From: WeOurselves
To: Soc.Fen.Military
Subj: RE: Worst Case Scenario
This thing's not going to be a war in the conventional sense - it'll be paralysed and bubbling, tit-for-tat but not really deciding anything because everyone will be afraid of pushing it to the point where someone thinks they have to go ugly and break out the big guns and have things go the Mass Destruction route. They know we can drop rocks, so they won't push us to the point where we feel we need to drop rocks. We can assume they can get some sunshine onto a missile to Crystal Tokyo, or Kandor City, so we won't push them to the point where they feel they have to try do that. Which, ironically, means not getting to the point of threatening their ability to do it.
Everybody will be afraid to do anything really overt, so it'll be a backstabbing war. They won't even call it a war.
They'll go economic. That's their big advantage. They can Embargo us, hard.
To physically attack us, they'd have to come up here. The problem is, so much of the stuff we rely on to live has to come up here too. Our ship runs tons of it daily. And it's a lot easier for them to stop that from happening, than it is to come all the way up here.
It'll rapidly get harder to get food up here for a start. We'll have to rely on native production. I don't know what stage we're at with that but maybe, just maybe, we could do it. But, right now, it wouldn't take much, if anything, for them to cripple that ability to the point where people start going hungry, and it won't be impossible for them to make getting anything off Earth a lot harder. They won't have to fire a shot to do it, or launch a single battlewagon. They just have to make dealing with us very expensive for the few people that still will. Which means prioritising some settlements over others when there isn't enough to go around. Those will be our weak points.
We have CPU cycles. They have sheer bloody numbers on their side. A massive industry. Newspapers. Media. All of it. They have masses of food and the ability to overproduce it, and probably ship it to places that might consider splitting from Fenspace and paying the Danegeld just to get something to eat. That's how they'll fight us. Not with Marines and Tanks, but with resources, equipment and influence. It'll rapidly get a lot harder to live up here and get all the nice things we've gotten used to, unless you start playing by their rules. Pay the Danegeld, host a military base, be good and behave and your life will be comfortable again.
They also have the ability to rapidly overlook legal niceties when they become inconvenient - don't assume they'll play ball according to their constitution. Or international law.
Furthermore, they won't fight us directly, but they'll start funneling money and arms to the people who will. Maybe they'll be the ones going after our food shipments. I've done convoy duty during the War. It's expensive. It's time consuming. And you'll still loose freighters no matter what you do. It's a fight that'll leach the lifeblood further and further until we're either faced with escalating the fight, or inviting them in with open arms to deal with the issue they created.
I've heard some tinfoil hats suggest that this has already been tried. I won't comment otherwise.
Winning against the United States won't involve dictating peace terms at the White House. Winning means holding out, and making maintaining the conflict more trouble than it's worth. And that will take years
>>We've got a lot of advantages to help us not lose, though.
They have a fixed home base. They have to come up here to get us, but they have to come from a rigidly fixed place. They have fixed national infrastructure. A rigid government structure. We have a lot of Space to hide in and a lot of flexibility - we can move stuff and make them find it. Tinman's right. We can drop down and attack literally anywhere, which means we don't have to do much to keep doing damage. They've a lot of sky to cover. Also. They know this too.
The problem is, pushing it too far risks backing them into a corner where they either have to actually start fighting hard, which risks further escalation, or they look for some other dirty games to play. Remember, a lot of people up here have family still in the States. Also remember what McCarthyism is, or No-Fly lists, or warrantless wire-tapping, or Executive Order 9066. They have all these tools before they ever have to send an F-35 in anger, or a squad of Marines. (And then Games Workshop will sue them over Space Marines so.... )
>>More Psych-ops: Hang a big transmitter in the GEO spot that covers most of the USA, and swamp their signals with our noise. They ain't got enough fibre or copper cable to carry all their cross-country traffic any more. Tell the civilians that they ain't allowed to watch the Kardashians on TV or buy from Amazon until the war's over, and suddenly there's a lot of pressure on their government to wind things up fast.
