Future Equipment of WWIII

[Junghalli]

This is a good opportunity to talk about something I think is a serious poision on nerd attempts at fiction.

An excessive focus on minutia. Lists. Timelines. Data. Tangentially relavent, floating, disembodied facts. A sort of mission creep of background material, where it moves from a purely instrumental thing that informs the story and prevents immersion-breaking moments to taking on a life of its own, diverting the would-be writer into hamster-wheel spinning busywork and leading to Weberesque prose where tangentially relevant minutia is awkwardly shoehorned in because the writer is under the tragic misapprehension that if it never sees the light of day something of value will be lost.

I have suffered from this problem myself. Perhaps I jump to conclusions in thinking the OP may be a fellow sufferer, but he/she's got the visible symptoms. This is exactly the kind of mindset that leads to thinking that getting a detailed floating disembodied list of military equipment right is a high priority in writing a story about WWIII.

Look, this list largely represents something you don't really need to know to write a good war story. What you need is to know enough about the experience of being a soldier in wartime to maintain immersion. The go-to place for this isn't lists of military equipment, which doesn't tell you much about the experience anyway. The obvious go-to place that springs to my mind is real soldiers' personal accounts, e.g. of the Iraq War, or WWII. You don't need to know the weight and horsepower of your tank, you need to be able to describe what it's like to operate one well enough not to break suspension of disbelief. If you want the most relevant feedback, don't present a giant list of equipment, write a battle scene and then ask what people think of that.

You can probably get away with not knowing very much about the tech at all, if you break with the technothriller paradigm of writing, which I think probably has more popularity than it deserves in sci fi amateur writer circles. To me the interesting thing about imagining WWIII isn't the tank battles, it's the fallout, figurative and literal. Unless the enemy is really evil or the propaganda is really effective it seems to me it's likely to be the sociological experience of WWI cubed; there's probably going to be a huge sense of disillusionment and disgust at the culture, politics, and institutions that created the conditions where burning the world in nuclear fire looked like a sane idea to somebody with the power to order it done. A story about, say, a soldier returning home from a bloody and futile war to a homeland of irradiated ruins seems more interesting to me than some technothriller about WWII-esque clashes of American and Chinese armies or whatever.

[Starglider]

To me the interesting thing about imagining WWIII isn't the tank battles, it's the fallout, figurative and literal.

To me the interesting thing about imagining WWIII isn't the fallout, it's the tank battles, equipment and tactics.

However, standard novel structure is not a good way to do this. I liked 'The Third World War' (both books) because it's written largely as a fantasy military history textbook; personal accounts from a large number of characters are sprinkled in as excepts between deliberately dry historical accounts (although those character moments do take your advice and were based on accounts by active military personnel). The 'Colonial Marines Technical Manual' is jam packed with fantasy tech descriptions (and fantasy blueprints) with just a few character quotes to give flavour, and it's a fun book.

So basically being obsessed with technical and historical detail over story is fine but probably indicates you should be writing a different kind of book. Also if you are going to do this you had better make sure you are good at alternate history and speculative military hardware design.

[ryacko]

Also, isn't the 'Schwarzkopf' name concept stolen from People's General?

Never read that. All I know is that it would probably be named after an armor commander of some importance.
Did you know that a proposed name for the Abrams was Marshall (not the rank)?


Also, unless I failed a Catch-22 test to write "alternate history," can someone tell me what current US tank stockpiles are with citations? It's not like other people make mistakes and I may not be perfect.
I read somewhere that it was planned to keep stockpiles of M60s through 2005, on FAS I believe.

[Block]

It's 2012...

[ryacko]

It's 2012...

I guess that just about turns everything upside down, seven years.

I know the National Guard trains with the Abrams, but I'm certain we still have stockpiles of M60.

[Block]

It's 2012...

I guess that just about turns everything upside down, seven years.

I know the National Guard trains with the Abrams, but I'm certain we still have stockpiles of M60.

Sure, and I'm sure they're totally functional considering
The army has more than enough M1a1s and 2s according to its leadership and We've got so many Abrams that we're just giving them away! No really.

