Very plausible short story posted on Twitter
This thread from this account:
https://twitter.com/FedUpGrump/status/1437466429457043471
Unrolled for your ease of reading and just in case Twitter makes it go away:
You’re a battalion commander in 2ID. For nine months you’ve been tasked with keeping I85 open between Portland and Boise. It’s a ridiculous area for one battalion, but every maneuver unit in the military is tasked.
There is no rotation out on the horizon. Your companies are strung out in platoon COPs across 500 miles of mostly remote highway.
Most of your HHC is in ad hoc platoons covering sectors as well.
The supply line is absolutely vital to keep the rest of your brigade sustained as it tries to secure Idaho.
Just as important is keeping it open westbound, to supply Portland, Seattle, and the areas in between. The insurgency played hell with the supply chain. FEMA is rationing food and necessities in urban areas, and every load is needed.
Early on you mostly dealt with occasional harrassment and clearing logs from the roadway. Turns out one guy with a chainsaw can snarl traffic through Umatilla National Forest for hours. Tracking them on logging roads and ATV trails is a nightmare.
You quickly learned that if you sent out road crews without escort, they would take harassing fire immediately. After one crew had their equipment torched and was forced to walk back in underwear, they refuse to work without a security element.
The problem is that when security is with the road crews, the insurgents just flex a few miles away and either create another roadblock, or sometimes hijack and burn a few loads stuck in the traffic. They especially seem to love hitting your fuelers. You’ve tried sending up UAVs to catch them at it, but they seem to have uncanny awareness of when you’re setting a trap and rarely bite. Those few you do roll up are sent north to the massive camp near Moses Lake. What you really need are SOF assets hunting the enemy while your forces hold key terrain.
Unfortunately, those assets are stretched thin and hard to come by.
It doesn’t help that the army lost 35% of long tabs in the Vax Purge of ’21. It also doesn’t help that half of 1st group is considered “politically unreliable” and is kept on Rear D at JBLM. Rumor is at least a dozen of those guys have up and vanished with their families, but solid info is kept close. You just know getting SOF assets in your AO is dicey.
SOF aren’t the only ones with personnel issues. You left 28 natives of Oregon and Idaho on rear D, to avoid any conflicts. Just last month CID rolled up an E4 who was passing convoy manifests and schedules to an old battle buddy in Lakewood, who was passing it to the insurgents.
Now your entire rear D is in segregated barracks and closely watched, and you’ve had to confiscate phones across the battalion. Your soldiers get one monitored call per week to their families. You’ve already signed 7 NJPs for guys who got caught with burners. The best intel you get, at least at first, was from social media companies providing data based on algorithms that identified insurgent activity.
The first round of mass arrests got hundreds. That dried up quickly, as they stopped using the platforms. It also scooped up hundreds of people based on social media history who are being held without charges, and are a constant PR nightmare. You have family members at your CP every day demanding due process, though you have nothing to do with detainee ops.
The biggest headache in your life, though, is the “volunteers”. When the proud boys tried to make a stand in Vancouver, and were immediately crushed, hundreds of “antifascists” showed up to “help”. You’ve been ordered to treat them as partner forces, but they’re worse than ANA. Half of them wheeze when they climb out of their subarus, and the other half can’t hold high ready for more than 10 seconds. They don’t follow orders, and after a few complaints about looting and some proud boy families going missing, the gloves came off locally. They still won’t engage your forces directly, but any “volunteers” who leave the wire on their own are likely to be found nailed to a tree. Of course local property crime and rape seems to correlate directly to their presence. They don’t want to fight, but they’ll harass civvies.
You get your morning brief and find that some of Idaho NGs missing Stingers surfaced last night and you’re down a chinook. You thank your lucky stars that Americans with ARs can’t fight the military.
