As has been famously said, quantity has a quality all of its own. World War Two was the pinnacle of this militarily-the Soviets, having failed to learn much against the Finns, doubled down and threw even more quantity against quality and won mostly as they allied with us and achieved yet more quantity. The Germans should have won, achieving unmatched superiority despite ingrown handicaps, and it took the combined meat-grinders of the globes two largest resource laden empires to wear them down. If you look at the casualty counts and study a bit of the typical general’s strategies, you’ll notice that the Americans had little finesse outside human wave assaults. That we actually had leaders that applied a bit of common sense and managed slightly better than the Russians who refused to part from the practices of the first war still doesn’t lend all that much extra credence to our side, given our supposed level of education and wealth. We were just as wasteful of human life, a practice our Army has perfected for over two hundred years without wavering, but failed to match our allies in percentages only because while their struggle was for life and death, ours was merely on behalf of the bankers. If the cause of avenging the attack on Pearl Harbor had been as widespread as the propaganda seems to suggest, there would have been no need for the draft.
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For the survivalists, this old school military practice has been copied enthusiastically from our military, that brilliant organization of waste and stubbornness. Nothing delights the glorious warriors of the future apocalypse more than throwing gross ton weights of lead down range in a vain attempt at hitting something in shotgun fashion. Not that this isn’t a standard accepted military practice. It certainly is. And not that most survivalists could even think about being proficient marksmen. They really aren’t. Nothing tickles my sense of irony more than most folks fantasy of being snipers while loaded down with dozens of magazines for their semi-auto’s. But I’ll get off my most favorite hobby horse. My point is that their insistence on quantity has nothing to do with longevity, and everything to do with quality. They believe in a superior use of firepower winning the day. Granted, it certainly helps. But that superiority only wins the day initially. What then? You are still planning for a short collapse, followed by a swift return to a resource abundant future. But, alas and however, logic points to a very long, if nor permanent, dark age of resource contraction. Right now, today, this instant, in a still functioning machine agricultural age, in a petroleum fueled resource extraction economy, you need to be stocking up for the long haul post-apocalypse. Years and decades of grain reserves ( NOT weeks and months of high cost luxury foods ) and ammunition to last for multiple years ( NOT multiple gun battles ). Stop acting as if the nuclear war planning during the Cold War is valid. There won’t be a recovery after a few weeks in fallout shelters. That was NOT good planning, that was pap served up to fooling the sacrificial lambs they had a chance of survival. NO recovery. You are on your own for several lifetimes. Plan accordingly.
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Contact Information* Links To Others* Top 20 Survivalist Fiction* Land In Elko* Lord Bison*my bio & biblio
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My books: http://bisonprepper.blogspot.com/2015/04/my-book-links.html
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.
"ammunition to last for multiple years" ... how many gunfights do you expect to survive ?
ReplyDeleteI think most survivalists take the excuse of prepping to enlarge their collection of guns and I know they will not like this but I think the goal should to avoid a gunfight at all cost.
I'm certainly not a pacifist or even anti-guns at all. I just don't like the idea to get shot at ;-)
So have guns, be proficient with them but don't make them your first option.
I think food is the primary concern, then debt free, then guns. That said, the more ammo the better. Not because you will in probability outlast the enemy, but just in case you actually do
DeleteI'll be hidin out like a wood tick until the initial 80% have been killed off then I'll emerge and defend the compound from any impending ne'er do wells wandering around. Might even be able to peel off a few boxes of ammo for some walkin round money. I got a deep aversion to high speed puncture wounds.
Delete7,000 rds of US taxpayer paid for ammo was expended for each killed Iraqi soldier.
ReplyDeleteThe thing the US gov't does better than anyone else is waste everything.
But then, I probably would too if everything I had was stolen.
Gunpowder weapons started out needing to be "shotgun" fired. The thinking never really evolved past Gustovus Adolphus innovations increasing rates of fire and smaller more mobile cannon ( a lot of ideas borrowed from the Dutch, but he made them work better ).
DeleteOnce, in the army, to quell our interest in full automatic, we were given the opportunity to do so with the M16 and a 30rd mag. Every action flik I've seen since then has been damaged. It is not humanly possible to prevent the end of the M16 barrel from quickly rising skyward rendering it's accuracy invalid. That 30 rd mag was empty in 2.6 seconds - over 600 rds per minute. At the end of "First Blood" Stallone opens up on full auto with an M60 while holding it with one hand. LOL, yeah, RIGHT!
Delete3 rd burst at most if you're serious.
"shotgun-fired" powder weapons: thus the lines of Redcoats, 3 or 4 ranks deep, drilled to near-perfection/automatic-soldiers in terms of timing to fire, rotate back, reload, rotate forward, repeat until victory.
