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Subject: scenario creation
NOFSC    2/6/2007 11:28:35 PM
Where would I find people so interested in military tactics that they enjoy coming up with invasion scenarios and figuring out how they would win in those situations? I'm talking about modern day what ifs, not historical events?
 
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Jeff_F_F       2/7/2007 10:12:57 AM
LOL, how can I help but bite... What sort of invasion are you thinking of?
 
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tomadog02       2/7/2007 1:45:28 PM
Well, I'll bite.  Count me in.

Given the vast amounts of technical data out there and the ability to view anywhere on the planet (thank you Google Earth), I would think that you could really create some fantastic scenarios.

 
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tomadog02       2/7/2007 1:56:32 PM
Well, I'll bite.  Count me in.

Given the vast amounts of technical data out there and the ability to view anywhere on the planet (thank you Google Earth), I would think that you could really create some fantastic scenarios.

 
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NOFSC    Is this going to get me in trouble?   2/7/2007 8:40:28 PM
Santa Cruz, California.

It's a small beach town, population 40,000 or so. It's sandwiched between the Santa Cruz mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Highway One, running north and south is the main road out of town in those directions. Highway 17 goes over the mountains towards San Jose and the silicon valley area.

If you were invading from the ocean, and the goal was to hold it for awhile, until a larger force could land, how big would your initial landing party need to be? What equipment would you need/want to have? How would you cut off those main arteries out of town? What else would you need to do to subdue a population of that size? I'm not talking about an invasion by some country with a navy, etc. - more of a small, desperate force with an axe to grind.

As far as I know there are police and a swat team in town. I don't believe there is any kind of military base/training place, etc. There is a hospital with a helicopter landing pad, but no airport.

(And yes, this is purely a mental exercise)

 
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Jeff_F_F       2/7/2007 10:51:10 PM
Are we thinking realistic here? Is this part of a large scale campaign, or are we just using the terrain and local population as OpFor in an isolated scenario?
 
The isolated scenario would be interesting, but for there to be much point, you'd have to let it go long enough to develop partisan insurgents, pipe-bomb factories, individual people coming out of the woodwork with guns, getting together and running hit and run sniping campaigns, etc.
 
If you are looking at a long term campaign attacking the US has 5 big problems. 1) The US has a huge amount of untapped natural resources, in addition to a variety of minerals, we have a huge petrolium reserve that if we were motivated to use we could tap for quite a while. My understanding is that America has one of the worlds few un-exploited deposits of aluminum oxide ore as opposed to bauxite which it the usual form of aluminum ore. Little things like that. 2) The US has a huge economy and is capable of mass production on a scale that few enemies could possibly equal today. 3) The US has a fairly large population 300,000,000+, which has a tendency to violence under the best of circumstances, many of whom have military experience, even more of whom have grown up playing violent first person shooter video games, of which the MMP versions are decent introductions to military tactics. 4) The United states has at least 200,000,000 privately owned guns, and a widely distributed knowledge base when it comes to improvisation of explosives. The US population is also no stranger to all forms of civil disobedience and the not-so-civil forms. 5) The sleeping giant effect.
 
It isn't that you can't do it, but you have to plausibly either mitigate or overcome these obstacles.
 
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joe6pack       2/7/2007 11:06:15 PM

Santa Cruz, California.



It's a small beach town, population 40,000 or so. It's sandwiched
between the Santa Cruz mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Highway One,
running north and south is the main road out of town in those
directions. Highway 17 goes over the mountains towards San Jose and the
silicon valley area.



If you were invading from the ocean, and the goal was to hold it for
awhile, until a larger force could land, how big would your initial
landing party need to be? What equipment would you need/want to have?
How would you cut off those main arteries out of town? What else would
you need to do to subdue a population of that size? I'm not talking
about an invasion by some country with a navy, etc. - more of a small,
desperate force with an axe to grind.



As far as I know there are police and a swat team in town. I don't
believe there is any kind of military base/training place, etc. There
is a hospital with a helicopter landing pad, but no airport.



(And yes, this is purely a mental exercise)




Hmm, I was actually using google to look for info on Santa Cruz.. and came across this article:
 
 
I'd say perhaps with a decent Psy Ops campaign you could convince the locals that your "group with an axe to grind" was in the right and the US had it coming.
 
Seriously, I suppose the force you would need would greatly depend on how "hostile" the local population is going to be to "occupation".  If there is a peace at costs or save the city crowd rather death before occupation crowd (think Paris vs Stalingrad WWIIish)
 
 
 
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NOFSC       2/8/2007 12:18:15 AM
Joe - your link didn't work, but yeah, the local population is bound to side with just about anyone against the US government.

For the sake of this discussion let's call the scenario a limited one.

If you look at a map of the area you'll see Santa Cruz (the city), Capitola, Soquel, Aptos. In Capitola, Aptos, and along the west side of Santa Cruz you are going to find upper middle class to wealthy people who own very few weapons. In the Santa Cruz Beach Flats neighborhood there is some? gang activity - so maybe an enclave of fighters there that would band together. Soquel might also have a group of people who are a little more on the fringe side - I doubt anyone's stockpiling, but there are certainly guns, handguns - small stuff. In the mountains you'll find some amount of people connected to marijuana production and trade, along with more "interesting" out-there people doing their own thing. At one point there was a small crowd of Freemen in the area. The growers definitely have some weapons, and would probably fight.

