East Africa 1930: An ORBAT Quest

[C_Z]

I've taken a look at the calendar given this minimum program, and we have a good amount of flexibility. The pacing item is really the Officer Academy -Enlarge the Officers Corps - Expansion track: the time we can complete the plan in depends on how much we're willing to let those overlap. There is some appeal to trying to complete the long-term plan in less than three years, because it'd probably make the government happy and let each of our plans be more focused, but it'd also mean overlaps which could make some actions run less smoothly (probably better to have the Academy as ready as possible before expanding the officer corps, etc)

Here's a possible timeline which assumes a one-turn overlap on each of those actions. It leaves 11 points not earmarked and would most likely complete the plan in three years or maybe 2 years 9 months. Something like it seems best to me as it doesn't take too long and leaves us plenty of flexibility for deeper or broader investment or to deal with any issues as they come up.


Here's another possible timeline showing that we could likely complete the plan goals in two and a half years, maybe less - certainly less if we were willing to flex on the schedule for Chaco War observation. I don't necessarily recommend it because we'd be making sacrifices to ensure a tight timeline which might be thrown off by any issues. Having less to debate as we go might also be less fun. But speeding up the long-term plan tempo and making each plan more focused wouldn't be a bad thing if it worked out.

Click to shrink...

I'd rather we try and squeeze some other programs in instead of trying to get done in two and a half years. I don't think the government will particularly care that we hit our objectives 6 months earlier than expected nor the 2-turn overlap plan is that well-rounded. Also, while 1 turn overlap does seem fine, having too many things on the go wrt training might reduce effectiveness in the same way that we're leaning hard on our armaments industry right now (which might be the cause of delays).

I like the one turn plan; if we look at the "free" slots, we get this:

1933	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
	Ordnance	Ordnance	Ordnance	Ordnance
	Rangers	Navy	Navy	(A)
	Navy	Chaco	Chaco	Chaco
	Foreign Ideas	Foreign Ideas	Officer Academy	Officer Academy
1934	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
	Ordnance	Ordnance	Ordnance	Ordnance
	(A)	(A)	(A)	(A)
	Chaco	Officer Training	Officer Training	Officer Training
	Officer Academy	Officer Academy	(B)	(B)
1935	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
	Ordnance	Ordnance	Ordnance	Ordnance
	(A)	(A)	(A)	(A)
	Officer Training	Artillery Training	Artillery Training	???
	Expansion?	Expansion?	Expansion?	Expansion?
		(C)	(C)	(C)

The three slots are thus:

A) 9 turns of the Carabinieri/Navy slot. I'm going to push back on using this for things other than the Carabinieri because I think the Carabinieri is an integral part of our defence and politically important. There's still a lot we can do to improve upon it and neglecting it would be unwise.
B) ~2 turns of an unallocated slot. The easiest thing to fit in here would be field exercises and/or road building. Alternatively, if we get a strong bite on our Foreign Ideas write-in section and find a reputable foreign group that'll help with infantry training that isn't Japan, we could try and fit it in here. If we can reduce our expansion down to 2-3 turns, we can put more in here as well.
C) Est. 3 turns of an unallocated slot from Japanese reparations being paid off. This'd be best left for now as spillover from other stuff, IMO.​

Edit: I think I broke it.
Edit2: I hate bbcode.

 

[FrangibleCover]

Adhoc vote count started by maelstrom.seeker on May 11, 2023 at 1:13 PM, finished with 27 posts and 9 votes.

• ---

  7 people have voted

  [X] Marksmanship Training - With an average of twenty rounds per man per year, marksmanship is of very poor quality. Regular range training will begin to improve this, not only for the infantry but for the cavalry and artillery too.
  -[X] Optional: Request Japanese support for this program, improving impacts and benefiting from IJN institutional knowledge.

  • Dessard
  • C_Z
  • Potato Anarchy
  • Mortenkam
  • LoLyPoPx3
  • Traveller76
  • DegenWeeb

  2 people have voted

  [X] Marksmanship Training - With an average of twenty rounds per man per year, marksmanship is of very poor quality. Regular range training will begin to improve this, not only for the infantry but for the cavalry and artillery too.

  • Jprice
  • maelstrom.seeker

 

[FrangibleCover]

I think the Carabinieri is an integral part of our defence and politically important. There's still a lot we can do to improve upon it and neglecting it would be unwise.