Delete"Aiming" was sort of a general-direction thing with a smoothbore firing a round ball through clouds of black smoke. The colonist rifle technique was completely unfair, like little brown people shooting at GI's with AK-47's from dense jungle. If a technique is unsporting, but you win, it's good for war. Sportsmanship will be discussed with survivors.
I want to be on the sneaky side, doing just enough to keep the enemy stressed, while putting myself in as little danger as possible. There just isn't enough meat or ammo on my team to throw it out willy-nilly into an industrial meat grinder of a modern army.
Tiny pieces of smelly irresistable bait (tuna juice over chicken knuckles!), inside an inescapable trap, set by an invisible enemy is my kind of fight. Possum jerky, possum gloves! Scale up as required.
We saw AF-1 fly over SE Portland this afternoon with a monster escort of fighters, as if the POTUS was part of a Moscow Red Square victory parade. He's only here to get $10K/plate donations from the collectivist elite of Portlandia. Disgusting, in the middle of a deep depression like this.
pdxr13
The elite can't live by our rules, it would make them less than elite. One day, the poor will be tazed for rooting through the White House dumpster for all the wasted food.
DeleteG.S.- I remember the full auto myself- one of the few sensible training moments we had. Something a lot of fiction writers should have experianced
Delete“I think the goal should to avoid a gunfight at all cost”
ReplyDeleteGood post 7:58, and I agree wholeheartedly. Contrary to what many wannabe Rambo's might think, I don't think that you would survive too many firefights in real life. I recall one of my college friends telling me that he was given custody to his Aunt, due to his father being a combat soldier in Vietnam. I can't recall what he said that his father's odds of returning were, but statistically speaking, they were not the best.
To take a page from history, and contrary to the television westerns, real life gunfighters rarely squared off and faced one another in battle. Had they done so, they would have had even shorter lived careers than they already had. So Matt Dillon facing off against bad guy after bad guy well into middle age, would have been an act of sheer folly. He would have been lucky as hell to have survived such a fighting style more than a dozen times had this been real life.
Dillon being smart and bushwacking his enemies doesn.t sell detergent or kiddie plastic Marshal capgun sets
DeleteWe're big fans of Gunsmoke around here, we rent the discs from netflix and listen to the even older radio shows (William Conrad was Dillon - Yeah, that fat dood) in mp3 format for free from archive.org and I had read somewhere that over the course of the TV series Dillon had killed something like 300+ people. Incidently, the guy at the front of the old B/W shows that Dillon draws down on was some sort of real life gunsharp back in the 50's.
DeleteDillon: "Now get outta here before I keeya, or throw ya in jail, or beat ya half ta death." LOL
I actually like the radio program with William Conrad better ghostsniper.
DeleteI had a friend that grew up in Chile in the 1960's and early 70's who once told me of all the gun fights he(even as a small boy) and his family had partaken in and obviously won. His father in particular was regularly shooting people it seems( a loverly old gentalman he was to). I actually believe that to survive in a post apocalyptic world, you probably will be in at least a few deadly encounters. Not all of those 80% of sheeple that will die off will have the good grace to starve to death quietly in there homes, I'm afraid many will need to be sent to meet there maker hissing and shrieking. Aussie
ReplyDeleteWhy can't they die off in a global pandemic? Then we could go shopping at each empty home.
DeleteWhen comparing die off scenarios the #1 best is global 3+ wave pandemic. Killing less than 30% in each wave, (but more than 10%)
Deletethe survivors of one wave dispose of the bodies of the wave previous. With waves 6 months or less apart, the population could be reduced to about 1/3 the current amount.
Which is why I KNOW that ebola isn't engineered by TPTB for this purpose, no one wants to get near a still highly infectious ebola bodies, and the death rate is too high vs infection rate.
Some sort of Super Flu would work better, especially if it dies out of a living host for a day or two - wait 3 days, haul off the bodies and hope you don't get hit with the next epidemic wave.
I bet the inability of TPTB to figure out how to sufficiently protect themselves is why this hasn't been used yet. The biggest risk would be if a star trek like 'total immunity' shot is developed and proven workable; then, while it is elective and expensive but with a good track record (several years) is when the designed plague would hit.
Plague is far superior to other weapons of mass destruction, conventional wars, other large scale natural disasters, starvation, etc., for reducing the human population. done quickly enough, but not to quickly, there would be hardly any clean up, just salvage/looting on a massive scale to dwarf the colonial period of the American Frontier.
what about emp? weapon already available, no need to wait for oil drawdown.
Delete