Victoria Falls: A Post-Collapse American Nation Quest [Down With Victoria!]

[X] Plan Force Preservation

ChairAgainstWall said:

To everyone who has voted for Force Preservation: is there anything you don't like about the write-in on Raise Periscope? The rest of the plan is the same.

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I'm pretty sure nothing is free? Can we be sure the emphasis on scouting doesn't waste our defensive forces' time?

Nyvis said:

I'm pretty sure nothing is free? Can we be sure the emphasis on scouting doesn't waste our defensive forces' time?

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Could possibly consume a few extra resources. We have specialized scouting groups, right?

ChairAgainstWall said:

I'm operating on the assumption that they knew from the start it was hosed, and that it was a ploy to distract us.

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That seems pretty unlikely. The Victorian landing force had us outnumbered about 8:1 at the point of contact and 4:1 in terms of overall forces on the peninsula. They have overwhelming air superiority. The ONLY advantages we have are our gunboat fleet, somewhat better artillery, and (unbeknownst to Victoria) the way the Californian sabotage is interfering with their aircraft.

If they'd just wanted to distract us, they could have done it by landing two divisions farther east, somewhere we couldn't even secure, and marching menacingly close, or something like that.

I'm voting for Raise Periscope, but I'm worrying that Toledo is also a distraction. (Not paranoid enough!) Is there anything to stop them from marching troops overland on the north of Lake Erie? That's what I'd be doing, if I was doing what the Vicks are: an Inchon-style (as Lind would no doubt put it) landing to clear the way for an armored thrust following through by the land route. In this scenario, Toledo is a decoy, and the "tanks" there are inflatables. It's stupid and overcomplicated, but Lind would love it.

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Firstly, lack of ports on the north shore of the lake- would have to doublecheck later but I think that's an issue for a large force.

Secondly, all those troops, even if they do show up overland, would be on the wrong side of the river to take the bulk of Detroit proper. If they were going to attempt the tactics you describe, their better bet would have been to hit us from the south with the force that actually went to Leamington.

Thirdly, it'd be taking a big risk to base their air force out of a location not heavily secured by ground troops while the Devil Brigade is around. That's a fully mechanized 5/5 unit that could potentially attack the airbase overland.

Nyvis said:

I'm pretty sure nothing is free? Can we be sure the emphasis on scouting doesn't waste our defensive forces' time?

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I'm sure it'll result in some kind of tradeoff (lost time, maybe even casualties)...

But on the other hand, not having any idea what the enemy army is doing is a huge handicap in warfare. Right now, we don't know if the second half of the Victorian expeditionary force is:

1) Already marching towards our fortifications and ready to attack us within a day or two.
2) About to march, still busy reducing the terrain obstacles between Toledo and Detroit.
3) Still sitting around hoping/waiting that the attack in the east will draw off our forces and give them a clear shot
4) Maybe not even IN Toledo technically though I don't think that's a realistic fear.

Not knowing what the enemy is doing or where their forces are, while they have air reconnaissance and can easily see where we are, is a problem. If we don't make efforts to learn what the enemy is doing, things get messy.

ChairAgainstWall said:

I'm voting for Raise Periscope, but I'm worrying that Toledo is also a distraction. (Not paranoid enough!) Is there anything to stop them from marching troops overland on the north of Lake Erie? That's what I'd be doing, if I was doing what the Vicks are: an Inchon-style (as Lind would no doubt put it) landing to clear the way for an armored thrust following through by the land route. In this scenario, Toledo is a decoy, and the "tanks" there are inflatables. It's stupid and overcomplicated, but Lind would love it.

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For much the same reason as @Simon_Jester I think this plan is unlikely. That said, I'm not discounting it but, since nothing in our current plan commits the devil brigade, we can still respond either way. Our defensive lines are prepared to fall back, and the likely won't be able to overtake them until they commit the CMC and tank divisions, at which point the Devil Brigade can come out to play.

For the sake of knowing what the southern prong is doing I'm voting:

[X] Plan Raise Periscope

Because the only thing that could seriously ruin our day and break our carefully laid plans is if the Victorians are moving into position to hit us from both sides at once while the eastern force is still capable of doing some serious damage. If they are doing that then having at least some advance warning, whether through foot-based recon, naval scouting or some combination of the two, will at least mitigate the danger from the south somewhat.

And if it turns out they haven't moved in force from Toledo yet then we know we've got the time to execute our plan properly.

