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DispatchBulletinOpinion

by The Federal Command of Kathol Rift. . 136 reads.

Roleplaying a War in Nationstates

Greetings. This dispatch will have two purposes. One, analyzing military tactics used currently in Nationstates roleplay, as observed by the author. Two, showing how they could be improved upon, varied, changed, or tossed out the window. This study will be supported by RMB quotes, occasional forum quotes, outside evidence for military strategies, and basic logic. For purposes of length and maintaining one purpose, this will focus on planet-based wars. Interplanetary wars are quite fictional no matter what, so it would be pointless to analyze their strategies for realism.

Note to anyone reading this: I am not Sun Tzu or General Patton. I’m not some brilliant strategist in real life. All observations here are based on roleplaying a war on NS, not how to fight one in real life.

Ah, everyone’s favorite opening to a war. “My military starts bombing your coastline, and paratroopers are dropped in to take your cities.” Simple, easy, functional, right?

Unfortunately, no. One of the most commonly ignored parts of a war in RP is actually preparing the military for a war. The vast majority of nations do not keep their military at a permanent level of readiness. There might be a select few that do, but those will be nations that are either already very close to a state of war, or dictatorships that frequently use their military on a whim. So those of you that aren’t one of those will need to mobilize your military first.

Mobilizing the military isn’t something that happens instantly. There’s orders to be given out, generals to appoint, plans to draw up, reserves to be called up, and recruits to train. If you start your war with an attack, or a force en route, you’ve already failed military realism class.

Now the specific details of how a military is mobilized aren’t extremely relevant here. This is about roleplaying a war, not how war works in the real world. Suffice to say that your military cannot be deployed instantly. It will take time to get them ready to do so.

Conscription is a part of mobilization that we will look at here, because it’s rather important. I know that NS gives the conscription policy out rather easily, but that doesn’t mean you can just gather up every able-bodied young man and woman and send them to the front lines in ten minutes. Conscription is a slower process than that. You’ll need to send out letters, or some form of electronic communication depending on your technology, and they’ll then need to pack up and make their way to whatever training area they need to report to. They’ll then need to train (US Army basic training takes about 10 weeks, and that’s just for a standard infantryman) and get separated into their units in the military. After that, they’ll need to ship out. In other words, most wars you fight on an NS RMB are not going to have time for you to conscript new soldiers and get them trained. If you’re doing a longer, more drawn out plot with somebody, or your RP has a set speed at which time passes (example: 1 hour IRL equals 1 week in RP) then you might. Defensive wars where you are the one getter by invaded are a different situation, and I’ll get into that later.

As for training itself, that’s where a lot more common mistakes occur. I see a lot of the more militaristic nations have extremely brutal training that results in fatalities for those who don’t make the cut. Now, will this kind of training make extremely tough people? Yes, yes it will. But will it also mean that your entire military consists of people who just got tortured and nearly killed by the government? Yes, yes it will. Realistically, this is a recipe for disaster. It’s not a good idea to make your entire armed forces hate you for torturing and killing them in training. You can have more brutal training for special forces, but do it after they complete basic training. That way, they gain discipline and demonstrate their loyalty and toughness before they get put through that.

Another common mistake is skipping training almost entirely. Now, this could be done in very desperate situations, but it will lead to a much less effective military with a much higher casualty rate. Not even you “warrior societies” out there have a population where every conscript conveniently is an expert soldier already. You might have a small portion of conscripts that already are skilled marksmen or hunters, or are already very strong, but they aren’t going to have full military skills and knowledge without having already gone through military training.

Repeat after me: There is no such thing as a completely elite military. Every realistic military is going to have its cannon fodder and basic infantry. Will some militaries have an overall higher quality than others? Absolutely. But they will all still have the same enlisted or drafted young adults who've only gone through a few months of training and are now fighting a real war. Some of them will desert, some will defect, many will surrender if their lives are threatened. This is a given.

