Thread: Twilight 2025
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Old 07-10-2018, 08:12 AM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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I think an important aspect is that of the potential for modern Western society to break down under the strain of war. It's something that has been discussed in other threads but is particularly relevant to this one.
That is to say, the current Western practice of "just in time" deliveries will make the wartime civilian situation much worse than it was in the past.
Shops don't hold large stocks anymore, often what you see on the shelf is all there is because they expect a "next day" delivery to replenish anything they sold.

Military forces typically have a far more robust logistics system and so are unlikely to be affected by this but the situation in civilian organizations is likely to be very dire.
I'm not just talking about things like food delivery to your local store but such things as medical supplies to hospitals, equipment and/or ammunition deliveries to police units and so on. I don't know what sort of ammunition stocks an inner-city US police station is likely to hold but in many other countries it's really minimal.
In some Australia police stations, it amounts to about double the normal patrol issue of ammo per officer so for a small station of six officers (with the Glock or S&W semi-autos popular here, three mags per officer) we're talking approximately 300 rounds in total of handgun ammo.

I think the potential for societal breakdown is far greater now than in the timeline of the Twilight War of 1st and 2nd editions because these days for example, if we have a disruption at the fuel stations, all those "just in time" deliveries will stop, shops will rapidly run short of supplies with little hope of getting resupplied within the week.
In peacetime, these sorts of things get resolved by the government as fast as they are able but in wartime, the government's attention won't be able to focus exclusively on a civilian problem.
That one week of no deliveries could lag on and last two weeks or more.
By that time, some people will probably feel like taking the law into their own hands.
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