Quote:
Originally Posted by ToughOmbres
Good points-do you think it would be naivete' even in game terms to portray Milgov formations as "we're here to help, we brought firepower, some basic foodstuffs for a limited time and then we're moving on to push the (insert opposition here) back. Carry on." Effectively restoring order but leaving most people alone since they need their lines of communication, food production and potential new recruits for limited induction?
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I think you would have a great deal of variation between how Milgov units operated and how populations treated them in the areas they moved through, and a lot of that would evolve over time as conditions improved or deteriorated.
One way of looking at a bureaucracy like the government or the military is as if it's an organism. The first job of the organism is to survive.
If we break the US experience into phases, here's how I would break it out:
- Immediate post-attack anarchy (Nov-Dec 1997)
- Faux recovery (Jan-Jun 1998)
- Unravelling (Jul-Aug 1998)
- Collapse (Sep 1998-Jun 1999)
- Re-organization (Apr 1999+)
- Recovery (?)
Immediately post-attack, the military would be providing disaster relief, security, logistics and transportation support for relief supplies, etc. There would still be enough food and fuel in situ for the military to be a force for good during this period and during the Faux Recovery phase.
The Unravelling sees several different things happen at around the same time. One, the fall harvest is meager, and Milgov fails to secure most of it. Which means, the food doesn't get appreciably distributed from the growing regions to the consuming regions. As hunger turns to starvation, most urban areas go Mad Max anarchic. Populations riot, murder each other, and then the exodus from the starving cities to the countryside begins like a plague of locusts. A military unit interacting with angry desperate, starving people (and with lots of guns, this is America after all) would almost by necessity have to use a heavy hand to avoid being overrun, much less restore or maintain order. The other two things that happen are: the Mexicans invade, and the US pulls units from disaster recovery and riot suppression to dealing with the invasion, and MilGov also decides in Fall to send about half of the remaining domestic military forces to Europe to stop the Pact counter offensive.
During the collapse phase, just about everyone (outside of rural agricultural areas) would be going hungry. This is the period where any large, organized group of men and women with guns would likely acquire a bad reputation. Money is worthless, group A has food, group B has rifles, machine guns, mortars, and AFVs. Group B needs food to survive. Group B can no longer trade money for food. But they can take / extort food to survive.
During the collapse phase, the US military executes a fighting withdrawal from Texas. Let's say your unit is retreating up I-35 in Texas, Mexican advanced units are 50 miles to your south. Your unit passes by a cattle ranch with 50 head of cattle. Do you:
- Leave the cattle and continue your retreat?
- Take/kill some of the cattle for unit consumption, leave the rest?
- Kill all of the cattle to deny them to the enemy?
I could see all three happening. The rancher probably wouldn't be very happy that the cattle he needed to survive with just got shot by the US army. If he survived (no thanks to the US government) to see the US army show up again 2 years later, he probably won't be very happy to see the player characters and the prospect of "taxes".
Similarly, in areas where there's a lot of anti-government activity (partisan/marauder attacks on military units), units would probably start to see the population as "the enemy" and be much more willing to confiscate everything, especially as they withdrew from areas.
And the thing is, under FEP-D, all of this confiscation would be "legal" (and not like there would be courts to resolve the Constitutional question). And every single military / paramilitary / police / state militia unit would probably be claiming these powers, and so the farm / community might get "visited" multiple times in a short amount of time and have their food, fuel, weapons, and people confiscated.
And last but not least, without a currency, trade and taxation in economic terms becomes really challenging. You go back to feudal tax-in-kind (a farmer gets taxed part of their harvest) with most people employed directly by the government (you don't work, you don't eat for the most part). There would be no capacity for prisons. A lot of crimes would be treated as capital crimes and summary execution the punishment. And this is just necessity, not the government being intentionally evil. Using warlords in Africa as a reference, food would also be used as a weapon. Deny and take it away from "disloyal" areas, give it to loyal areas.
All that being said, players have to be fighting for something besides pure survival, right? Someone needs to be the shining light on the hill, and maybe that's CivGov, maybe it's MilGov. New America would certainly be framing themselves as that.
Re: recruitment, I would say recruiting for any military unit would be pretty easy, for the most part. Lots of unemployed and hungry, and the military would be seen as, if nothing else, food. And being on the outside of the wire of a labor camp is probably better than being on the inside of the wire.
The way I see the three factions are:
1. MilGov - basically Stalinist (ironic in that), 100% command economy, top down control, trying to do their best to rebuild the country, but running society like a military camp.
2. CivGov - corrupt but at least nominally dedicated to the idea of rule for the people, by the people.
3. New America - neo-fascist, presenting themselves as less anarchic and better run than CivGov ("we get the trains running on time"), and less heavy handed than MilGov ("we aren't some brutal military unit from Pennsylvania that stole your food when you needed it most, we're the men and women that ran off that marauder band last month when they were looting and murdering their way through Georgia").
The way it appeared GDW had it going is MilGov and New America essentially killing each other off and CivGov "winning" by default.