[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

I didn't mean engineers and cardiac surgeons..... I meant people capable of running a village with a little jumpstart..... The Project isn't going to be able to dictate who is in or out by much. Still at 3-5 years your going to find electricians, plumbers, warehouse managers, policemen, chefs, hoteliers, green house operators and local politicians and a host of people that can learn.

I can't believe truly unskilled people are going to be around at 3-5 years.

I think you overestimate the number of "skilled" people in this country, compared to the number of people who answer phones or wait tables or groom dogs or any of the thousands of occupations that earn people money but do not necessarily translate well to a post-apocalyptic setting. I also think that even people with useful skills are going to be at a competitive disadvantage for years compared to people whose primary skills are simply survival.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

One to two weeks tops. Jumpstart, get it going, and leave it in the hands of locally recruited competent persons...

So... you see the Project as basically showing up, dumping a set of gear, and leaving after showing them how to turn it on? Then why bother with the college degrees? Why bother with psychological and civil affairs teams (who will take months or years to see a result with any particular population)? Heck, the basic challenge of reconnoitering and securing an area is going to take substantially longer than 1-2 weeks! I would expect marauders to just follow the groups around, pillaging those untrained and unprotected villages as fast as Morrow leaves!

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Forget about controlling it. Deliver the equipment, install it, and bring in the survivors. The survivors will self identify and it will shake itself out.

That is a lot more callous approach to aid than I can imagine working. I also think that a lot of Morrow equipment is effectively irreplaceable, and giving it over to a bunch of shoe salesmen and hoping they will figure it out is more than a bit optimistic.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

The Project has more important tasks like water treatment plants and power plants..... Things that will speed recovery by orders of magnitude.

Those are indeed very important, but they are also large-scale projects that will take a long time to implement for even a small area - Morrow is not building and maintaining a national power grid in the first year, probably not in the first 5.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Don't fret about village level politics.

You have to worry about any level of politics that has control over equipment/supplies you are distributing and/or that has the ability to pose a threat. CG Seattle has 79 people. A modest village that knows the lay of the land and has spent 5 years fighting for survival might be one election away from being the exact kind of militia that can take down a bunch of idealists who eventually have to leave the V-150 to urinate.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

That has so many variables it can be argued anyway either of us wants to spin it. How many come over when there is a warm bed and food on the table?

There are a lot of variables in there, but I was being far, far more favorable to the Project in my estimates than I actually think realistic. At any given time in this country, we have about a third of a percent of our population incarcerated not counting those still going through the courts, those released, and those simply not yet caught. Add to that the opportunists and other types who won't commit a crime in a "civilized" society but who turn wolf after missing a couple of meals, and one percent seems awfully darned low to me.

It's an odds game. You cannot handle every contingency, but you can't just ignore them either, you have to prepare for enough challenges to have a solid chance of success, and considering that this is a completely unknown set of challenges I can't see doing this in a minimalist manner and expecting anything other than disaster. When you are stretched so thin, there are just too many things that can go wrong and take you down, and why would TMP accept that?

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

How many come over when there is a warm bed and food on the table?

When you provide no security, no policing, and no permanence, probably not that many. Five years post war I would expect that vast majority to have formed small, tight communities that do not trust outsiders and are not likely to accept the brigands' promises to be good in return for three hots and a cot. It is going to take more than a few weeks for a bunch of educated novices to take a population scattered and changed by years of post-war struggles, identify and filter out the "bad eggs", and integrate the rest.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

I leave it to MARS, the Snake Eaters, surviving .gov assets, and frankly the survivors populating the recovery site who know damn well what they stand to lose.

Per your staffing level, MARS would be less than 100 people for the entire country, the Snake Eaters are unknown to the pre-war Project and may be hostile even post-war, other surviving government assets may or may not be the exact enemy you are fighting against, and the survivors likely lack the weapons or training to protect anything that anyone else really wants to take.