Your Team Is Just Like A Submarine, by GuerrillaLogistician

Reference – 13A The Control Room

“If you want people to think, give them intent, not instruction.”
― Unknown

You sit around a small table with the black-out blinds covering the few windows in an old farmhouse.  Everything with cell service and an internet connection has been shut off and placed far away from this room, as a guy you know watches the TinySA Ultras for any anomaly in the background RF spectrum.  Both have different antennas attached to help sniff out different signals.  All the electronics in the room have been cleaned by the tech guy you became friends with before all this crap started and you all sit watching a small projected screen on a painted white wall.  Alfred sits down with the last cup of coffee, his real name a vague memory.  “Alright gentleman let’s go over the information we have”, Alfred clicks and works the computer displaying a map with arrows showing routes, and some thermal images.  “Thanks to our recon teams, we have a good idea what they are setting up down near the lake.”, he continues as images of some weird-looking containers on military vehicles are shown both in thermal and a few images dimmed by the setting sun.  “From what it looks like we have a water purification plant going in, and thanks to our logistics guy doing some rough calculations it looks like they are setting up for about a thousand troops coming in.”  “With the boss standing up another force in another county he said it is all up to us so let’s get to planning.” He points a hand politely in your direction, and “This is where your team is going to come into play.”  “I am going to need you guys to do some final recon, and then be prepared for a tandem strike with Mike”, he points to a guy you have worked closely with across the table.

For the next hour, you guys go through plans, writing notes on precious almost irreplaceable notebooks, and the handful of eternal pencils that have become the go-to for writing.  All the nice things that everyone took for granted to keep a Tactical Operation Center up and running have almost become scarcer than bullets and food.  No one thought a $7.99 aluminum pencil would replace 159 regular pencils, but as resources dried up strange things replaced the replaceable world.  Men with old knowledge were at work teaching and building the sustainment items, and here you are with some friends and confederates planning to stop an opposition force.  This force wasn’t some weak group of soy boys unskilled and not knowing how to hold a gun.  Everyone said they would blast these weak city dwellers with their stockpile of ammo, but the soy boys had turned out to be very educated fighters.  Sadly for many of the uneducated Bubba’s, these Soy Socialist Fighters were better equipped and those that had survived were trained in real wars like Syria, Kurdistan, and Ukraine while all the Bubba’s drank beer, and cried about politics.  Yet none of them had so much as lifted a finger or held even one of their conservative in-name-only politicians to task for voting this shit into law.

A lot of those tough guys had gone over to the other side turning in their weapons because they couldn’t provide clean water for their family, much less food.  So off they went handing in their “assault weapons” that now were in the hands of the forces coming to occupy your town.  All those bullets were given to people who planned to convert or kill anyone to the socialist ideology they had pushed for decades in the disguise of equity, and fighting against colonialism, past wrongs, and present injustices.  The worst part was sometimes those bastards had a point about corruption, but their idea of medicine was to kill the body and get a new one instead of healing the damage.  Now thanks to years of classes, training, and smart people you went to class with you have a good idea of how to wage a guerrilla war.  Some of those people were already dead, because of simple accidents, others just got lazy one day, and others were good fighters but used stupid systems like Meshtastic and got scooped up.

The worst were the guys who fought hard and had a bad hand dealt to them, against overwhelming forces, and the few that did survive broke after seeing friends dead.  You had already seen a close friend from high school have his head scooped open by a round, and it made you puke after the battle, and gave you some shit dreams.  If only all those Bubba’s had thought about the long game as well as the socialists you might not be fighting an uphill battle right now.  Maybe that battle would have had fewer causalities, which would have meant waking up screaming in terror less often.