Really, History has shown that you don't Beat Empires in the conventional sense. You win by not making it fight you. Empires don't really like hard wars - they're expensive. So you wait for it to get bored. You keep tapping away, year after year - even as their government talks about making progress and staying the course - continuously proving over and over again that really, it's all just lies. Things get worse and worse as they get harder and harder and crack down further and further. The bodies keep coming back drapped in flags, over and over again. Eventually, it moves to the point where their own people turn against the crackdowns. It's all about waiting for public opinion to finally turn against the war, and being very careful to not do anything drastic that'll make it turn back.
Look at the Irish War of Independance. 1916 failed because it tried to be a conventional military action, and Britain stomped it flat because they were geared up to do exactly that - in the middle of a World War no less. The campaign that followed in 1919 worked for two years until DeValera decided on a conventional attack on the Custom's house - which almost broke the old IRA. Eventually, England just got bored with it trying to swat it down cheaply and failing, while English public opinion turned hard against the Tans and they needed a way out that saved them face - offering the choice between a truce and negotiations, or expensive, all-out actual total war.
It won't be short. It won't be decisive. It will be messy. It will leave a legacy of bad blood lasting decades.
But that's how you beat Empires. Not with a bunch to the face, but a hundred thousand gentle pokes.
Of course, all that's moot if someone has well and truly awoken the sleeping giant and kicked him square in the bollocks. In which case, the only way we'll win is to be in a position to dictate terms in the White House after 6 months. Getting there means rapidly crippling their ability to outbuild. We can do one thing Germany or Japan couldn't - we can hit them at home. But that's not a war I'd want to fight and a lot of people would feel the same. And it's hard to win a war you don't really want to fight. The Boskone war was almost easier that way.
From: "ValkyriesRide2012"
To: Soc.Fen.Military
Subj: RE: Worst Case Scenario
I'd wonder if there isn't a way to get Russia or China to fight that battle for us?
Slap Russia in the face while wearing the Stars and Stripes. A 'warning' not to get involved in an 'American' conflict.
Too Risky?
Really, there's no way we can fight them on our own. The trick being not to get caught because nothing would piss them off more.
-----
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
To: Soc.Fen.Military
Subj: RE: Worst Case Scenario
This thing's not going to be a war in the conventional sense - it'll be paralysed and bubbling, tit-for-tat but not really deciding anything because everyone will be afraid of pushing it to the point where someone thinks they have to go ugly and break out the big guns and have things go the Mass Destruction route. They know we can drop rocks, so they won't push us to the point where we feel we need to drop rocks. We can assume they can get some sunshine onto a missile to Crystal Tokyo, or Kandor City, so we won't push them to the point where they feel they have to try do that. Which, ironically, means not getting to the point of threatening their ability to do it.
Everybody will be afraid to do anything really overt, so it'll be a backstabbing war. They won't even call it a war.
They'll go economic. That's their big advantage. They can Embargo us, hard.
To physically attack us, they'd have to come up here. The problem is, so much of the stuff we rely on to live has to come up here too. Our ship runs tons of it daily. And it's a lot easier for them to stop that from happening, than it is to come all the way up here.
It'll rapidly get harder to get food up here for a start. We'll have to rely on native production. I don't know what stage we're at with that but maybe, just maybe, we could do it. But, right now, it wouldn't take much, if anything, for them to cripple that ability to the point where people start going hungry, and it won't be impossible for them to make getting anything off Earth a lot harder. They won't have to fire a shot to do it, or launch a single battlewagon. They just have to make dealing with us very expensive for the few people that still will. Which means prioritising some settlements over others when there isn't enough to go around. Those will be our weak points.
We have CPU cycles. They have sheer bloody numbers on their side. A massive industry. Newspapers. Media. All of it. They have masses of food and the ability to overproduce it, and probably ship it to places that might consider splitting from Fenspace and paying the Danegeld just to get something to eat. That's how they'll fight us. Not with Marines and Tanks, but with resources, equipment and influence. It'll rapidly get a lot harder to live up here and get all the nice things we've gotten used to, unless you start playing by their rules. Pay the Danegeld, host a military base, be good and behave and your life will be comfortable again.
