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even without nukes you run into the incentive problem that has existed since the founding of the country; we have all been incentivized to defend our tiny hamlets with the ferocity of wildmen. sure, half the country would surrender but that just gets you some beachheads. I doubt anyone in the world is equipped to take the Mississippi and its tributaries and the land cored by it.
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It’s not even because they love America. It’s because they love their home and you fucking got too close to it for comfort.
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@vii @mirq you couldn't take it over by conventional means but that shits lame, death by moral and ethical degradation and by driving proverbial wedges between neighbours and community till all you have is indentured servitude towards faceless corporations. Or/and do the Jew thing and import the third world.
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@mirq Sorry, clarification. I don’t think Europe, Russia, or China are capable of taking the Gulf of Mexico, let alone the Mississippi and its tributaries, for reasons of what happens when Americans are decentralized by force due to the cultural underpinnings of gun rights, freedom of speech and opinion, and having to defend against trespass on one’s own.
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@vii im not sure what the context of this is but i think the coastal states would roll over comparatively a lot easier (you'll have issues in California but aside from that...), and once you control the seaways you can just starve out the rest of the country
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@mirq Taking California would be far more costly than it would be damaging. You have to take Louisiana and they won’t fucking roll over. You have to take Texas and they won’t fucking roll over. From New York to Norfolk is absolutely forsaken. So yeah everything east of the Rockies that doesn’t touch the Colorado River suddenly lose all existing shipping and networks. But Man In The High Tower definitely got the idea right generally — you can take the West Coast pretty easy, but you end up creating a complex balkanized zone. Where I disagree with Philip K Dick is that I don’t think Europe, Russia, or China are capable of taking the Gulf of Mexico let alone the Mississippi and its tributaries.
I spent like 10 years where my primary hobby was reverse engineering continuity of government potentials. I found it so fun, I loved making althist maps but like, no one else seemed to get what I was describing so I just felt stupid trying to share after a while.
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@kirbius @mirq Yeah but look how fucking long that takes, and look at what always comes as a response. You’re betting on something that is way more of a gamble than people present it to be. Vanguardism isn’t some perfect strategy, and global information warfare creates attrition, but not victories. I’m not saying you’re wrong — you bring up exactly the right tactics for such a front — but I can’t confidently say that it’d work in the South. Now, If you started at one of the sources of the tributaries in the Midwest, let’s call it Cleveland for simplicity’s sake? Yeah, you’re absolutely right; it’s a matter of sociopolitical infection downstream until you reach like, St Louis or Memphis, and now you have enough nodes on the highway and river system to really fuck with downstream dependents and interstate shipping. And that’s not yet even considering the hugely strategic gains one would get from taking Dayton, OH as just a single example.
But I can’t help but think the ten years of escalating next-generational warfare we’ve so far seen has made people sensitive to the very tactics as well. So the whole thing still results in this remarkably ugly stalemate leaving the Great Basin and half of the Great Plains unaccounted for, the potential for Continuity of Government in Dallas or Houston, the Gulf states under constant sociopolitical attack from the East Coast, and an entirely new MAD sustained by multiple parties holding the nuke locations across the country plus AI because fuck anyone who can’t make decisions fast enough apparently.
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@vii
I gotcha now
My thought was mostly "capture the coasts, blockade the gulf"
Certainly trying at LA or TX would be a waste of time without weakening them first
But also
Americans have not had war stateside in like well over a century
You're right about the spirit, but I'm not sure that spirit can survive sustained bombing & siege
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@mirq But who would be bombing or sieging in the Gulf? Literally only China, France, and Italy have the navies necessary and existing empirical islands necessary to stage that invasion, but to do so requires taking away from the east coast, unless the east coast has already surrendered. If the US even suspected for a second that France was using or permitting its islands to be used to stage an invasion then the US takes Cuba without a second thought far earlier than any East Coast action, Puerto Rico becomes a military base immediately.
You’re not wrong about us not having had a war stateside in over a century though, and you’re not wrong about how strong that spirit is at this point. I am ready to concede that maybe 50% of that spirit has died, as a count of heads in the country that would at a moment’s notice pick up that spirit and exercise it. But I also meet people every day exercising it in one way or another. If my Bayesian filter has hope, I do too.
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@vii @mirq people seem to forget that every small town in California is full of gun loving rednecks and that there are farms up and down the coast in rural areas full of more gun toting rednecks. The north coast has self blockaded from the state and federal government with armed guards multiple times.
Also I think it’s unlikely anyone did a traditional invasion of the us, they are more likely to do what the us does to their vessel states and take it over from the inside
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@technolyze @mirq Totally fair; I tend to undersell everything north of Sacramento/SF, everything in the Inland Empire, but even Orange County and San Diego are special cases directly on the coast, full of young adults who are reservists at Pendleton. Fresno and Bakersfield, the highway connections between LA and SF, would be hell to take to be sure.
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@vii @mirq theres also an active nuclear powerplant there and multiple inactive plants and waste sites, i think cali would end up pretty viciously defended by the national gaurd/military if anything went down
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