A bit of analysis: Posleen War

[Ahriman238]

BONUS QUESTION

What exactly is Posleen logistics?


Quote:
There were over twenty God Kings in sight of the manjack. All of them fired at the sensor point. And so did approximately eight thousand normals.

A storm of flechettes and missiles slammed into the side of the skyscraper...


Ringo keeps talking about how the Posleen are all teeth teeth teeth, no tail. But how does the teeth keep shooting off HVMs and flechettes?

Do they eat corpses and then shit out fresh munitions?

Or do they just keep shooting until their ammo is expended, pick up a gun from a corpse, shoot some more with that ammo?

It is slightly more complicated than that, though they can and do scavenge weapons and ammo from the dead. The Posleen aren't complete idiots-well, 99.8% of the Posleen are complete idiots, but they generally do what remaining .2% say, which is more than our idiots do. They do farm and they do manufacture more weapons and ammo, some on their ships, but high value is given to terrestrial factoris that can be converted to churn out Posleen hardware, and heavy metals that can be used to make them.

And the Posleen trade amongst themselves. They don't seem to employ money, or any sort of objective currency, but rather they use a complex barter system. They trade land, metals, food, gear, weapons and ammo, and breeding stock. All Posleen are hermaphrodites, but it generally seems to be the God-kings that-um, 'mount' and the superiors or normals who carry the egg. They also have an ovipositor, with the word for 'son' is a derivative of. Since the ovipositor is not used in laying eggs that leaves a couple of...disturbing possibilities for Posleen reproduction.

But back to the subject, many God-kings run breeding programs to improve their oolt in specific ways, and good superiors are very much valued in this way.

Why are you guys trying to make sense out of trash?

Serious question. I can see trying to make sense out of Harington or whatever, but from this stuff? What is the redeeming value here, especially of those NAZI NAZI NAZI books of Kratman?

Why not? I started it as a way to get the information out there in case anyone wanted to use it. And to practice my novel analysis. And stave off boredom. I more-or-less expected to post my walls of text and be largely ignored except for people challenging a particular point or saying how much the books sucked.

Instead, this has turned into a lively discussion. I'm having a blast, and learning buttloads about physics (which I never seriously studied) and the military (which I did, but I come from a Navy family and it still shows, a lot.)

Plus, I'm still doing way less calcs than I would for HH. And while I've read most of the books, the only one I actually own is Short Victorius War.

And yeah, I'm going through the main books, the first four. Doubt I'll keep going after that, and even if I do, I'm not planning on touching Watch with a twenty-foot pole. I'm much happier living in a world where that scrod was never published.

I think Shep is having fun with this (I've never seen Ringo's take on military tactics analyzed this way, in terms of "he's light infantry, he underestimates armor and artillery accordingly," and I like it). I'm just shooting the breeze- I don't really think it holds together, but it's entertaining.

Don't forget the Army Corps of Engineers. About 20% of Gust Front was a love letter to the ACE. He admits in the afterword that he wanted to honor his father, who was a combat engineer in WWII, and had died a couple of years before. The Posleen outright run when confronted with the ACE symbol.

[Simon_Jester]

The running from the Army Corps of Engineers comes from the painful lesson that any place they occupy will have a buttload of lethal traps, and basically no loot. Not some place you want to fight as a pillaging horde army whose economic and social strength depends on having a fighting force at the end of the day.

[Lonestar]

Plausible- his idea of tactics still winds up coming as much from the airborne as anywhere else, at least anywhere outside his own skull.

Why do you think so, by the way?

Because his Bio is like "I was in the Army for 4 years, with the Airborne, Did a little community college with Marine Biology, then I was a DBA until I became a published author."

I guess I'm am saying it's a bit odd that someone gets out of combat arms and then gets into Database management in the civilian life when his formal college education had nothing to do with IT. Really, the most likely way he could have pulled that off was put down his MOS in his resume and it was Comms/IT related. "Yup I got experience".

[Simon_Jester]

Ah. Yeah, I see what you mean. That makes sense.

Although, again, it's still totally reasonable that if he's doing IT for an airborne division while in the army, most of his ideas about military tactics will revolve around what they do in the airborne.

[MKSheppard]

Instead, this has turned into a lively discussion. I'm having a blast, and learning buttloads about physics (which I never seriously studied) and the military (which I did, but I come from a Navy family and it still shows, a lot.)

You'll love what I'll post after this..........

Don't forget the Army Corps of Engineers. About 20% of Gust Front was a love letter to the ACE. He admits in the afterword that he wanted to honor his father, who was a combat engineer in WWII, and had died a couple of years before. The Posleen outright run when confronted with the ACE symbol.

That part was understandable, and really, Gust Front should have consisted 90% of the posleen running into ACE-created obstacles through their civilian employment program of every backhoe, frontloader, etc in an emergency, in addition to the US Army's Active Duty Combat Engineer Brigades with M9 ACEs and D9s.

Now for what you'll love....

The US Army has long run a very extensive test/R&D program of vehicle technology, in conjunction with industry partners since WWII.

We've gotten all sorts of things like nuclear powered tanks and other bizzare oddities.

But a lot of ideas keep reoccuring, because the US Army operates on a 25 year cycle (roughly) of going:

oh god if we don't become more mobile and air transportable, the marines will take over and get all the glory

You saw this with a lot of wheeled vehicles being proposed in the 1950s under QUESTIONMARK. Some of the APC versions of those bear a remarkable resemblance to the STRYKER.

Later, in the 1970s, after CARTER proposed a Rapid Deployment Force (RDF), there existed a serious problem. The RDF had to be light enough to be deployed with C-130 assets (only way to get enough airlift) to the theater, yet strong enough to stand up reasonably well to SOVIET ARMORED HORDE.

Elsewhere, it's because the idea is sound, but the technology level is not yet there to permit their effective implementation.

