This week, we’re doing another ‘silly’ topic, but this being me, it is a silly logistics topic, because – as the saying goes – amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. So we’re going to be professionally silly this week and talk about the logistics of vehicle warfare in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting, in part because this is a good way to also think about why militaries (of various description) use the vehicles they use, from a logistics standpoint.
Our pop-culture starting point here is going to be the ‘Mad Max’ universe and similar settings (Rage, the recent Badlands Crew, Fallen Earth etc), particularly the vision of motorized post-apocalyptic warfare that emerges quite clearly from Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.1 I should note that while I’m treating Mad Max as a single setting here, I’m going to focus a lot more on Fury Road and Furiosa, because those are the films that feature the most large-scale warfare (though we’ll get a few mentions of Mad Max 2 as well). We’ll outline in a moment the overall warfare ‘model’ these settings use, but what I find particularly notable are the vehicles used: often large numbers of motorcycles and motorbikes, muscle cars and the distinctive presence of ‘war rigs’ – massive weaponized trucks – and the assumption that a lot of the fighting is conducted ‘at speed.’
Of course that’s not the only vision for vehicles in the post-apocalypse. In some settings, vehicles figure in only a little: in the modern Fallout games2 the only vehicles of gameplay import are aircraft. The existence of ground vehicles is implied in dialogue, but we never see them, presumably because they’d be too difficult to implement in the engine. Zombie fiction often features small groups of survivors in individual civilian vehicles, sometimes hardened for combat, but typically not (and often when they are hardened, it is for ‘ramming’ crowds, which is not a thing that would be good to modify a civilian vehicle for).
I want to focus on the Mad Max-style settings because they feature larger factions engaging in warfare at a variety of scales with modified and even purpose-built vehicles. We wouldn’t expect small survivor groups weeks or months after some form of the apocalypse to be significantly modifying their vehicles but we would expect substantial modifications to be made by full societies engaging in warfare at scale with these vehicles. Also, again, it’s a fun setting.
So what we’ll do is outline the ‘warfare model’ of these Mad Max-style settings, discuss the problems with that warfare model and then lay out a more plausible replacement and in the process think a bit about modern military logistics.
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The Mad Max Warfare Model
We want to start by laying out what I am going to call the ‘warfare model‘ of the setting. When I say ‘warfare model’ here, what I mean is how a fictional setting imagines warfare to be conducted across all of the different levels of military analysis. Put simply how does warfare work in this setting? So the ‘warfare model’ is a big collection of smaller models, like a ‘strategic model’ (what aims are pursued by war in the setting and how) or the ‘tactical model’ (how does battle with these weapons actually work) and so on. For this post, we’re really interested in the tactical and logistical models, but I want to start by outlining in a basic way the whole ‘vision’ and how within the fiction it fits together.
This is, I think, a particularly handy framework to think about in science fiction, because while fantasy works often implicitly borrow a lot of their warfare model from pre-modern history, science fiction settings do not. They may feature radically alien war aims, logistics or tactics, predicated on equally unusual technologies or conditions.
Fortunately for us, the Mad Max warfare model is not so alien, though it does have quirks. Warfare in these settings is waged principally over resources, primarily four: water, food, gasoline and ammunition. The primacy of those resources is most clearly demonstrated in the two most recent Mad Max films (Fury Road and Furiosa), where each wasteland ‘fortress’ is clearly tied to one of the resources and the central economic function of the setting is moving those resources between the three fortresses. In practice, a wasteland warlord would likely have other resource concerns as well, but for a setting that due to the brevity of film, must dwell in simplicity, this more or less works: those are the most substantial logistical demands of any modern war machine.3 Warfare is fought either to control production of those resources, or to scavenge them, as stronger groups cannibalize smaller ones.
The one oddity here of note is that the nodes of resource production (or substantial storage) appear in Mad Max setting specifically as points, rather than zones of control. The Citadel, Gastown, the Bullet Farm and even the fuel refinery from Mad Max 2 are also single points of production, in a single settlement. In practice, in the real world, resources tend to be a lot more spread out than this, demanding military powers – like the warlords of the setting – to disperse their forces much more widely to enable production and extraction. Reducing resource production to a handful of ‘strongholds’ surrounded by ‘wasteland’ allows these warlords to concentrate their military forces a lot more than they otherwise would, which we ought to keep in mind.4 Warfare is thus about either raiding groups moving between these fixed resource points, or efforts to seize control of one of the points itself.
