The second and last part of the Sea Lion Press discussion is now up.
Soviet-Romanian War: The Chronology
I finally have a set chronology for the course of the Soviet/Romanian alternate history war I keep posting about. And yes, I’m now running three WIP books simultaneously.
Using the classical best-case 60km a day (on average) rate of advance, the Soviets would cross Romania in a little more than a week. Under their 70-100km guidelines for weaker opponents (which it’d definitely qualify as), it would fall in 5 days (too optimistic)[1] However, the same sources drop their rate to 30 km in mountainous terrain, found in central Romania.
The Bulgarians take an outsize share of the casualties. In part, this is because of the difference in both skill and equipment (in 1989, the Bulgarians historically still had T-34s equipping their reserve formations!). It’s also because of them having to cross the Danube opposed, never an easy task.
Bucharest, with its population of 2 million people, is not initially stormed in full. Instead it’s surrounded, left for the Bulgarians to keep encircled, and squeezed while the rest of the country is overrun. In around two weeks at absolute most, it is.
In a nod to the Gulf War, BARCAPS are placed to keep the doomed RoAF from escaping to Yugoslavia…. but the majority of planes that make it across due so to Hungary, the longtime rival, instead.
The stumbling block I had because of how much it depends on the story is what would happen to Ceausescu. Whether he successfully escapes, tries and fails to escape, gets couped, or killed/captured by the Soviets (keeping in mind he’d be very old and was in terrible health already in 1989). Of course, now I’ve found a solution that I can work into the plot…
Regardless, it ends in considerably less time than the current Russo-Ukrainian War has already been going on for (which is why I feel comfortable posting this now.) Using MCOAT with variables and unit sizes that I feel are close enough, casualties amount to:
- Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics: Circa 3,500 killed, 14,000 wounded to varying degrees.
- Bulgaria: Circa 6,500 killed, 26,000 wounded
- Afghanistan: Circa 640 killed, 2,900 wounded
- Romania: Circa 47,000 killed, 131,000 wounded [around a quarter of forces deployed at least hurt!]
These calculations assume nine days of high-intensity combat. Bulgarians and the Basic Forces divisions would take a large share compared to Mobile Corps with better armor, equipment, and medicine.
The result is a regime installed made up of local collaborators and those with some ties to Romania. Occupation duty is largely left to the Bulgarians and Afghans. Although prewar Romanian doctrine called for guerilla fighting, there isn’t terribly much stomach for it from the apathetic, shell-shocked population. Much of Romania’s population flees during and after the war, primarily to Hungary and beyond.
And out of it emerges, among other things… a mystery. Or several mysteries….
[1]The coalition managed a rough 45 km a day in the Gulf War, against a weak opponent in open terrain, and 30 km in the conventional phase of the Iraq War, with a pause and while facing the rougher areas of Iraq itself.
Sea Lion Press Panel Discussion: Guns and Butter
I had the great experience of participating in a Sea Lion Press discussion on power, war, and violence in alternate history. The first part has been posted here.
Review: The Iraqi Army
The Iraqi Army: Organization and Tactics
The NTC special text dubbed “The Iraqi Army: Organization and Tactics” is a valiant attempt at quickly trying to adapt to a different enemy. While the Iraqis used lots of Soviet equipment, their actual doctrine was more British-based on paper and often varied from both (usually for the worse). Just all on its own, it’s a fairly conventional and standard OPFOR document. But I find the context incredibly fascinating.
Like in Lester Grau’s much later The Russian Way of War, a tightrope had to be walked between the observed performance and the theoretical doctrine. Given the latter country’s vast paper trail and its known obsession with quantifying everything, separating the two was/is an easy task. As is/was noticing when theory inevitably diverged from practice, from Grozny to Hostomel.
Here, not so much. The Iraqi Army was notoriously slapdash, so the challenge was even greater. One example I like is that an Iraq War wargame supplement even told the player not to try and use any kind of standardized formation for them at all (!). On the more important doctrine, it acknowledges the flaws shown in the war with Iran, but cautiously and wisely goes with what can be paraphrased as “This may have been an aberration, treat them as a mechanized force worthy of their equipment”. That in many cases they turned out not to be showed the importance of assuming strength rather than weakness.
As a primary source, this is a very interesting snapshot. Plus it’s in the public domain and available readily now.
Even Cheapies Are Expensive
So take these cheapie eastern night vision division devices: Good for a range of 150-200 meters depending on context, around $700 a pop. Both goggles/binoculars and rifle scopes for different contexts.
To equip the line personnel (defined here as those in the actual fighting regiments/brigades) of one small division in the absolute most oversimplified fashion would be around $7-10 million, depending on the exact size. Getting around 5,000 sets, but then there comes the hard part: Maintaining 5,000 sets, keeping track of 5,000 sets, making sure that those 5,000 sets aren’t lost (via honest or dishonest means…), and so on.
Now apply this to almost any even slightly expensive piece of military equipment and you can see why, for instance, Egypt still issues its draftees equipment left over from the Yom Kippur War. That’s an extreme example, but you can see how even the individually “cheap” stuff can be expensive, particularly for less funded armies. And you can see both the political and military advantage of reserving such a thing for “elite” units if one has no choice but to only acquire a limited number of said items.
