Garrisoning the glacier mines and other harvesting operations seems to be the larger problem than protecting supply in and out from these sites. Can NOD identify these sites, ascertain their lack of defenses, and gather forces to strike them while ZOCOM is still coming up to speed? Especially when the Regency War was particularly hard on NOD's elite forces- those best suited to launching a strike into a Red Zone?
I think we have decent odds, but is it a game we feel like trying to play?
Part of my question is,
is Nod even playing? Should we take it as a given that Nod will be harassing our Red Zone operations with the kind of enthusiasm we saw shortly before, or for that matter during, the Regency War, in the aftermath of that war?
Is that a realistic fear, or are we jumping at (literal or metaphorical) shadows here?
We can't be sure that all NOD forces were exhausted.
We know that at least one major warlord didn't even participate, and we know that India wasn't even attacked.
There could easily be one warlord that kept forces in reserve to see if we overreach with glacier mining.
This one warlord, attacking alone after all other warlords have ceased to do so, and after by all appearances Kane just yelled at all his warlords for being idiots about picking stupid fights with GDI for no reason...
Well, I think that one warlord would have to be pretty Giddyboy to launch attacks on GDI Red Zone operations right now.
And we
have a Giddyboy, and we know he's not in great shape to press such attacks himself. Sure, he could pull some shit off if he were fighting in the face of zero defenses, if nothing were there to stop him, but there's a difference between "stretched a bit" and "we have nothing between us and the enemy."
The Congo is mentioned on Red Zone Harvesting, but I thought the super glaciers were on Red Zone Border Offensives?
Well, if we can't do border offensives (despite them seeming like the places where our security is
best equipped to chase off Nod forces), surely we can do regular harvesting in such a remote area?
Australia is likely safe, but we'll also be harvesting a long way from any support. So the remoteness cuts both ways there.
I think it cuts Nod a lot harder than it cuts us, what with us having conquered the entire East Australian Yellow Zone.
North America is quite fractured, but that also means that people are there looking for opportunities to prove themselves. And push deep into the RZ there will be very open to being pincered.
Context. Majors/Waters (whatever the northern Canadian Nod warlady's name is) doesn't seem very interested in "proving herself" by blowing up our shit. Especially, as alluded to above, after just how
incredibly badly that strategy has worked out for her previous boss Gideon, and for Nod's top warlords as a whole, to the point where Kane publicly humiliated them all
in front of GDI, and they know GDI knows it. Humiliated them for being a bunch of belligerent morons.
Mondragon is a different matter, but Mondragon suffered some pretty heavy pounding in Steel Vanguard, and the geometry of the battlespace is very favorable to our attempts to keep him at arms' length.
Balkans should be mass graveyard meets alien world, but for all we know getting too close to former Temple Prime in Sarajevo could prompt a response.
I suppose Kane might be a bit sensitive about the Temple Prime Memorial Bomb Crater. In theory.
When it comes to ZOCOM being happy about Red Zone Ops once more, I'm expecting it'll likely be Q3 2062. If we're lucky, it'll be Q2 and we can hammer the RZ Border Offensives in order to get to super glacier mines. If we're unlucky, Q4.
After all, it's not just building the armor, GF has to train troops to use the armor. Then probably deploy units to take over "heavy infantry" jobs from ZOCOM in order to free up ZOCOM for purely RZ work. Once we get more factories going, that'll slowly increase the amount of ZOCOM freed up. I'd half expect that completing Set 1 factories clears ZOCOM of all "heavy infantry" duties globally. Set 2 factories would likely enable GF to start handling shallow Red ops.
The trick is, ZOCOM is
tiny compared to even a small fraction of Ground Forces. Even if Set 1's factories only supply 5% of Ground Force, 5% of Ground Force's infantry is probably more actual soldiers than the entirety of ZOCOM.
So in a situation where
statistically speaking Nod warlords are weakened, demoralized, and very possibly explicitly leashed by Kane, and where Red Zone attacks are particularly difficult to implement on a large scale even for them, and where we have the assistance of the Forgotten granting us a statistical advantage in ability to see that kind of thing coming, and where ZOCOM knows that within a matter of months or a year at most, Help Is On The Way in the form of very large forces of Ground Force power armor infantry...
ZOCOM may be more willing to stretch itself than it would otherwise.
Sort of like how after all the shit they'd been through in 1917, you really wouldn't think the British or French would be willing to launch further attacks on the Western Front. But then the Americans started showing up in enormous numbers, providing a stream of reinforcements the British and French knew would continue to come right on up through 1919 and on. And then the Germans exhausted themselves with their spring offensive. And suddenly, military operations that would have seemed very ill-advised in January 1918 started seeming like a better idea in June 1918...
and they worked, at least by the standards of World War One offensive battles.
We've been shying away from Red Zone Harvesting Ops since the next stage is the Congo and that's sitting between two Mehretu YZs. And we're kinda low on convoy escorts. Given someone hijacked a load on tendril harvesters, I think everyone can understand the hesitation on that currently.
Fair, but we already have cargo ships running down that way anyway; it's the only way to ship anything from GDI's stronghold positions around the North Atlantic to, uh... much of anywhere else. Besides, the Congo isn't
close to Mehretu's territory. Crossing hundreds or thousands of kilometers of Red Zone is not something you do easily or lightly.
