Chapter 12

“Marcel, I don’t think that anyone could do more to derail this effort than the facts before us. None of the problems we face could be affected by anyone. The entire ‘solution’ we have created rests on a house built of cards. If anything falters everything stops. As I said earlier, our major issues are all interconnected. We need to solve them all with a combined solution.

Once we do that, we have another issue. Speed. The air, land and water contingents each move at a different rate. I have to ignore the fact we have nothing to keep the OPFOR in place while we stroll up to them. This is nor a war we can take 7 weeks to mobilize for.”

“So are you saying everything we do will be useless?”

“No, what I am saying is we must ‘think out of the box’, what we need does not exist yet; at least not in the form and for the purposes we need.”

“Could you give me, us, really an example. I for one just wish to understand better what you are saying.”

“Oui! For instance Space travel is a bit like our venture. Once you are out there, re-supply it’s a long way before a place to ‘pit stop’. Ion fuel and the use of pulse engines or magnetism is thought to be a solution. It is very slow and no crew could live through a voyage that takes 1,000 years or longer. They are looking at using ‘Dark Matter’ or even the Saudi kid’s thought for no real fuel at all. We have a similar concern.

We need speed and cannot rely on taking more fuel than we have on-board in the first days, maybe not even after then. Our land crafts and air attack copters too are conventional and need fuel. ‘C’est Tuo’, the problem becomes much greater. Does that help? We do not have much in the way to develop ‘Dark Matter’ here on Earth.”

“So?”

“So nuclear power is currently our only fuel free shipboard propulsion method at least for a while. There are some problems with this. Electric is slow too and even if we could develop something like a ‘cat’ drive, we need more than the 60 or 70 kph than a sub does and batteries would fry. Those copters travel like over 300 kph. Land craft 60-70 kph and ships like 40 -50 kph at best. Hence, we split our forces not to mention the much greater speed of any first strike air support we would have.

Any way you look at it, unless we ‘fix’ things, we are going ‘to be late for any party’.”

“This is just ‘wonderful’. You now sound like that ‘fool’ who took your place.”

“Marcel, I never said we could not do it! I am trying to explain my thinking so you all know ‘why’ I am not looking here or there and research one way or another over others. Unless you can tell me otherwise, we can’t use what is in-place today and we do not have the time or the funds to just ‘create’ everything from scratch. We need to find things that already exist but used in a different way. This is my ‘stake in the ground! If this is not agreed to by all of you, find somebody else to ‘dream up’ something, I won’t mind at all.”