There are a lot of factors to take into account when writing about the morale and spirit of your soldiers though. Are they on the defensive or the offensive, for instance? A soldier fighting to defend his home has much more reason to fight his hardest than a soldier who got a draft letter and now is in a foreign land fighting for some abstract cause that they don't really believe in. Also, is there any chance for escape? If there's some open route to freedom while under attack, you'll have soldiers that desert to save their lives. If you're completely surrounded though, many "will prefer death to flight." This situation can affect different people in different ways though. Some will surrender or give up, believing that fighting a losing battle is pointless. Others will find themselves emboldened by the probability of death and fight all the harder. That choice is dependent on both the individual and the general morale prior to being surrounded.

Turning to more practical military quality, there will always be cannon fodder that can't hit the broadside of a barn and can't duck to save their lives. Remember, these guys just finished basic training. They mostly just learned how to point the gun in the general direction of the enemy and how to clean it. The more skilled and/or the luckier ones will tend to survive longer and become your "grizzled old sergeant" cliché. The others, not so much. Skill will tend to grow with combat. An army that just started a war will be full of inexperienced conscripts and enlisted. An army that's been fighting for five years will still have conscripts and enlisted, but now they'll have more experienced leaders and soldiers populating the ranks as well, along with more specialized soldiers like the movies show. A soldier who couldn't hit a building if he was inside it might be pretty good at wiring explosives, and a few years later be the stereotypical demoman in a bomb squad. Experience and skill grows with time in any military, so don't write your military that's never seen a day of combat as being "elite" and "specialized."

As for general composition, there is one very important thing to remember: if your military has a million personnel, that doesn't mean you have a million fighting men ready to go. It means you have around four hundred thousand actual combat personnel and around six hundred thousand support personnel (supply, engineering, medical, command, human resources, basically anything not on the front lines). Exact ratios and numbers are dependent on the specific military and situation, but remember that no military can ever devote 100% of its soldiers to the front line. An army can't fight without its food, gas, bullets, bandages, paychecks, and orders, and you need military personnel to handle all of those. Obviously less of this applies with a guerrilla or insurgency type of military force, as they tend to rely on liberating their supplies from the enemy's support system. That isn't nearly as reliable as having a support system of your own though, so it's not advised.

How many of you have played chess? I personally suck at chess, but one thing I've noticed from all the people that keep beating me is that they all manage to get me to focus on a completely different part of the board than where the true danger is, and I never realize it until they suddenly swoop in and take my most important piece. And the worst part? I always knew they would do that, but because I didn't know exactly how, I was powerless to stop it.

As Sun Tzu said, "All warfare is based upon deception." You never want the enemy to know where you are going to attack or how you are going to attack. You also never want the enemy to be able to attack you where it will really hurt. Sounds simple enough, right? Ah, were it so easy. It's one thing to say that you're going to fool your enemy, another to actually do it. And much like the chess game, it's one thing for me to say "I won't let them take my queen in the first 5 moves this time," and quite another for me to actually pull that off.

Let's start on a grand scale: strategy. In any war, both sides have a set of goals. Your goals in an offensive war might be to take the enemy capital, capture their armies, and take their country intact. Or it could be to salt their lands, destroy their capital and armies, and turn their country into an uninhabitable hellhole. Those goals will depend on how the war started and what kind of person your leader is. If your goal is destruction, you effectively don't need an army in the modern or futuristic world. Long range missiles, air forces, and the navy can wreak incredible havoc on every population center, and chemical or nuclear weapons can poison the land for generations. Once you're done with that sort of war though, you have gained nothing other than the destruction of an enemy. No new land or people to rule, no economic benefit, nothing. On the other hand, trying to take and occupy a country is a very different game. Now you need an army, because you need to be able to destroy the enemies within cities and lands without destroying those cities and lands. You need to be able to defend that land after you've cleared the enemy combatants off of it, and you need a presence to keep the enemy civilians from rising up and retaking it the moment you're done. The goal of destruction requires very little strategy. The goal of occupation requires a lot.

