I would disagree here. Victorian contribution to destroying the "New American Confederation" amount to going south, meeting some guys, using a nuclear bomb on Atlanta and going away, whistling happy about the atrocity just committed. So Victoria literally just used a nuclear bomb randomly, while the actual work was done by Russian agents carefully supporting sympathetic reactionaries in the south. While using a nuclear bomb did destabilize the south, it also was not part of the Russian plan. The Tsar considered this whole affair to be an utter failure and thought about executing Rumford's handler for this. Randomly dropping a nuke isn't really a good contribution.
The Victorian involvement in combating the NCR amounts to sending military commanders and occupation forces. Those attaches fucked up so badly Victoria replaced the entire war with a fictional war in their propaganda. Also, massacres and crimes against humanity. Given the performance of Victoria against the CFC, which just had a single division of old military around, I don't think Victorian military performance fighting against a nearly pre-collapse military ever rose above "Hötzendorf during the Carpathian Offensive".
I don't think you could describe Victorian contributions to those ventures as "helpful". In my opinion, Victoria was just completely unsuited to wage a war against an opponent with an actual military, but they were able to keep the the North-Eastern polities in line. They are and were unsuited for smashing emerging states with a decent army, but they could care of the hundreds of small interventions regarding minor polities, which helps Russia a bit.
Hm. You make a fair point, but while it definitely means I need to walk back, I'd like you to consider something.
Victoria's contribution against the NAC was ideological and area-denial, not direct military beatdowns... but it was nonetheless essential. Victoria was the exemplar for all the 'old South' reactionaries who might hope to create a new Confederate States of America. Victoria was the reason that the (historically rather liberal) New England and Mid-Atlantic regions were in no shape to support the 'New South' wing of the NAC government. I said that Victoria was
essential to the Russian strategy, not that they were an unstoppable military juggernaut in that strategy. Much of what Victoria contributed against the NAC, they contributed just by passively existing in the state that they existed in.
Likewise, against the NCR, Victoria's contribution was to force the NCR to actually post forces and attention to a threat on their Western border. This necessarily put a greater strain on their command arrangements and personnel at a time when every resource they had available was needed just to survive and hold strong in the face of Russian pressure. Even though the Victorians were mainly there as slaughtered cannon fodder, and won no battles or conquests of any note, they still played a very important role. One Russia couldn't have gotten any other way, given their reluctance to put military boots on the ground in North America.
There is a difference between having an ally who loses a lot, and trying to do without an ally. Alexander IV appears to have been very gifted in the field of taking advantage of that difference.
I would generally agree with you here, just two disagreements.
Point 3)+4) We weren't really that good at force projection, we just mostly sat around a port and received resupply from our ships. Operating defensively from a position with good, natural transport ways isn't much of a challenge logisticswise. The lacking logistical capabilities on the Victorian side were not so much caused by bad equipment and bad doctrine itself, but by failing to grasp the effects on enemy naval power on your ability to resupply. Five divisions didn't receive any supply because the CFC navy sunk any supply convoy heading their way. While the logistics were terribly, the key failure IMO was Victoria making themselves dependent on a method of supply delivery that was unavailable to them. A competent military would probably cancel/delay a naval landing after your fleet in the theater was sunk in your harbor, but the Victorians continued with the plan.
We're good at force projection
by post-Collapse America standards. We got our forces tooled up and ready to move within a few months, deployed them on time before the winter ice blocked our water route, and everything went smoothly for purposes of ensuring that those troops could deploy, get set up, and prepare the battlefield. By the standards of a modern First World army this isn't very impressive, but most of our competitors and most of the people the Vicks have been fighting for a long time don't operate to those standards.
As to the Victorian side, "failling to grasp the effects of enemy naval power on your ability to resupply"
is, in effect, bad doctrine and bad equipment, importantly with the bad equipment being caused by the bad doctrine.
If Victoria didn't have some kind of weird brainbug about having purpose-built warships with plausibly effective weapons, we would never have been able to humiliate them repeatedly using our existing gunboat fleet, because those gunboats' basic design and equipment is something straight out of World War One. They would have been obsolete in very important respects
150 years ago. It's as if someone showing up in a Civil War ironclad schooled a military force today- it is clear evidence that the guys who got schooled were making some very serious mistakes and didn't think shit through.