Firmly in the camp of sound, but not there yet are...



...unmanned turrets.

Yes, that's from 1953. They allow you to keep all of the crew in the hull, allowing better protection, and reducing the profile of the tank at the same time.

Biggest problem was/is situational awareness. The Army's long tested vehicle testbeds using TV cameras back into the 1950s for crew-in-hull applications.

But the big sticky point is that the cameras just weren't good enough compared to opening the turret hatch and sticking your head out. This is critically important when you need to spot tough things like enemy tanks in ambush positions, or infantry dug in.

...against the Posleen, this is not a problem, since they have no concept of cover or concealment.

A lot of lightweight stuff was also proposed in the 1980s for the RDF force; such as...



That's an AAI ARES 75mm cannon on the thing.

Development of the gun began in 1973, and it was designated the XM274 in 1981. It fires at...60 rounds per minute, or 1 round a second on average. Imagine that firing Cannister into Posleen from behind said berm.

Problem is that the typical revolver drum for that gun takes 22 rounds, and a pair of drums is 44 rounds...so you'd run out fast firing into masses of Posleen...

But other RDF concept proposals fix that problem of small magazine sizes by other means...



105mm cannon on that one. Note mechanized reload port.

Of course, not every concept was good or smart.

This is one particularly fun one for a scout vehicle in the 1950s I believe.



Yes, that's a guy sitting in that...thing, firing a .30 caliber or .50 caliber MG. Would have been a scout...thing, and would have been armored with TITANIUM.

[MKSheppard]

One of the big problems I can see logistically with the much enlarged US Army; and by extension every other Army suddenly exploding, is fuel shortages.

You still need a lot of fuel to go into transportation in order to get maximum war production, and you can't totally shut down leisure travel; because a lot of people will demand to get that last vacation before ALIEN HELL BEASTS INVADE; so you can't just arbitrarily declare that all un-used gasoline not used for military training purposes or transportation will be stockpiled during the four year buildup period.

But there's a solution to this, along with the transportation issues imposed by the Posleen Invasion Area Uncertainity; e.g. you don't know where the Posleen will land for planning purposes.

Naturally, the US Army had a program for this, with many GRAEPHS.

Modern armies can-consume fuel at a voracious rate. Recent estimates indicate that even a small force of 1000 men can require several million pounds of fuel over a one year period. The same amount of energy could be produced by nuclear reactors weighing less than 1% of the equivalent fuel load. The weight advantage of nuclear energy supply can be directly translated into a reduction of transportation equipment and personnel. Furthermore, if the nuclear reactors could be used directly in the combat area, long and vulnerable supply lines between fuel manufacturing facilities and the combat zone could be eliminated.

Vehicle propulsion accounts for most of the fuel used in the Army. Consequently a number of studies were made to determine if nuclear reactors could be installed directly in military vehicles. These studies indicated that direct use of nuclear reactors was not practical for most vehicles. Therefore, an Army-sponsored program was initiated at Allison in July 1961 to determine if a method could be found for indirect use of nuclear energy as a source of vehicle propulsion power. The concept conceived for this purpose was termed the energy depot.

They eventually settled on manufactured liquids, and quickly dismissed hydrogen and settled on ammonia.

Ammonia has a reasonable energy level (40% that of gasoline); and unlike other alternative fuels, it's actually practical from a storage point of view.

By that, I mean you can store it at 70 deg F in a 125 PSIA container, which is a bit easier to build than a -423 deg F, 15 PSIA container.

Virtually every modern military engine is multifuel by now and driven by a digital computer system, allowing you to easily retune the engine for a specific fuel, though it may not operate optimally without having the injectors replaced.

One of the problems cited in the original energy depot papers from the 60s was that when using conventional engines with Ammonia, some sort of high energy fuel such as hydrogen or gasoline was required when starting the engine.

So you'd still need gasoline, just a lot less of it; like a small 5 gallon tank of gasoline that's refilled every few days.

As for the electricity to crack the ammonia from THE AIR?

You could set up ammonia plants next to existing powerplants; which you can declare to be fuel depot plants when the landings occur; and of course, there's always the ever popular....ATOM ON A FLATBED:


ML-1 Closed Cycle Gas Turbine Powerplant.

Designed for 300 kW, but only hit 140kW. I'm sure we can do better today.

[Simon_Jester]

One of the big problems I can see logistically with the much enlarged US Army; and by extension every other Army suddenly exploding, is fuel shortages.

There's also the peak oil problem- even in 2000, we were getting close to the present plateau in production, at which bringing new sources of oil online becomes immensely expensive. This is, or should be, a big issue in any story featuring a war mobilization in modern times: oil production just cannot be accelerated as much as we'd like, and suddenly needing to burn 50% more of it would have enormous knock-on effects in such a mechanized society.

[MKSheppard]

There's always the M139 Volcano mine system.

It lays a minefield containing 960 mines in a zone 1,100 m by 120m in 43 seconds from a ground vehicle, and 17 seconds from a helicopter. Introduced around 1995/96.

All equipment for the ground system fits on a 5 ton truck as shown below:



The air system is in two containers that are hung off the side of a UH-60 Blackhawk.

So you just have VOLCANO stockpiled at various cities (remember, the posleen are attracted to tall buildings/urban areas as that is where the most loot is to be found); and fly UH-60s to them, where they're fitted with the Volcano; and they lay minefields along the expected Posleen Routes of Advance -- they can lay it within say 20~ miles of a Posleen horde, since at those distances, the curvature of the earth blocks God-King weaponry that one shots moving aerial targets.

[Raxmei]

Onto the deconstruction tangent, Posleen are what I call tactical strawmen. It's a military scifi tool of giving man's enemies easily exploited tactical blind spots so the heroes can defeat them with moderately clever tactics within the ability of the author to describe and the reader to understand. In order to maintain tension in the face of stupid enemies it is necessary to increase the threat level in other ways, eg overwhelming numbers, superior technology, or a combination of the two. If the illusion is maintained skillfully then the reader should be impressed at how the skill and determination of the heroes allows them to prevail in the face of such an overpowering foe.