They also have the ability to rapidly overlook legal niceties when they become inconvenient - don't assume they'll play ball according to their constitution. Or international law.
Furthermore, they won't fight us directly, but they'll start funneling money and arms to the people who will. Maybe they'll be the ones going after our food shipments. I've done convoy duty during the War. It's expensive. It's time consuming. And you'll still loose freighters no matter what you do. It's a fight that'll leach the lifeblood further and further until we're either faced with escalating the fight, or inviting them in with open arms to deal with the issue they created.
I've heard some tinfoil hats suggest that this has already been tried. I won't comment otherwise.
Winning against the United States won't involve dictating peace terms at the White House. Winning means holding out, and making maintaining the conflict more trouble than it's worth. And that will take years
>>We've got a lot of advantages to help us not lose, though.
They have a fixed home base. They have to come up here to get us, but they have to come from a rigidly fixed place. They have fixed national infrastructure. A rigid government structure. We have a lot of Space to hide in and a lot of flexibility - we can move stuff and make them find it. Tinman's right. We can drop down and attack literally anywhere, which means we don't have to do much to keep doing damage. They've a lot of sky to cover. Also. They know this too.
The problem is, pushing it too far risks backing them into a corner where they either have to actually start fighting hard, which risks further escalation, or they look for some other dirty games to play. Remember, a lot of people up here have family still in the States. Also remember what McCarthyism is, or No-Fly lists, or warrantless wire-tapping, or Executive Order 9066. They have all these tools before they ever have to send an F-35 in anger, or a squad of Marines. (And then Games Workshop will sue them over Space Marines so.... )
>>More Psych-ops: Hang a big transmitter in the GEO spot that covers most of the USA, and swamp their signals with our noise. They ain't got enough fibre or copper cable to carry all their cross-country traffic any more. Tell the civilians that they ain't allowed to watch the Kardashians on TV or buy from Amazon until the war's over, and suddenly there's a lot of pressure on their government to wind things up fast.
Really, History has shown that you don't Beat Empires in the conventional sense. You win by not making it fight you. Empires don't really like hard wars - they're expensive. So you wait for it to get bored. You keep tapping away, year after year - even as their government talks about making progress and staying the course - continuously proving over and over again that really, it's all just lies. Things get worse and worse as they get harder and harder and crack down further and further. The bodies keep coming back drapped in flags, over and over again. Eventually, it moves to the point where their own people turn against the crackdowns. It's all about waiting for public opinion to finally turn against the war, and being very careful to not do anything drastic that'll make it turn back.
Look at the Irish War of Independance. 1916 failed because it tried to be a conventional military action, and Britain stomped it flat because they were geared up to do exactly that - in the middle of a World War no less. The campaign that followed in 1919 worked for two years until DeValera decided on a conventional attack on the Custom's house - which almost broke the old IRA. Eventually, England just got bored with it trying to swat it down cheaply and failing, while English public opinion turned hard against the Tans and they needed a way out that saved them face - offering the choice between a truce and negotiations, or expensive, all-out actual total war.
It won't be short. It won't be decisive. It will be messy. It will leave a legacy of bad blood lasting decades.
But that's how you beat Empires. Not with a bunch to the face, but a hundred thousand gentle pokes.
Of course, all that's moot if someone has well and truly awoken the sleeping giant and kicked him square in the bollocks. In which case, the only way we'll win is to be in a position to dictate terms in the White House after 6 months. Getting there means rapidly crippling their ability to outbuild. We can do one thing Germany or Japan couldn't - we can hit them at home. But that's not a war I'd want to fight and a lot of people would feel the same. And it's hard to win a war you don't really want to fight. The Boskone war was almost easier that way.
From: "ValkyriesRide2012"
To: Soc.Fen.Military
Subj: RE: Worst Case Scenario
I'd wonder if there isn't a way to get Russia or China to fight that battle for us?
Slap Russia in the face while wearing the Stars and Stripes. A 'warning' not to get involved in an 'American' conflict.
Too Risky?
Really, there's no way we can fight them on our own. The trick being not to get caught because nothing would piss them off more.
-----
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?