Click to shrink...

I don't know if this is a majority opinion or not, but I do know that we've run out of Carabinieri projects right now. I'm sure we could find some more for you, but if anyone has any views on what they would like to see to improve the Carabinieri please don't hesitate to comment.

 

[C_Z]

I don't know if this is a majority opinion or not, but I do know that we've run out of Carabinieri projects right now. I'm sure we could find some more for you, but if anyone has any views on what they would like to see to improve the Carabinieri please don't hesitate to comment.

Click to shrink...

I don't know if it's a majority opinion (and I suspect it's not) but I'm gonna keep arguing for it until people vote against me.
One of the things you guys previously mentioned (during the long term plan vote) was a carabinieri air service. While I wouldn't suggest we do something that large just yet, giving a flight of patrol/liaison aircraft to the Wilderness Rangers could let us build experience with pilot training and ground maintenance that'd be helpful later. Likewise, if we were to take some medium trucks and modify them for use in Reewiin's internal deserts and scrubland, we could make our own version of the Long Range Desert Group. While the Navy was only supposed to have the Kutulo, we could try and expand to some small torpedo craft or river monitors. Lastly (off the top of my head), we've been modernizing the weapons and kit of the army, and getting the Carabinieri similarly fitted out might help with logistics, combat effectiveness, and esprit de corps

 

[Dessard]

I definitely think we need to take a year+ off from the Carabinieri this plan, because the Army desperately needs more than the bare minimum training reform. We should also throw some points to infrastructure and maybe other things. And we can't do much of that without using the slot that's now Carabinieri.

It might be good to close the Carabinieri office after we've spent what we want to on the navy and then re-open it in late '35 to do an evaluation of their state before we enter the next long-term plan - it 'wastes' an action but what it buys is flexibility we definitely need. It'd be good to do an evaluation several years past the last one and with a year+ for the most recent changes to have settled in.

 

[Potato Anarchy]

Yeah I guess I'm somewhere in between here. I would like to expand Carabinieri naval stuff, maybe along the lines of the set up a new specialty actions we've taken with them before. And I think there's room for another action or two about improving their readiness for war and general good administration / operations reform.

But I do think that shifting focus away from them in the middle term is probably good. There's also some actions which are about the Army mostly which I think they'll be able to peripherally benefit from, which will keep them from becoming a complete backwater again.

 

[Mister Phantom]

Tie in a Coast Guard and maybe an Air Guard to the Carabinieri. And maybe rename the Carabinieri to Gendarmerie.

 

[C_Z]

I'm worried that, long-term, closing the office only to reopen it doesn't seem efficient since we'd need to spend extra points on reopening it. We're hitting all the targets in 3 years that we need to, and if we consider a fairly basic program for the Carabinieri (add a very modest air service, getting a few more boats and some coastal artillery so the Carabinavy isn't useless, reforming things a bit more so that they can act as a feeder program to the army, and modernizing their weapons to get them off black powder rifles), we're still looking at it taking a few years. None of that stuff is particularly more effective if we do it in, say, 1938, and I'd argue some of it - like preparing the Carabinieri to be used as a recruiting pool for the Army during our Big Expansion(TM) or improving the Carabinavy - are ways of hitting targets for this three-year plan.

 

[DegenWeeb]

Tie in a Coast Guard and maybe an Air Guard to the Carabinieri. And maybe rename the Carabinieri to Gendarmerie.

Click to shrink...

I can somewhat understand the coast guard but an air guard? We don't even have an airforce so that seems like a complete waste of time right now.

 

[Jprice]

I'm worried that, long-term, closing the office only to reopen it doesn't seem efficient since we'd need to spend extra points on reopening it. We're hitting all the targets in 3 years that we need to, and if we consider a fairly basic program for the Carabinieri (add a very modest air service, getting a few more boats and some coastal artillery so the Carabinavy isn't useless, reforming things a bit more so that they can act as a feeder program to the army, and modernizing their weapons to get them off black powder rifles), we're still looking at it taking a few years. None of that stuff is particularly more effective if we do it in, say, 1938, and I'd argue some of it - like preparing the Carabinieri to be used as a recruiting pool for the Army during our Big Expansion(TM) or improving the Carabinavy - are ways of hitting targets for this three-year plan.

Click to shrink...

