- Joined
- Feb 13, 2008
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- 118
Exactly. Mercenaries have several liabilities that come with them: 1) Command and control issues, especially if you have no military experience or credibility yourself. 2) Potential language barriers, especially if you're pulling from a variety of different cultures. 3) Numbers. Despite how well-trained many of today's mercenaries are (and many of them are extremely well trained), there aren't that many of them floating around out there. Even with $50B at your disposal, you're not going to levy an army of more than a couple hundred thousand mercenaries of any appreciable skill level. And that's at most. Yes, but they're really part of the same conversation. Like I said, I don't understand the point of taking over a country if you don't intend to hold it afterward. If we're serious about this intellectual exercise, we really need to try to follow it through to its logical conclusion. Taking over a country and not bothering to hold it is sort of like making a delicious meal, and then throwing it in the garbage rather than eating it. IMO, if you're going to talk about hypothetical invasion plans, you should take into account contingencies and plans for the aftermath. I don't think that's an unreasonable line of thinking. In fact, I think it's unreasonable not to consider those things. Or at least unrealistic.
Is this supposed to be problematic? Many African countries don't even break into double-digit thousands
And your point is? I brought that up because the poster I was responding to had assumed he was simply going to waltz on in and change those dynamics by building roads and hospitals and ****. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that easily. The instability is part of the game, and addressing it realistically should be part of the game. This isn't like playing Monopoly or something. "Oh, I'm going to buy Marven Gardens and build a hotel on it. La dee da."
You thought I was going to need millions of mercenaries sitting around. That's what the native army is for, at most a few hundred mercs would stay to train them (though it'd be more likely that another military power would send some)
I think that getting an army of more than 1,000 or so serious mercenaries would be impossible for a private citizen to do today. aside from anything else, you'd need a staging ground, who is going to let you gather together and train an army? I was thinking that any project that required more than a few dozen wouldn't work. and the trick would be taking it over, and then handing it to a local person who you control and who pays you "rent"
A neighboring country unhappy with the current government wouldn't be opposed to the idea (look at how many countries directly support coup attempts)
Taking over a Central or South American country, or even an African country, would be unrealistic for a nonnative with no local ties to the population and no groundswell of local support. i think the best-case scenario possible for this game would be a Cuban native returning to Cuba with a reasonably sized militia and several years of legwork secretly arming and gaining support of a faction of Castro's military. So when you landed on the island, if everything went to plan (big if), those you've bribed or persuaded to your side would rise up with you. But, as I've pointed out earlier, look at how well the previous Bay of Pigs attempt went...
Islands aren't a good choice, most have a peak of some sort that's heavily forested. Any opposition can retreat to the hills and mount a decently effective guerrilla campaign. Cuba also has a modern air force and support from a number of nations (including China)
89 posts in and no one has thought of Belgium? Come on, the country was practically made for invasions.
And you'd have NATO on your ass the moment you set foot on Belgian soil.