- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
See, here's my problem.
You're mating a medium-term strategic outlook with a short-term strategic conclusion, while ignoring a short-term strategic problem and relegating the solution to a medium-term timeframe that seems not to reflect the urgency of the problem.
...
You talk at some length about the very real danger that our infantry being outclassed in "the next war" (that is, the next round of intensive GDI-Nod fighting) will cause crippling military losses or at any rate a severely unfavorable exchange rate between GDI and Nod. However, this sidesteps the question: "when will the next war be, anyway?"
Nod's not going to come back and start the next round of intense fighting next year in 2061. You don't get knocked back to the tune of losing 10-20% of your national land area and seriously considering breaking out the nukes to prevent national annihilation and conquest and then be ready to counterattack the next year into the teeth of a force that soundly beat you all along the front and whose munitions stockpiles are rapidly replenishing the reserves they expended beating you in the first place. You're gonna have to stop and eat a sandwich first, to borrow a phrase.
Furthermore, Nod's biomonsters are, in a way, their equivalent of our 'consumables.' They are fundamentally expendable, in that they aren't people. But they can only be produced at some finite rate. They require extensive surgical modification, probably repeated modification at multiple stages of their growth. Which implies skilled labor and a degree of situational customization; Nod cannot have infinite numbers of cyber-surgeons and the lower their standards of performance are, the more biomonsters they lose in the manufacturing process, causing a vicious cycle. And since they have just thrown just about everything short of mass nuclear bombardment at us, it is likely that their reserves of biomonsters are depleted. Only the least-engaged warlords are likely to have plenty on hand right now, which means rapidly expanded global demand that India will struggle to meet in a hurry, especially if they continue to pursue the siege of BZ-18, or to reinforce their own defenses at all.
Conclusion? In the near future, there won't be a general Nod counterattack great enough to do more than scratch the surface of our territory, barring extreme bad fortune or incompetence on our part. I don't expect it any time in 2061 and probably not in 2062. Maybe local counterattacks or a general shift to a more even 'we attack them, they attack us' mode of warfare, but Nod will need time to prepare to retake the initiative.
Furthermore, such a general counterattack will be offensive warfare, which gives us all the advantages of the defensive. Including the ability to concentrate heavy weapons and draw attacking biomonsters into kill zones, rather than being forced to go into areas where defending biomonsters can easily fight in close quarters as is their greatest advantage.
In the long run, or rather, in the medium run (3-5 years), Nod will recover, and will likely start resuming offensives at at least the "one-warlord" level. But that isn't going to happen right away. Historically, it was several years after Tib War III before Nod even considered launching offensives on a large scale against us, for instance- the first big push there was the Battle of Chicago, in (as I recall) 2055-56 or so.
...
So yeah. We just fought an intense war with most of Nod. Nod isn't completely exhausted, but they are very unlikely to be ready for a major massed offensive soon.
However, a nuclear exchange designed to cripple GDI's conventional advantages while leaving Nod's concealed forces intact, while perhaps an unwise strategy for the Nod warlords responsible, could be attempted at any time. Their weapons of mass destruction are intact, and several major Nod warlords (especially Gideon, one of the most fanatical) have taken massive, humiliating and weakening losses of territory thanks to the recent offensives. Gideon in particular has already attempted to use weapons of mass destruction (tiberium shard missiles) against us twice, for instance. He has already been pushed to the threshold where nuclear war may not seem like an unattractive prospect to him.
And while he is the most extreme example, he is not the only one.
The point I am trying to get at is that the prospect of Nod attacks with weapons of mass destruction is not something to worry about by and by. It is something to worry about yesterday. We need to take defensive precautions against nuclear and other cruise missile attack immediately, since this is already the profile of attack that is causing us the worst damage, and the enemy has become dramatically more likely to launch such attacks now, compared to the likelihood of them doing so in 2059.
We need zone armor production in time for a war 2-3 years from now, a war that on most fronts will probably be defensive (except, probably, Karachi). We need SADN now.
As I see it, this gets it backwards.
We came very, very close to fighting a nuclear war with Nod on a large scale just now. The consequences could have been disastrous. Remember that just the damage from a raid against Tokyo in particular with purely conventional missiles turned into a 360-point reconstruction project. Just how damaging do you think a nuclear war would be?
The prospect of fighting a fully nuclear war is much worse than the risk of fighting a future conventional war at an infantry disadvantage because of biomonsters. And moreover, such a possibility is more imminent, more likely to take place in the near future.
This is not to say that zone armor is unnecessary or irrelevant, or even should be fully postponed. But it should not be started to the exclusion of SADN during 2061, given the urgency of putting up defenses against crippling Nod nuclear attacks.
