@natruska, over on
Stars and Stripes Forever, you wrote
a post examining warfare within the post-nuclear United States.
How much of this would still ring true for the smaller factions on the North American continent? What would be different (other than the nuclear exclusion zones)?
Not
@natruska but I see a lot of differences.
Key factors that change the picture:
1) Victoria going around smashing concentrations of old assets continuously and intentionally
2) Victoria doing this as part of a premeditated policy of preventing any reunification from happening spontaneously.
3) To a lesser extent, the rest of the world being basically intact, which is often not the case in nuclear apocalypse scenarios though I can't comment on this setting in particular.
4) Probably larger population totals even with the political chaos, because the US isn't a bombed-out nuclear wasteland as a whole. You can still grow crops well enough for subsistence agriculture, you didn't usually have the population of an entire city dying all in one horrible spasm. The infrastructure's wrecked, but there are more people in a lot of places than would be the case in a typical post-nuclear-war scenario.
Think of it like this. The various factions control vast swathes of land, but don't have very large armies. Their troops are mobile and don't rely on supply lines, being either reliable technicals or footsloggers who can forage for food. But those troops aren't able to fight independently for very long. Even the richest units from factions like Dodge City probably only carry a few firefights worth of ammunition, and the poorest ones are lucky if they can scrape together a full magazine.
The biggest thing is that the underlined gets complicated.
Victoria tends to break up any faction that controls vast swathes of land- if they came across a loose confederation of neo-feudal warlords stretching across hundreds of miles, they'd probably just decapitate it with extreme prejudice every time it looked like someone was going to unite the place. This also means that
nested feudalism with several layers of governance becomes less common, because for most post-Collapse polities there are no "outlying provinces" more than about an hour or two's drive on bad roads away from the central control of the capital. That's a small enough area that you just don't need more than one layer of vassals to keep it under control.
Conversely, larger populations mean larger
theoretical army sizes, with the caveat that the Vicks tend to crush anyone who actually tries to arm them all.
This may actually further exaggerate the infeasibility of capturing cities, though, and may explain why the city-state is such a common form of governance here. Because the only people who are 'allowed' to have an army big enough to sack a large city are the Victorians, and anyone who successfully sacks a city is under the Victorians' eye in a bad way even if the Vicks put them up to it.
So you end up with a lot of stable equilibria where the Victorians are actively glad to see internecine conflict between city-states. But if such conflicts aren't stopped, they drag out indefinitely between puny armies with minimal force projection who basically just spend years gradually burning the small towns and countryside between them into a no man's land.
Though then you DO get a scenario something like this...
Everything that makes up an army is precious. Manpower is rare, trained soldiers even rarer. Munitions, weapons, vehicles, all are incredibly hard to replace even with an industrial base. Even if you "win" a war, you won't have long to celebrate if you threw your army away doing it.
So combat is rare and indecisive. Patrols will run into each other and take shots, but they don't have the ammunition or the nerve to get close and do serious damage. Ambushes are probably the main mode of actually wearing the enemy down, if you commit to that, but it's a serious commitment. Moving troops into enemy territory, close enough to risk being rooted out and destroyed.
And of course, like our friend Bloody Mary just showed, a successful ambush on a big troop column is hellish. High risk, high reward.
And then you add in the nature of towns and fortifications in all of this. For a small gang, clearing an entire town room by room is just impossible. They'll all be gunned down. For larger groups it's probably feasible, but at that point it's easier to negotiate a surrender or starve them out. You don't want to lose soldiers (because you will lose a lot) clearing every house room by room, not in a town of hundreds or thousands of people. And you don't want to leave these forts and towns behind you, because they might be hiding enemy technicals that'll jump out and raid your precious supplies.
All this is pretty much true, to be fair. Except that in many cases you just never get to the part where you...
So you wear the enemy down over time, test his defenses, and decide to attack for real. The goal here isn't really to smash into the enemy army and destroy it. That'd be great, but if your opponent's weak enough to be destroyed that easily, he probably isn't going to come out and fight you. Instead, you try to outmaneuver each other with your speedy cavalry, fighting quick skirmishes and swapping bits of ground. He'll hold back in his interior areas, finding somewhere safe to dig in, and the sieges will start. If you're lucky, you'll be able to convince the border towns to just swap sides and make it easy.
...Because the territories involved aren't that large and people who try to maintain large forces of 'speedy cavalry' tend to get squashed. Basically, there's none of...
And if he does, that's when the fun stuff comes out. Pre-war tanks, armored technicals, combat aircraft! There's probably not a lot of anti-tank weaponry lying around, certainly not enough to fully equip most armies, so tanks and armored vehicles will dominate field battles. They'll have the mobility to make breakthroughs and encircle the enemy, while infantry fighting is probably tame as they mostly hold the frontlines in place.
None of this. Almost nobody has pre-Collapse Old World military equipment like this.
So, that comparison I was thinking of:
Small mobile cavalry units roam around the countryside raiding and skirmishing with each other. Occasionally an offensive will put a castle or town under siege. These sieges are the main mode of warfare, tying up most of the attacker's force using a small number of troops. Pitched field battles are fairly rare but decisive, and are dominated by heavily armored troops who can smash through infantry.
So you get this, but
without the heavy armored troops.
...
Also, it's very dangerous in this setting to be a large polity trying to expand by conquering weaker neighbors, because the Vicks will just wait until you've got several restive vassals to worry about, then play out their Cortez fantasies by allying with your rebellious vassals and remaining angry bitter enemies, in order to sack and pillage your central capital.
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