The Posleen war presents a situation in which both the alien invaders and the regular armed forces of the humans are strawmen, both meant to pale in comparison to the comparatively brilliant ACS. The Army's playing dumb here as a foil to the ACS and at the same time their losses to the Posleen build up the Posleen as a credible threat. A competently managed conventional defense would fare better than the one in the books but that would not accomplish the author's goals.

BTW, three batteries is a battalion of unremarkable size, about what you'd assign to a brigade combat team these days. Back in the day DivArty was an artillery brigade, which worked out to about the same amount as attaching an artillery battalion to each of the division's combat brigades. If those three Reaver batteries truly are meant to exceed the firepower of three 20th century divisions then each M222 battery would have to do the work of over a dozen batteries of M109A6. If Ringo slipped up and said Battery when he meant Battalion then they're only slightly anemic in number and worth only 3-5 times their number of paladins.

[MKSheppard]

Second Front NOW - 1943 by Walter S. Dunn, Jr. had some interesting points:

In 1942, the US adopted a standard method to "shake-n-bake" a division:

1.) A Parent Division would be picked, and a cadre of 160 officers and 1,200 men was chosen from within that parent division. These people would assemble a month before the new division was activated.

2.) During the assembly process, 450 extra officers would be added.

3.) On the date of activation, 13,400 raw recruits would be assigned to the division. Two weeks after their arrival, basic/individual training would begin.

4.) 17 weeks later, training would be at the level of regiments, followed by 3 months of training at the divisional level. A final two months of training was done in combination with tanks and aircraft. During this period, equipment would be provided at 50% of authorized allowances, more than sufficient for training purposes.

5.) Following all this, the division was considered fit for combat; so 10-12 months were needed for the US to "bake" a division.

That said, there were problems. Sometimes a newly raised division would be forced to provide cadres to form another division, and in some cases a division was cadre'd twice; resulting in a serious loss of experienced manpower.

Additionally, providing Cadres was sometimes seen as a way to dump problem children on someone else; in one case, the 97th division in Spring of 1942 reported that one of it's cadre corporals was 61 years old, and another was over 50.

To solve the problem, the US designated two divisions as replacement divisions in the fall of 1942.

Now, lets apply this to the US Military.

Looking at Wikipedia, my crude count shows the following US Army divisions...

[NOTE: Yes, I know OOB from 2011, not 1999, and we've 'transformed' the military since then from divisions to brigades, but I'm lazy..]

Active Duty:

1st Armored "Old Ironsides"
1st Cavalry "First Team"
1st ID (Mech) "Big Red One"
2nd ID (Mech) "Indianhead"
4th ID (Mech) "Ivy"
3rd ID (Mech) "Marne"
10th Mtn (Light)
25th ID (Stryker) "Tropic Lightning"
82nd ABN
101st ABN

National Guard/Reserve:

28th ID (Medium) (PA/FL)
29th ID (Medium) (VA/MD)
34th ID (Medium) (MN/IA)
35th ID (Mech) (KS/NE)
36th ID (Medium) (TX) (Used to be 49th Armored, changed in 2004)
38th ID (Medium) (IN/MI/OH)
40th ID (Medium) (CA)
42nd ID (Light) (NY/NJ/VT/ME)

So let's work on these assumptions starting from 1999:

• Mobilization starts 1 May 2001.
• Active Duty Divisions, due to their higher quality personnel, can be cadred twice, while National Guard Divisions are cadred once in the initial round of cadreing.
• The 82nd Airborne is cadre'd just once, and then designated our Extrasolar Expeditionary Force (EEF) and has just it's troops transported to Galactic-land, where they take over manning Galactic equipment and pushing the Big Red Buttons, so the Darheel don't sacrifice one Darheel per weapon firing. They also don't provide cadres after this, to avoid depleting the EEF.
• It takes 18 months to form a division to combat status, and while they are training, they need only 50% of assigned equipment.
• After the initial cadre cycle; only half of the divisions now ready are chosen to provide cadres for the next wave, and they only provide one cadre. This is done to prevent dilution of personnel quality.

So here we go:

May 2001 Authorizations; Combat Ready around 23 October 2002.

• 10 x Active Duty Divisions Cadre 19 Divisions.
• 8 x National Guard Divisions Cadre 8 Divisions.
• Divisions Available at end of Cycle: 45 (one is EEF)

November 2002 Authorizations; Combat Ready around 24 April 2004.

• 45 x Active Divisions Cadre 22 Divisions.
• Divisions Available at end of Cycle: 67 (one is EEF)

May 2004 Authorizations; Combat Ready around 23 October 2005.

• 67 x Active Divisions Cadre 33 Divisions.
• Divisions Available at end of Cycle: 100 (one is EEF)

You can see how without too much trouble by posleenfall, I can build up the existing US Army into a 65 division behemoth all ready to munch on Posleen, without crippling problems.

I also have about 30~ divisions five months into an 18 month training cycle, which are beginning to be trained at the regimental level, which means I can somewhat credibly use these divisions as rear area units.

Also, compared to WWII, our recruit pool is much creamier; as we can use Blacks for more than just menial tasks, and we can use women for almost everything now; in addition to our recruits just plain being much healthier compared to their WWII counterparts.

Yes, people are fatter now, but that's something that can be fixed with special boot camp fat farms -- you can't fix stunted growth caused by malnutrition growing up.

[MKSheppard]

Onto the deconstruction tangent, Posleen are what I call tactical strawmen. It's a military scifi tool of giving man's enemies easily exploited tactical blind spots so the heroes can defeat them with moderately clever tactics within the ability of the author to describe and the reader to understand....

snip

That's actually a quite brilliant insight. It also makes sense -- trying to describe and write a moderately complex tactical scene is pretty hard, what with all the artillery, Electronic Warfare, Deception, artillery smoke, IR/Visual decoys, scatterable minefields, etc that can be brought into modern warfare....while human waves are quick and easy to write.

