@PoptartProdigy, assuming they sort out equipment issues, how long would it take for the Vicks to train another CMC division? How many could they produce in a worst-case scenario where they have 7 or more years and full Russian support (logistics, training, modern equipment)?
How could we possibly know that?
@PoptartProdigy, sorry to keep bothering you, but I thought I should ask, could Victoria (and Russia) hire the same mercs they did in the Pacific War to harass or fight us?
Like, literally the same people? Well, they'd be hiring a greatly attrited army of old farts, so bring 'em on!
Except that's obviously not what you meant. What you meant to ask was "could the Victorians and Russians hire mercenaries to fight us?" The answer is "dunno, maybe."
On the one hand, North America is a big place, and I'm sure there are places to find thousands of men willing to go kill foreigners for money or aid to their communities. On the other hand, consider the following points:
1) Victoria has no spare money to hire mercenaries on a large scale. They've just suffered a disastrous military defeat and need to rebuild, and their civilian economy will require upgrades to sustain the army they'd need to
succeed in rebuilding.
2) Hiring mercenaries runs into obstacles. Firstly, recruitment. We just utterly wiped out what was previously the scariest armed force this continent has seen in forty years. We made it look fairly easy, even. They never advanced more than 20-30 miles against our opposed forces, and were slaughtered in the tens of thousands.
Who would sign up to fight that?
3) Secondly, organization and training. This will take time. Russia could supply the weapons and trainers, but why? Wouldn't it be more effective to send that aid directly to Victoria?
4) Thirdly, logistics. From where will this mercenary army operate? Will the Russians support it as blatantly as they've supported Victoria? What lines of attack could it follow, that wouldn't result in them having to hammer past multiple defensive bottlenecks and/or large amounts of terrain we can trade for time and lives, to actually wreck the vitals of our state?
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm not
especially worried about it posing a large scale military threat any time in the next few years.
Will Japan get involved if they believe we are helping the rebellion in the NCR?
How could we possibly know THAT?
...I mean, seriously, do you expect Poptart to just randomly volunteer tons of OOC information that we have no way of knowing in-character? I'm surprised they reveal as much as they do in this campaign; I think it's the effect of having the Discord chat. Or just desire to cool down rampant speculation that starts barking up the wrong tree and risks causing people to become utterly convinced of random ideas they just made up in their heads...
I agree with your overall point, but I'd like to point out that generally fanatic states are led by people who totally drink the Kool-Aid.
The leaders of the French Revolution were largely sincere believers in liberal rationalism. One of the big discoveries after the fall of the Soviet Union was that the Soviet leaders totally believed in Marxist-Leninism and Stalin, rather than being some Machiavellian psychopath, was in fact a zealot who mucked up over and over because he kept ramming the Soviet Union face-first into reality and insisting his ideology was correct every time. Mussolini seems to have absolutely believed in what he was telling people (edit: and yes, I know Mussolini told people a whole bunch of contradictory things) and the top Nazi leadership remained sure that they were right (and that some miracle would save them) almost to the very end in the case of those who committed suicide, and even after the end in the case of those who were captured.
OK, you have badly misunderstood what I meant by "drink the Kool-Aid." The fault may be mine.
You see, I was using "drinking the Kool-Aid" to represent a sliding scale, not just "believes a strange ideology," but also, "believes so firmly that one is willing to engage in blatantly suicidal actions."
The willingness to self-destruct, to martyr oneself and the nation as a whole, is
not typical of leaders of an ideological regime. There are exceptions (famously, Hitler), but stable totalitarian governments tend to have internal political processes that don't select for that kind of madman. They select for apparatchiks. They select for men who believe in the ideology of the state but
ALSO believe in doing what is necessary to personally survive, thrive, and overcome enemies. And who are accustomed to interpreting state ideology flexibly in pursuit of those goals.
...
Now, I said, in so many words:
"Even though they are sincere proponents of the ideology, they will find a way to at least try to survive."
That is my core point.
To take examples:
Yes, Stalin sincerely believed in communism a la Bolshevik-style. He was
also intensely paranoid and extraordinarily ruthless, of course, and it was the combination that characterized his regime. To his dying day, though, he no doubt believed communism was basically correct and good and that he was helping to usher in a bright new age for humanity by leading a communist revolution-flavored thing.
The thing is, Stalin was also practical about the basic "don't die" parameters of running a nation-state.
For instance, the Red Army as we know it is what
replaced the earlier socialist militias with their elected officers. Why did the central proto-Soviet government remove those elected officers and impose a conventional hierarchical military structure? Because they were facing repeated battlefield defeats against the Germans and the Whites
without such structure. Even in the earliest, headiest days of the Soviet state, ideology was utterly serious and earnest...
but did not trump survival.
Similarly, during World War Two Stalin famously relaxed restrictions on the Russian Orthodox Church. Why? Well, he was a sincere atheist, but he recognized that making his people feel happy and safe would be beneficial to winning the war for their survival that otherwise threatened all of Russia.
...
The take-home lesson from all this is that while totalitarian leaders DO believe the ideology of their state, as a rule, that doesn't mean they will mindlessly cling to every jot and tittle of their prior strategies after those strategies have failed on a level so disastrous that the very survival of the state is endangered.
So again, we can expect the Victorians to adapt,
in some important ways. Which possible adaptations they'll take and which ones they'll reject is uncertain. But we need to be very very cautious about accepting arguments of the form "the Victorians can't adapt to us in Way X, it's against Retroculturism as laid down by Lind."
This is, as I've said before, a
@PoptartProdigy quest. Even given that the antagonists were created specifically to illustrate how flawed and horrible a particular work of fiction is, we should NOT assume said antagonists will be pushovers, or that they will react weakly, stupidly, or with helplessness when faced with a devastating defeat.
