[GZG] GZG] C-IED/COIN in SGII/DSII

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http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lMy comments
interspersed with [TomB]

Our resident Ginger Beer said:

IED challenges in SG/DS

1: "Sniffers" -- vapor analysis which detects traces of explosive.

used to discover caches of explosives.  Problems - false positives,
won't detect gunpowder (must be set to ignore any propellant used in the
weapons of the troops using it),

[TomB] - We don't know that they haven't perfected binary propellants.
We also don't know that making BP explosives isn't possible. And it may be
that there are other fingerprints you can engineer into the gunpowder that a
detector could differentiate from stuff made by the locals. You can play this
one either way is what I'm getting at.

2. If Thermals are down to the size of goggles, and image analysis software is
far more powerful and accurate, spotting IEDs is going to be significantly
easier. Camoflage is going to be much more necessary and hence they are going
to be more time consuming to emplace.

[TomB] But the similar sorts of technological advancements may provide
solutions for the insurgents. Camouflage may be a trivial matter with the
technology of the day.

3: Concentration of chemical industry. Fertilizer production is not something
that is going to be spread out all over the planet,

[TomB] That would depend on colony maturity, economic profile,
and national division. It might also depend on attitude (a libertarian colony
might well split out such things into smaller local centers, as
might an eco-green colony to avoid the carbon footprint of transporting
the stuff all over). In general, you might be right, but exceptions may well
exist.

 but
primarily concentrated in areas easily accessible to major agricultural areas.
Smuggling is going to relatively difficult,

[TomB]: I can easily construe at least one scenario for smuggling
that works on a crappy colony world. Stipulate that these places
aren't worth a huge high-tech presence. High tech forces may
deploy some spy sats, but they'll be limited in how much of the space around
the planet they can monitor. If stealth material is cheap (and it may well
be), it could be easily possible to have a ship jump in outside of detection
range, drop a stealthed pod of munitions, and jump out without ever being
seen. The pod then inserts ballistically, using some crappy parachute system
to slow its descent. It arrives at particular coordinates and the insurgents
pick it up. The spy sats may or may not pick it up. High tech forces may or
may not be able to get there to stop a pickup. Requirements: Cheap stealth
materials enough to fool a spy sat,
some coordination with offworld brokers/smugglers or extra-planetary
influences (enemy gov'ts are one example).

4: Should be plenty of non-nitrate fertilzer, or fertilizer which is

Of course, it's produced in quantity in Pakistan and smuggled in, but that
would not be an option if there are only three
fertilizer plants on the planet, all surrounded by counter-insurgent
troops.

[TomB] Depends a lot on the nature of the colony.

5: Grav vehicles have a physical seperation from the ground, so they are less
vulnerable to blast damage.

[TomB] Makes an assumption about the susceptibility of Grav systems
but that seems vindicated by existing rules.

Any wheeled or tracked vehicles are likely to built mine resistant

[TomB] A fair number of the minis might have you question that....

unless sniffers are so accurate as to make underbelly explosives completely
ineffective. Not sure it is even theoretically possible to build a mine
resistant GEV, since they have to have exposed fans and skirts.

[TomB] I think it may be. Your vents need not be directly in line with
your fans. This gives a 'jog' to protect the fans. Perhaps GEVs also have a
sensor system to detect an overpressure and slam some sort of shield over the
fans. Yes, you might ground your GEV and crumple some skirting, but it might
save the fans. I do concede that GEVs should be the most vulnerable.

[TomB] Ground penetrating scanners capable of making 3D models and
evaluating threats from 'mystery objects' may well be able to rule out most
landmine threats that rely on vehicles overrunning a mine or IED.

[TomB] Improvised off-route mines may be one option for the bad guys,
but requires a slight increase in technical ability. Not terribly effective
against tank (think SG2 IAVR vs. Armour 3) but perhaps useful against soft
skinned vehicles.

But recovering a GEV or a GRAV vehicle presents some significant challenges of
its own.

[TomB] Worse than recovering a tipped over or rolled wheeled vehicle?

 They
can't be towed, they will always require a 'lowboy' of some sort.