[Simon_Jester]

I do not think the Galactics, under the basic terms of the scenario, would accept one division of button-pushers as sufficient aid to justify providing us with the GalTech weapons that we are, realistically, going to need pretty badly. The Galactic's own self-designed weapons are grossly insufficient to stop Posleen armies in and of themselves; or so it is implied. The "lose the button-pusher" aspect only makes things worse, so replacing Darhel button-pushers with human ones doesn't really change that equation.

Try to do nothing but send the 82nd off to Diess to push buttons, and the Darhel may come right up to you and say "Yes, you know those antilander weapons you're counting on to shoot down Posleen starships, because nothing you've got is up to the task? That unobtanium armor you want to insert into your tank glacises?"

"Yes, ambassador?"

"Unobtanium just got... unobtainable."

[puts on sunglasses]

I'm sure you see the problem. It's made even worse by their ulterior motive- the desire to use up the human means of resistance, with GalTech as their main means of leverage. They have every reason to force you to send 'all' your experienced troops off-world, although they don't understand warfare well enough to grasp that you can send eight divisions minus a small cadre from each and wind up with eight fresh divisions (or sixteen) in short order.

[Ahriman238]

@simon on the one hand that's true, on the other, the Darhel were always going to screw us over, the only thing you can change is the timetable. GOing back to the first hand, they can't really know that. Well, they do know the Darhel tried to screw them over the issue of pay. However, the Darhel have already recruited several people, in cluding the Secretary of Defense, to push their agenda without ever seeming like they're doing so. Talking everyone down to a 'reasonable' compromise, etc.

There's always the M139 Volcano mine system.

It lays a minefield containing 960 mines in a zone 1,100 m by 120m in 43 seconds from a ground vehicle, and 17 seconds from a helicopter. Introduced around 1995/96.

All equipment for the ground system fits on a 5 ton truck as shown below:



The air system is in two containers that are hung off the side of a UH-60 Blackhawk.

So you just have VOLCANO stockpiled at various cities (remember, the posleen are attracted to tall buildings/urban areas as that is where the most loot is to be found); and fly UH-60s to them, where they're fitted with the Volcano; and they lay minefields along the expected Posleen Routes of Advance -- they can lay it within say 20~ miles of a Posleen horde, since at those distances, the curvature of the earth blocks God-King weaponry that one shots moving aerial targets.

The God-kings rarely go much higher than 1 km, but at that alltitude the horizon is more than a hundred miles.

I like the Volcano idea. The one bit of GalTech EVERYONE has is sort of a version of that, where the mines are somewhat mobile and reusable. Know what, I was keeping this as part of a future post, but here:

The M-281A anti-Posleen area denial weapon was one of the few commonly available bits of "GalTech," the technology that the Galactic Federation had first offered then been unable to supply in any significant quantity.

The device was the bastard child of a mistake, a mistake made by one of the members of the 1st Battalion 555th Mobile Infantry. In the early days of the conflict, Sergeant Duncan, who was a notorious tinkerer, had tinkered a Personal Protection Field into removing all its safety interlocks and then expending all of its power in a single brief surge.

The surge, and the removed safety interlocks, had created a circular "blade" that cut through several stories of the barracks he was in at the time. And, quite coincidentally, through his roommate's legs.

It took quite some time for all the right questions to be asked and in the proper way. But finally it was determined that the boxes were relatively easy for the Indowy technicians to produce, even one at a time. And they easily could be fitted into a human device called a "scatterable mine platform."

The resultant artillery round threw out forty-eight mines, each of which was slightly mobile and had a conformable appearance; the mine was a flattened, circular disk, somewhat like a "cow-patty." The surface could change color and texture depending upon the background, but the default setting was the yellow of Posleen blood, for reasons that became obvious.

After being released from the artillery round in flight, the disks would scatter across a "footprint" about two hundred meters long and seventy meters wide. Then if anything came within two meters of it, the mine would "hop" up one meter and create a field of planar force that extended out fifty meters in every direction. The field would cut through anything except the most advanced Galactic armor, which meant sliced and diced Posleen.

What was nice about the system, from the humans' perspective, was that it had up to six attacks on "onboard" batteries. After its attack it would scuttle sideways slightly and "hide" again, waiting for the next wave of Posleen and looking for all the world like one of the unpleasant "Posleen bits" that was left behind. Although the piles of chopped up Posleen generally gave away the fact that there were Bouncing Barbies in the area. Even to the moronic normals. Since the Posleen generally reacted to minefields by running normals over them until they were clear, this gave the capability to deal with multiple waves, which normal mines did not.

Bouncing Barbie. The accident from the first book come full circle in a mobile reusable cuisinart mine. Deployed via artillery in packs of 48. Only GalTech in widespread use, even now, a decade after the initial conference. Not very impressive, compared to the existing Volcano, besides the idea of reusable mines.

Second Front NOW - 1943 by Walter S. Dunn, Jr. had some interesting points:

In 1942, the US adopted a standard method to "shake-n-bake" a division:

1.) A Parent Division would be picked, and a cadre of 160 officers and 1,200 men was chosen from within that parent division. These people would assemble a month before the new division was activated.

2.) During the assembly process, 450 extra officers would be added.

3.) On the date of activation, 13,400 raw recruits would be assigned to the division. Two weeks after their arrival, basic/individual training would begin.

4.) 17 weeks later, training would be at the level of regiments, followed by 3 months of training at the divisional level. A final two months of training was done in combination with tanks and aircraft. During this period, equipment would be provided at 50% of authorized allowances, more than sufficient for training purposes.