And what do you call it when a military force has an ideological resistance to thinking shit through and making good choices, because they have a fixed playbook that entirely ignores the reasons they need to be thinking shit through?
You call it 'bad doctrine.'
Point 1) Also, not sure how much the Russian planning to buff Victoria was giving Victoria air power steroids, since Victoria failed to effectively utilize air power for anything whatsoever. They had total air supremacy for most of the campaign and just took pot-shots at the army and let aircraft die to MANPADs. Also, Victoria failed to recognize deliberately sabotaged fighter munitions, which speaks volumes about the general reliability of their munitions. It doesn't matter how technically superior your flying artillery is when you have no idea how to use it. I would guess the munition shipments from the NCR were more of a routine resupply prior to conflicts than a deliberate attempt to attempt to strengthen them.
We know the VAF expanded its numbers with additional F-16Vs before the Erie War. We also know the VAF deliberately amassed a stockpile of air to ground guided missiles- not nearly
enough, but by their standards a lot!
The problem was that the Victorians didn't really have a clear concept of what to do with air superiority- again, the underlying problem was doctrinal. Officially they're an air-to-air force whose role is something out of World War One, in that they sweet the skies of enemy fighters and then clear the skies for their own (manned) reconnaissance aircraft. But since enemy aviation hasn't really been a threat since the mid-2040s, hey're not trained for BVR conflict against an enemy who can shoot back (even with Vietnam-era guided missiles). To a large extent, the VAF is a service without a mission, because the Victorian state distrusts the technically minded officers who command it and because their founding father saw no real value in air power beyond MANLY DOGFIGHTS.
Their deliberate amassing of air to ground missiles may have represented a bid by the VAF to demonstrate that they could be useful in other roles and accomplish good things in a large scale conflict. It was just too bad for them that said missiles were sabotaged, and that the Victorian lack of budget for large scale Air Force training operations using the full range of modern-for-them weaponry meant that they had no relevant experience.
(Also that sabotage of guided munitions by the manufacturer, especially when that is likely to be software-based, is going to be hard for the Vicks to detect)
But the combination of the Vicks getting
substantially more planes delivered and munitions for those planes that they wouldn't normally even bother with... Well, put together, it suggests a deliberate effort to enhance Victorian forces in preparation for the war. One that the Russians almost certainly pushed for, because the NCR would never be shipping munitions to Victoria without
some active Russian pressure.
IMO the primary way for Russia to buff Victoria would be sending in special forces, giving Victoria intel from Recon drones and putting a Russian military attache effectively in charge of the war, so somebody who doesn't think "We must vanquish the Witchcraft of Logistics by being tough, hard Spartans" does the battle planning. Russia likely considered us to not be worth the effort during the Erie war, so Victoria tried to do it with their usual methods.
I feel like this is kind of missing my point. The Russians didn't try to buff Victoria
during the Erie War, because at first it seemed unnecessary (Russians are not immune to victory disease), and then seemed impractical (see also the Russians
not sending in massive airlift to resupply and reinforce the Victorian forces after the Battle of the Raisin, something the narration explicitly points out that they would normally have done whenever a Victorian force started losing like this), and then seemed pointless (because the Victorian army was dead and Victoria itself had fallen into civil war).
The point is that now,
after it has become apparent to the Russians that their client state is unequal to the task at hand, they have no real recourse apart from giving that client state steroids. They are fortunate in that Blackwell represents the kind of Victorian leader who is willing to take the steroids and has some idea of how to take proper advantage of them.
I am pretty sure- and this was my original point- that the Russians don't really have a good Plan B for what happens if Victoria not merely
fails, but is
conquered. Flight school memes apply here; to Alexander IV, any scenario in which Victoria can actually be conquered by any plausibly surviving American remnant state is "gruesome" and the key is to just not allow it to happen in the first place. The man spent fifty years of his life working to keep it from ever happening.
Unfortunately for his legacy... well, it happened anyway.
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