To that end, we see variations on a single military system developing, both in Mad Max and derived settings. Tactically, these systems anticipate primarily vehicle combat: even when attacking a fixed point, the ‘road warriors’ (as it were) are never far from their vehicles. What is distinctively missing are motorized or mechanized infantry – troops that, whatever their transportation, expect to fight primarily on foot. Instead, a lot of the fighting is done while moving at speed and vehicles are present even in static engagements. We’re thus dealing, effectively, with ‘vehicle armies.’
The centerpiece of these vehicle armies is what we may call (following Fury Road and Furiosa) the ‘war rig,’ large improvised vehicles that serve as both transports and fighting platforms. Obviously the most memorable of these are Immortan Joe’s war rigs5 from Fury Road and Furiosa, but we see other smaller factions employing smaller war rigs, like the spiked and armored tractor-trailer of the ‘Buzzards‘ in Fury Road. These show up in other takes on the setting concept too, like the big centerpiece vehicles in the convoys of Rage 2. As noted, the recent Badlands Crew, set in what I can only describe as a ‘legally distinct’ Mad Max setting is all about building and fighting with these sorts of war rigs.
War rigs appear to serve a few functions. On the one hand, they are larger, more heavily armored platforms capable of absorbing punishment and holding a substantial number of combatants and heavier weapons. At the same time, a lot of them are built also for carrying cargo and could – on longer campaigns – serve some sort of logistical sustainment function, refueling the smaller vehicles.
Supporting the war rig are what we might call ‘outriders:’ smaller combat vehicles that are more maneuverable but often function principally as escorts for the war rigs. Notably, there’s a consistent tend in these settings that these tend to be cars or sometimes buggies, with the two recent Mad Max films favoring a range of muscle-car and antique car bodies, albeit often with the trunk space opened up to create a fighting platform in the back. These vehicles are much less heavily armored, but faster and more agile and make up the majority of most army’s combat power.
Finally, we see the heavy use of motorcycles and motorbikes, both as raiders and as escorts. Often this is by ‘factions’ in the setting implied to be poor (like the ‘Rock Riders‘) or roving gangs like Dementus’, but we also see them employed by large factions: there are motorbikes in the escort of Immortan Joe’s war rigs in both Fury Road and Furiosa. Notably, these function in a lot of cases as primary combatants: both Dementus and the ‘Rock Riders’ attack war rig convoys with bikes, so these aren’t just personal transport or scouts, at least for some of the factions that use them.
And of course we should note that as fiction these vehicles have an important role in signaling things to the viewer. A faction that mostly uses dirt-bikes and lives in the mountains feels rugged and almost half-civilized, while Dementus’ giant hoard of motorcycle-mobile raiders visually evokes the way Steppe nomads get presented in media, complete with massive dust-cloud (fitting, as Dementus is presented as a nomadic warlord). Cars covered in spikes might not be very effective as weapon-systems, but they visually communicate something fairly primal and direct to the audience.
Because most of the fighting in the setting involves either overrunning thinly garrisoned fortresses or attacking motorized convoys moving resources, a lot of the fighting is done ‘on the move,’ with vehicles moving continuously at full speed while exchanging fire. In the Mad Max setting, its clear that proper firearms (or perhaps more likely, their ammunition) have become relatively rare, reserved for key combatants and vehicles: instead, improvised weapons using cruder explosives or gasoline are a lot more common, so thrown explosives are a key component in this sort of fighting. That varies by setting, of course and in some settings we see a lot more guns (or non-gun missile weapons made mechanically equivalent to guns through the magic of video game rules).
Road War Tactics
In practice, I see two problems with this combat model, one tactical and the other logistical. We can start with the tactical problem, which comes down to two fairly simple points: first, without complex modern stabilizers (and often even with them) it is extremely hard to hit a moving vehicle firing from a moving vehicle and second, armoring most of these vehicles to resist even small arms fire would be difficult and involve prohibitive increases in weight.