That might be true but your forgetting that army training and expansion is a goal whereas the carabinieri is only something nice to have. Yes it would be nice to have those things and they would be useful. That is not the problem here, we desperately need the army in a somewhat capable shape especially because in 1935 this might still happen Second Italo-Ethiopian War - Wikipedia. If we don't want to be a tempting target we need the army or if we want to interfere on Ethiopia's behalf and/or simply grab some land.

 

[DegenWeeb]

I wholeheartedly agree that we should focus on the army from now on due to the Italians being a major threat for now.
I however disagree with even entertaining the thought of helping out Ethiopia when they get invaded by the Italians as long as our current army size remains, we'd get absolutely fucked as the Italians could very easily send men from Italian Somalia and defeat our meager army. Not to mention, the Italians could easily dispatch a light cruiser to bomb our capital to the stone age and we wouldn't be able to do much about it.

Presently, we could at best sell the Ethiopians some guns.

That is of course, if the Japanese do not immediately veto that/do not coup us for helping Ethiopia.

I think the best course of action is doubling, if not trying to triple the size of our current army. We'd also need to get more artillery as only having infantry will result in us being swept by the Italians, we don't have the same terrain as Ethiopia to make a mostly infantry army work.

 

[Dessard]

If we're interested in investing in the Carabineri as a second-line army, I can accept that, but I'd definitely want to focus on their war-readiness as infantry rather than new branches/their use as a reserve. Remember, they're larger than the Army currently and have actual experience mobilizing to do things, even if it's not war, so we'll be leaning on them heavily if anything happens soon.

I don't know how many actions it'd take to keep up with the weapons - I'm assuming that new models of hardware types they already have are being shifted from the Army as it's replaced there, so as far as rifles go we might want to check some time but the black-powder rifles are probably already relegated to a specialist weapon.

If we do want to focus on the Carabineri, I think one thing which could help would be dividing the regional Training & Machine-Gun Companies into a centralized school and battalion (note that right now there are no battalions) heavy weapons companies. That way our existing Ordnance actions would be able to say "Send some of these to the Carabinieri weapons companies" rather than having to explicitly form units, and centralized training would be good. I think keeping heavy weapons at the battalion level would be best since the rifle companies may be deployed in domestic roles where having those on hand wouldn't help.

I also note that two early issues we never fixed are the huge companies (we introduced more officers to allow lower-level subdivision, but never rationalized them along a battalion/normal-sized-company structure IIRC) and the pay/lack of bureaucratization:

A supplementary letter, attached to but not part of the main report, details a third issue. Local administrators across Reewiin pay the Carabinieri via their officers, and both of these groups are intensely susceptible to coercion by landowners, farmers, and other businessmen. Groups of Carabinieri can often be found standing guard over mines, factories, farms, and similar. The letter stresses that this is not any part of their listed duty but is likely a source of additional income for those in charge of pay.

Click to shrink...

Spoiler: Carabinieri organization before our reforms

• Northern Brigade (~5000 men)
  • Training & Machine Gun Company (~250 men, ~6 Perino 1908 HMGs, ~6 Vickers HMGs)
  • 5x Carabinieri Company (~950 men each)
• North-Western Brigade (~3500 men)
  • Training & Machine Gun Company (~250 men, ~6 Perino 1908 HMGs)
  • 4x Carabinieri Company (~650 men each)
  • 1x Carabinieri Company (~12 boats, ~650 men)
• Southern Brigade (~2500 men)
  • Training & Machine Gun Company (~250 men, ~4 Maxim HMGs)
  • 4x Carabinieri Company (~550 men)

Equipment (estimated)

• 6000+ Remington Rolling Block rifles, .43 Egyptian
• 2500+ Murata Type 13 rifles, 11×60 mm Murata
• 1000+ Lee-Metford rifles, .303 British
• 500+ Vetterli-Vitali Mod. 1870/87, 10.35×47 mm
• 1000+ other firearms
• 12 Perino 1908 HMGs, 6.5×52 mm Carcano
• 6 Vickers HMGs, .303 British
• 4 Maxim HMGs, 7.92×57 mm Mauser

 

[C_Z]

That might be true but your forgetting that army training and expansion is a goal whereas the carabinieri is only something nice to have. Yes it would be nice to have those things and they would be useful. That is not the problem here, we desperately need the army in a somewhat capable shape especially because in 1935 this might still happen Second Italo-Ethiopian War - Wikipedia. If we don't want to be a tempting target we need the army or if we want to interfere on Ethiopia's behalf and/or simply grab some land.