[TomB] Do we know that a GEV doesn't have a deployable wheel system
underneath to allow it to be rolled around while unpowered? (Ditto grav?) With
that, an emergency tow may be possible. Alternately, a large wheeled dolley
might be available to be fit to hull fittings on a damaged grav or GEV to
allow towing in a conventional manner. [Or maybe engineers can bolt an
external Grav unit to a wreck and float it back....]

[TomB] Note, I'm assuming GEVs will tend to be a bit lighter than
tracklayers or Grav vehicles because they need to be lifted by fans. That
would tend to suggest easier lifts.

[TomB] Your lowboy scenario also has merit, of course. Perhaps future
forces also have a 'Skycrane' style VTOL with enough capacity to lift a tank.
That makes recovery quick from any terrain.

IED trends 1: Passive electronic sensors are primary means of activation.
Command wire is dangerous, radio controlled can be jammed too easily, pressure
plates are too detectable. Widespread light manufacturing capability means
ability to make relatively simple electronic devices will be more widespread.

[TomB] Radio can only be jammed if you know what frequency to jam and
when.
This is a non-trivial power expenditure for jamming effectivley across a
spectrum. If you foe has all bands from baseband up to high GHz available to
them and they can in theory use the same frequencies your military system hop
through, then there is no reason they can't use command detonation.

[TomB] The chips and circuitry to support a variety of transmission
options will be trivially cheap (they aren't that expensive now if you aren't
planning to buy them from a US defense contractor). I'm not even sure that
spread spectrum won't be commonplace in the civilian market. There's already
some moves that way.

[TomB] If I was building this system, I would have 1 or 2 radio triggers
(coded),
plus a sensor trigger. A fiber optic cable may also be acceptable - no
real radiation threat, hard to detect if it is hair thin, spools of fiber may
be readily available commercially. In the long run, its far cheaper than
copper.

2: Simple blast IEDs will be limited -- need massive ones for a solid
kill and again, sniffers make them difficult to use.

[TomB] Except that if we posit the high-tech force doing what they do in
the real world, we'll find many nations won't have as many sniffers or
detection
systems as they should, people will use multi-purpose vehicles for light
armour, light armour for heavy, etc. and so there will be more opportunities
for carnage than the tech level by itself will suggest. How long did it take
to decide some protection for HMMWV gunners was required? (Or M113s if we want
to go back a generation?) There's always a part of your military that is
underequipped even for a
high-tech
force and they usually get deployed at some point.

3: The precision machining capacity for EFP disks will be far more widespread.
You really do need a better grade of explosive than can be done with
fertilizer and diesel fuel, ability to produce explosives that are of high
quality and in which the blast wave propagates evenly is a question for
discussion. But if it's possible, this will be preferred technique. You can
park them 80 meters off the road and
shoot them off, almost a one-shot HKP.  Anti-personnel method of
choice, again, to beat 'sniffers' is going to be DFC/DFFC (aka
grapeshot). These can use HME (Home Made Explosives) that are fertilizer
based.

[TomB] Or perhaps other propellants. It might be possible to homebrew
some form of FAE mixture. Or a gas based propellant for shot for AP purposes.
Certainly, if you can get a good blast wave, you can do some crazy things. I
saw one film of a US company that had manufactured a
large copper disk (I'm guessing about 15-20 inches in diameter) that
was propelled this way from a remote control 4 wheel ATV. It destroyed the
ATV, but it blew through the derelict tank they fired it at like the armour
was irrelevant.

4:  If I have to support an insurgency by loading a limited-volume
spaceship and using it to run a blockade, I'm going to pack it full of things
that give me maximum bang for volume. This means military
grade explosives, blasting caps, anti-tank weapons, and ammunition.
Not pallets of fertilizer bags. You're getting a data chip with the
specifications for EFP plates and assembly, and specs for some electronic
sensors for activation. The rest is on you.

[TomB] Right, but you'd never risk the ship when you can deliver this
stuff by ballistic pod or (if you want a notch up) a delivery missile with
manouvering and perhaps even decoy/ECM capabilities. Make it something
that scatters fake payloads or fakes landing sites to confuse response forces.
You don't need to expose the ship and the high tech force just can't build a
deep enough, good enough blockade to stop every stealthed packet coming in
ballistic.