We can start with the accuracy side of the equation: these settings very often feature combatants firing (or throwing weapons) from moving vehicles on to moving vehicles and that’s just very hard to do, except at very close ranges. After all, not only does a shooter on a moving platform have to account for their relative velocity with the target (which may be rapidly shifting) but a moving platform isn’t going to be perfectly level either, with bounces and bumps throwing off aim, potentially in all sorts of directions for a vehicle moving at high speeds on rough terrain.
You can actually get a sense of how hard a problem this is with even a brief look at the development of stabilizers for the main guns of tanks. The first attempts at tank gun stabilization come in the 1930s, but the initial capabilities were really limited, requiring tanks to basically stop to engage in accurate fire. The United States, for instance, didn’t think stabilization was really worth it in the 1960s and an add-on stabilization kit for the M60 main battle tank didn’t come until the early 1970s. On-the-move accuracy without a stabilizer – or even with an early stabilizer – was remarkably poor. The consensus to my understanding, for instance, of WWII-era tanks, was that none of them had much chance of hitting a tank size target at any range that mattered while moving, even tanks like the M4 Sherman which included very early stabilization technology.
Indeed, the Allies ran accuracy tests (because of course they did) on the M4 Sherman the Crusader Tank and their stabilizers and Tank Archives was good enough to dig up the reports. You can really get a sense of the problem from the table on p. 12 of the report, the table labeled “Stationary Fire, Firing from Halt, Moving Fire with and without Gyrostabilizer.” It records accuracy against a stationary 49 square foot (7×7) target “under the most favourable conditions,” as a ‘probability of hit’ at a given set of ranges:
| Type of Fire | 200 yards | 500 yards | 1000 yards |
| Stationary | 99+% | 99+% | 99+% |
| From Halt | 99+% | 99+% | 88% |
| Moving, with Gyro | 82% | 46% | 19% |
| Moving, without Gyro | 46% | 18% | 6.5% (est) |
And the problem should just jump right out at you: under conditions where a shot fired stationary or ‘from halt’ (slam the breaks, wait for the tank to stop and stabilize, then fire immediately) could be accomplished (in training field conditions) with basically perfect accuracy, firing on the move with a basic stabilizer was a crapshoot and without a stabilizer, the chance of hitting anything collapsed to almost nothing beyond extremely short (for tanks) ranges. As the report notes, in combat conditions – with all the stress and confusion that implies – these figures must be substantially lower. After all, WWII era tanks did not, in fact, have perfect accuracy at 1000 yards in actual combat – far from it! The report goes on to note that the ammunition cost of firing on the move “is largely wasted in view of the evident lack of advantage gained over firing from halt.” In short: the chance of hitting anything firing while moving was so low it wasn’t worth wasting the shots and you instead ought to stop the tank if you needed to fire (‘fire from halt’).
Of course you might try to square the accuracy problem with volume of fire: simply get something fast-firing and put a lot of rounds in the air. But that runs into the second problem: these are societies with pretty sharp limits on ammunition production. Spraying thousands of rounds into the air to maybe-or-maybe-not disable an enemy vehicle is probably not viable. Of course one option would be to drive much closer and engage the enemy at very close range. But the far better answer in most cases is going to be stop and fire when stationary. Once you stop moving, you have a stable firing position (no bouncing around) and only need to lead the target based on their motion, which is not a trivial task at long ranges, but a far easier task – human soldiers with nothing more than iron-sights and the Mk1 Eyeball are regularly able to put bullets on speeding automobiles at non-trivial ranges.
The other tactical complication, once your war-vehicles are being shot at by stationary enemies, is that armoring large vehicles against that small-arms fire is actually pretty challenging.6 It takes a non-trivial amount of steel plate to stop even standard rifle calibers (5.56mm, 7.62mm, etc), as you can find any number of YouTube tests demonstrating. The upshot is that for a steel-plate defense, ‘safety’ looks to be more than a quarter-inch (closer to half an inch) and that’s quite a lot of armor, which substantial weight implications. In practice, a number of modern armored vehicles, like the M2 Bradley and the M113 APC use aluminum armor (on the Bradley, enhanced by laminate plates) at an inch thickness or more (aluminum is almost three times less dense than steel).
