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.
I was wondering where he was going, the last sentence took us there. I don’t think the military would pair up with antifa though, but they would be there for sure causing trouble.
Some pointers I got reading that:
-don’t use social media
-study guerilla warfare
-don’t cause so much trouble as to warrant SOF attention. Squeaky wheels will get the grease.
-that scenario is for the rural PNW, midwest and urban locales would be a different story.
Sounds like a stalemate with no end in sight.
The rural Midwest would be a different chapter, but not a different story.
The northeastern Midwest – Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana – would play out much the same as the story above. Small groups of harassing guerrillas striking out and then melting back into the woods. The Michigan and Wisconsin contingents would no doubt also have a lot of fun playing pirate on the Great Lakes…
The Great Plains states of the Midwest – Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, etc – would basically be the Indian Wars crossed with Mad Max…
There are only a few expressways across Michigan. While high explosives might be hard to come by, creating 100 pounds of black powder is not. Now find one of those bridges that has central columns. Place your improvised munitions against that column. Pack it down with a metric done of sandbags, make that 3 metric tons. Light the fuse and vanish.
There will be a large Kaboom. It may or may not destroy or damage the bridge.
What it will do is close that bridge until it has been fully inspected. You don’t want your fuelers crossing over a bridge that might collapse at any moment. And now they have hundreds of bridges and overpasses they have to watch.
Security just got that much harder.
Or one person with an anti-material rifle taking shots at 500+ meters into the engines of just about any big rig. That rig is going to stop and block traffic. Don’t need no trees.
Now you have a bunch of people trying to clear the mess, do the insurgents take a few pot shots at dismounted troops?
During the American revolution there was low scale guerilla warfare going on for a long time before the Americans organized into armies. Civil war Mk. II will be forth generation warfare. It will be people taking one shot and making it count. The only way to stop that sort of warfare is terror reprisals.
Terror reprisals against your own people doesn’t sit well with most troops.
Just imagine reading the proclamation from president Joe Bidden’s office, during is 22 year in office during this emergency, stating that for every soldier killed, 10 people will be rounded up at random and executed, as the Germans did in WWI and WWII.
At the same time the military would be having significant issues weapons blowing up in soldiers hands when fired. Turns out that some arse has been sneaking over pressured 5.56 ammo into the supply chain.
Seems they took slow burning rifle powder and replaced it with a major over charge of pistol powder. The rounds are indistinguishable from production rounds and they are showing up in almost any batch of ammo produced after the great vax purge of 2021. There is even rumors of .50 BMG ammo out there that is over pressure.
And maintenance time on almost all equipment has gone through the roof. Seems that fuel is being contaminated with sugar. Not enough to shut down an engine right away, but it does clog up injectors and carbs horribly.
And somebody managed to get a few 100 thousand class 3 bolts marked as class 8 bolts and there have been failures all over the place. Even 100% testing isn’t solving the issue.
The vast majority of infrastructure in this country – bridges, overpasses, railways, electric grid, fuel depots, locks, dams, et cetera – are keep secure by little more than a chain link fence (maybe with some barbed wire), a padlock, and a sign that says “Do Not Enter.” If it’s really important, there might be a security guard with a flashlight and a walkie talkie to chase away curious teenagers.
They’re safe mostly because no one wants to mess with them. For god’s sake, in almost all of our largest urban areas, the main drinking water reservoirs are PUBLIC PARKS… and the water treatment plants that clean the water coming out of them are largely unmanned, run by automated systems, with a couple of guys doing maintenance checks during the day and maybe a night watchman.
The amount of sabotage that a determined insurgency within this country could do is mind-boggling.
Our country is mostly kept safe by the collective goodwill of its residents. If that’s lost…
The miltitary pair up with child-rapists and criminals? You’re right, that could never happen. And they certainly didn’t spend twenty years doing it in Afghanistan because the politicians said to…
The military might not partner up with Antifa, but they certainly would use them. More likely allow them to run rampant in some areas so that the military can concentrate elsewhere.
Just one more tool in the box. Use it if you have it.
It would be unsustainable for the military in the long term. The longer a scenario like this plays out, the less legitimate the military is in the eyes of a growing number of people.
It sounds like he’s pretty familiar with the terrain and roads between Portland and Boise (I expect it’s an innocent typo that he wrote “I85”; the actual highway is I-84).
For most of the Columbia Gorge, the highway parallels the Columbia River and is carved out of the hillside, resulting in near-vertical climbs in many places. There are exits every mile or two, as with any other highway, but very few bypasses; most exits dead-end in whatever town or attraction is there, and to get back on the highway you usually have to backtrack to the same exit’s on-ramp.
A large river to the north, mountains to the south, and limited real exits and bypasses, I-84 is a very effective “Thermopylae” situation. You’d have to go WAY out of the way to get around it, and it wouldn’t take much to turn it into a logistical nightmare.
He did miss a few points that would make it painfully easy to severely restrict traffic … but I wouldn’t want to give anyone ideas…. 😉
How long before Chinese (or Russian or Cuban or Iranian or…) “volunteers” would be brought in to “help”? You know that the rest of the world wouldn’t just set back and watch.
I shared with a friend who’s been there, done that. He agrees it’s realistic. Of course, this is not an urban scenario. For that read about Sarajevo. Makes this one look like dodgeball.
Roy brings up a good point, and there wouldn’t be much better success down here in the SW, we still have indians that are REAL GOOD about sneaking and peeking…
In fall of 2020, approximately 11.5 million individual licenses to hunt deer were issued nationwide.
That’s 11.5 million people who have at a minimum rudimentary skill in camouflage, movement through rough terrain, stalking and/or use of a blind, and the ability to accurately kill a 150-300 lbs. animal with a single shot… from weapons of similar design and caliber to the battle rifles used by every single nation involved in WWII.
Plus, in any given year, one has to assume that a fair few people who have gone deer hunting in the past that for one reason or another couldn’t get around to it this year. Then there’s people like me who have the skills to be a hunter, but just don’t like hunting (“It’s early in the morning, it’s really cold outside, and I don’t wanna go.” –Ron White). Even if it’s one to ten ratio, that’s a couple million more people.
And that’s just the ones that bothered to do the paperwork to get permission to hunt the king’s deer. You gotta assume there’s at least a few thousand poachers out there… Probably tens of thousands.
Not only that, but some fraction of that 11.5 million hunts with bow and arrow. So even if you manage to get rid of all civilian firearms somehow, that wouldn’t make the enemy safe.
The short story reminds me a whole lot of essays of Matthew Bracken, like “When the music stops”, not to mention his Enemies trilogy. In Vol.1 of that trilogy, illegal immigrants were recruited into the armed forces to keep the citizens down. In Vol. 2, UN “peacekeepers” with their well known rapist habits are added.
If you haven’t read these, I’d urge you do to so. Scary lessons wrapped in excellent story telling.
Either it stops at less than 10,000 dead, or it goes to 30-40 Million dead. Maybe 150 Million if nukes get used.
China, and Russia, even Mexico and the EU will all want to support their faction(s). In the mean time, while we draw inward, China tries to, and maybe takes Taiwan, Japan, and Australia. India and Pakistan may go hot, especially if China eggs Pakistan on.
The mideast will get really messy. Israeli nukes may deter the Arab National Armies from attacking and keep them out of the worst of it. Don’t expect a real reliable oil supply when Iran decides to support the Shia minorities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.
Africa? You can count on four things. it will be tribal, stupid, extremely bloody, and leave a screwed up mess.