[chico20854]

Ok, a few thoughts. (I've been entertaining guests for the past week and am now just getting caught up).

On the availability of ships, it's a matter of numbers.

The world merchant fleet in 1996 consisted of about 86,000 vessels. About 5,000 of these were under Russian or Polish registry. So there are about 81,000 vessels trading when the war breaks out. The recovery plan requires about 100 merchantmen - 54 tankers and 43 cargo ships, or about one eighth of one percent of the prewar fleet.

So lets run the numbers for the losses to rise this high. First, assume half of the fleet is destroyed by civil unrest or caught in a port that was nuked. So the USSR needs to sink 40,000 ships. Assume that the Soviet navy had 40,000 torpedoes and missiles in their magazines or the ability to churn them out of their factories. Assume that every ship requires but one hit to sink it and that every weapon launched hits. The active phase of the naval war is one year - December 1996 to December 1997, and assume that Murmansk is undamaged in the Kola offensive and therefore able to fully support operations until December 1997. Assume that the Soviet Navy devotes its entire attack and cruise missile submarine force to sinking merchantmen (leaving its SSBNs unescorted, its naval bases unguarded, with no watchers on NATO SSBN bases, and not seeking out NATO carrier, amphib or surface groups), with no losses to NATO en route or by escorts, and that NATO keeps putting merchantmen on the North Atlantic or North Pacific, conveniently close to Soviet bases. Also assume that the USSR is able to find enough reservists to man 136 submarines brought out of mothballs, keeping in mind that most technical tasks aboard ships were performed by officers in the Soviet Navy.

So with these somewhat generous assumptions, each Soviet submarine (90 cruise missile boats and 310 attack boats) would have to sink 100 merchantmen in a one year period. What about surface raiders? There were 401 seagoing surface combatants available, so again making all the same assumptions, that cuts the number of targets per submarine or surface ship to 50 per vessel.

By way of comparison, in 1942 the German U-boat fleet hit 1322 ships (with another 342 hit by surface and air attacks). The top U-boat ace, Otto Kretscmer, sank 35 ships in 11 months with U-99, before having his boat sank and being captured. 1153 German U-boats hit (not sank!) a total of 3478 Allied and neutral ships, just slightly over 3 each. (All figures from uboat.net), while 9 German merchant raiders sank a total of 142 ships (15 3/4 each, on average). Total allied merchant losses, worldwide, were 5150 ships, over six years of war.

So for the Soviet Navy to sink 50% of the world merchant fleet, given all the assumptions outlined above, it would have to be anywhere from 16 (each sub would have to sink 16 times as many ships as a WWII U-boat) to 48 (inflict eight times as many losses in one-sixth of the time) times more effective than the Axis powers in WWII. You can argue all day about apples and oranges, the differences between WWII and WWIII, but they aren't going to make up for these fundamental numbers. When push comes to shove, the Soviet Union doesn't have enough time, ships or torpedoes to sink enough shipping to make the recovery plan fail for lack of shipping.

As for naval losses, we've tried to error on the side of heavy, but again we have to be realistic. The USN sends 150 nuclear subs to sea during the war - for there to be none left in service is just beyond believable. Even on V-E day, with Germany overrun, the Kriegsmarine had 43 U-boats at sea, and 232 scuttled in harbor, with overall loss rates during the war of slightly over 65 percent. I would argue, instead, that the modules may present a view that is intended to convince the PCs of the importance of their mission and the desperate lack of resources Milgov faces. For example, the PCs are told that Corpus Christi is the last sub available and that it is vital to recover it. A more accurate statement would probably be that Milgov had lost control of Corpus Christi and that it was vital that the UBF be prevented from controlling it, regardless of the size of the USN submarine fleet. (Likewise, the occasional "loose nuke" adventure is more oriented on regaining control of the weapon rather than restoring a nuclear capability - if the US had fired off all 15,000+ strategic and theater warheads we wouldn't be playing T2k, we'd be playing Gamma World.) The PCs likely aren't told the whole truth, whether or not the security clearance system is still intact, as they're headed "outside the wire" and may not ever return.

The limited crew available to man Corpus Christi reflects the demands Milgov has on valuable human resources - it is sent to sea with the minimum crew needed to sail her. Likewise, John Hancock may have been used as the flagship for TF 34 because that was all that was needed - with a minimal naval threat there was no need to send a cruiser, with its higher demands of crew, fuel and rare spare parts. The USN doesn't want to send a LST with a 225 man crew to drop the PCs off in Baja California, so they go in a leaky rust bucket pleasure boat. Sailboats and sailing ships are valuable assets that Milgov troops should grab - sure. To me, this points to prudent use of scarce resources rather than the destruction of over 575 naval combatants. (Again, by comparison USN combatant losses worldwide during WWII was 345 ships). I am not implying that the USN is able to put all these ships to sea - but they exist, can be made seaworthy, and a crew for some of them scratched together from those serving ashore. In fact, many of them remain at anchor simply because there is nothing useful for them to do at sea and their operation is a drain on resources.

