PODA weapons devolution 5

PODA WEAPONS DEVOLUTION 5

Conventional And Guerrilla Warfare

Agricultural empires don’t “do” guerrilla warfare.  For one thing, food surplus plus labor surplus plus resource extraction isn’t needed to conduct irregular warfare.  You fight with the infrastructure you’ve built for war.  For another, one standard army is a match in a fixed defense against an invader whereas a guerrilla army has little hope for victory if they remain in place.  Fixed defenses in the form of farmland dictate the fighting style.  Just as mobility and an entire male population of individual warriors ( tribes have less hierarchal leadership than nations or empires ) dictates how war is conducted.  Another consideration is that empires don’t have thirty years to conduct hit and run ambushes to subdue an enemy.  Standard armies are expensive.  Hurling them against another army where in victory the payoff is tangible in the form of land and treasure and strategic advantage is much more agreeable than having them piss away time and material raiding in squad sizes.  This might seem quite the obvious point, but you must keep this in mind in an Apocalypse army and your grand strategies.  You can use guerrillas, and you can use conventional fighting armies, but in the long run you can’t use one for the wrong type of fighting.  You can’t use guerrillas as defenders.  An invading army triumphs against irregulars.  The question might become whether that army will stick around after a period of harassment, given a lack of will or resources, but the question is rarely if they will initially prevail.

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There is going to be a pretty standard fantasy going around the post collapse hinterlands amongst the independent homesteads comprised of free thinking survivalists that made it through the die-off ( very few participants of that die-off are going to make it through, and those that do should be particularly vulnerable to those emerging from the rubble, fresh of supply and energy-although some will of course be combat hardened- and they should in probability be defeated ) that they are the modern Minutemen who shall take up arms at the first sign of trouble, converge into voluntary war bands, fight the good fight of the strong and righteous and emerge in God’s shining light victorious, then disband and go back to running their own lives as they see fit.  The reality is going to be a smidge different.  Individualism was never strong in the northeast YankeeLand.  It was the Celtic immigrants to the southern west that were willing to fight for their independence and it was the Anglo-Saxon immigrants who were far more willing to be led as sheep under the illusion of their vote counting.  Most of the sheep lined up in pretty rows for the British to blast- the woodsmen who were independent fought Indian style.  It is pretty simple.  It doesn’t matter if you are a true blue American that determines if you will be free.  It is your style of growing food.  If you need roads and police and soldiers at the trade spots or protecting your crops from invading armies, you’re going to be a subject.  If you are in the mountains, in villages that are poor but self-sufficient, or are able to graze animals for substance, THEN you will be free. 

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