[ryacko]

It's 2012...

I guess that just about turns everything upside down, seven years.

I know the National Guard trains with the Abrams, but I'm certain we still have stockpiles of M60.

Sure, and I'm sure they're totally functional considering
The army has more than enough M1a1s and 2s according to its leadership and We've got so many Abrams that we're just giving them away! No really.

....
the Russians still have T-55s in stockpile. Built since 1955.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

Yeah, they have. Do they feel they still need them? Because the US thinks they don't need, or want to maintain, a certain number of tanks. The Russians keep them because they want to keep them.

[PeZook]

An interesting thought is that, since modern war involves really destructive weapons and a fast tempo while these same weapons are also fucking expensive...then it may turn out that really, really old tanks are being pulled up and hastily modernized because industry just can't keep up with replacing more modern models lost to enemy action, and thus the barrel is scraped deeper and deeper until you're scratching the bottom just to have SOME form of armored vehicle supporting your infantry while modern MBTs are fighitng enemy armor and being lost by the hundreds.

[Simon_Jester]

the Russians still have T-55s in stockpile. Built since 1955.

The Russians are OCD about such things. Their entire Cold War military was hugely overbudgeted, by a bunch of central planners who had very little grasp of the concept of "opportunity cost," and were seriously trying to have so much war materiel that in case of World War Three, they could have a nuclear bombardment blast the crud out of their civilization and still have enough armaments to conscript the surviving menfolk and send them off to beat the surviving Chinese and Europeans.

Or something like that. It wasn't particularly realistic, sane, or cost-effective, but they were trying to do it. And having warehouses full of ancient WWII-surplus weapons wasn't the most expensive part of the scheme by a long shot.

But this is not a rational model for a nation which isn't an overmilitarized garrison state. And if you are pitching the US as an overmilitarized garrison state, then maybe it'd be more interesting to see why it acts like that, and how than to worry about the details of who's armed with what.

As Junghalli points out, it'd be an interesting exercise to do a find-and-replace in everything you right and just have "big nasty tank," "normal tank," and "old tank." So we'd have "Sergeant Smith revved up his big nasty tank and got ready to move out on the signal from batallion."

[ryacko]

http://www.annistonarmydepot.net/
An army depot dedicated to still maintaining M60 tanks (how can this be, we have none???).

You're a troll, and I'd like you to be helpful for once.

An interesting thought is that, since modern war involves really destructive weapons and a fast tempo while these same weapons are also fucking expensive...then it may turn out that really, really old tanks are being pulled up and hastily modernized because industry just can't keep up with replacing more modern models lost to enemy action, and thus the barrel is scraped deeper and deeper until you're scratching the bottom just to have SOME form of armored vehicle supporting your infantry while modern MBTs are fighitng enemy armor and being lost by the hundreds.

Don't forget exports to our allies. The M60 is obsolete, and would have be to be upgraded to serve for rear garrison duty or to be acceptable to send to our allies.

[Dark Hellion]

The fact that people don't think your ideas are good doesn't make them a troll. So far you haven't explained any of the situation for us to know why M60s would be used, why the existent M1 supply is insufficient, any element of the development of the M2, etc. You have given a whole bunch of meaningless numbers without sufficient context to make any judgement on any element of story or why the numbers you are providing have any significance what-so-ever.

[Block]

http://www.annistonarmydepot.net/
An army depot dedicated to still maintaining M60 tanks (how can this be, we have none???).

You're a troll, and I'd like you to be helpful for once.

Actually it says that it's dedicated to repairing the M1, and that it's still designated to repair the M60. Did you know that there are places still designated to repair things that haven't existed outside a scrapyard/boneyard in decades? There's this thing called organizational inertia, the Army is famous for it, someone sees something on the previous report and just copies it to the next year's. Also, if the M1A3 exists in any significant numbers at all, your story has to take place at least another 8 years in the future since the rollout isn't planned til 2018, meaning 15 years off the TO&E for an obsolete tank. Since you have yet another generation of tanks in there, it'd have to be even further in the future, making your focus on a 60+ year old tank nonsensical. Why not just replace M60 with M1, of which we have shitloads that haven't undergone the SEP upgrade yet, and go from there? It makes more sense. Also why are you focusing on tanks since cheap dronespam is likely to make tanks a fairly useless weapon soon enough anyways?