Click to shrink...

I don't think the Army will be what's important in a near-term war. It's too small and too focused on our cities with no experience operating outside of them. Even if we doubled the size of the army, it'd be trivial for the Italians to trap us inside Kismayo with a force several times our size and then pound it with heavy guns until we're gone. Our army also isn't suited to a mass mobilization yet; if we try and get every appropriately aged man in Reewiin to fight, it'll end up looking a lot more like an oversized Carabinieri formation. Irregular forces are also useful in that we can try and mount a guerilla campaign in Reewiin's interior in addition to the Army doing stuff along the coast.

I wholeheartedly agree that we should focus on the army from now on due to the Italians being a major threat for now.
I however disagree with even entertaining the thought of helping out Ethiopia when they get invaded by the Italians as long as our current army size remains, we'd get absolutely fucked as the Italians could very easily send men from Italian Somalia and defeat our meager army. Not to mention, the Italians could easily dispatch a light cruiser to bomb our capital to the stone age and we wouldn't be able to do much about it.

Presently, we could at best sell the Ethiopians some guns.

That is of course, if the Japanese do not immediately veto that/do not coup us for helping Ethiopia.

I think the best course of action is doubling, if not trying to triple the size of our current army. We'd also need to get more artillery as only having infantry will result in us being swept by the Italians, we don't have the same terrain as Ethiopia to make a mostly infantry army work.

Click to shrink...

I don't think we can get that done in two years. What I could see working is if we sell Ethiopia a lot of guns; IIRC less than half of the Ethiopian Army had guns and most of those were very old. Simply getting more rifles and machine guns to the Ethiopians could force it closer to a stalemate, and if that's the case, we could consider significant involvement later with a smaller force.

I don't think Japan will veto; they're not part of the League of Nations anymore and I don't think they particularly like the Italians.

If we're interested in investing in the Carabineri as a second-line army, I can accept that, but I'd definitely want to focus on their war-readiness as infantry rather than new branches/their use as a reserve. Remember, they're larger than the Army currently and have actual experience mobilizing to do things, even if it's not war, so we'll be leaning on them heavily if anything happens soon.

I don't know how many actions it'd take to keep up with the weapons - I'm assuming that new models of hardware types they already have are being shifted from the Army as it's replaced there, so as far as rifles go we might want to check some time but the black-powder rifles are probably already relegated to a specialist weapon.

If we do want to focus on the Carabineri, I think one thing which could help would be dividing the regional Training & Machine-Gun Companies into a centralized school and battalion (note that right now there are no battalions) heavy weapons companies. That way our existing Ordnance actions would be able to say "Send some of these to the Carabinieri weapons companies" rather than having to explicitly form units, and centralized training would be good. I think keeping heavy weapons at the battalion level would be best since the rifle companies may be deployed in domestic roles where having those on hand wouldn't help.

I also note that two early issues we never fixed are the huge companies (we introduced more officers to allow lower-level subdivision, but never rationalized them along a battalion/normal-sized-company structure IIRC) and the pay/lack of bureaucratization:

Spoiler: Carabinieri organization before our reforms

• Northern Brigade (~5000 men)
  • Training & Machine Gun Company (~250 men, ~6 Perino 1908 HMGs, ~6 Vickers HMGs)
  • 5x Carabinieri Company (~950 men each)
• North-Western Brigade (~3500 men)
  • Training & Machine Gun Company (~250 men, ~6 Perino 1908 HMGs)
  • 4x Carabinieri Company (~650 men each)
  • 1x Carabinieri Company (~12 boats, ~650 men)
• Southern Brigade (~2500 men)
  • Training & Machine Gun Company (~250 men, ~4 Maxim HMGs)
  • 4x Carabinieri Company (~550 men)

Equipment (estimated)

• 6000+ Remington Rolling Block rifles, .43 Egyptian
• 2500+ Murata Type 13 rifles, 11×60 mm Murata
• 1000+ Lee-Metford rifles, .303 British
• 500+ Vetterli-Vitali Mod. 1870/87, 10.35×47 mm
• 1000+ other firearms
• 12 Perino 1908 HMGs, 6.5×52 mm Carcano
• 6 Vickers HMGs, .303 British
• 4 Maxim HMGs, 7.92×57 mm Mauser

Click to shrink...