I also don't think the fears of a third prong are likely. As much as Rumford would do such a stupidly complicated plan whose number of moving parts rivals the more hare-brained schemes cobbled together by the IJN such a long, overland march would have needed to set out well before the Buffalo raid and marching through Ontario in late winter/early spring on a thin tether of a supply chain strikes me as foolish rather than dangerous. I don't think the Vicks would be that reckless.

@PoptartProdigy how good is our signals intelligence? I'm sure at this point there has to be some radio traffic flying around, especially since the Victorians aren't likely to use anything more sophisticated, so are we getting any sort of noise coming from Toledo or Leamington?

[X] Plan Raise Periscope

[X] Plan Raise Periscope

[X] Plan Raise Periscope

[X] Plan Raise Periscope

In regards to the idea of a third prong to the attack, or to Toledo being a bluff...

Basically, the thing to remember is that armies have an effective radius of action from their base of supply. The farther they overextend past that radius, the more weakened they become.

Having to rely on animal transportation makes your radius of action very short, because the animals either graze and move slowly, or carry their own feed and it cuts into how much cargo they can move. Motorized vehicles, which have a much more favorable "mass fraction" of cargo compared to fuel, greatly extend the radius of action.

Given historical precedents, our defense lines south of Detroit, roughly 50 miles from Toledo, are pretty certainly within the radius of action of a force marching out of Toledo. Getting over the terrain in between won't be fun or easy, but it's not exactly a case of Hannibal crossing the Alps or even Rommel punching through the Ardennes.

By contrast, an army skirting the north shore of Lake Erie- which if you look, has very few harbors or port facilities even in the present day- is probably NOT going to have the radius of action to be very effective at striking from known Victorian territory all the way out to Essex County, Ontario.

With a good logistics corps, a LOT of advance planning, and willingness to gamble on securing a port of some kind (a sizeable one, such as may not even exist on the Lake Erie side of the Ontario Peninsula in the first place)... Well, a nation with the resources of Victoria could probably make it work. But even then, why would they have tried? The Victorians themselves didn't know they were going to be trying to conquer Detroit with a large army until roughly six to nine months ago. I don't think they could have set it up with reliable confidence that it would work. Nor do I think they would have had a reason to try, seeing as how they couldn't possibly have foreseen our defensive deployments at the time that they would have had to plan and launch this expedition.

If they're already committed to a major overland route march anyway, the march from Toledo to Detroit is a LOT more manageable than the march from Buffalo to Windsor. And it is no more dependent on lake shipping, since the Victorians would have to drop off supplies along the lake shore to supply a marching army if they took the "march to Windsor overland" option anyway.

natruska said:

If we could even get limited superiority though, enough to only be sacrificing dozens of aircrew per week, fixed-wing gunships would be a huge game-changer. The amount of fire they can put down (even the rather improv AC-47) is just insane. They were brutal against the North Vietnamese, imagine using them against actual human waves this time.

I vaguely remember a wonderfully vivid well-written (and horrifying) story about a pair of Cobra pilots in Vietnam encountering Spooky. They'd just pounced on a NVA battalion moving down a trail, tearing into them with grenades and minigun fire, when an order came down to leave them and move on. These guys were pissed, thinking Command was throwing away the clearest shot they'd ever have at the enemy. Then dozens of flares lit up the sky and a hailstorm of tracers started ripping the jungle out from under them, 50-yard circle by 50-yard circle. Their ops box had been handed over to someone capable of putting a round in every square yard of jungle, because it's the only way to be sure.

and let's not even talk about Spooky 2, or "the field artillery got lost, got drunk near an air force base, and the babies are horrifying."

it's a howitzer. a flying howitzer. why.

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Never. Enuff. Dakka.

But honestly I feel like even an AC-130 wouldn't be horrific for us? Aren't C-130s in general stupid-durable (in terms of general wear-and-tear), and stupid-easy to work on? They're meant as rough-and-tumble workhorses and we've been using them for like 50 years IRL....

We're talking about a roughly 180 mile overland march through what is IRL-current day solid farmland. Amusingly enough, a force that actually paid attention to logistics as a primary factor could handily manage that by way of staged supply dumps. A force that dismisses the value of logistics, would tend to need to "live off the land" moreso, which means that their actual ability to traverse that distance is entirely dependent upon how many people live and farm in the area.