[PeZook]

Don't forget exports to our allies. The M60 is obsolete, and would have be to be upgraded to serve for rear garrison duty or to be acceptable to send to our allies.

See, I'd focus on things like these and try to answer how it makes modern war even more shocking than before, because not only do you lose friends, you lose them far more quickly and in greater numbers than ever before, and entire national economies are spent within a few years trying to sustain this.

How does this affect people? What consequences does this have on military thinking and individuals waging such a war? Can humans even keep up with the quickly changing situation, or is it just a dance of a series of pre-planned procedures and plans being executed one after another?

See, the particular type of obsolete tank doesn't matter much if you want to tell a war story ; It matters if you want some faux military report from TEH FUTURE, but you should probably decide which one you want to write.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Sticks and Stones, well in the end....

[ryacko]

See, I'd focus on things like these and try to answer how it makes modern war even more shocking than before, because not only do you lose friends, you lose them far more quickly and in greater numbers than ever before, and entire national economies are spent within a few years trying to sustain this.

The cold war started because we shipped the Russians an inadequate tank.

[Esquire]

... What? And more importantly, what has that got to do anything?

[Beowulf]

http://www.annistonarmydepot.net/
An army depot dedicated to still maintaining M60 tanks (how can this be, we have none???).

You're a troll, and I'd like you to be helpful for once.

Engineering Variants of the M60 still exist ( M60AVLB, M728, M88, etc), and allied countries still operate them, and utilize the US knowledge base to help maintain their own vehicles. Also, that's not an official website. The official website Doesn't mention the M60 at all.

[ryacko]

I see. I thought that was the official website.
I never said that the United States still operate the M60.

[Straha]

This is a good opportunity to talk about something I think is a serious poision on nerd attempts at fiction.

An excessive focus on minutia. Lists. Timelines. Data. Tangentially relavent, floating, disembodied facts. A sort of mission creep of background material, where it moves from a purely instrumental thing that informs the story and prevents immersion-breaking moments to taking on a life of its own, diverting the would-be writer into hamster-wheel spinning busywork and leading to Weberesque prose where tangentially relevant minutia is awkwardly shoehorned in because the writer is under the tragic misapprehension that if it never sees the light of day something of value will be lost.

I have suffered from this problem myself. Perhaps I jump to conclusions in thinking the OP may be a fellow sufferer, but he/she's got the visible symptoms. This is exactly the kind of mindset that leads to thinking that getting a detailed floating disembodied list of military equipment right is a high priority in writing a story about WWIII.

Look, this list largely represents something you don't really need to know to write a good war story. What you need is to know enough about the experience of being a soldier in wartime to maintain immersion. The go-to place for this isn't lists of military equipment, which doesn't tell you much about the experience anyway. The obvious go-to place that springs to my mind is real soldiers' personal accounts, e.g. of the Iraq War, or WWII. You don't need to know the weight and horsepower of your tank, you need to be able to describe what it's like to operate one well enough not to break suspension of disbelief. If you want the most relevant feedback, don't present a giant list of equipment, write a battle scene and then ask what people think of that.

You can probably get away with not knowing very much about the tech at all, if you break with the technothriller paradigm of writing, which I think probably has more popularity than it deserves in sci fi amateur writer circles. To me the interesting thing about imagining WWIII isn't the tank battles, it's the fallout, figurative and literal. Unless the enemy is really evil or the propaganda is really effective it seems to me it's likely to be the sociological experience of WWI cubed; there's probably going to be a huge sense of disillusionment and disgust at the culture, politics, and institutions that created the conditions where burning the world in nuclear fire looked like a sane idea to somebody with the power to order it done. A story about, say, a soldier returning home from a bloody and futile war to a homeland of irradiated ruins seems more interesting to me than some technothriller about WWII-esque clashes of American and Chinese armies or whatever.