And you need a lot of stuff, to the point where it’s almost an “I, Pencil” situation. Boots, uniforms, load bearing equipment, helmets, packs, shelters, it all adds up. The bottlenecks can appear where you wouldn’t think they would. For instance, many people know of WWII Germany’s fuel shortages, and historians know of their special alloy shortages, but what a lot of either don’t know is of their cotton shortage resulting in less effective leather load bearing equipment.
Review: Conclave
Conclave
There’s this only half-joking thought I’ve often stated in regards to book writing that, if you’re stuck, just write the characters fighting a bunch of crazy bikers. This is a lesson I learned from The Survivalist. And I saw something like that in a place I didn’t expect.
Robert Harris’ Conclave is the tale of a papal succession by a well-known author who’s written the alternate history classic Fatherland. He does not have the cardinals face off against crazy bikers. But he does have them encounter what seems like everything else. The writing itself is often good, and certainly Harris’ skill is on display. The setup of the book is excellent, save for a contrivance where a secret cardinal manages to slip into the conclave in spite of historical precedent.
…And then the plot goes off the rails into more and more melodrama. One of the papabili is felled by baby mama drama. Then another, who steered the baby mama into the Vatican to crush his rival, has his machinations uncovered and his candidacy sputters. Then the main character finds the papal equivalent of Regina George’s Burn Book and metaphorical chaos happens. Then there’s a terror attack outside the chapel (really) and literal chaos happens.
With all of the rivals having shot themselves in the foot (and the book has gotten to the point where a papabili cardinal pulling a Plaxico Burress wouldn’t be surprising), Mr. Sneaky Cardinal then becomes pope. Then in the final twist, it turns out that the new pope was born a girl , mixing the Pope Joan legend with the likes of such highbrow epics as Fate Stay/Night and Sleepaway Camp. The book ends with Pope Joan Angela Saber I Innocent XIV taking the throne.
I mean no transphobia, and think that you could make a perfectly tasteful, good, and profound novel with that (and its discovery) as the premise. But as the biggest swerve in a book full of them, it still comes across as bizarre and tacky. Even if the concept is quite doable, the execution here falls flat.
In fact, as another review in the conservative Catholic World Report has noted, Harris’ sources in the acknowledgements are a little questionable. Imagine a military novel where the sources are well-intentioned and good-hearted but obviously slanted antiwar activists and axe-grinding Pentagon Reformers, and you can get an idea for how skewed this is (even if I agree with a lot of it on the merits as a nonreligious descendant of Lutherans).
This isn’t the equivalent of one of the worst popes ever. But it isn’t one of the best either.
Baseball Returns
Major League Baseball, after an owners lockout, has returned to being after a new collective bargaining agreement has finally been agreed upon. It’s very hard to sympathize with either side. The owners are what you’d expect from billionaire sports team owners, and the players have been desperately trying to hold onto a classic seniority cartel that has been eroded by analytics and too many bad megadeals.
Now we can actually talk about the game on the field.
The Airlifters
Airlifters are very interesting to me, especially mega-lifters. But “exotics” are also fun, like tilt-ducted fans, compound helicopters, convertiplanes, flying wings, and much more. I think there’s several reasons why I’ve taken a liking to them, besides some very good sources that I’m eager to review.
- They represent an army marching on its stomach, or in this case, flying on its stomach. They’re the behind-the-scenes things that no one can do without.
- They’re military but not inherently destructive (unless converted to bombers, of course). Thus they can serve humanitarian and civilian support efforts very well.
- Finally, the numbers analyst in me likes seeing, especially for inherently risky airborne drops/landings, what you can accomplish with X number of airlifters with a capacity of Y per unit. Operations researchers with far more resources and far better command of math than me have been studying this since the parachute was invented.
- Plus I live fairly close to an airlifter base and see the big grey Globemasters and Galaxies flying overhead fairly frequently.
- Paradropping can be used as a way to add drama to the characters in a story, regardless of the overall force balance.
- It’s hard not to be impressed by something weird and/or big.
What I’m most interested in at the moment is: “To what extend does having big lifters that can reach the LZ safely remove bottlenecks?”
Review: Final Target
Final Target
John Gilstrap’s Final Target is a Jonathan Grave retread. “Grave gets in a tussle down south of the Rio Grande” is basically the plot of the book. Which he’s done before. Oh, and he helps rescue a group of kids/teenagers as well. Look, cheap thrillers don’t exactly have the most intricate plots.
Being a retread, this is a 51% book. There’s little in it that hasn’t already been done in previous Grave novels. But this is a 51% book in the best possible way. It’s comfortingly familiar, and all the fundamentals are sound. The writing is good and so is the action. There are worse things to read than a book in a series you like that demonstrates all the qualities that made you enjoy the series in the first place.
Review: Journey’s End
Journey’s End
Amazingly, surprisingly, the Kirov series has gotten a formal conclusion with Journey’s End. I’d predicted that there was no way for the series to end gracefully after 64 clunky volumes. And my prediction turned out to be accurate. A lot of this is de facto flashbacks to each ill-developed member of the crew. The final battle is just a wargamed clash like the hundreds before it. The hanging threats of Volkov and the aliens are dealt with hurriedly and contrivedly.
The conclusion is “a generally happy ending is stuffed in at the last second due to yet more time travel technobabble.” Schettler was clearly desperate to finish Kirov so he could write a fantasy novel series (which are no stranger to giant, bloated, sagas), and it shows. Still, that a 64 book epic with millions of words was completed at all is no small accomplishment.
Fuldapocalypse Fiction 