5.) Following all this, the division was considered fit for combat; so 10-12 months were needed for the US to "bake" a division.

That said, there were problems. Sometimes a newly raised division would be forced to provide cadres to form another division, and in some cases a division was cadre'd twice; resulting in a serious loss of experienced manpower.

Additionally, providing Cadres was sometimes seen as a way to dump problem children on someone else; in one case, the 97th division in Spring of 1942 reported that one of it's cadre corporals was 61 years old, and another was over 50.

To solve the problem, the US designated two divisions as replacement divisions in the fall of 1942.

Now, lets apply this to the US Military.

Looking at Wikipedia, my crude count shows the following US Army divisions...

[NOTE: Yes, I know OOB from 2011, not 1999, and we've 'transformed' the military since then from divisions to brigades, but I'm lazy..]

Active Duty:

1st Armored "Old Ironsides"
1st Cavalry "First Team"
1st ID (Mech) "Big Red One"
2nd ID (Mech) "Indianhead"
4th ID (Mech) "Ivy"
3rd ID (Mech) "Marne"
10th Mtn (Light)
25th ID (Stryker) "Tropic Lightning"
82nd ABN
101st ABN

National Guard/Reserve:

28th ID (Medium) (PA/FL)
29th ID (Medium) (VA/MD)
34th ID (Medium) (MN/IA)
35th ID (Mech) (KS/NE)
36th ID (Medium) (TX) (Used to be 49th Armored, changed in 2004)
38th ID (Medium) (IN/MI/OH)
40th ID (Medium) (CA)
42nd ID (Light) (NY/NJ/VT/ME)

So let's work on these assumptions starting from 1999:

• Mobilization starts 1 May 2001.
• Active Duty Divisions, due to their higher quality personnel, can be cadred twice, while National Guard Divisions are cadred once in the initial round of cadreing.
• The 82nd Airborne is cadre'd just once, and then designated our Extrasolar Expeditionary Force (EEF) and has just it's troops transported to Galactic-land, where they take over manning Galactic equipment and pushing the Big Red Buttons, so the Darheel don't sacrifice one Darheel per weapon firing. They also don't provide cadres after this, to avoid depleting the EEF.
• It takes 18 months to form a division to combat status, and while they are training, they need only 50% of assigned equipment.
• After the initial cadre cycle; only half of the divisions now ready are chosen to provide cadres for the next wave, and they only provide one cadre. This is done to prevent dilution of personnel quality.

So here we go:

May 2001 Authorizations; Combat Ready around 23 October 2002.

• 10 x Active Duty Divisions Cadre 19 Divisions.
• 8 x National Guard Divisions Cadre 8 Divisions.
• Divisions Available at end of Cycle: 45 (one is EEF)

November 2002 Authorizations; Combat Ready around 24 April 2004.

• 45 x Active Divisions Cadre 22 Divisions.
• Divisions Available at end of Cycle: 67 (one is EEF)

May 2004 Authorizations; Combat Ready around 23 October 2005.

• 67 x Active Divisions Cadre 33 Divisions.
• Divisions Available at end of Cycle: 100 (one is EEF)

You can see how without too much trouble by posleenfall, I can build up the existing US Army into a 65 division behemoth all ready to munch on Posleen, without crippling problems.

I also have about 30~ divisions five months into an 18 month training cycle, which are beginning to be trained at the regimental level, which means I can somewhat credibly use these divisions as rear area units.

Also, compared to WWII, our recruit pool is much creamier; as we can use Blacks for more than just menial tasks, and we can use women for almost everything now; in addition to our recruits just plain being much healthier compared to their WWII counterparts.

Yes, people are fatter now, but that's something that can be fixed with special boot camp fat farms -- you can't fix stunted growth caused by malnutrition growing up.

I'm liking the idea of the shake n' bake. The main problem of raising a vast conscript army in the books was that they were counting on rejuv to give them officers and senior NCOs. When that dried up, you got a lot of Indians with no Chiefs and they rioted and looted and sold off military hardware for booze. This way, any rejuv is a bonus, but they don't really need them.

My one beef is that while you could conceivably gather the officers and cadre beforehand, you absolutely cannot activate before August 16 (the day the world governments go public with the alien menace) and probably not for a couple of weeks afterwards. Even if you announce the draft on the same day, it will take time to get everyone registered, assigned to their new units etc.

[MKSheppard]

I'll answer your questions a bit later, but something jumped at me, and I did some dirty calculations:

Even if we sacrifice one button pusher to kill 100 Posleen with GalTech Tanks firing wide area SpaceClaymores[tm] at the push of the BIG RED BUTTON...

It would only cost a hundred million Darheel driven insane to kill 20 billion posleen. I'm sure we can find that many; given how Diess IV was stated to have a population of 12 billion before posleen-fall...so why do the Galactics need humanity? 100m dead is small scope on a GALACTIC scale.

Also, surely their AI can't be that terreble at killing Posleen...really, the more you drill in, the less it makes sense.

[Simon_Jester]

I'll answer your questions a bit later, but something jumped at me, and I did some dirty calculations:

Even if we sacrifice one button pusher to kill 100 Posleen with GalTech Tanks firing wide area SpaceClaymores[tm] at the push of the BIG RED BUTTON...

It would only cost a hundred million Darheel driven insane to kill 20 billion posleen. I'm sure we can find that many; given how Diess IV was stated to have a population of 12 billion before posleen-fall...so why do the Galactics need humanity? 100m dead is small scope on a GALACTIC scale.

Also, surely their AI can't be that terreble at killing Posleen...really, the more you drill in, the less it makes sense.

Ahem.

The 12 billion sentients on Diess are/were almost entirely Indowy- who cannot push the button. They cannot do it, racially; you cannot reliably find Indowy willing to push a button that will kill Posleen. You can just barely, maybe drive an Indowy mad enough (by the standards of their species) that they will issue a chain of orders that leads to a machine killing Posleen, but it is nearly impossible to do this. Practically speaking, only the Himmit and the Darhel can push lethal buttons.

