that there will be elevated loss of life among civilians in those cantonments (as well as farms outside the cantonment system that were stripped by units passing through). The inability to logistically support offensive action circa 2000 appears to be be why there is such limited active fighting going on in Europe, the American Southwest, etc. Even trying to move a unit a couple hundred miles without any expectation of major fighting beyond some minor marauder encounters and such is way deep into the realm of Clausewitzian friction and is only feasible within narrow windows of time based on the agricultural cycle.
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