Good call on the issues, I forgot that we'd never addressed them. I'm not sure if creating battalions is a smart idea, though; I kinda like that right now the maneuver unit is a company since that's the kind of force that the small towns in Reewiin's interior can support. I'm assuming that the brigade's command staff can allocate the MMG teams to the various companies as needed and that the training company isn't actually planning on engaging in combat. I'm not sure if there's an efficiency gain to be had by consolidating our three training camps into one, especially as it would make refresher training more difficult for units in the "field".

The reason having the Carabinieri act as a reserve is so appealing to me is that, right now, there's political differences between the Army and the Carabinieri - the Army isn't open to Bantus, and serving in the Army gives the vote IIRC while serving in the Carabinieri does not. If we can demonstrate that the Bantu troops in the Carabinieri are good enough to serve in the regular army, then hopefully we can desegregate Reewiin's armed forces down the line (and as an added bonus, we increase the available manpower pool). I also think that we will want a small number of planes and trucks eventually for things like artillery spotting/logistics, which is why I was attempting to dip our toe in first so that we're not trying to cram the entire jump into a single 3-year period.

 

[Dessard]

I don't think the Army will be what's important in a near-term war. It's too small and too focused on our cities with no experience operating outside of them. Even if we doubled the size of the army, it'd be trivial for the Italians to trap us inside Kismayo with a force several times our size and then pound it with heavy guns until we're gone. Our army also isn't suited to a mass mobilization yet; if we try and get every appropriately aged man in Reewiin to fight, it'll end up looking a lot more like an oversized Carabinieri formation. Irregular forces are also useful in that we can try and mount a guerilla campaign in Reewiin's interior in addition to the Army doing stuff along the coast.

...

Good call on the issues, I forgot that we'd never addressed them. I'm not sure if creating battalions is a smart idea, though; I kinda like that right now the maneuver unit is a company since that's the kind of force that the small towns in Reewiin's interior can support. I'm assuming that the brigade's command staff can allocate the MMG teams to the various companies as needed and that the training company isn't actually planning on engaging in combat. I'm not sure if there's an efficiency gain to be had by consolidating our three training camps into one, especially as it would make refresher training more difficult for units in the "field".

The reason having the Carabinieri act as a reserve is so appealing to me is that, right now, there's political differences between the Army and the Carabinieri - the Army isn't open to Bantus, and serving in the Army gives the vote IIRC while serving in the Carabinieri does not. If we can demonstrate that the Bantu troops in the Carabinieri are good enough to serve in the regular army, then hopefully we can desegregate Reewiin's armed forces down the line (and as an added bonus, we increase the available manpower pool). I also think that we will want a small number of planes and trucks eventually for things like artillery spotting/logistics, which is why I was attempting to dip our toe in first so that we're not trying to cram the entire jump into a single 3-year period.

Click to shrink...

On the Army not being ready, that's why I want to fix its training and establish the basic combat arms this plan, so that in the future we can expect whatever we have, regardless of the size, to basically function. The expectation of not fighting the enemy in the field is a dangerous one, because even if we can't expect to stop a really committed attack by any world power either way, if we don't have a functional and quick-to-react core then Reewin could easily be beaten in a smaller expedition or border conflict.

That kind of incident may not be an existential threat in itself, but it could be one to the current administration, make us look like easy prey, or provoke Japan to assume direct control - and it could come from any neighbor, even those we don't expect to try any major/centrally-supported conquest. Reewin does have disputed borders with British Kenya, and Italy or even Ethiopia (or Japan) could easily try something if they think they can get concessions or win points domestically.

Regarding the Carabinieri organization, you're right that it's probably not the highest priority even as a Carabinieri option (I'm still voting to close the office after some Navy stuff at this point, this is all in case that's not supported). However, we never changed the fact that 'companies' range between 550 and 950 men. So realistically, what are called companies are really homogenous battalions and all subformations are probably ad-hoc or at least not standardized between regions.

 

[C_Z]

On the Army not being ready, that's why I want to fix its training and establish the basic combat arms this plan, so that in the future we can expect whatever we have, regardless of the size, to basically function. The expectation of not fighting the enemy in the field is a dangerous one, because even if we can't expect to stop a really committed attack by any world power either way, if we don't have a functional and quick-to-react core then Reewin could easily be beaten in a smaller expedition or border conflict.