The Himmit will always run if spotted*, which makes relying on them to fight (as opposed to relying on them to kill by remote control when they are beyond any danger) nigh-impossible. The Darhel themselves make up only a tiny (powerful) minority on most of the worlds so far attacked- one of the triggers that causes them to bring humans in is that if this goes on, the worlds where significant numbers of Darhel live will be threatened by the Posleen advance.

Darhel can push that button and go horribly, fatally mad in short order. It is not something they are proud or eager to do at all; quite the opposite. Their culture does not exactly encourage that sort of self-sacrifice, either. They are the ruling elite of their civilization and they maintain control via what amounts to corporatist loan-shark tactics. Sacrificing others to save themselves comes as second nature; the reverse does not.

No, you cannot find 100 million Darhel out of a population of several billion who are willing to push those buttons.

Moreover, and this is important, the Galactics are set up to suck at warfare. Since they do not fight wars among themselves, their mental models of what a weapon should look like, how it should be used and kept supplied, are very primitive. This makes it very hard for them to come up with a useful means of handling even something relatively simple like human wave tactics, given that there are complicating factors like the risk of the Posleen landing their troops on the 'wrong side' of your prepared trap.

This also makes it hard to program effective combat AI- they don't know what an effective combat AI looks like.
______________

*Yes, you SHOULD be able to hide a Himmit on the other side of a mountain range and have him push a button which exploderizes a bajillion Posleen by remote control. The Himmit would probably even agree to do this, but Ringo's got the Galactic social structure effed up enough that efforts to do this have not been seriously arranged. Also, it is problematic if the Posleen don't land where expected, among other things.

@simon on the one hand that's true, on the other, the Darhel were always going to screw us over, the only thing you can change is the timetable. GOing back to the first hand, they can't really know that. Well, they do know the Darhel tried to screw them over the issue of pay. However, the Darhel have already recruited several people, in cluding the Secretary of Defense, to push their agenda without ever seeming like they're doing so. Talking everyone down to a 'reasonable' compromise, etc.

The trick is to come up with a mobilization plan that doesn't give the Darhel active reasons to screw us over more. If we have the right 'earthly' weapons to deal with the bulk of the Posleen ground forces with a minimum need to rely on GalTech, and only need GalTech for antilander defense, things should go as well or better than they do in the novels: humanity survives, Darhel ability to screw us is mitigated by our reliance on earthly weaponry. Which they can sabotage, but only to a limited extent.

However, we need some GalTech, so we can't openly reject the Darhel offer to trade GalTech for human expeditionary forces, even given that the Darhel are planning to make that trade very much on their own terms.

The God-kings rarely go much higher than 1 km, but at that alltitude the horizon is more than a hundred miles.

My impression is that they usually stay pretty close to the ground, so as to remain in effective control of their own troops; God-Kings hovering 500 meters up won't be able to talk meaningfully to the normals on the ground. However, they might at least have the concept of a few guys hovering at that altitude as "top cover" and scouting; I don't know.

They don't seem to do it very reliably, though- if they did, you'd expect tactics which revolve around reverse slopes and indirect fire to not work against the Posleen very well, and they do work pretty well.

Bouncing Barbie. The accident from the first book come full circle in a mobile reusable cuisinart mine. Deployed via artillery in packs of 48. Only GalTech in widespread use, even now, a decade after the initial conference. Not very impressive, compared to the existing Volcano, besides the idea of reusable mines.

Oh, I don't know. The lethal radius of the Bouncing Barbie (fifty meters) is enough that if you throw 48 of them in a single cluster round (you can fire multiples of them, remember), you get pretty good coverage...

48*pi*50*50 is roughly... 375000 square meters. That's a larger area than is covered by the M139, and since these mines can physically relocate themselves, they can probably be programmed to form an optimal coverage pattern. So they can arrange themselves to hit pretty much everything in such an area with lethal effect, slicing and dicing practically everything in that third-of-a-square-kilometer. Six times over. From one repeat one artillery-fired cluster munition.

In theory, you can probably even go pick up the mines after the battle is over, recharge the batteries, and load them into another cargo shell to do it again next week.

So basically, this allows one 155mm shell to do the work of full laydown from an M139, and then some.

I'm liking the idea of the shake n' bake. The main problem of raising a vast conscript army in the books was that they were counting on rejuv to give them officers and senior NCOs. When that dried up, you got a lot of Indians with no Chiefs and they rioted and looted and sold off military hardware for booze. This way, any rejuv is a bonus, but they don't really need them.

Yeah- what they should have done is only drafted enough people for the existing army plus rejuv to provide the cadre for. This is also better for war mobilization, because you don't take five million people out of war production before you're ready to arm and properly train them.

This is the difference between a mobilization plan and a "oh shit draft everyone" kneejerk response.

There is a reason why, during WWII, the US military kept calling up new draft numbers throughout the war, rather than just drafting a zillion people in 1942 and then gradually filtering through a system of training camps and supply chains that weren't ready to receive them...

My one beef is that while you could conceivably gather the officers and cadre beforehand, you absolutely cannot activate before August 16 (the day the world governments go public with the alien menace) and probably not for a couple of weeks afterwards. Even if you announce the draft on the same day, it will take time to get everyone registered, assigned to their new units etc.

You can't do that anyway- you can't start the draft before you announce the threat regardless of how you raise those divisions, so you're not starting your divisions any faster. Nor can you start churning out masses of new rifles, artillery, or other weapons by stepping up war production before you announce the threat, because people will ask why you're suddenly requiring the factories that make 155mm shells to work three shifts a day. No mobilization is possible without public awareness of the need to mobilize, period.

Also, you can, in theory, announce the threat sooner if you really need to start drafting people sooner.