This got me thinking. When I was a kid I read a ton of Military Sci-Fi, but all the stories I remember, and certainly the ones that get traded around as cultural touchstones, dealt with equipment only so far as how it changed society and warfare.

Think of the emblematic technology changes the battlefield story, Starship Troopers. I remember nothing about the Lines of Battle and barely anything about the suits capabilities themselves because all the time spent describing them was contextualizing them in context of the battlefield and society. The Forever War does the same thing, changing technology is always described for the fish-out-of-water Vietnam vet and then it carries impact and meaning, this is the guy who once strolled the jungles of Vietnam with an M-16 now handling an advanced battledrone capable of blowing up city blocks and he doesn't know how to deal with it.

Even boiler-plate Science Fiction like Battletech goes the same way. As a kid I remember eating up with a spoon when they tried, and admittedly failed mostly, to explain why Mechs were important and why they were now the touchstone of an inter-stellar culture of nobility and warfare. Whenever they got into the nitty-gritty of "the Timberwolf was able to use its three medium range pulse lasers to outclass the long-range orientated Warhawk at a short distance" I, and many other fans, hit the fucking snooze button.

Hell, think about historical fiction. Is All Quiet on the Western Front remembered for comparing the firing rates of rifles and machine guns? No. It's remembered because the impression of the firing rate is contextualized in context of the human experience.

Maybe this is why John Ringo's work (to pick a name out of a hat), and especially his later books, are so fucking reviled in mainstream science fiction. Because there's a certain kind of person who wants to read orders of battle with differing capabilities and schematic readouts and if they're your audience there's no unique reason to write science fiction. This is not to denigrate that field but rather to say that if your main appeal is long lists of capabilities there's no reason to make it science fiction as opposed to modern fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, an RPG, pornography, or speculative non-fiction. Certainly nothing is gained, and if anything fans are driven away.

Perhaps this is just overly academic navel-gazing. People who certainly seem to cross that boundary into lists are popular as authors, see David Weber, but I always get the feeling that they are popular despite these flaws rather than because of them. I just don't see how lists of the amount of M-60 Gavins future armies will use... matters as part of a fictional account.

[Simon_Jester]

The fact that people don't think your ideas are good doesn't make them a troll. So far you haven't explained any of the situation for us to know why M60s would be used, why the existent M1 supply is insufficient, any element of the development of the M2, etc. You have given a whole bunch of meaningless numbers without sufficient context to make any judgement on any element of story or why the numbers you are providing have any significance what-so-ever.

Seconded. Who is being fought here, and why, in what context? Are the nukes flying? If not, why not?

World War Three would not be a repeat of World War Two, any more than World War Two was a repeat of World War One, or than World War One was a repeat of the Napoleonic Wars before them.

Knowing the details of strategy dictates what weapons will be used, what kind of mobilization would be possible.

See, I'd focus on things like these and try to answer how it makes modern war even more shocking than before, because not only do you lose friends, you lose them far more quickly and in greater numbers than ever before, and entire national economies are spent within a few years trying to sustain this.

The cold war started because we shipped the Russians an inadequate tank.

First lesson of grand strategy and geopolitics:

It is never that simple.

Maybe this is why John Ringo's work (to pick a name out of a hat), and especially his later books, are so fucking reviled in mainstream science fiction. Because there's a certain kind of person who wants to read orders of battle with differing capabilities and schematic readouts and if they're your audience there's no unique reason to write science fiction. This is not to denigrate that field but rather to say that if your main appeal is long lists of capabilities there's no reason to make it science fiction as opposed to modern fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, an RPG, pornography, or speculative non-fiction. Certainly nothing is gained, and if anything fans are driven away.