That kind of incident may not be an existential threat in itself, but it could be one to the current administration, make us look like easy prey, or provoke Japan to assume direct control - and it could come from any neighbor, even those we don't expect to try any major/centrally-supported conquest. Reewin does have disputed borders with British Kenya, and Italy or even Ethiopia (or Japan) could easily try something if they think they can get concessions or win points domestically.

Regarding the Carabinieri organization, you're right that it's probably not the highest priority even as a Carabinieri option (I'm still voting to close the office after some Navy stuff at this point, this is all in case that's not supported). However, we never changed the fact that 'companies' range between 550 and 950 men. So realistically, what are called companies are really homogenous battalions and all subformations are probably ad-hoc or at least not standardized between regions.

Click to shrink...

Agreed, that was specifically in response to "we need the Army ready by late '35 for the Second Italo-Ethiopian War". A well-equipped and trained brigade or two will make for a much stronger deterrent against foreign aggression, as long as we're not dealing with the 285,000 soldiers Italy amassed in Italian Somaliland prior to the war.

The problem however with relying on the Army as a "quick to react core" is one of geography. If we look at a map of Reewiin, huge amounts of the countryside are only accessible by foot:

(Red lines being approximate locations of transport links)
Let's say, hypothetically, that something happens at the triple point between Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland - it's somewhat of a worst-case scenario, but we should expect our enemies to attack us where we're weak. If the rail line passes through Wajir, it's a 350 km march as the crow flies. If the railway is a straight line from Kismayo to Marsabit and doesn't dogleg in the middle, then it's over 400 km. With our current setup, the army units are going to have to wait for a runner from Dolow to reach the nearest telegraph station with news of the attack (presumably along the rail line, let's say this takes around a week), then the army has to mobilize (let's be absurdly unrealistic and say they can get onto the railcars within a few hours), then they have to travel ~350 km along rail lines designed for fairly slow freight cars (another few days to a week), and then they disembark and march to the site of the border skirmish. In all, this takes upwards of a month for the "quick reaction force" to get there, and by then the army's assaulting a dug-in strongpoint. I'm not sure what the best solution for this is, but I think having a more robust Carabinieri presence along the border could buy us enough time for the army to get there and avoid anything being a fait accompli. Things like naval expansion into riverine/lake gunboats or coastal artillery are also useful to prevent those kind of adventurous grabs from an unexpected enemy.

 

[DegenWeeb]

What I could see working is if we sell Ethiopia a lot of guns; IIRC less than half of the Ethiopian Army had guns and most of those were very old. Simply getting more rifles and machine guns to the Ethiopians could force it closer to a stalemate, and if that's the case, we could consider significant involvement later with a smaller force.

Click to shrink...

We would also have to get the Ethiopians gas masks as the Italians made heavy use of mustard gas and other chemical weapons during the Second Italo-Abyssinian war, it pretty much prevented the Ethiopians from conducting counter attacks and I think caused an estimated 1/4th or 1/3rd of all Ethiopian casualties.

The problem however with relying on the Army as a "quick to react core" is one of geography. If we look at a map of Reewiin, huge amounts of the countryside are only accessible by foot:

Click to shrink...

That's kinda why I suggested bicycle infantry a bit ago, they'd be a cheap way to get some faster infantry divisions without needing trucks (too expensive for us to motorise completely) or forming new cavalry divisions (not as expensive as trucks, but needed for supplies.).

 

[4WheelSword]

It appears to be bringing things back era, but we're looking at bringing this back!

 

[4WheelSword]

