1) There is nothing to indicate our intelligence service is incapable of handling the intelligence of an improved Mississippi network.
No blip about the intelligence service being unable to handle additional intelligence like I would expect if those problems were imminent. Plus, we expand the number of analysts next turn with the sec. department specific AP on Long Tail.
2) AP is explicitly a representation of the state budget. Doing retraining campaigns isn't going to increase our AP, since state budget doesn't scale with work force training. If I were to guess, I would expect retraining campaign to reduce dc for industry projects (and industrial output). There is also a decent chance that retraining campaigns will be moved to the education department, since training skills would be a type of adult education.
3) Also wrong. Green energy and the ensuing electrical grid is an infrastructure investment. Further projects are locked behind Infrastructure projects, which we can auto-succeed on any turn with 2 AP. Unless you can make a case for industrial projects being categorically less important than infrastructure, it's better to attempt industrial assessments first, since the small chance of failure can be compensated for when you start it first.
4) We had a very specific confirmation our entire seven-year plan hinges on getting arms imports. To the point the QM felt the need to emphasize it. I think getting started on the critical element for military expansion early makes quite a bit of sense.
Also, logically speaking, our military has to plan around what arms it can get. Wanting them to tell us what they need before they knew what they could get is a questionable way to approach military planning. Our military doesn't know if it could get tanks, IFVs, fighter jets, Manpads or trucks. It doesn't know the numbers, timeframe our what budget we might allocate and can consequently not present us with any expansion plan What need is contingent on knowing what we will do, which depends on what is possible. I criticized your interpretations and priorities above, but in this specific area I think your making a grievous error of withholding information the military needs to plan. It's kind of like expecting the navy to give us an expansion plan without telling them our budgetary limits first.
1)We are explicitly told we could use more analysts in the very text of the Security section .
And our intelligence needs are not limited to the Mississippi and Victoria. Sourcing Foreign Arms depends on the quality of our intelligence on potential foreign suppliers and their motives.
2) Retrained Workers = Increased labor pool for non-agricultural activity = reduced barriers for setting up new businesses = increased domestic economic activity = More Taxes and Tariffs = More AP. I didnt think it needed to be spelled out. And I'm not even counting the social benefits of putting a lot of the incoming refugees to work.
3)Yes they are.
Governments do not have to invest in industry; often, private initiative will lead the way even before concerted govt intervention. Govts DO have to invest in the underlying infrastructure that enables industry, from roads to ports to power.
And as Chicago's beating heart is trade, infrastructure is even more important.
4)Yes, agreed. As soon as is practicable.
So who are you going to approach? Who is going to sell to us? What is their price? Do they demand cash or will they advance a loan? Do they have interests in territorial or economic concessions? Will they demand military basing rights or ask to set up intelligence monitoring stations? Do they demand political support internationally?
What of their international reputation for reliability?
Do they stay bought, or do they change the deal later down the line?Is a deal used as a wedge for further influence? Is a domestic political faction likely to come to power and oppose the deal?
International arms deals are not like shopping at Wal-Mart.
Especially when you dont have cash and hope for either loans or to trade future favors.We need both the American Diaspora and more intelligence analysts before getting into that pool of sharks.
Doing it without a better group of analysts, contacts in the American Diaspora or both? Jumping the gun.
A little more prepwork first.
IMO.
I don't think special forces are all that useful; they suck soldiers away from other units, as fasquadron has pointed out and tend to be a resource sink. Further, if they exist, they will want to be used and it will be a tool that we will be tempted or want to deploy, even if it's not the best tool for the job. They are better as a force multiplier for our entire military, in being a cadre that can bring our entire force up to a better level and providing our own, homegrown officer corps and instructors who will train the next generation.
They can't do that if they're on standby for deployment or shooting up pirates somewhere in the Mississippi basin. We need a broad, "good enough" military with strategic depth and the economy to back it up. A special forces unit is... useful. But it isn't a must-have. It isn't something we need.
1) Special forces actions from the Trojan War and the Trojan Horse onwards have helped shape wars decisively.
And even today in the quest, special forces are judged to be important enough that the NCR dedicated a whole section of their uprising to neutralizing the Spetsnaz team in Cali.
Just looking at our own situation, one of the stretch goals from the NCR during alliance negotiations was a Quality 3/5 deniable special forces team. If we'd had a competent special forces unit of 800 effectives during the Detroit War, we could have tried to attack the Victorian Air Force on the ground at Toledo.
