Another noteworthy problem the NCR faces in trying to reunite
the entire country as opposed to just the part west of the Rockies is, well... the Rockies. The infrastructure links across the mountains are effectively cut, and the local populations up that way are among the ones most deeply hostile to California. So any prospective effort to reunite the US overland for California that leverages their military might runs into trouble. They're going to spend a long time struggling to pacify and reconstruct that territory.
The normal counter to this would be to leverage sea power, but the combination of the Russians trying
really hard to hang onto Panama, plus general greater (if not infinitely greater) Russian naval power and diplomatic influence, makes this difficult too.
By the time the NCR could extend a sphere of influence east of the mountains and back it up with troops without
extremely heavy local support, it's going to be the mid-2080s at the earliest, I would think. And by that time, the combination of a hopefully growing CFC and other world powers starting to back their own client states in America will mean that the Californian advantage is less impressive.
What if instead of fighting Californian influence we did just go along with them?
I mean yeah. Barring good reason to push back against them, I'm happy enough to do that. The big issue is "what if the NCR decides to be a dick about things," which is obviously an X-factor we can't be certain about just yet.
People are comparing the upcoming war to desert storm, but I always imagined it more as the Russians in Afganistan. Create a quagmire that drains resources and saps morale, make it so that even if the Czar wins, it costs more than he gets out of it.
The Desert Storm comparisons are being made to illustrate that there is a
significant gap in military technology between the two sides, and that while the NCR's military technology seems impressive to
us, it's not impressive to first-rate world powers anymore.
It doesn't mean literally everything
will, inevitably, play out the way Desert Storm played out.
I generally agree with the QM, but that doesn't mean the QM can't make mistakes.
It's not that the QM can't make mistakes, it's that
one shouldn't be an ass about it even if one thinks they have. Repeated increasingly flowery performative gestures of respect for the QM, immediately followed by or following "but I think you're wrong on all counts and don't believe what you say" are a little over the line, I think.
There was a very interesting wargame conducted by the US military in 2002 that pitted "Blue" (the USA) versus an enemy nation called "Red" that was kind of obviously Iran. Red smashed Blues invasion fleet using asymmetrical warfare and reliance on relatively primitive communications technology that couldn't be monitored.
Not to be a retroculturist (because the general commanding Red definitely did not use Lind's tactics) but technological advantages can be overcome if the person with the advanced tech is overconfident and over-reliant on that technology.
en.wikipedia.org
Not that Russia wouldn't probably beat California anyway, but it might not be as guaranteed as the Czar would like- another reason for him to avoid a direct invasion.
As Uju noted, Red Team (under General van Riper) cheated, and also took advantage of some rather unrealistic conditions of the simulated military exercise (such as the need of the attacking fleet to cruise around in circles in an artificially small and limited box, due to need to avoid crashing into civilian traffic IRL, as I recall). Van Riper's protests that the exercises were biased come across when you read them as "How dare they fail to acknowledge the glory of the TACTICAL GENIUS that is I, VAN RIPER!?" His actual discussion of military thinking comes across as being fairly... well, trite.
By WoP, there has been an entire generation of improvement in military technology between now and then. Anti-missile lasers are now a thing.
Not so much specifically to join this argument as because this equipment is interesting and we may find someone shooting it at us some day, I want to make a few observations.
One, undermining your side a bit, is that antimissile lasers probably don't work very well in adverse weather conditions. I don't care how good your laser is, it's not going to penetrate a fog bank or a mass of raindrops or snowflakes
nearly as well as it penetrates clear empty air. A radar-guided or inertially-guided missile, by contrast, has good chances to ignore such things. Thus, a
well-timed missile attack against Russian ground bases, or a very fortunately timed attack against a Russian fleet (since you have to localize the fleet precisely to know when it's being rained on, and localizing a fleet is easier said than done)... Well, such an attack might have significantly better results. This doesn't make the laser defense systems useless, but it does represent a frequent source of relatively predictable windows of vulnerability. Something military planners on both sides will be watching out for.
The other point,
supporting your side, is one of Murphy's lesser-known laws (there are many):
"If the enemy is in range, so are you."
Russia almost certainly has a strategic bomber force capable of air-launching cruise missiles, and can also launch cruise missiles and drones from submarines and surface ships. And if the Californian (former American) cruise missiles are long range and hilariously capable, the potentialities of the
Russian cruise missiles are going to be downright hair-raising. They can pop into range with mobile forces, launch attacks on Californian targets, and pop back out of easy detection and surveillance range. If the Californians go looking for them with long range radars, those radars become targets for anti-radiation missiles. If the Californians try to find a fleet a thousand miles off their coast that's lobbing cruise missiles using search aircraft, the search aircraft are apt to become
very vulnerable targets, since such maritime patrol aircraft tend to be big, fat, and slow.
...
This is a form of warfare that has never really occurred in real life- not an armored blitz or a trench stalemate or even a conventional air battle of bombers trying to fly over your territory where your own air defenses try to shoot them down. It's... I'm going to borrow a phrase of Churchill's and call it a "wizards' war." It's a conflict where both sides sit at far apart in protected locations and conjure up invisible forces (radar) and subhuman servitors (missiles and drones) to pick away at each other's capabilities from a distance.
The Russians would almost
certainly win the "wizards' war" phase of a conventional conflict with California. By the time they were inclined to start basing land-based aviation out of Alaska (as opposed to, say,
Hawaii), or bringing fleets close enough to the California coast to be detected and fired on reliably, California's own military capabilities and civilian infrastructure would have gotten a
lot of holes shot in them.
So if things go really bad and the NCR decides to go nuclear, what could they hit? I suspect Russia probably has some sort of defense grid, so where could they aim that they could realistically hit and do the most damage?
Good question, but it's hard to answer without knowing what the Californian nuclear
launch platforms are. Presumably California must have missiles capable of hitting targets somewhere in Russia (which is damn near an antipodal round-the-world shot) or their nuclear deterrent would not be credible. Alexander IV is unlikely to bow to a Californian threat to nuke Hawaii or Cuba or Victoria or a target somewhere in the North American Arctic; the NCR would have to threaten to hit at least a place like Vladivostok.
