I agree on the feral Vv - Velocity of violence. Immediate and fast moving against the usual soft targets- human and retail.
Communications will be a controlling variable on their ‘combat radius’ so to speak, so while they will likely ‘go kinetic’ very rapidly, they won’t be able to sustain effective operations without comms — even if they have working individual and collective transport.
Makes me wonder what the gummint QRF have cooked up from a C3I perspective.
How FAST and to what degree will they shut down social media, texting, personal cell phone traffic, etc?
Will they leave it up to gather intel, and allow the early mayhem to develop and organize, or will they shut it all down except for ‘official’ traffic. dunno. Depends on their intent - benevolent or malevolent. If malevolent, they will allow mayhem to scare the populace into a desired set of cocoons and safe zones. If benevolent, they will work to shut it down as best they can.
BUT, per your ABNB, I feel certain the populace will be called via the EBS (and ‘amber alerts’ and digital road signage) to ‘safe zones’ - which effectively amount to control and redistribution facilities.
REM: keep your Midland’s charged and available. Doubt they’ll kill the CB channels.
Food for thought.
I think store looting will turn to general mayhem, violence and destruction so fast (2-3 days max) that all of the govt plans will be swept aside like Inspector Clouseau standing in front of a tsunami blowing a police whistle.
Read the personal accounts of the survivors in the NOLA Superdome, or some of the NOLA hospitals, and then don’t rescue them after a few days, and extend that horror across the entire nation.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be a wet match in a hurricane.
If the government cuts all public communications, then business completely and utterly stops. The Internet is necessary for “Just in Time Inventory” from local Mom and Pop to big box retail.
To shut it down to stop an insurrection or civil unrest will be insane! People not working? Who would they blame? No food because Walmart couldn’t order the right or even ANY deliveries as soon as the shelves are empty? Repeat tens of thousands of times across the fruited plain and the chaos would be TOTAL and FINAL.
Imagine millions of rifle toting bitter clingers—now out of work, with idle hands, caused by the government or DoD, and getting hungrier every minute... THAT’S chaos.
They military wouldn’t be able to sustain themselves, let alone the country. In 1977, I was in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, THE USAF Nuclear war command center, in a terrible blizzard. No one could get up the mountain road. We had to triple shift triple times. We ran out of food after 24 hours! Yeah, there was tons of emergency rations, but eating any of them was against orders unless we were at a higher DEFCOM. Stupid, but that’s how obeying orders can be.
The modern way of life we now have is totally dependent on those communications. I teach high-level network and server classes at a big university. I often ask my students, “How long can a modern business last without email?” The practical answer is not more than a week. “Why?”, I then ask. “Emails only been around for 25 years, and business survived fine without it.”
The reply—and think about this—is we’ve FUNDAMENTALLY changed our whole supply, inventory, supplier to business to customer way of doing things. We are absolutely dependent on computing and electronic networks.