But the weight premium for ‘can resist small arms and not much more’ over an entire vehicle is substantial: the M113 APC is 13.6 (short) tons, the BTR-80 is 15 tons. Not only is that vehicle going to need a much more powerful engine, that engine and weight is going to have logistically significant impacts to fuel efficiency (to say the least!) which we’ll get to in a second.
But tactically, the implication here is quite bad for our ‘war rigs’: as moving, fighting platforms, they can’t fire back effectively, but they’re so big that a stationary enemy can probably put a good amount of fire on them as they pass by. Worse yet, there’s simply no feasible way to protect the rig or its combatants from much of that fire. You probably can slap armor on some key elements (the tractor cab on the front is the obvious choice), but there’s really no way to offset the vulnerability created by size (and less ability to maneuver) by just slapping on armor. In particular, the ‘tanker’ components of the Fury Road and Furiosa war rigs, simply due to the size, are going to have to be far too thin to actually repel rifle fire, which could be particularly awkward if fuel or ammunition is being moved.
So while I can imagine throwing a couple of light-weight fighting positions on to a large cargo-carrier simply to provide an extra amount of deterrence and firepower, you really wouldn’t want to take it into a fight. You might be slightly more willing to risk the outriders and bikes, but even then, these are going to be thin-skinned vehicles that can’t do much more than demonstrate with fire unless they stop. Of course I am assuming no one has a functional stabilizer here, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.
Because first we need to talk about…
The Logistics of Road War
The logistics of this kind of warfare, like nearly all modern logistics, centers around two considerations: fuel and ammunition (and, as we’ll see, also spare parts). But we need to distinguish between operational logistics concerns and strategic logistics concerns, both of which matter here. Put it this way: a given faction in the wasteland may have a certain stockpile of gasoline and bullets, but any given raid or convoy is only going to carry some much smaller amount of that larger stockpile. Once they leave base, they have to accomplish whatever their mission is with that smaller amount, so there a concern with how much can a given force carry in the field (operational logistics) and a concern with how much do operations in the aggregate consume against production and stockpiles (strategic logistics).
In essence the operational question revolves around matching up consumption (of fuel and munitions) against the carrying capacity of the vehicles involved, which determines operational endurance. By contrast, the strategic question revolves around matching the consumption of many operations against the productive capacity of the faction as a whole to determine how long operations can be sustained and at what tempo.
Both considerations would shape the actual conduct of ‘road war,’ albeit in different ways.
We can begin with the operational limits: any given raid or convoy can only carry so much fuel and ammo for itself. Spare parts are less of a concern here, because only relatively minor repairs are going to be possible in the field. Of course not only can vehicles move fuel in their fuel tanks, if they have cargo capacity, they can also store spare fuel (and spare munitions). Now, I have to confess, I am not a ‘car nerd’ – nothing against car nerds, it just isn’t my brand of nerd – but we really do need to benchmark here against some numbers, because the actual fuel mileage, fuel tank size and cargo capacity for actual vehicles matters for this question. So forgive me if I have made any errors here, but here are some relevant figures:7
| Vehicle | Fuel Mileage (mpg) | Fuel Tank (gallons) | Op. Range (miles) | Cargo Capacity | Notes |
| Yamaha WR250R (motorcycle) | c. 54 | 2 | 108 | Not Much | 295lbs total mass |
| BMW R18 (motorcycle) | c. 50 | 3.5 | 175 | Not Much | 761lbs total mass |
| 1973 Ford Falcon | c. 7.4 – 13.8 | 21.2 | 225 | ||
| Toyota 1995 Hilux | 22-27 | 13.7 | 335 | 1,820lbs | |
| Toyota 2025 Tacoma | 21-26 | 18.2 | 428 | 1,700lbs | |
| Semi-Trucks (estimate) | 6-8 | c. 300 (in two tanks) | 2,100 | c. 45,000lbs on road | Not designed for off-road |
| Deuce & 1/2 (Military Truck) | 8-11 | 50 | 475 | 5,000lbs (off road) | 12+ passengers diesel |
| Humvee (HMMWV) | 8-11 | 25 | 237.5 | 2,500lbs | ~4-6 passengers diesel |
| M2 Bradley IFV | 0.75(-1.6?) | 175-197 | 80 (300 on-road?) | 6 passengers diesel | |
| M1 Abrams MBT | 0.19-0.52 | 504 | Road: 265 Off Road: c. 100 | Uses JP-8 jet fuel |
And from that we can make some observations. First, the relative weakness of motorbikes and motorcycles comes out pretty clearly. Sure, they have very high gas mileage, but for almost no cargo and an extremely low passenger count. Cargo payload and passenger count matter here because that is where our combat power – mounted weapons, munitions, or combatants beyond the driver – go. A motorcycle delivers a combat power of one human with small arms. By contrast, the pickup trucks have half the gas mileage, but if you are willing to load up the bed can deliver half a dozen or more combatants, making the fuel-to-combatant ratio actually very unfavorable for motorcycles. Indeed, given how light some of these motorcycles are, you could load the motorcycles and its drivers on the back of a truck (either a pickup or the heavier Deuce-and-a-Half) and gain operational range without losing mileage efficiency. Heck, putting ten Yamaha WR250R’s in the back of a Deuce-and-a-Half might appears to end up as significantly more fuel-efficient than driving the bikes, plus you also get a truck out of the arrangement.
