The General shakes her head. "Our illustrious new trainers have a surprise for us," she says.
Wendy scowls, the mood amongst the others spoiling as well. None of them liked the new guys. When word had gotten around that they were getting a group of old Air Force veterans training them how to fly, they'd practically had stars in their eyes. Hellfire and the Devils come again, this time to give the Commonwealth Air Force some of the Old Country magic.
Imagine their disappointment to instead receive a batch of the sourest, least disciplined assholes ever to walk the Earth. She and the other girls had swiftly learned not to be alone with any of their trainers. She'd nearly pulled a knife on one of them, once, when he wouldn't back off.
Interesting note here.
"In the air?" hisses Burns, turning to Aubrey. "You can't possibly still have the pilots."
Aubrey glares up at Burns. "I have 'em. I still have some of the boys from the War. I said Ace Wing is still ready to fly, and I meant it. You want eight Raptors in the air with aces at the controls, I'll give 'em to you!" He takes a deep breath. "...I'll admit that the boys are getting older. Been doing their best to stay in shape, but the youngest one is over sixty. We have new pilots, these days."
"They can't have had any real training hours on these planes," says Burns. "Not if you've stayed hidden."
"I've had boys bitch about the Major making them do maintenance on rust hulks whose engines won't even start," rasps Aubrey. He coughs to clear his throat. He smirks. "But...yeah, no, they don't fly anymore. Russians think I don't know about the radar sets they've planted in my land. Hah." He shakes his head. "We have a simulator. It's better than nothing, and the boys train for flight under the old aces and on our trainers. We have a couple of jets. Couple of old Talons that I can keep in the air with spit, glue, and spare parts from the black market. Plus, they all fly the props, whenever we need it. It's...no, it's not exactly what I would choose to put on a Raptor, but it's better than nothing. And hey, a proper state can do a lot better, right?"
So if Im right? They're probably mostly dealing with the new guys, not the original crop of ex-USAF veteran -22 pilots.
Old guys are not really in the state to pull hard gees, and are likely getting their brains picked for operational knowledge by everyone from military intelligence to the instructors setting up training programs.
Plus, attempting to press a fit twenty something year old pilot is not exactly for old dudes with limited healthcare for thirty years.
Having to pull a knife suggests perps a lot younger and fitter.
So you have a bunch of hotshit pilots who think they are hotshit as the only F22 pilots in the world, and they are having to train their replacements. And worse, their replacements dont even have the decency to be nepotism hires, but are genuine combat veterans of the largest air war on the continent in the last two decades.
Little wonder a lot of them are sour. I would be sour too in their place.
No excuse for the lack of discipline though, especially since its stupid; if you want to fly again, keeping a clean nose and being helpful is most likely to get you in the cockpit of at least an F16, even if the Commonwealth cant reurn all the other 22s to service.
Remember, it's not just about experience operating the vehicles. It's about experience commanding units that use a weapon system. Experience running around pretending to be an artillery battery with no guns just isn't a substitute for experience running around being an artillery battery, even if you're using obsolete guns and will need months to retrain on the new guns you actually intend to use in the future.
Of course, that's subject to drastic changes with new generations of equipment, too- but it's a factor. One thing we don't want is a situation where effectively no one in our military command structure has more than a couple of years' experience working with complex modern hardware of any kind when the war starts. You can train the grunts to use new equipment in a year or two, but you can't necessarily train the majors and captains. With that said
Sure.
This stuff wont help though, because given the paucity of supplies for any of it, you cant use them in training anyway.
So your majors and captains and colonels are stuck doing the same tabletop exercises and unarmed mock field exercises they would be doing in the absence of all this thirdline scrap, because you cant afford to run that mishmash of equipment in the field for training exercises and blow through what maintenance supplies you were able to scrounge up.
technically there's also the old airplanes from that general-turned-warlord-turned-cooperator. Though I think we lack the means to maintain them long-term right now, so unless we get replacement parts from oversea (or maybe Cali?) they're basically limited-use.
Aubrey's 388th Fighter Wing had an indeterminate number of helicopters, some T38 Talon supersonic jet trainers, and an assortment of prop planes, presumably including some cargo planes.
All ours now.
He also originally had 17x Raptors in Ace Squadron in Utah; we saw 17x underground revetments.
4x are operational, another 4x can be brought back to life with grease work and supplies, and who knows if we can resurrect the last 9 outside of a proper factory refurb(the GM knows). Will need foreign help anyway.
If we can bring them all back, that represents an operational combat squadron of F22s. ONE squadron.
Which isnt bad if you use them as the doorkickers for a bunch of late model fourth and fifth generation aircraft, with cheaper drones filling in the rest of the way.
While the Russians definitely looted a bunch of F35s and know their performance profile well enough to train the VAF against them, there's a fair chance that they did not get their hands on any F22s because there were so few built.
Which means the VAF and any Vic radar crews will knows very little about their performance and sensor characteristics.
It does depend on how much effort the Russians commit to equipping the OPFOR.
So here's a question, what if we made Denver the source of our new nation instead of Chicago?
Pro: USAF Academy with former USAF assets and infrastructure, Colorado Springs is less than a hundred kilometers away, significant local technical base, massive historic army and air force presence in the Denver County/El Paso County area, distance from Victoria and California both.
Con: Rightwing Dominionist Christian presence, limited local resources, largely roadbound logistics, relatively small population base, 1200km from the Gulf of California, whatever happened to NORAD during the Collapse is still unresolved.
So how large is our military at this point? Is our ground forces still at the same size as during the 1st Erie War (which I am calling it as we will no doubt have another with Victoria soon enough)?
Im not counting militias here; my understanding is that those are territorial defense, at least at the moment.
We might change that.
Text evidence is that the army is six combat divisions of regulars, numbering 84k to 90k.
Assuming Ron Burns insists on what he was taught, division slice is in the 40% range for Western forces, so there's up to another 100k of support troops and affiliated civilians keeping those guys in the field.
So you're looking at somewhere in the 150-200k ground army.
We operated a hundred aircraft at Leamington, and still had around twenty five turboprop ground attack aircraft after neutralizing the VAF. We had around 4x operational F16s survive Lesmington. We know around 50x Vic F16s we know survived that SAM trap near Monroe; when we captured their base 20x could fly, and 13x required maintenance. Plus there's Aubrey's contribution.
Then add up all the people necessary to keep them running from ground crew to admin to training to intel and meteorology to base security to search and rescue. Throw in Aubrey's contribution of techs and maintainers.
I'd estimate another 5-10k in the air force and growing, depending on which of Aubrey's guys are airmen and which are contractors.
The Navy has 22xish wooden gunboats and a marines component in the reinforced company/battalion range.
By the time you add up the gunboat crews, port defense dudes, all the support elements and the marines?
Assume another 5-10k for them as well.
So in total, by my guess, that would give the total Commonwealth armed forces in the 160k-220k range.
Somewhere around the size of the Victorian force at the Detroit War. Roughly 1% of a 19.5 million person nation and growing.
Far and away the biggest armed force the Great Lakes has seen in thirty years.
Helps explain why even enemies come to diplomatic conferences when we call.
The Commonwealth definitely looms menacingly by North American standards.