Godwinson said:

We're talking about a roughly 180 mile overland march through what is IRL-current day solid farmland. Amusingly enough, a force that actually paid attention to logistics as a primary factor could handily manage that by way of staged supply dumps. A force that dismisses the value of logistics, would tend to need to "live off the land" moreso, which means that their actual ability to traverse that distance is entirely dependent upon how many people live and farm in the area.

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Solid farmland in the winter is not what I'd call ideal foraging conditions.

LHB said:

Solid farmland in the winter is not what I'd call ideal foraging conditions.

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If there's small farming communities in the area, they'll have foodstocks which the Vicks can steal, even if they're taking from the seedstock for this year's planting.

KnightDisciple said:

Never. Enuff. Dakka.

But honestly I feel like even an AC-130 wouldn't be horrific for us? Aren't C-130s in general stupid-durable (in terms of general wear-and-tear), and stupid-easy to work on? They're meant as rough-and-tumble workhorses and we've been using them for like 50 years IRL....

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I mean.

If we have any reasonable capability to build large aircraft (making the wing spars will require a heavy industrial press of the sort others have been talking about), we have the capability to build a C-130-alike.

The problem is just that against our most probable opponent, AC-130s are trivially easy targets to destroy.

Godwinson said:

We're talking about a roughly 180 mile overland march through what is IRL-current day solid farmland.

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...180 miles? Um. If you mean the north coast of Lake Erie I'm pretty sure it's farther than that.

Amusingly enough, a force that actually paid attention to logistics as a primary factor could handily manage that by way of staged supply dumps. A force that dismisses the value of logistics, would tend to need to "live off the land" moreso, which means that their actual ability to traverse that distance is entirely dependent upon how many people live and farm in the area.

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LHB said:

Solid farmland in the winter is not what I'd call ideal foraging conditions.

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Especially since, if Poptart speaks truly, the area has been heavily depopulated by flight of refugees away from Victorian depredations, plus economic collapse and difficult conditions in Canada. Farmers only do well if they're plugged into a distribution infrastructure that can supply them with the goods they need- or they revert to subsistence farming and can't supply an invading army with much food.

If that region IS still significantly inhabited, it's probably only because it's exporting grain to Victoria itself.

Godwinson said:

If there's small farming communities in the area, they'll have foodstocks which the Vicks can steal, even if they're taking from the seedstock for this year's planting.

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Yeah, but in this case it may well be that the Victorians have driven away enough of the inhabitants that there just aren't enough people with enough food to steal to feed an army.

The problem with "make a desert and call it peace" is that it's hard to cross that desert. You wind up literally painting yourself into a corner. By encouraging destabilization of nearby neighbors, Victoria makes it much harder to deal with more remote neighbors.

Simon_Jester said:

...180 miles? Um. If you mean the north coast of Lake Erie I'm pretty sure it's farther than that.

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Ah, sorry, I misunderstood the topic, I'd thought that people were talking about Victoria attacking Detroit from the north, bypassing Essex County all together, with them making the crossing at the St. Claire River somewhere around Marine City because of course they would. Someone had said something about the Victorians aiming for a three part pincer, with their obsession with maneuver warfare and clever encirclments.

[X] Plan Force Preservation

Godwinson said:

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood the topic, I'd thought that people were talking about Victoria attacking Detroit from the north, bypassing Essex County all together, with them making the crossing at the St. Claire River somewhere around Marine City because of course they would. Someone had said something about the Victorians aiming for a three part pincer, with their obsession with maneuver warfare and clever encirclments.

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That would be a mess for other reasons. There's enough shipping that we'd notice them crossing the river since they'd literally be crossing our supply line. Our gunboats could interfere with that rather badly. They'd have to cut loose from any line of their own supplies in anything except food which they can forage; stuff like bullets and mortar bombs and medical supplies would be very hard to get to the third pincer force.

The idea the other person was talking about was "what if a big Victorian army was marching overland from Buffalo to join up with the Leamington landing force," which just doesn't work or make a lot of sense IMO.

[X] Plan Force Preservation

Simon_Jester said:

-[X] Write-in: You don't know what the other half of the Victorian army is doing. Make it a priority to get some reconnaissance information on the situation south of the defense lines on the south side of the city, by whatever means seem feasible and not needlessly dangerous. This may include naval action after the weather clears, but not air action with the handful of planes you have left.