A Review of the Actions of the Defence Council of Reewiin
The uncolonised nation of Reewiin entered the 20th Century surrounded by enemies, but nonetheless managed to avoid conquest and desecration. In the last three years, the defence council has managed much, some of which is detailed below:
1930
- The first military reorganisation plan was laid out, with the intention of developing a domestic arms industry, securing the supply of horses for the cavalry, and reforming the carabinieri.
- The Ethiopian Civil War begins, with a series of devestating battles that raged across the northern part of the nation.The terrible battle of Addis Ababa lasted three days and saw the death of many thousands of Ethiopians as well as the first appearance of tanks in East Africa. Negus Haile Selassie I retains control of the nation.
- A rail line from Kismayo on the coast to Turkana in-land was begun in earnest, with the initial line between Kismayo to the mines at Marsabit being the first priority.
- The Army Reform Program 1930 (ARP-30) conducts its first significant reforms as the Reewiin army undergoes radical shifts in organisation.
- The Defence Council orders 14,000 Type 38 Rifles and Type 44 Carbines from Japan in order to re-equip the Army.
- Regional Headquarters for the Carabinieri are established in three locations, all reporting to Bur Gaabo, while significant numbers of officers have been promoted from aongst the ranks.
- The Government, bypassing the Defence Council, has ordered and had shipped to Reewiin 24 M1929 Hotchkiss Heavy Machine Guns.
1931
- Elements of the Reewiin Army are dispatched to regional Carabinieri headquarters to assess and improve training procedures.
- A report titled 'The Army of Reewiin: Its Nature and Disposition' is delivered to the Defence Council.
- A financial crisis hits the nation (and the world), imposing limits on what the state can afford to do.
- Production of local ammunition begins with the intent of supplying the army entirely domestically.
- IJN Chikuma is purchased at massive discount by the Defence Council and begins its long journey to Kismayo. It will go on to be renamed the SS Kutulo and become the first ship of the Carabinieri's new maritime force.
- The first locally produced type-38 rifles come off the lines in Reewiin, a domestic production of a kind that has never been seen in the state before.
- Tens of new horse ranches are established around Bur Gaabo, overseen by the Veterinary Office, in order to supply horses to the cavalry in future.
- A major riot breaks out in Kismayo between Reewin soldiery and Japanese sailors, leading to a significant diplomatic deal between the two nations to avoid any longer term issues.
1932
- A report titled 'The logistical constraint of the Pack Animal in Reewiin' has been delivered to the Defence Council.
- A twelve-month recruitment drive to swell the non-comissioned ranks finished with significant bolstering of their numbers. Discipline improved dramatically, but morale has fallen across the entire Army.
- The licence for a helmet design and a single typewriter have been acquired from Czechoslovakia. An agreement in principle has been made for the production of the ZB vz.30 in Arisaka 6.5mm.
- Industry leaders warn the government, and thus the defence council, that manufacturing arms beyond the Type 38 Rifle, the Type 3 HMG and the prospective Czech LMG is outside the scope of current infrastructure.
- The Kismayo-Marsabit train line is complete, driving men and industry to the coast.
- New uniforms were adopted, to the distaste of most of the soldiery, especially amongst the officers and cavalry ranks.
1933
- The January Plan is formed, which replaces the ARP-30. It will focus on entirely reforming the Army with particularl views on training, leadership, heavy weaponry and laying the groundwork for expanding the Reewiin Army as a whole. It will also see the establishment of the Carabineri Naval Service.

 

[PrognosticHannya]

Woo, it's back!

 

[Woltaire]

Let go it back!

 

[Uhtread]

Nice to see this!

 

[C_Z]

 

[FrangibleCover]

April 1933

Army

Total headcount is around 6000 personnel and 2000 horses, donkeys and mules.

Key equipment:

• 8000+ Arisaka Type 38
• 32 Fiat-Revelli 1914 MMG
• 6 Type 3 MMG (all with the Guards Regiment)
• 12 Krupp 75mm Pack Howitzer (Brigade level)
• 10 Type 92 70mm Pack Howitzer (Battalion level)
• 24 Hotchkiss 13.2mm DP HMG

Carabinieri

Total headcount is around 10000 personnel, although not all are necessarily active.

Key equipment:

• Around 10000 Arisaka Type 38/Type 30
• 12 Perino 1908 MMG
• 6 Vickers MMG
• 4 Maxim MMG
• Over ten thousand assorted firearms

Maritime Carabinieri Force

Key equipment:

• Protected Cruiser Kutulo
• 12 lake patrol craft
• Assorted auxiliaries

 

[Manowl]

Yay! Can't remember what exactly was the potential plan last time, but do remember discussion either of getting a handgun design from Japan or Germany or to copy one of the 1911s "ancestors" for some reason.

 

[KlavoHunter]

Yay! Can't remember what exactly was the potential plan last time, but do remember discussion either of getting a handgun design from Japan or Germany or to copy one of the 1911s "ancestors" for some reason.

Click to shrink...

Or something like sawing down reject Arisaka barrels and coming up with a 6.5mm pistol round...