I think it's really because Ringo doesn't do that; he sticks all kinds of weapons into his fiction and they tend to dominate the story but it's not just lists of weapons schematics. Certainly no published orders of battle appear in the main writing. He writes stories. They have characters, who have motivations even if they're cartoonish and simplistic.

You want someone who really craps up their fiction with technical details, look for Stuart. And there's a reason Ringo's got Times bestsellers and Stuart's a nobody: Ringo writes books that hundreds of thousands- nay, millions- of people might conceivably decide to read of their own free will.

Lists of schematics probably don't have more than a fraction of that many potential fans in the world, not unless there's one hell of a draw other than "here are the weapon schematics."

Perhaps this is just overly academic navel-gazing. People who certainly seem to cross that boundary into lists are popular as authors, see David Weber, but I always get the feeling that they are popular despite these flaws rather than because of them. I just don't see how lists of the amount of M-60 Gavins future armies will use... matters as part of a fictional account.

Seconded.

[Straha]

I think it's really because Ringo doesn't do that; he sticks all kinds of weapons into his fiction and they tend to dominate the story but it's not just lists of weapons schematics. Certainly no published orders of battle appear in the main writing. He writes stories. They have characters, who have motivations even if they're cartoonish and simplistic.

You want someone who really craps up their fiction with technical details, look for Stuart. And there's a reason Ringo's got Times bestsellers and Stuart's a nobody: Ringo writes books that hundreds of thousands- nay, millions- of people might conceivably decide to read of their own free will.

Lists of schematics probably don't have more than a fraction of that many potential fans in the world, not unless there's one hell of a draw other than "here are the weapon schematics."

I will gladly concede the possibility that I may have Ringo wrong. I read one of his books from the Polseen arc when I was much younger, tried to read a second one and was deeply put off by how it seemed to revolve solely around special weapons and units and gave up on it and judged the rest of his works based on that and received experiences from others.

Stuart is, without a doubt, an exemplar paragon of this in action. I think the best sort of platonic example of this sort of "story" being done is the 'Orange Star' FanFic that someone tried to cobble together on this board. The one that was simply painful to read because it was nothing but manifests and generic exposition. It's also an exemplar of how fucking awful these things are as written fiction.

[Connor MacLeod]

Weber seems to be a good example when it comes to the 'too much math/technical' stuff than Ringo (I never quite figured out what Ringo's attraction is, unless its some political/cultural appeal amongst the baen crowd). I actually suspect alot of Weber's following stems from all the technical/detail oriented stuff. At least whenever I browsed the baen boards or read up on the DW excerpts pulled from it (that Pearls of Weber site) it seemed like there were a huge number of fans of his work who seem to actively enjoy trying to anticipate or contribute to the 'tech' side of things in the Honorverse (which Weber seems to spend a ton of time either debunking or arguing over). I suspect alot of that may have bled into his writing over time more and more, which is why the technical/numerical details crowd out everything else. Of course even in his early novels he had a fondness for redundant numbers (anything involving time/distance/acceleration calculations comes off like he's novellized the math he did off-screen, for example.)

I also suspect Weber reflects a 'wargame' hobbyist's approach to writing - I think he even had done that awhile with his old Starfire stuff, and you can draw alot of parallels between the starfire works and his latter HH stuff. By now he seems to have a compulsive need to cram as much detail into ALL aspects (politics, economics, military, etc.) into his books - so much so the last novel he wrote acutally got split up into two, IIRC.

[ray245]

A lot of Sci-fi writers would be better off writing all those Tech books about their Sci-Fi universe than actually writing the story.

There is a lot more focus on trying to give us an overview of a particular war than telling the individual personal stories on the ground. I can certainly understand some people's desire to read an after action report than an actual narrative.

[Stark]

To write a good book you need to have something to say. For many scifi writers, the only things they have to say are OMG TEH GIGATUNZ and SPACE IS NEAT BRO, so stuff like the Colonial Marine Fluff Bible are probably a better vector for their expression.

However, I believe scifi FANS actually prefer mastubatory fantasies of control and power (like most people) and thus they may in general prefer the sort of derivative filth people generally associate with the genre.