[PeZook]

You know, I read a couple of Posleen books waaaaaaay back, so I might not remember something, but...

The God-Kings were essentially feudal warlords who constantly jockeyed for power and influence in the poslie social structure, right? And power and influence was directly tied to how well armed and numerous their little warband was.

So, uh, how come they were willing to just casually throw away hordes and hordes and hordes of soldiers on stuff like clearing minefiels? Shouldn't they, logically speaking, avoid this as much as possible and try to get the next pack over to do it, so that they kept their strength and weapons and depleted their rivals of resources?

[CaptainChewbacca]

God Kings were awarded wealth based on a complex mathematical processor called 'The Net'. It would decide what a God King warranted based on the achievements of his underlings, and could easily award a 'victorious' commander additional troops and superior gear, even if his troops were killed.

[PeZook]

God Kings were awarded wealth based on a complex mathematical processor called 'The Net'. It would decide what a God King warranted based on the achievements of his underlings, and could easily award a 'victorious' commander additional troops and superior gear, even if his troops were killed.

Oh, right!

I thought I was missing something

[Simon_Jester]

Also, new troops breed so quickly after making planetfall that troops are pretty cheap.

The preferred model for the Posleen warlord seems to be to accept heavy casualties in order to secure claims to land and productive industry during planetfall, then quickly breed a new crop of troops in the years after planetfall, then skedaddle off-planet to start the cycle again before said planet blows up in a massive nuclear war due to overpopulation.

Losing the bulk of your "normals" during the invasion is arguably beneficial as long as you win the war, because it increases the amount of time before your holdings reach carrying capacity and overpopulation becomes a problem again.

[MKSheppard]

*snip some recounting by SIMON SAYS*

Darhel can push that button and go horribly, fatally mad in short order. It is not something they are proud or eager to do at all; quite the opposite. Their culture does not exactly encourage that sort of self-sacrifice, either. They are the ruling elite of their civilization and they maintain control via what amounts to corporatist loan-shark tactics. Sacrificing others to save themselves comes as second nature; the reverse does not.

So they're Space!Ferengi Mk II.

Wouldn't that corporatist loan-shark nature also lend itself well to creating hapless dupes?

"Yes, we know Ixylpak; you are in debt to our house for 1 trillion GalCreds, as are your children and their children's children...

...but, you can wipe that debt clean if you push that button."

No, you cannot find 100 million Darhel out of a population of several billion who are willing to push those buttons.

Dyess IV's population was 12~ bn before the Posleen came. If we go by the traditional socialist working cry of "1% own everything", then there were about 120 million Darheel on Dyess IV at that point.

0.5% to 1% of that (Wild Ass Guess/Assumption of percentage critically in debt) gives us from 600k to 1.2m Darheel who can be coerced into pushing that button.

That's enough to kill 60 to 120m Posleen if we assume 100:1 death ratios from those SpaceClaymore tanks; enough to attrit the typical Posleen invasion force (assuming Earth is a typical invasion example).

And of course, there's other planets that the Galactics can draw on for indebted personnel to provide button-pushers.

Moreover, and this is important, the Galactics are set up to suck at warfare.

They can't suck at conceptualizing primitive warfare, if they're still alive against the Posleen 150-175 years after first contact.

It's also stated that teh Galactics have a small amount of success in space warfare, but totally suck in ground war; which means that the ratio doesn't have to be 100:1 for the Darheel suiciders.

It could be 4,000,000:100 if they can spear a Posleen invasion globe before it lands -- and the orbital battle takes a while at each world; in Gust Front, it took five hours (!!) for the Fredericksburg globe to land after it appeared in GEO.

(snip -- I'll answer your other questions later, OK?)

You can't do that anyway- you can't start the draft before you announce the threat regardless of how you raise those divisions, so you're not starting your divisions any faster.

OK, so the public announcement's on 16 August 2001. So figure the mobilization orders get put out on 1 September 2001 -- we need about a month to plan out the basic mobilizations:

This changes the US mobilization to:

End of First Wave: 45 available on 23 February 2003.
End of Second Wave: 67 divisions available on 22 August 2004.
End of Third Wave: 100 divisions available on 23 Feb 2006.

Of course, this is with an 18 month cycle, compared to the 10-12 month cycle of WWII.

Modern weapons actually make it easier to train a soldier; so we could cut a few months from the cycle.

King of The Killing Zone had these statistics from tests the Army did in 1984 on 1,131 M-60 Patton and M-1 Abrams tank crews. Basically back then the Army ranked crews from Category 1 (Smart) to Category 4 (Lowest level accepted by Army).

They found that on average the M-1 crews did 46.7% better than their Patton counterparts, and here's the really interesting bit:

Category 1 crews did only 25% better, while Category 4 crews did 85% better. (!!!)

Nor can you start churning out masses of new rifles, artillery, or other weapons by stepping up war production before you announce the threat

Well, you only need half of a division's basic unit inventory to conduct training; and the US does have quite a lot of stockpiled inventory from the Cold War; I previously posted how we had 5 million 155mm bomblet shells left over.

Meanwhile, the US Army Small Arms Stockpile as of 11 April 2001 was:

Machine Guns:

M2HB Flexible: 23,784
M-60 GPMG: 24,112
M-249 SAW: 70,377
M-240: 12,196
M-240B: 6,164
M-240C: 5,418

Grenade Launchers

M79 Thump Gun: 633
M203: 58,611
Mk 19 AGL: 21,936

Armalytes

M-16A1: 218,693
M-16A2: 641,963
M-16A4: 16,077
M-4: 78,458
M-4A1: 16,497
M-231 Firing Port Weapon: 16,381

Holy Shit, We Still Have These?

M-1 Garand: 4,174
M-14: 117,254
M-3 Grease Guns: 12,637

Sadly, we'd be in better mobilization shape if it wasn't for...



