Operation Omega and MILGOV

[Webstral]

Kalos, you may not be getting a lot of bites on this one because a) the Omega angle indeed has been considered in great detail by others and b) it's a sore spot on this forum still, I think. The DC Group did some extensive work on Operation Omega, and the reception of this work led to the largest blow-out in quite some time.

There are a few factors to consider before you completely dismiss Operation Omega, some of which you have mentioned.

1) Not everyone was supposed to go straight home. The RDF Sourcebook allows for Europe-based characters to get to the Gulf as a result of Operation Omega. How many were expected to go to the Gulf is a legitimate question.

2) Many troops were expected to leave the service. Personally, I think any who would trade a meal ticket for the uncertainties of post-Exchange America is out of his mind, but I'm not in the shoes of any of the troops returning from Europe.

3) Maintaining logistical support is a different matter than moving people once. The Marines and the Airborne forces face this problem without a nuclear exchange to gum up the works. Getting bodies to a locale requires far less effort than keeping those bodies supplied with all the necessities, even when those necessities are neatly stacked at the applicable rail head, runway, or pier. The inverse of this truism is that whereas MilGov in late 2000 may be unable to maintain a reliable distribution of supplies to its East Coast and Gulf Coast cantonments, moving people once requires far less than reliably delivering food, fuel, ammunition, etc.

4) Mindset matters. If MilGov is determined to go ahead with Omega, torpedoes be damned, then the orders are going to be issued. More than one campaign in the modern world has been conducted with terse instructions to the logisticians to "make it work." It's possible that SACLANT told Colorado Springs that they didn't have enough food in Norfolk for fifty thousand Omega troops, only to be told that the operation was going ahead anyway. The Joint Chiefs may have decided, with cold logic, that if moving fifty thousand Americans from Europe resulted in a few thousand casualties en route to the ports, a few thousand reinforcements for CENTCOM, ten thousand replacements for CONUS, and losses to mustering out, desertion, and starvation for the rest, then CONUS would be ten thousand troops stronger than before Omega started. It's not pretty, but then we do devote ourselves to a game in which half the global population is dead and most of the rest scratching for a living.

Webstral

[Legbreaker]

May 2001 - that's the date Howling Winderness brings the timeline up to.

Virgina: The eastern part of the state was hit fairly hard, but the damage was mostly restricted to the coastal areas. Despite severe damage to the port facilities at Norfolk and Newport News, the area around these communities currently supports a small (and shrinking) Milgov enclave, consisting mostly of troops brought back from Eruope in late 2000. In March of 2001, the enclave was ordered to evacuate and move to Fort Dix using all available transport. None have arrived as of 1 April 2001.

Refering back to Howling Wilderness again we can see that only the 78th infantry division is in the area and numbers just 900 men - 800 of which were European reinforcements.

We can also see that the Norfolk community consists of mostly European evacuees and has been shrinking for some time. We're also told desertion from the enclave is high and the communication with Milgov has been cut off for several weeks since being ordered to move to Fort Dix and reinforce the 78th.

From this we can assume the total military strength of ex-european troops remaining cannot be much more than a few thousand. Any more than that and the orders would probably have been along the lines of "move to Fort Dix and take command of" or "assimilate the 78th".