[GonzoGOP]

It may be like Somalia.

That is the perfect example. Or perhaps Zimbabwe. In Somalia a couple of trucks with DShKs on the back made you a warlord. But a column of takes could make you king.

Farmers are not mobile. They are tied to the land. If you shoot the tax collector Rham isn't going to send another tax collector. He is going to drop a barrage (heck one well placed round would do nicely) on your house and then send out his loyalists to confiscate the food.

Also you assume the locusts will be outnumbered. Here in the Peoples Republic of Illinois the Chicago Metro has 9.8 million people. The entire rest of the state has only 3 million people, and most of those are clustered around St. Louis. So exactly who is going to have that advantage of numbers. How are you going to outnumber them 10 to 1 when they start off with a three to one advantage, and they have interior lines. The highways all lead to and from the cities.

Finally you count on attrition. Well remember this discussion starts off with the theory that the people in the cities are starving. So the choice is to risk quick death bullet or die with absolute certainty from starvation. Suddenly the threat of attrition works against the rural population in terms of motivation. The threat of starvation is highly motivating.

The one thing that could stop this is the loyalty of Air Force and ANG units. Continuing the Illinois example the Illinois ANG has no fighters. So they won't be of any help to Mayor Rham. So if even a had full of regulars with A-10s decide to back the rural population then any attempt to to a repeat of Sherman's March is going to end up more like the Highway of Death. The ability to call in close air support solves a multitude of problems.

On the other hand if the Illinois ANG can scrape up even a handful of F-16s (they rotate some through for training purposes) the A-10s will end up doing a reenactment of the Marianas Turkey Shoot. Again it all comes down to who gets what from the US arsenal, and to whom are the troops loyal. Heck with Ft Knox having the 1st Armored Division and the gold to buy gas and ammo Kentucky may end up running the entire country.

Probably the only place the dynamic if firmly in the hands of the rural population are Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota. They grow their own food so they won't go hungry. They don't have big cities so there are no problems with local locusts. And under the ground they have coal, some oil and about 450 LGM-30s. The former are a source of cash. The latter say keep off the grass like nothing else on Earth.

[Free Vulcan]

The problem with troops, if loyal, need to be paid. States like Illinois are in desperate financial shape and our dollar could likely be near worthless. That’s going to make logistics real difficult.

We could unload our entire conventional arsenal on the country and a great deal would still be left intact. The national guards don’t have that much to make a dent. It would also work against the govt to destroy the tax base and infrastructure, but the point is you aren’t going to control territory without boots, and there simply aren’t enough soldiers to maintain control. The military is about concentrated force, a highly dispersed situation is not conducive to victory, such as what happened to our troops in Somalia.

There will be a fan out, but after you take away the elderly, sick and weak, people without transportation, it will be muted. Most people with nowhere to go will look to the first place for food, not hop in the car and drive to Carbondale. Most won’t be armed, gas will be limited, they will be starving and getting weaker, and up against dug in people. The farther away the less the influx. A great deal will never make it out of the city.

Those that do will be outgunned. It won’t be pretty but if they can’t settle in they’ll either starve or be killed, numerical superiority or no. After the initial anarchy things will work out to the natural order, but be sure that there will be little to nothing beyond local control what isn’t wasteland. Even most state govts will be pretty impotent. It’s those in the far rural areas 3 or more hours from a major city that will have the best chance of surviving.