On the more general subject of resources: Prior to Operation Omega much of Milgov's limited resources were devoted to supporting a war on three fronts. Practically, this support was mostly nominal, but even "a trickle" of replacements, equipped with mortars turned out from machine shops, trained and deployed to Europe a year after the nuclear attacks, is a lot of resources spent (How many of your PC's have a time in combat of less than 36 months? That means post-nuclear exchange replacements!). The end of active combat operations allows this flow of resources to be spent on reconstruction rather than wasted on foreign battlefields. The trickle of resources flowing back to the US from CENTCOM is by no means enough to restore life in America to anything resembling pre-war (CENTCOM sends an average of 120,000 barrels of oil a day to CONUS, versus pre-war consumption of 18.5 million barrels - about 4%). Instead, when combined with a plan and troops willing and able to execute a plan, it presents an opportunity to restart things a little bit at a time. I would argue that the biggest asset the US Army Europe vets bring with them is the will and ability to organize things, hence the disagreement between CINCLANT and CINCEUR. I don't believe that Milgov went to the trouble to organize and execute Operation Omega so that there would be another 50,000 armed individuals wandering North America witnessing its decline to the Middle Ages.

As to some of the more specific points:

Construction equipment: as Fighting Flamingo mentioned, most of the equipment for the Seebees and engineer battalions comes from state and local transportation departments and construction companies. Many of these assets would have spent the past few years sitting and rusting, in areas abandoned by any authority with the resources or will to use them (such as the DC and Baltimore street gangs that run the Delmarva peninsula prior to III Corps arrival). Sure, they'll need some maintenance, but not every 63H (Heavy wheeled vehicle mechanic) that was transferred to the infantry was KIA. Replacement seals are some of the "high priority spares" sent back from CENTCOM, probably as sheets of synthetic rubber to be cut as needed, while other parts can be cannibalized or manufactured by machine shops (the same ones that had been producing mortars or aboard ship).

Other vehicles: The troops that return from Europe are mostly light infantry, with limited numbers of CUCVs, HMMWVs and converted civilian vehicles. As I noted in "European Veterans Return Home": The light infantry battalions received the few 120mm mortars and most of the other heavy weapons that were available. The combat engineer battalions were equipped with civilian construction equipment and support equipment - compressors, dump trucks and the like, given the dearth of combat-capable heavy equipment. The MP battalions were the main motorized combat force, using a variety of light wheeled vehicles (the odd HMMWV, requisitioned civilian pickup trucks converted to mount machineguns) and armored cars (mostly former bank armored cars but also including a hodgepodge of former police vehicles, Department of Energy armored cars and vehicles in the ports that were awaiting embarkation for the war zones). The support battalion provided transportation (using school buses, delivery trucks and horse-drawn wagons). VII Corps fields two battalions of mechanized troops, with equipment drawn from an existing corps in the Deep South.

The nine ships listed in canon: Obviously, I don't agree that these are the only ships left available to the USN. They are the only ones that GDW intended a group of PCs to encounter. As for the ships in CENTCOM, Legbreaker, you state "These ships are all located in the Persian Gulf and are unlikely to be leaving any time soon - they're needed by the western allies in Iran." They're ships, mobile by design (obviously), and what do you think they're doing in Iran after the end of the war there? (Or even during the war?) There aren't any Soviet ships running around the Persian Gulf! As for enemy action, who's still out there? Barrikada?

I agree that the scale of the destruction is massive and that the available resources overall are scarce. What this plan posits is a slow, targeted recovery, starting in a handful of small areas, that will take decades to restore life to a semblance of its prewar state. The end of combat operations allows the limited resources available to Milgov to be directed to the reconstruction that had been put off by the need to run the remnants of the war.

As for the ability of organizations to cope, I agree that by 2000 FEMA and pretty much all the disaster relief organizations would be ineffective, but that things would have stabilized on a local level - if they hadn't, things would have collapsed, and casualties would be far higher than the 50% in canon. Keep in mind that Katrina in some ways is a poor model of the ability of the US as a whole to respond to a disaster in T2k. First, New Orleans and Louisiana were (and are) spectacularly poorly governed - look into their police department before the hurricane struck, a bunch of scum and drug dealers in uniform. Second, by Thanksgiving Day the US has been under the threat of nuclear war for almost a year and had several panics, giving people and authorities time to plan, stockpile and practice. Milgov and the European veterans provide the means to pull these local stabilized areas together and make use of the specialist knowledge that each one may have - maybe some of the evacuees from urban areas, working on farms, are US Navy veterans, electrical engineers, tug boat crewmen, petroleum geologists or even airship assembly techs. In the context of a county-sized area these people would be useless, but when a Milgov civil affairs team comes by looking for these kinds of experts are beyond valuable.

As for the scale of damage, again remember that civilian casualties are 52%. That leaves, for example, 175,000 electrical engineers in the US. It won't be hard to find a dozen to reopen the electrical engineering department at Princeton. There is no basis to argue that every USAF and USN base was struck in the exchange or that there was a high-altitude EMP strike that shut down the entire US. (Localized EMP damage, however, is widespread, and the electrical grid was shut down to protect generating capacity and limit the spread of EMP damage, plus the fossil fuel plants ran out of fuel in many cases.) The specialist personnel might very well have spent the past 2 years on base security, some getting killed in the process, but when the part they've needed for 2 years shows up on an airship from Colorado or there's fuel for the aircraft again they're back to work.

A lot of this recovery plan depends on is a change of scale of how we look at the world of T2k. What may be impossible for a group of PCs to accomplish is easier for a cantonment to do, and when multiple cantonments coordinate and have a trickle of fuel to move vital things with the impossible becomes much easier to do. A tanker truck of fuel is an impossibly large cache for 8 individuals but only 20 minutes of fuel for a single 20MW electrical plant.