I'm going to suspend my Twitter holiday to squeeze in one more super-nerdy Twitter thread — I assume it will be my last of 2020.

And it's not even about Star Trek! It's about a different CBS property: Jericho.

Specifically, why the town's tactical plan sucked.

Buckle up.

Jericho aired 16 years old, so not exactly recent (but actually more recent than my usual fare, come to think of it). It aired on CBS for one season, and was cancelled. A fan campaign succeeded in getting the show renewed for a seven-episode second reason to wrap up the plot. +

The premise of the show is that it shows how one small rural Kansas town copes with a sudden attack — origin and motive unknown — that sees dozens of U.S. cities simultaneously destroyed by nuclear weapons. And the chaos that follows the attack. +

Not knowing who was behind the bombings, and the motive, is a major part of the Jericho storyline. The confusion only gets worse when, shortly after the bombings, the U.S. is hit by an electromagnetic pulse attack, which destroys most electrical systems and communications. +

A few months after the nukes and EMP, Jericho is in dire condition — without power for heat, people are freezing to death in their homes. Fuel is scarce. Food supplies are nearly exhausted, and the next crop is still months away.

But Jericho is doing better than its neighbour. +

The neighbouring town of New Bern has some manufacturing; Jericho doesn't. But New Bern's surrounding land isn't ideal for farming; Jericho's is. New Bern was raided by rogue mercenaries (sent by the U.S. government to help) and loses much of its food and many men. It's bad. +

New Bern is being led by its sheriff, and he makes a ruthless but logical conclusion: New Bern must annex Jericho's farms and claim a share of the yield of Jericho's salt mine, the major employer in town. New Bern begins preparing for war. +

It mobilizes a large force of men. These men are generally well armed — shotguns, rifles, a decent assortment of automatic rifles. It outfits whatever vehicles survived the EMP to use as troop carriers. And this is key — it uses its factories to make improvised mortars. +

I don't know enough about mortars to evaluate how hard it would be. My guess is that making mortars would be relatively easily, but that making mortars that don't tend to blow up your own guys when you try to launch them would be hard. But New Bern accomplishes this. +

New Bern's plan is tactically sound. It demands several of Jericho's large farms and a share in the mine, and shells Jericho's town square. It will keep shelling each hour until Jericho agrees to its terms. Jericho sends out a party to destroy the mortars. +

Jericho's party, though, is rushed and led by amateurs, and the force is almost totally wiped out. A second attack is able to take out the mortar tubes — at least the ones that were shelling the town, there might have been others. New Bern prepares a ground attack. +

Jericho prepares an ad hoc citizens militia, armed with assorted rifles, shotguns and a relative handful of AR-tyle automatic rifles, to drive off the New Bern attacking force.

They also have a tank, but ... that's a long story and it's not really relevant to what unfolds. +

So let's get into the analysis.

Jericho, to put it mildly, is not prepared for a battle. It does have a small group of town "Rangers" it has trained to act basically as scouts and light or mounted infantry, but there's only a few of them, and their training is minimal. +

They are armed with a mix of light weapons, mostly hunting rifles. They are trained using the U.S. Army Ranger's handbook ... but they're not trained well.

They are not trained well at all. +

Before I get into why the Rangers are woefully inadequate, I want to take a bigger-picture look. Jericho itself had NOT prepared to defend itself. A handful of rangers with deer guns ain't gonna cut it.

They had taken no effort to train a larger light infantry militia.

They had not done anything to standardize their weapons, even to the extent possible (which would obviously be limited).

They had not mobilized any kind of motor pool out of surviving vehicles. They had not trained anyone in basic support roles: comms, medics, scouts*, etc. +

(OK, fine, the town Rangers were scouts of a kind, but I'm talking more about the lack of any Jericho militia beyond the scouts, who are totally insufficient, for reasons I'll get to).

+

Other than a couple of semi-competent town deputies and a few Rangers, this town of thousands is totally undefended, and by the point New Bern attacks, there was no excuse for that. They knew there was danger out there, and they did almost nothing to prepare for it. +

They certainly hadn't done anything to come up with any heavy weapons, and I find that galling.

I'm not an expert on modern infantry tactics, but I'm a reasonably well-read amateur. It might surprise you that guys with rifles aren't the big killers in infantry battles. +

In many modern infantry battles, the guys with rifles — M4s/M16s, C7/C8s, AK-47s, whatever — are mostly protecting other infantry with even more powerful weapons. Machine guns and mortars, for example. +

Guys with rifles and grenades are essential, and are obviously needed desperately in certain situations, such as urban clearance (which grinds through them at a horrific rate). But the real killing by infantry is usually done with the heavier weapons while rifleman guard them. +

New Bern's militia had some heavy weapons. Military issue machine guns they'd acquired somehow. Improvised mortars.

Jericho's had NONE. Just rifles and shotguns.

