If you publicly unveil that you hold the Declaration of Independence and reap the Legitimacy gains that ensue, you do in fact move up on Alexander's shit list. It moves you from, "Troublesome state that gave Victoria a lot of trouble," to, "the whole purpose of this exercise is to prevent somebody from reuniting the United States and these fuckers are flashing relics of the USA while expanding and integrating new territory."
Thank you for the clarification.
I am aware Alexander has to prioritize. What I'm arguing is that if we move too aggressively, he will prioritize us. Sure, China or someone else is probably going to make a move while he's distracted, and that'll be painful for him, but if he decides it's worth it, we're boned.
And I also completely agree that the path down the Mississippi is something we could use Legitimacy for, and so we should probably announce we have the Declaration before trying to push south. But we're not going to be trying to move southwards in the immediate future, so that's not a reason to make our move now. Again, I am not disputing we should announce that we have the Declaration in the near future. I am simply saying that this is not a good time.
-We wiped out the Victorian field army. We broadcast it on international TV.
We have diplomatic teams out there in the wider world, forcing his diplomats to scramble to attempt to squelch us.
The die is already cast.
The primary factors that govern whether he has the resources to prioritize us are well outside our control.
Indeed, the only way we can affect those factors is by modifying our Legitimacy to the outside world, which will lead to public pressure from those nations that actually did remember the US sorta fondly. At least in comparison to Russia.
Legitimacy also helps our attempts to exchanging foreign embassies.
Which is important for trade, and getting the Commies fully linked back into the international information market. Making it much less attractice to attempt to pull shit on us and blame it on "unknowns".
Do remember that the Declaration was a bonus find on a 99 dice roll. It was never likely to be a cause of a major setback.
Future complications yes, but not major setback.
Even if we don't bring NCR in, I want to do a coordinated reveal with FCNY on the Tricentennial.
Bad idea.
You're jostling for attention in the news cycle at the same time that California is about to go hot.
No see, the problem is that one agent does not have a reliable realistic way of keeping track of a specific object we don't want found and that can potentially be stored in just about any arbitrary climate-controlled building*.
Its not one agent though, innit?
It's an agent, or an agent team backed by the full might of the Russian intelligence apparatus. Including overhead coverage by recon satellite and possibly HALE (High Altitude Long Endurance) UAVs like the Global Observer drone.
We really aren't in the place to do anything if they parked a loitering drone at flight level 120, like the US used to do to the Soviet Union with the U2; nothing in our current arsenal would reach it, and even if we could, drones are expendable.
And we are a third world country thats still struggling to comfortably feed itself. There are no arbitrary climate-controlled buildings in our territory. There are cold-chain storage depots for vaccines, possibly some ICU units with lim, sites for pharmaceutical manufacture, and some sites for the cottage industry manufacture of early infotech.
But there isn't exactly a facility for storing or restoring something like this that can just blend into the nonexistent industrial hum of the Commonwealth.
Bear in mind that the Commonwealth does have a concept of military secrecy and internal security. It's entirely probable that there are shipments of bottled nitrogen being produced (it's not hard to compress) and shipped to undisclosed locations. Or to several such locations. And the Declaration can be moved, perhaps to a site in our large rural hinterland where random spies would not normally have occasion to go, and to which some of our archivists have "disappeared" without telling anyone where they went.
I mean, I'm not saying this kind of security is unbreakable. But it's just... not hard... to level things up to the point where it is genuinely challenging to find such a small and inert object that a national government doesn't want found. It would take time, and resources. And there's a risk of accidentally exposing your existing spy networks when they go digging for information like "hey, so who's been shipping around bottled nitrogen lately" after the local equivalent of the FBI has already established that asking that question without a damn good reason puts you on their watch list.
If the Russians actually have good intelligence penetration of our territory (not a given), it's entirely possible that Alexander IV would prefer to let the Declaration be, rather than seeking it out and destroying it in a way that would make it obvious to us that Russian spies had done the dirty deed and that we needed to start hunting down and rolling up his networks.
-I think you vastly overestimate our ability to conceal a facility from satellite or drone overflight or just ELINT.
Even modern public source imaging can be beyond belief, let alone whatever the military have.
Your consumer DJI Phantom 4 drone has a range of 5km for example, and it costs 1500 dollars.
-It really is hard. For items that require specialty care like a three hundred year old relic, there's all sorts of breadcrumbs.
Just the security force that will be necessary to guard the place will leave a trail a mile wide. And it bears remembering that we still don't know how Russian Special Forces managed to take out Cheyenne Mountain in the middle of Colorado.
You try to set up an isolated facility in the countryside for a HVT, there's a good chance you are condemning your staff to star in a horror movie.
TL DR
Attempted security by obscurity is generally a terrible idea. Not when people are looking.
Right now, a succession of airstrikes hitting around Chicago and maybe Detroit, flown out of Victorian territory by long range stealth aircraft, could pretty easily cripple the Commonwealth's ability to make war or grow economically. If we integrated a very large number of friendly revivalist states scattered over an area of the Midwest 2-3 times larger, the sheer number of significant targets and the physical extent of the territory would make it harder for Russia to squash us without doing things they have historically avoided doing (like actually deploying Russian ground troops in large numbers on North American soil).
