One big advantage that especially FCNY and the NCR have is that they have modern educational system. Alot of people have been saying that the Vics will have fully modern tanks and will be able to use them effectively in round 2. I'm not sure that will be true.
Given that the Vicks will have Russian trainers who
do know how to operate the tanks, the most likely consequence of this problem is that the trainers keep telling Blackwell "no, the training is not finished because your people are dumbasses, your new tank corps is not ready."
Unless some outside force compels Blackwell to start the second Commonwealth-Victorian War
early, before his new model army is ready, this just delays his readiness.
And while you suggest the idea of starting the war early, that's going to work out even worse for us than it is for them. Most of our twentysomething military-age population has little or no better formal education than the Vicks do, and unlike the Vicks we don't even have suppliers lined up for the weapons we need. Attacking them in 3-4 years may very well result in their half-prepared modern army being a lot more dangerous than our half-prepared modern army.
I think you tend to conflate "this breaks rules and is ruthless" with "this is a good idea." It is 'ruthless' and 'breaks rules' to ignore the ceasefire, but that doesn't mean we actually profit from doing so.
Everything you stated about military procurement only counts if FCNY is only willing to buy top of the line and brand new. If FCNY is willing to settle for gear a generation old that's been sitting in a storage warehouse for a decade thier options are much much more signicant.
By your own argument, those highly militarized countries will be reluctant to
give up all their outdated last-generation military equipment, as they may need it soon to equip their own reserve troops. Buying it for cash is going to be difficult, unless the foreign powers in question decide to do so as an outgrowth of their foreign policy.
Given that New York has no reason to expect immediate Victorian invasion, paying large sums to get foreign arms manufacturers to make new equipment and stick it in a warehouse for them may actually work better than trying to hastily purchase older equipment on short notice and finding out that the owners don't actually want to sell.
Short version is that everyone is remilitarizing right now, which means there's a LOT of demand and relatively little offer, because each country will obviously prioritize their own armed forces.
Now, FCNY was paying for keeping stuff ready for them, so they're probably in a better situation than us, as they already had deals established. But NORMALLY it would be complicated to buy equipment on a large scale right now... At least for a year or so
Well, it seems likely that New York has been laying groundwork in this area for many years, and they've had vast sums of money, unthinkably large compared to what we have to throw around. We're a complete unknown, by relative standards.
But you're not wrong.
Just that we should be fully prepared to have to conquer and occupy Victoria in its entirety and also that effective counter insurgency against truly fanatical opposition is extremely ugly and we should also be prepared for that.
So far as I can tell, everyone else has already accepted that, so it seems pointless to write at length on the subject of urging us to accept it.
...
However, it should be noted that all the "very killy fanatic" people we've so far come across are in the Victorian
military, primarily their army units and the CMC-Crusader units, or veterans of same. The Victorian Army is a long-service force whose recruits remain under the colors for easily 20-30 years if not killed in action before mustering out. They are, yes,
heavily indoctrinated.
That doesn't mean the underlying mainstream society is nearly as indoctrinated.
During the Pacific War the US military saw constant suicidal resistance from Imperial Japanese Army and Navy units, and fully expected that they would have to occupy Japan in the face of decades of violent counterinsurgency and probably kill a double digit percentage of the entire Japanese population. In practice, after the surrender in Tokyo Bay, this fanatical resistance did not materialize. Putting together a new and much, much,
much less warlike Japanese government turned out to be eminently possible. Life went on.
It turned out that the fanatical indoctrination was relatively thinly spread across the top of Japanese society, and was mainly the province of the military. The civilian population was nowhere near as interested in dying for Yamato spirit, and even the conscripted military rank and file had to be aggressively pressured into doing it.
Japan's Fanatism was fanatical loyalty to the Japanese goverment. A goverment that was comprised of primarily of people older than Imperial Japans descent into fascism many of whom had not drunk the coolaid. If Emperor Herihito had instead ordered japan to fight to the last alot of the Japanese military would have continued fighting intil no longer phsycally capable of doing so. We know this not as some alternate histroival speculation but as a observed fact because some thier soldiers that did not get the surrender notification literally did.
We saw into Blackthornes mind. We know he's a coolaide drinker who legitimately believes at least a signicant amount of Victoria's bullshit. There is no one to order a early surrender cause the inmates have long since taken over the asylum. No cool heads exist TO prevail.
Spelling aside, the question then becomes "what percentage of the population is actually indoctrinated into violence." We've found that this is oddly complex and nuanced. For instance, captured Vicks (not unlike captured IJA soldiers) often become surprisingly docile in captivity because the same indoctrination that tells them to resist captivity also tells them to defer to the authorities of whatever location they're stationed at.
Ironically, much of the same obedience training that allows Victoria to maintain tyranny will work against any attempt by its survivors to play "Werewolf" fantasies and live among its population as a resistance movement against Commonwealth occupation. The same people who spent their lives being terrorized into convincing themselves it was proper to sell out dissidents to the Inquisition for food will have little trouble convincing themselves to locate renegade inquisitors 'gone to ground' as guerillas and sell them out to the Commonwealth for more and better food.
Of course a war with large-scale mobilization is going to involve a demographic hit. But there is a lot of room between "demographic hit due to the war" and "Paraguay after the war of the triple alliance." That is a far different discussion than your near fantastical story about the victorian population "supporting retroculture so much we can't ideologically win until they are all dead". Honestly, I didn't think this internal propaganda would work on outsiders.
Some people just find the idea of a war of annihilation resonant and will project its inevitability onto situations where it is very much evitable.