As you plan your next moves the darkened small room feels more like the control room in a submarine, with people working on specific electronics, maps being looked at, and planned maneuvers and outlines given instead of hard set-in-stone plans.   Unlike the big military, your team relied on moving quietly, and swiftly both day and night.  Hiding your intent by either camouflage or walking around in working clothes your team moved among the people like a submarine underwater.  Weapons, equipment, and expendables were sometimes prepositioned just like a sub would maneuver to a pre-set ambush location in front of a convoy.  This was a tactic you had done many times as well.  You would hit these convoys or sometimes let them go depending on conditions, and even just the feelings of the group.  This was your long game, your covert war of attrition where you would hit supplies instead of trying to have a stand-up fight.  You may have recalled Joe Dolio had once said something about the fact that one should know how not to be the monster the enemy was, but still be willing to fight dirty.  His books had served you well although you wish you had bought a few more copies of TW-03A so you didn’t have to rewrite the book.  TW-01 Base Line Training had helped you teach others, TW-02 had kept friends and family alive, and TW-04 Scouting and Patrolling had been read by every one of your team members to the point it was held together with the now precious and scarce duct tape.  Many books had started falling apart, but with shotty power, and interrupted/controlled internet they had become a trade commodity and sometimes a near priceless bit of knowledge.

You knew many submarines carried all the knowledge they could in paper form, and so had your team collected the important books.  Not to mention the various books Brushbeater had republished, the good books like FM 7-93, Long Range Surveillance, and your buddy had made so many antennas for your team from the Special Forces Antenna book.  God knew you didn’t understand that book but you were glad someone had soaked it up, and you were very happy he had gone to the RTO class and taught your guys how not to die while using radios.

While all the tactics and plans you were using were land-based, the movement and flow had more of the feel of the ocean.  Everyday life just sloshing about, waves of issues rolling over your community, as your little team would pop up discreetly using thermals, SIGINT gear, and night vision to Find Fix, and Finish the intel that made operations like these possible.  Small teams would move at night and day popping up like a periscope long enough to get intel, photos, and Signals to pass on to smarter people.  Ultimately taking over the purification system would be amazing, but without all the necessary consumables, it wouldn’t last long.  Just like a captain of a submarine your small group had decided destroying the supplies would be more beneficial and critical than letting them get to their destination.  Now though this operation was more of a port strike, sneaking into the harbor and risking your small team to devastate the enemy where they felt secure.  Just like WWII submarines had to navigate minefields, and subnets designed to tangle, and immobilize the sub, the enemy defenses had been set up to stop your team from making such a decisive strike.

Those same Defensive Operations in TW-03 were almost identical to what you would face.  Not to mention that drones had become the all-to-present hazard no one could easily detect without the SIGINT dudes working their magic, and even then it wasn’t always easy to know when they were moving about.  Sometimes they had thermals on board which made them more dangerous and your skills were put to the test because of that.  Just like the recon planes in WWII, things in the air were present and hunting you as well.  Like the submarine you had to mask your movements, and know when to go under the waves to hide, and went to move quickly on the surface.  All the issues of a submarine were analogous to what you faced.  Each member is critical and doing a job similar to that of the men on a submarine.  The SIGINT guys acted as the sonar, the few precious vehicles kept alive and running by mechanics just like the engineers.  The women making food for patrols day after day like the cooks on a submarine, to the logistics wizards finding and purchasing all the items acting like the Logistics team for the sub.

All the little bits that keep a fighting force up and moving were put together to support your team, which was the torpedo and the torpedo men.  You not only drilled as much as you could but a few people had been trained in a previous life to play with spicey playdough which was a rarity these days.  They had built for you some improvised thermite to destroy critical and irreplaceable equipment.  With that, your team just like a torpedo would have to travel to the target, guided by all the people that formed your little unit.  Your handful of trained men were going to decide in the end if that torpedo, hit, missed, or was a dud and died in the water.

You may not always have a Captain or act like the military with a rigid command structure your group had leaders that represented each division of a submarine.

You weren’t the leader but you were in charge of your men because of their confidence in you and your intelligence and the stress of that weighed on your shoulders every second of every day.