A much smarter military historian than me once wrote that one of the better ways to deceive your enemy is to move in such a way that very obviously threatens multiple important targets. For example, during Sherman's Atlanta campaign during the US Civil War, he invaded Georgia with 3 different armies, which remained close enough to each other that you couldn't attack one without being flanked by the others, but far enough apart that each army was threatening a different city or military target at any given time. The Confederate leadership became so concerned with trying to defend several different cities at once and trying to find a way to attack Sherman's forces, that they were completely unprepared when he marched on Atlanta, and ended up abandoning it for him to take with minimal casualties. It was a massive success for the Union Army, aided by the fact that Sherman positioned his armies in such a way that necessitated the splitting and weakening of Confederate forces without much actual fighting. Moral of the story: if you're trying to write a military on the offensive that just cannot seem to be stopped, a good way to do it is by having that military be threatening so many targets at once that it's absolutely necessary but absolutely impossible to defend them all. Then at the end of the day, have them sweep in on the grand prize that nobody expected they would attack.

Another point that cannot be stressed enough. It's so obvious but so ignored throughout history: get behind your enemy. The flank is your ally. Scipio beat Carthage because his cavalry was able to get behind the Carthaginian forces and attack while the front was pinned by his infantry. The Mongols beat up most of the known world because their forces were more mobile than anyone else at the time, and could get behind enemy infantry armies and threaten any target from any direction they wanted. Operation Overlord succeeded in part because allied paratroopers from the night before tied up Nazi forces and prevented reinforcements to the Atlantic Wall. Attacking enemies at their front is how you get massive casualties on your side. Attacking enemies from their sides or rear is how you break their cohesion and make them fall apart. You want to write a rout? Remember. To. Flank.

Now, onto some defensive strategies. Remember that fighting defensively will never "win" a war. You don't win by fortifying cities or sabotaging supply lines. You'll need to go offensive at some point. And for all you Fabian strategy fans out there who think guerilla warfare is the best thing since sliced bread, remember: Fabius never won any significant objectives. He just slowed Hannibal down a bit. Scipio won after he went on the offensive and invaded Carthage itself. Guerilla warfare is a fine thing when you've either already lost or are starting a revolution of some kind, but if you're trying to defend something, might as well forget it. All you'll accomplish is annoying your enemy, not defending your country.

And on the other extreme end of the defensive spectrum, for the love of all the gods, don't just plant all your soldiers in cities and fortifications and expect that to work. Will you make it costly for the enemy to take your cities? Yeah, but you'll also lose countless troops in the process and still lose the city in the end anyways. And if you do this on a large scale, you'll end up never destroying enemy forces or misdirecting them, just causing massive amounts of casualties.

And if you dig a single trench, I will teleport into your fictional world and strangle your leader myself. That's a bit of an exaggeration (trenches/foxholes are an effective part of defense when used properly) but trench warfare has never ended well for anybody. And it won't work on a large scale with modern militaries now that we have things like tanks, bombers, precision munitions, and all that fun jazz.

Now, I'm sure you've all heard the phrase "The best defense is a good offense." Cliché, I know, but holds true in a lot of ways. Historically, the generals who have been the most effective at defense are the ones who do not fight like they're on the defense. Got a Carthaginian army led by Hannibal in your backyard? No worries, just invade Carthage and force him to abandon Italy to go defend against you. Got a stalemate and tons of casualties on the east side of your civil war? No worries, just invade on the side west and burn a path all the way to the ocean. It's obviously not quite that simple, but you get my point. Your enemy can't force you on to the defensive if you're constantly forcing them on to the defensive. And if they already have you on the defensive, using whatever forces you can spare in a serious and dangerous offensive assault can force them to let off the pressure while they deal with that. Your offense might work, it might not. But it will at least buy you time. This same concept is also where guerilla warfare actually gets a chance to be useful. Need to distract enemy forces from the front line? Sending minimal forces to upset supply lines and demand a larger military response from the enemy can be a pretty low-cost way of splitting your enemy's attention. Once again though, all it does is buy you time to plan a serious offensive. It doesn't win the war for you.

Now remember, we are talking about roleplaying a war, not fighting one in real life. All those things I just told you not to do? Those are perfect if you're trying to write a stubborn or incompetent military leader in a war that's creating mountains of casualties. But if you're trying to write some military genius, their strategy will almost always be one that minimizes friendly casualties and maximizes the enemy's casualties. And 90% of the time, that will include flanking, deception, outmaneuvering, and generally running circles around the enemy, whether in a defensive or offensive manner.

The Federal Command of Kathol Rift

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