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I might have missed it earlier, but this write-in feels like it came out of nowhere. We have no idea how effective this might be, or what we're risking by doing it. It doesn't seem right to just vote "do X unless it's too risky". We're the ones supposed to determine if X is risky or not. We don't even have proper recon forces, so what does this even mean? Are we going to send out scouts on foot, where they might be completely outnumbered if anyone spots them? With no given write-in option and no QM input I'd more expect this to blow up in our faces than actually give us more intel than whatever abstracted-to-the-background methods we already have.

Can't remember if I voted yet, but--

[X] Plan Force Preservation

Simon_Jester said:

Very limited. The VIctorians don't have a strong air transport arm and don't seem to operate helicopters. And despite the fact that their army, with its focus on light, mobile "straight leg" infantry forces that operate with little or no concern for supply lines and heavy equipment and a lot of concern for maneuver and positioning, should be pretty good paratroopers, they don't actually have doctrine for airborne infantry tactics so far as we can tell. I don't expect them to do much parachuting except maybe to insert commandos behind our lines if they think they can get past our air defense network.

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On reflection, it seems likely to me that during those periods when Russia rents out Victorian troops, they probably furnish air assault materiel to the Victorians, since as you point out air operations would be a fairly obvious tactic for these sorts of troops. However...Victoria is poor. Air operations take huge amounts of fuel, and fuel is one of those things that's just going to cost money. They can ask Papa Alexander to make their mean big sis Cali to make them planes, and they can make (crappy) parachutes of their own, but fuel is something around which they simply cannot cheat. Nobody, not even Russia, is going to give them fuel for free, even this long after the Collapse. It's an expense that I frankly don't believe Victoria could sustain.

Thus, while I absolutely believe that they have paradrop-qualified troops, and a developed doctrine for those troops' use (albeit, perhaps one that assumes air superiority is just a gimme), they utterly lack the ability to actually launch airborne assaults.

LHB said:

@PoptartProdigy how good is our signals intelligence? I'm sure at this point there has to be some radio traffic flying around, especially since the Victorians aren't likely to use anything more sophisticated, so are we getting any sort of noise coming from Toledo or Leamington?

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Fairly developed within the intelligence networks that you have. The issue is that you've yet to complete the relevant integration action, and the way I chose to represent the failed action invested, remember, was by saying that your local assets had all gone dark in light of the war going hot. You do have your domestic intelligence organization, but they haven't had to do a lot with signals intelligence in the past. They're helping as they can, it's just that this is not their wheelhouse. They do more work with human intelligence and IRS-style operations.

Now, you can still have people listening in on radio sets -- and have been doing so -- but while the Victorians don't seem to have encrypted radios, they are speaking in codes you have yet to break.

Derpmind said:

[] Plan Force Preservation

I might have missed it earlier, but this write-in feels like it came out of nowhere. We have no idea how effective this might be, or what we're risking by doing it. It doesn't seem right to just vote "do X unless it's too risky". We're the ones supposed to determine if X is risky or not. We don't even have proper recon forces, so what does this even mean? Are we going to send out scouts on foot, where they might be completely outnumbered if anyone spots them? With no given write-in option and no QM input I'd more expect this to blow up in our faces than actually give us more intel than whatever abstracted-to-the-background methods we already have.

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I mean, it's going to get really messed up if we have no clue what the southern army is doing and they do something that is very inconvenient or troublesome.

If Burns is already taking reasonable precautions to reconnoiter the southern front, then this write-in is redundant. I admit that. But we are in an unusually delicate moment right now. We have a still-strong opponent advancing on us from the east, but also one with "feet of clay." One that we may be able to decisively defeat if we play our cards right. At the same time, a second and significantly stronger army is... somewhere... to our south, doing... something. That southern army is powerful enough to require all our strength if it attacks us, which in turn limits what we can do about the eastern army, especially as long as the southern army's actions and intentions are an unknown.

Under the circumstances, figuring out what the southern army is (or isn't) up to right now is very important to our plans.

Now, we HAVE had intelligence on enemy movements (notice the references in the 'Leamington' chapter to a map that got colored red as the enemy advanced on various positions around the west end of Lake Erie).
It is reasonable to suppose that our troops are under orders to keep out patrols of some kind. That might involve foot patrols, technicals, sentries with radios, people in motorboats ducking in and out of the coastal islands and inlets along the lake shore, extremely well trained crows, I don't know what-all.

My point is, I think it is a good idea for Burns to make it slightly more of a priority than normal to get at least some intelligence on the movements (or lack thereof) of the southern half of the Victorian army, which would otherwise be capable of giving us all kinds of trouble at a critical moment.

[X] Plan Raise Periscope