I was looking up interwar contigency plans.. and found the following
link
I am also looking up war plans red and scarlet but cannot find much short of sweet fuck all. Any one know much about these and have links to any hard info?The Compuserve Military forum many years ago had a small unclassified discussion
about a way-out contingency, this one as "left-field" as War Plan Scarlet, the
US War vs Australia in the 20s.
This was in the context of 2 separate incidents where Qantas aircraft were threatened
with being shot down by the USN, and the Australian PM said basically that if
it happened, it would be an act of war. The reaction of many on the forum was
"So what's Australia gonna do, huh?" Whereupon someone told em who'd done a
bit of work on the contingency - purely as an exercise in assessing our own
vulnerabilities. CyberAttacks on Stock Exchanges, Banks, a huge propaganda campaign
via the US media, and so on.
FWIW the conclusion from the Australians who'd looked at it was that with the
resources available then (early 90s), the US Economy could be wrecked pretty
comprehensively. It would cost in GNP terms more than all the wars in the 20th
century put together. The dollar would be worth its weight in paper, no more.
Trouble is, this would be "mutual annhihilation" - there's so much global interdependency
that the resulting worldwide Depression would get *everybody* upset at us, *really*
upset at us. And would wreck our own economy in the process of course, but that
would be the least of our problems.
At least one active [participant in the forum was in the US DIA (Defence Intelligence
Agency) to my knowledge. Within 2 years, the phrase "assymetrical warfare" had
been coined, and work started on attack. My own personal hobby-horse is Civil
(Cyber-)Defence, but that's another issue.