Wildcards: Science fictional interrogation techniques: If accurate lie
detectors are possible in a 'hasty' situation, or safe and reliable drug
interrogation exists (see David Drake's short story about the interrogator,
can't recall title, I'm sure someone else can)

[TomB] Also assumes you cannot be conditioned to beat these systems.
Assumes there is no chemical counter. Insurgents that are well supplied may
have a counter that kills their guys when they are subjected to drug
interrogation. Maybe there are ways to trigger similar effects with implanted
detectors. If we can build a lot of the other space tech, we can surely build
some implanted systems (we see it even today, the beginnings thereof with
micro-chip vitamin/nutrient distribution systems for SF in development).

insurgency is pointless, making IEDs is pointless, and you're completely
unless you have tanks to take the other guy's tanks in a
head-on fight.  Insurgency requires deception.  If I can dope up a
random local and find out where all the IEDs near his village are, who the
insurgents are, and who their relatives and supporters are, it's Game Over.

[TomB] Or a different game. The insurgent have to change tactics then.
Bribe local colonists. Make their cells tight and limit information beyond
those small cells. Find mechanisms to beat your interrogation methods. Play
the political, legal and human rights cards (against nations that care about
such things... not sure it would work against the ESU).

Nationalism: The Ground Zero Games universe seems to presuppose the death of
the concept of nationalism.

[TomB] Funny, I'd have said the opposite.

I know it's an ingrained part of a modern mindset, but it is not fundamental
to human nature. If
changing one set of off-world tax collectors for another which
actually provides the promised protection in return for taxes doesn't bother
most people, an insurgency would never get a whole lot of traction in the
first place.

[TomB] There's a lot more than just protection. The American Revolution,
for instance, doesn't seem to have had much to do with security. It had
a lot to do with not honouring local input and I can see vast pan-system
polities being very poor in terms of responsiveness. The ESU would almost be
culturally disposed to be and the NAC would be so for bureaucratic reasons if
no other.

Many of the cultural and linguistic issues can be settled with the assumption
that someone assigned to
work on a Francophone colony would have the finest French-translation
software money can buy in his earpiece, and 'sleep learning tapes' that
implant a deep knowledge of the cultural mores and sensitivites of the
subjects.:)

[Tomb] It is debatable whether peoples would put up with this. You could
argue both sides from current episodes in the "War on <insert flavour of the
week>".

[TomB] I would argue the GZGverse is the exact opposite. It has
nationalism in spades. It also has nations galore, from as small as an
asteroid colony of independent miners to
multi-national inner colonies. There are probably more flavours of
nationalism in the GZGverse than there are today and that's saying a lot.

Civil Rights: If I can dope up random locals and squeeze them dry, is it
likely that I will be permitted to do so? I'm betting yes, because
media will be far less immediate (unless you assume non-ship FTL
communications, which changes the game a great deal), and because honestly,
most people could care less about stuff happening on the other side of the our
planet when it's the only one we have, they aren't going to care about stuff
that happened six months ago on someone else's planet.

[TomB] Maybe, maybe not. Although your observation on human
nature is generally true, look at the American Revolution. It was very much an
affair where greivances of a local sort were ignored (one would even say
actively exacerbated) by the English Crown and its representatives. And part
of that was the whole 'we don't want foreigners putting the screws to our
people and tromping their liberty'. I don't think that basic factor of human
nature is going away either. There'll still be enough complaint and rebellion
if any offworld governance becomes onerous. And there will also be a lot more
players in the Great Game of Nations, using agitprop, Quislings, 5th
columnists, and so on to foment disquiet in trouble spots. So I see a lot of
revolts arising from a combination of local discontent with centralized power
structures that pay no heed to them and of remote meddling to encourage such
revolts.

[TomB] To me, the GZGverse in any time between massive wars (or at least
between nations not currently active) would be a lot like the cold war, with
multiple hands muddling around in the smaller client states for their own
larger strategic aims.
Also, in big pan-stellar nations, there will be a lot of bureaucratic
feudalism and power mongering (ref: any modern big gov't) and this will result
in people in those gov'ts playing factional games using colonial policy as a
tool. This will inevitably lead to discontent in some of the colonies. The
bureaucrats will be so busy backstabbing
and building their own power base, they'll be too self-absorbed to
notice the danger of revolt until it happens, then they'll have to send in the
Army to sort out the wogs (aka their citizens on foreign worlds).