[X] Plan Reconciliation, Recuperation, and Compensation
-[X] Toledo's aid is welcome. You will accept Toledo's aid. They can find their redemption in the thickest and hardest parts of the battle. If Detroit feels alarm at Toledo's sudden about-face and reconciliation with the Commonwealth, they can take consolation in the fact that soon their arsenals will swell to bursting with the very large piles of captured Victorian supplies that
will assuredly be falling into their hands.
-[X] No. Your pilots have been through enough, and you need every bit of expert knowledge left to rebuild your air force. The Victorians may only have man-portable SAM systems, but you are unwilling to take the risk.
...
OK, so this is a different "bribe Detroit" plan, one where we don't ask for permission (as under "Two Birds, Three Shells"), but do promise them the equipment.
There are good reasons to do that, because it makes Detroit much more capable of defending itself against any future Victorian army (I fully expect Victoria to attack us again in, oh, 4-6 years after they've trained and equipped a New Model Army).
And also because it gives Detroit the equipment to raise and train a force that's closer to parity with Toledo's
current army (Detroit had one big 'division' of 0/5 troops before we met, as against three 'divisions' of 2/5 troops, but now they can probably upgrade that to two or three divisions of 1/5 troops without much further difficulty thanks to the supplies and training).
@PoptartProdigy , I trust that my write-in is acceptable?
...
Basically, I want to give them the supplies anyway, and I want to keep them happy-ish with Toledo joining our side rather than trying to reconcile them later. But I don't want to
ask permission or get tangled up in political negotiations, I just want to offer them a concession that they'd be fools not to accept, as a face-saving option.
...
Alas, you are not privy to Victoria's strategic planning meetings.
You've never even been to that diner (yes, this is canonically the administrative tradition Rumford left the Victorian Army and the CMC).
A... diner?
I'm now picturing the most
hilariously security-conscious diner in the world, somewhere in Augusta, where the Russians quietly took over and handpicked the staff, so that the Victorians could actually discuss battleplans somewhere they'd only be overheard by the people who were supposed to overhear them.
Sara Goldblum:
"Huh. I'd love to work there; I've only spat in a Victorian general's coffee the once."
I am honestly not keen on bribing Detroit to accept our choice.
We're bribing them with something we'd have a very good reason to give them anyway.
I've always been a little shaky about the wisdom of equipping
our own divisions with the captured Victorian equipment. Large as our windfall of supplies is, it's still only the equipment the Victorians had for a single campaign. Sooner or later, our stocks of parts and ammunition for their equipment will run dry. Moreover, "not needing" to equip any more troops in the short term may seem beneficial, but it means less incentive to keep expanding our own arms industry, and we
badly need to expand our own arms industry.
This is further complicated by the fact that one of the projects we should almost certainly take in the near future is
Arms Design, which will mean standardizing on new equipment patterns of our own choosing- and almost certainly not the same ones the Victorians use, for anything more complicated than a rifle.
Arming
our allies with captured Victorian equipment is a better bet. Their overall scale means that the same amount of supplies will stretch farther and last them longer.
If they object, we should put our foot down. Burns is in charge here, and while it is Detroit that will suffer should we (somehow) fail, it's mostly Commonwealth soldiers dying out there right now. Toledo's intervention on our behalf could save hundreds of lives, and an alliance with them is a good strategic move. As long as we agree to accept any responsibility for this going south, which we should do anyway, Detroit has no reasonable grounds on which to object.
I would much rather buy their goodwill
now than have them get angry at our high-handedness and then have to buy their goodwill
later.
It nearly always costs more to buy someone's goodwill after you've pissed them off for any reason. Even a reason that wasn't a good reason for them to get mad over.
The VAF is split between people spitting fire and venom at their captors and those who are desperately confused about what they should be doing (under Geneva standards, no less!) and have defaulted to being as helpful as possible (this is what happens when you don't train your people to be captured, Victoria). The latter group has been able to say that they have identified twenty-one fighters as cleared for flight. A further twelve are downed for maintenance. Mostly engine problems.
And frankly, some of the twenty-one are only cleared because they're starting to run low.
Wendy Harrelson:
"Want."
Experienced prop pilots, not jet pilots.
There's actually a significant difference, or so I'm told. Can't just swap one set out for another.
Not instantly- new training is required. But given peacetime to retrain, experienced prop pilots can
become very good jet pilots, as a lot of air forces demonstrated during the transitional period from 1945-55 or so.
We do want to conserve them, but we shouldn't be expecting significant aerial losses here from Vics whose supply issues are beginning to bite. They just lost acces to what stores are left in Toledo.
They still have everything that was deployed with their field army. And since they haven't needed to fire any of those SAMs, they still have as many as they brought with them in the first place.
It's
POSSIBLE, just possible, that the Victorians went "nah, we don't need to lug SAMs along, the Reds haven't got any planes left." But unless and until we can confirm that... I'd rather not make that assumption. The Victorians are not
actually stupid in situations where the bullshit they need to unlearn isn't cluttering