Other than Alaska which probably "petitioned" to rejoin the Russian Empire, they have no forces on the continent.
.... You way too optimistic. With the kind of hologram tech we seen, airborne lasers are a thing. Even with current PGMs, a squadron of B1 can work over 50 targets, considerably more once you consider unlike Serbia, we don't have the machine tools or trade networks to rebuild. Or any effective air defence network against current airforces.
The problem there is that they risk getting stuck in the same game of whackamole Victoria has been playing.
Creating more hostile states by attempting to destroy one, just like ISIS spawned out of the Iraqi insurgent groups of the mid-2000s.
Russia has been deliberately conservative about the public use of force for a reason.
Also, unless we invest AP in coordinating the move with Cali, revealing the relic during Cali revolt will not be as effective PR wise for us and might draw steam away from California support after.
How? What is the scenario here? California starts revolting and we make a statement along the lines of "We support our brothers and sisters in California declaring their independence, also we just found the Declaration of Independence what auspicious timing and a sign of good luck." Is someone going to go "well I was going to help California, but now that Chicago has found the declaration, guessse I won't anymore? "
There is only so much oxygen in the international news cycle.
Compare and contrast the neonazi attack on a Jewish temple in Germany on Yom Kippur this week to the coverage of the one on the New Zealand mosque. The New Zealand attack happened in something of a lull in international news.
The latest neonazi attack happened in the middle of the final Brexit countdown, impeachment hearings in the US, and Turkey invading the Kurds.
Well then maybe we should coordinate with them next turn. It's hardly impossible now that we have a sizeable international diplomatic presence and potential intermediaries, especially if New York is quietly on-side and prepared to act as a diplomatic intermediary.
The Commonwealth of Free Cities, a three year old nation, just managed to embarass the Russian and global intelligence services by keeping a significant Old World military capability under wraps until it could employ it in a crushingly decisive manner. And now, having drawn the attention of every global or Russian intel weenie with a North America desk, you want us to attempt to run an intelligence operation under their nose, to a nationstate that they have kept under their lens for forty years.
And you want to use NYC as an intermediary, who we suspect reports officially or unofficially to multiple European intelligence agencies.
Right after they, FCNY, publicly recognize us in defiance of Alexander's wishes.
Do you not see a problem with this?
But they would compliment each other in the media cycle. California is rebelling and the rising power in the Midwest is in full support for them, and reveals a legacy artifact to hold up as a symbol, and then FCNY gets in on the action by confirming the documents legitimacy and also speaking in support of the NCR(I trust them to understand what we're doing). That would be a massive PR coup.
No they won't. Look at the news today.
Mr Trump's daily crimes are drowning out the lesser crimes and misdemeanors of his cabinet.
Secretary Perry creating an AI Office in the Department of Energy at the same time his wife is invested in companies that would benefit. Or Transport Secretary Elaine Chao granting special treatment to Kentucky grants beneficial to her husband Senator Mitch McConnell's political career. Or Secretary Carson and his family's breaches of nepotism rules. Or Secretary DeVos violating court orders against collecting student loan debts from the victims of a for profit college scam.
Any one of which would have been a major scandal in a clean administration.
Too many things happening just means nothing get proper attention.
Given our current resources and an unlikely ability to improve them rapidly, the resources necessary to burn our shit down are fairly small. We're talking a few squadrons of MiGs to do AtA, some SEAD planes, and then a few dozen BUFFs loaded with incendiaries. I know Russia has limited resources but even so they're a hegemon. Vulnerable doesn't even begin to describe us right now.
Unless technology has drastically improved, there's no way any of those MiGs or SEAD aircraft can base out of Elmendorf AFB up in Alaska.
And Victoria is an active warzone that's awash in weapons. Not a place to base several billion dollars worth of aircraft. A raiding team that crosses the wire could wipe out entire squadrons on the ground, like the USMC and Puerto Rico Air National Guard can tell you from experience.
A couple 81mm or 60mm mortars could do even worse. Or a loitering munition.
Full court press would wreck us.
But Alexander was unwilling to commit his airforce to resupplying the Vics during their last stand in front of the world press. He's not going to start dropping airstrikes on the Commies all of a sudden. Declaration or not.
Or, hell, it'll ratchet tension something fierce but its not like we could stop a boomer from tossing a few nuke-tipped cruise missiles from the East Coast and the resources required to do that are miniscule by the standards of a superpower. The US rising again would be a deathblow to his precarious world order and right now we have no friends or anyone to really care. Its not like we're any of the big players.
Given the number of nuclear states and nuclear breakout states in this Brave New World, this is not a strategy that helps the Imperial Russian Empire.
Especially since we know, and they know, they didn't recover all the US stockpile of special weapons or materiel. Even nationstates that can't build ICBMs and cruise missiles can stick a gun-type device in a container ship and send it to St Petersburg or Vladivostok Port by commercial shipping.
Or just get with the sarin brewing.
You really dont want opponents with nationstate resources employing asymmetrical warfare tactics.