Just like when 15x Taliban trashed 8x Harriers and a C130 at Camp Bastion in 2012.
Then maybe we wouldnt have lost 80-100 pilots in one afternoon.
2)That argument makes no sense. Sorry.
If we extend the same logic, we should have no armed forces at all because according to that logic, their existence means they will want to be used.
3)The Victorian and Russian playbook during the collapse was to use deniable mobile forces and intelligence assets to destabilize the rest of the country. They will attempt to do so again.
We do not have the luxury of ceding this battleground. Unilateral disarmament has consequences.
How do you know they didn't? We don't get that level of resolution on information.
Fair point.
I'd think it would be a plot point, but fair enough.
Looting Fort Knox in an increasingly collapsed America isn't the scale of operation you think.
Remember, by this point, there was no one paying the soldiers on the adjacent military base, so they must have either deserted, or looted the gold themselves and gone bandit/warlord/expatriate. In the former case, the gold was undefended and the Vicks (or anyone else) could loot the place easily just with their usual method of guys in flannels and pickup trucks. In the latter case, the gold is gone.
Dude. It's billions of dollars in literal gold bricks, just sitting there, in one of the most famous locations in the world. If you polled people in the English-speaking world about locations with a ton of gold bricks and where gold might be found, everyone thinks of Fort Knox.
There were millions of people with the incentive to steal from it, and no one securing it who wouldn't themselves have an even greater incentive to steal from it so they could get out of the hellhole that was Collapse-era Tennessee.
Use common sense.
The gold is gone.
Forgive me if I refuse to look up the original source material again, but the New American Confederacy allegedly inherited a lot of the US's infrastructure prior to the nuking of Atlanta in 2038. By the timeline on the front page, the Vics plain did not have the expeditionary forces to do anything much until the 2040s because they were still attempting to consolidate domestic power. And viable US successor states existed.
When the gold went walkabout, it was neither them nor the Russians.
This has never been about whether the gold is still in Fort Knox.
Its not.
Its about whether it was moved anywhere it might be accessible to us since then.
If it got stashed at the bottom of a coal mine or something, whoever stashed it has spent thirty years being very quiet about the location. With plenty of people, including the Vicks, taking a more-than-casual interest in where the gold went, and probably questioning anyone they could find in the area.
If the gold is still in a single mass and still hidden, whoever hid it either took the secret to their grave, or has gotten very, very good at keeping said secret. They're not going to suddenly start answering questions when the Devil Brigade rolls into town.
If individual ex-military dudes have the gold, then the gold must have been looted by a large group of men, in which case the hoard of treasure has inevitably been broken up, distributed, and partially spent. It's no longer a single treasure trove, it's a giant diffuse mass of gold spreading out across North America or even the world, and trying to recapture it is going to be like trying to unscramble an egg.
Just give it up, it's not a good idea.
I would not have expected to find a couple billion dollars worth of airforce in a hole in the ground in Utah either, especially not F22s, but there they were. Nor a dude auctioning a B-83 nuclear weapon in 2073, but that was there as well. I would not plan around it, but I would not be surprised to find a ton of bullion which is largely untouched because those with knowledge fear with good reason that its revelation would end with the Vics, or whoever they deal with, burying them in shallow graves.
There's reasons why we have cultivated a reputation for keeping our deals.
And high Legitimacy.
Yes, but it cuts both ways. Older OWE is going to be dated and worn, but newer OWE (from the NCR, specifically) is likely to make some design compromises because the NCR is under a lot of economic strain. They're operating with only a fraction of the original US industrial base, and their equipment is only as good as the Russians allow it to be, with the understanding that a lot of it is being made for the export market to Russian client states or Russia-approved neutrals. As such, it could cancel out. dunno.
I dont really agree. Major military developments outside of directed energy weapons seem to have stagnated, but the cost and techniques of manufacture dont seem to have regressed. And with the Californians producing most of their own shit, and being able to draw on Old Country research.... Just the improvements in battery storage capacity that came with the transition away from fossil fuels does a lot for what electronics are viable, for example.
The Russians demonstrably dont interfere on that level.California operates F-35s and Abrams in this setting. Not really credible that the Russians would be able to restrict ground forces equipment but not stealth fighters. Besides, I can see Alexander discreetly hoping to get the Californians to wreck their own economy trying to maintain Old Country levels of force.
QM fiat anyway.
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