For the sake of this scenario I'm going to put 1,000 trained soldiers (infantry) up in the hills. So, you've got an attacking force, a defending force, with a fairly hippy/fringe population in between them, and a limited duration of time before either side can be reinforced. The goal of the attackers is to subdue the population and get a toehold in Santa Cruz. The goal of the defenders is to repel this force with the least amount of loss of life of the civilian population.

I am going to have to think a bit about the locals. You're right - some of them could very possibly side with the attackers in terms of philosphy. On the other hand, any show of force is going to turn them right off, so it's probably a wash.

Jeff - the stuff you brought up about a larger scenario against the US raises a lot of interesting points - save those thoughts. I've got more questions about that down the road.

 
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smitty237       2/8/2007 1:43:59 AM
Sorry I missed this post when it originally came out.  There was a mini-series that came out in the late 1980's called Amerika, in which the United States was controlled by an occupying Communist army under the umbrella of the UN.  The concept there was that the Federal government had pretty much fallen apart and that the US had succumbed politically to a foreign invasion.  Frankly, I feel that this is the only way that a foreign invasion could stand a reasonable chance of succeeding in the United States, and even then the occupiers would be in for a long haul. 
 
Another scenario is that the Southwestern United States becomes so dominated by Mexican immigrants that they take over most of the local and state governments.  They then discuss secession from the United States to form their own nation and/or unite with Mexico.  When this is resisted by the Federal US government the people in those areas form their own militias and vow to fight any efforts of the Federal government to exert its will over the Southwest.  Mexico and other Latin American countries pledge solidarity with the Hispanic citizens of the Southwest and threaten to use military force if necessary to protect them from a US Federal crackdown.  Millions of Hispanics in other parts of the continental United States head to the Southwest out of solidarity or to escape persecution.  The Southwest areas controlled by Hispanics create their own government, military, and police force, and announce a referendum on succession from the United States.  The referendum passes, and the new government declares itself independent of the United States of America.  The President of the United States, backed by a bipartisan group of congressmen and senators, declares the referendum and declaration invalid, and announces plans to mobilize military forces to enforce Federal law and authority in the Southwest.
 
On the international front, the secession is wildly popular in the Latin American world.  Hugo Chavez (or a similar Latin American crackpot dictator) announces that he will form an expeditionary force to help his Latino brothers and sisters escape gringo tyranny, and invites other Latin American countries to do the same.  Overseas countries hostile to the United States see an opportunity to hurt the United States and collude with drug lords to finance armies and train guerrillas to fight any invading American forces.  Meanwhile, militias in the Southwest start taking over American military posts and National Guard armories and seizing enough equipment to form a rather formidable military force.  Troops from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and other South American countries, as well as tens of thousands of "volunteers" arrive in Mexico and begin mobilizing a few miles from the Mexican/US border.  The United States government calls these troop movements a "provocation" and vows to attack any military forces that cross the Rio Grande.  It asks for a number of resolutions in the UN to condemn the mobilization of hostile forces on the border, but those resolutions are blocked by Russian and/or China/France in the Security Council. 
 
The United States sends in Federal Agents to attempt to serve Federal arrest warrants of the secessionist ringleaders, but when those agents are arrested and detained by the Southwestern secessionist government, the President of the United States, backed by Congress, delivers and ultimatum:  The areas of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas controlled by the secessionist government will cease their efforts to secede and agree to submit to Federal authority.  If they fail to do so the Federal government will exercise the right to use military force to restore order and the rule of law. 
 
The deadline for compliance arrives and passes with no action on the part of the secessionist government.  Several US Army Divisions staged all over the region begin advancing into the secessionists areas.  Almost immediately the Mexican Army, supported by units from other Latin American armies, cross the border into the continental United States to support the secessionist forces.  Naval commandos and marines from Cuba, Mexico, and other Latin American countries land in Southern California to support secessionist militias already laying siege to Camp Pendelton and other American military instillations in the area.  Soon Venezuelan, Cuban, and Mexican Air Force aircraft are flying sorties in support of secessionist military operations, and eventually begin engaging US Air Force and Marine Corps fighters and bombers.  Army and Marine M-1 Abrams first encounter secessionist forces M-1 Abrams, and then Cuban and Venezuelan T
 
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NOFSC       2/8/2007 2:16:10 AM
Yeah, I don't think the whole hispanic invasion thing is going to play out, because of the whole assimilation thing. People from South America aren't immigrating to the US with evil intentions - they just want a better standard of living, you know? I can't imagine an established extended hispanic family in some northern city of the US travelling to the southwest to become rebels. I don't think they would identify as a group that way. And the French pitching in? Really? Now, I've certainly read science fiction that proposed scenarios in which other countries gang up on and overthrow the US because they're sick of it pushing others around. One book stands out in my mind that I read years ago, but I can't think of the title right now.

I'm trying to pick people's brains here about military particulars, really - for the scenario I posted above. Talking about other scenarios is interesting, too, and I've got a whole string of them to pose and ruminate over, but at the moment I'm searching for something pretty specific, in other words hoping that the people here can talk in terms of equipment and personnel because they've done a heck of a lot more research on all of it than I have. Or at least that someone can point me in the right direction.

 
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Jeff_F_F       2/8/2007 5:15:29 PM
The latin American scenario above doesn't assume evil intentions. It is basically the story of Texas pushed forward into the modern world, with the national roles reversed. IIRC, basically the Spanish government supported American citizens moving into the area, but then became oppressive when the full magnatude of the problem became apparent. A similar scenario could occur in the near future US.
 
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