If you go into battle against mortars and machine guns with hunting rifles, you're fucked. +

Again, I don't know how much technical skill and raw material would be required to improvise mortars or light field cannons (even just to blast shrapnel) or machine guns. I assume it would be feasible if difficult.

Jericho didn't even try. +

New Bern, as mentioned above, had also mobilized vehicles, and had mounted some of the heavier weapons on them. They were mobile and could move their firepower around quickly.

Jericho had enough vehicles to get everyone to the farm where they were all about to get killed. +

But they had no real tactical mobility. They had transport, sure, but were essentially dismounted light infantry once at the battle site. The New Bern force, though also an ad hoc militia, was essentially motorized infantry.

It was gonna be a total slaughter. +

So let's recap. Jericho is not organized. It's just a skirmish line. They have ad hoc weapons. They have no heavy weapons. They have no real unit and sub-unit leadership or organization. They are essentially light infantry with minimal mobility and they have no support fires. +

Their opponent is better organized, better armed, has support weapons, probably has support fires, and has tactical mobility. It's not clear if they have effective unit and sub-unit organization.

So, yeah, this isn't gonna be good. +

But you know what? Hey, let's assume this is the hand you're dealt. What are you gonna do with it?

If you're Jericho's militia, less than you could.

They don't even dig in. +

Like, the most basic thing Jericho's militia could have done — that it's Rangers could have told them to do! — was dig in. Get behind rocks. Throw a few sandbags and lie down behind them.

But they don't. They just stand there shooting, or hide behind car doors. +

I accept that the tactical situation Jerico faced probably precluded establishing any major fixed defences. (Which they should have done way, way before, but hey.) But they didn't even do BASIC steps to give their militia any cover.

That's crazy. +

This is what bothers me most. Even if we assume that they still haven't done anything, at all, to prepare for a battle — improvised some heavy weapons, prepared transport, established militia units with commanders — the very least they could have done was say, "Dig in." +

They weren't just fighting unprepared. They were fighting dumb.

And they really had no excuse. A major plotpoint in the show is that the former mayor is a former U.S. Army Ranger and combat veteran! They were criminally unprepared.

+

But there's actually a grander failure here.

Again, let's assume all the above conditions apply: you're unprepared, New Bern isn't, and they're coming in hours or minutes. You have no time to prepare.

Why not disperse and fight as guerrillas? +

I'm serious. If my town is about to be overrun and I'm unprepared, screw the open-field battle against a massively superior enemy force. Take 100 guys, break them into 25 teams of four, and tell them to raise hell.

Hell, send 50 of them right to New Bern to take hostages. +

Indeed, why didn't the Rangers think of this immediately? Screw the open-field infantry battle against machine guns and mortars. Disperse, vanish, and then spend the next few days sniping everything that moves. New Bern wanted a fast, easy win. Deny them that. Make them pay. +

I've given some thought as well to what Jericho could have reasonably done. I'm not saying maximum effort, but what would reasonable precautions have looked like?

First, as stated, have a proper standing town militia, not just a handful of useless Rangers on horseback. +

By all means, have those Rangers! But they're scouts for ... what? Without a militia, what's the point?

So that was the main failure. Organize a militia, give it basic training, and do what you can to standardize their weapons. +

The next failure was not having that militia organized in a way that allowed not just rapid transport to a battle site, but also a degree of tactical mobility. That requires organization, and there was none. That's criminal. +

The next failure was not improvising some kind of heavy support weapons. How hard would it be to make hand-crank machine guns, like a Gatling or Maxim? Those suckers are CIVIL WAR vintage. How about some kind of field artillery or mortar for lofted fire? +

Also, why not have some improvised fighting vehicles? Weld some steel plate onto a few pickups, mount a homemade Maxim gun on the top and you've got yourself an armoured technical. Put a plow blade on the front! A few of those would do a lot of damage. +

You could have had Jericho in much better shape to resist an attack by New Bern, or anyone else, if they'd taken the time to train a militia of a few hundred people in basic light infantry tactics, had a few technicals with improvised machine guns equipped, and run some drills. +

Before this thread I spent time looking up improvised weapons and strategies used by insurgent groups or ad hoc militias all over the world, and there's tons of interesting stuff, including things as basic as hurling Molotovs with big slingshots.

Jericho could have used one! +

Anyway, despite all of this, I have to say that the show — which I binge rewatched over the last few days — has held up better than I remembered. It was a really neat premise and I wish it had gone on longer. It was a fun show. +

There was a rumour a few years ago that it was coming back, one of the streaming-era reboots that are all the rage of late, and that would be fun! I dunno how you'd pick it up after 15 years, but hey, if they bring it back, I'll watch.

One final point: +

Having lived through COVID, I can say that a lot of things that annoyed me about the show during the original run no longer do. I used to think, "Wow, people would never be that dumb!"

Now, I I know they would be. Dumber, really.

Thanks for reading.

NUTS!

-30-

I will now take questions.