Because in 1993-94 the Army destroyed 479,367 M-14s and in 1996 torched 350,000+ M-16s.

There's more than enough small arms in present stockpiles to give 1~ million troops a personal weapon more significant than a pistol. Given that the official combat rifle count of a division is around 1,500~, we have enough to train/equip the first wave.

As for the rest of the waves; that's where new production comes in place, and we do have 35~ months between September 2001 and August 2004 to bring online production lines and stockpile crap.

Likewise, we also do have about 6,000 Abrams and 4,000 Bradleys in current stockpiles -- that's enough to train 40 divisions' worth at 50% of UE establishment while we wait for the shiny kit to come off the production line -- and we can always use M113s and M60s to make up the difference.

EDIT: That's just the US Army Stockpile of 1.6 million weapons. The USAF has 260k weapons, the USCG some 20k, and the USN/USMC some 800k.

[Thanas]

Shep, you might also be able to draw upon the large number of reservists the various EU nations, Russia and China keep around. Yeah, I know, most of them will not be worth much but some training is better than none.

[PeZook]

Shep, you might also be able to draw upon the large number of reservists the various EU nations, Russia and China keep around. Yeah, I know, most of them will not be worth much but some training is better than none.

They'd be enough to drive trucks and string razor wire around, and in five years you might whip a good number of them into fighting shape. I guess Shep is mostly considering the US because he has access to an insane amount of information on the US Army from all time periods

[MKSheppard]

Shep, you might also be able to draw upon the large number of reservists the various EU nations, Russia and China keep around. Yeah, I know, most of them will not be worth much but some training is better than none.

I'm getting to that mengs.

[PeZook]

We actually discussed with Shep how, if you mobilize the entire world, you can distribute manufacture of small arms, caltrops, razor wire, mines and ammo to all the modern automated factories in places like China.

Modern industry could produce simple weapons like, say, G3s and AK-47s in truly astonishing numbers, more than enough to arm an arbitrarily large army.

[MKSheppard]

I do not think the Galactics, under the basic terms of the scenario, would accept one division of button-pushers as sufficient aid to justify providing us with the GalTech weapons that we are, realistically, going to need pretty badly.

According to The Military Balance 2004-05, the following countries have Airborne units -- generally, these are of decent quality, even if the rest of the military isn't since they're prime anti-coup units/reliable.

Also, the airborne units are a small proportion of the total military, so it's not like you're sending every single good person in that country's military out of the solar system.

I've arranged them by their reliability quotient:

Pretty Reliable

• USA: 1 x Airborne Division
• Spain: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• United Kingdom: 3 x Airborne Battalions
• Belgium: 1 x Para-Commando Brigade
• Czech Republic: 1 x Airborne Battalion
• France: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Portugal: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Romania: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Serbia: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Italy: 2 x Airborne Battalions
• Russia: 4 x Airborne Divisions
• Sweden: 1 x Airborne Battalion
• China: 3 x Airborne Divisions arranged in one Corps
• India: 1 x Airborne/Commando Brigade
• Australia: 1 x Parachute Battalion
• North Korea: 2 x Airborne Sniper Brigades, 3 x Airborne Brigades
• Brazil: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Chile: 1 x Airborne Battalion
• Argentina: 1 x Airborne Brigade, 1 x Airborne Battalion
• Japan: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Indonesia: 2 x Airborne Brigades, 5 x Airborne Battalions
• Malaysia: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Cuba: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Venezula: 1 x Airborne Brigade

Going by 15,000 men in a division, 3,500 in a brigade/regiment, and 650 in a battalion; and also subtracting 10% men for cadres at home...you got 182,000~ troops.

[NOTE: Yes, it might sound funny to call Venezula, Chile and Cuba as reliable...but wait till you see who else has airborne units...]

Unsure Reliability

• Egypt: 1 x Parachute Brigade
• Iran: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Mexico: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Algeria: 1 x Airborne Division
• Libya: 6 x Para-Commando Battalions
• Morocco: 2 x Parachute Battalions
• Oman: 1 x Airborne Regiment
• Saudi Arabia: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Nepal: 1 x Airborne Battalion
• Uzbekistan: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Cambodia: 1 x Airborne/SF Regiment
• Mongolia: 1 x Airborne Battalion
• Vietnam: 1 x Airborne Brigade
• Bolivia: 2 x Airborne Battalions
• Ecuador: 6 x Special Forces/Airborne Battalions
• Guatemala: 2 x Airborne Battalions
• Honduras: 1 x Airborne Battalion
• Uruguay: 1 x Parachute Battalion

Same standards as before; 51,000~ men.

So you can see how Earth, by selecting an arbitrary criteria of only Airborne units, and ignoring airmobile/air assault units, or Special forces; can send 233,000 troops to push buttons; while leaving everyone else to act as mobilization cadre.

As for THE GERMANOIDS (I probably made a hash of this THANAS-kun...)

In the 1980s, they called 2/3rds of all conscriptable manpower up for 15 month obligations (you could opt-out as a conscientious objector and many did), and they formed about half of the Heer's active duty strength.

Once you left the Heer, you were funneled into the reserves, which were laid out as:

• Ready Reservists: 30,000. Those who completed active duty in prior year. Served 1 year in this status.
• Alert Reservists: 800,000. Completed Ready Reserve duty. Serve five years in this status then go to the Replacement Reserve.
• Replacement Reserve: General Manpower pool. You stay in this till 45 for an enlisted man and 60 for an officer.

Thanas may be able to supply more accurate numbers, but from my crude count; Germany from 1980-87 trained somewhere between 210,000 and 800,000 people on how to march in formation and freiheitize people.

These people will be about 30 to 40 in 2001 -- they won't be able to jump out of planes as well as they could in their youth, but they won't need Rejuve to function (unlike WWII vets), and they can train the callow youth of Germany in how to freiheitize the godless alien dinosauroids.