As a result, the usage of motorcycles, so common in these settings, would in practice probably be extremely limited. They’re not effective combat platforms – too unstable for effective fire and bad at carrying additional combatants – and they are terrible as a means to move combatants to a combat area as compared to just loading the same troops in a truck. Where one might imagine them used is as couriers or scouts, where a ‘minimum vehicle to move one person’ is valuable. I could thus see a raiding party loading a bunch of motorcycles on the back of a truck precisely to be able to use them as scouts and flankers, particularly if they can communicate back to the main force via radio (thus allowing for over-the-horizon scouting). But you wouldn’t want to try to use them for any actual fighting.
We can also see, both operationally and strategically, why even if a Wasteland Warlord had access to military combat vehicles, they might not keep using them: the fuel consumption on armored vehicles is extremely high. The HMMWV obviously has battlefield mobility advantages when compared to a Deuce-and-a-Half, but as a pure tool for moving combatants, supplies (or heavy weapons – we’ll come back to this) it is a flatly inferior system: the same fuel mileage, with a smaller tank and half the cargo or passenger capacity (and still in most cases too thin-skinned to really function as an armored vehicle).
Meanwhile, the actual armored vehicles are staggeringly resource expensive to even use, getting gallons-to-the-mile rather than miles-to-the-gallon. Running an actual tank or infantry fighting vehicle with your wasteland convoy is going to burn up a lot of fuel: both operationally (because that tank may need refuel from other vehicles in the convoy) but also strategically: keeping that thing on the move is going to rapidly overtax whatever fuel-production capabilities your faction possesses. Which goes back to their design: military vehicles were designed by and for modern industrial militaries. They assume a supply chain that reaches back from the front line through rail and shipping networks to the massive production of large-scale industrial economies; if any of our wasteland factions had such an economy, it wouldn’t be a wasteland anymore.
Complicating this picture further are spare parts. Without the ability to manufacture bespoke spare pairs at scale, keeping these vehicles in operation is going to be very difficult. So we ought to expect to see, alongside an emphasis on fuel efficiency, a preference for robust, easy-to-maintain platforms that use widely available civilian vehicle components, rather than hard to source or scavange military components. After all, asking your local junk mechanic to service the AGT1500 gas turbine engine in an Abrams MBT is going to be a pretty big ask, compared to finding the parts to fix the engine of yet another Toyota pickup. So while I can imagine a wasteland warlord maintaining a few actual military vehicles as prestige objects and perhaps for emergency use in siege contexts, these things are impractical for regular use by wasteland factions who simply cannot afford their sustainment.
Instead, in an operational context, the wasteland warlord is interested in platforms that combine favorable operational range with carrying capacity, either to move combatants, cargo or heavier weapons. At the same time, at the strategic level, the concern becomes less about operational range and more about combining favorable gas mileage with carrying capacity, in order to be able to regularly move combat power around. We haven’t talked much about mounting weapons to these vehicles yet, but carrying capacity here too matters: armor and weaponry are basically going to ‘come out’ of the payload capacity of any vehicle, so vehicles with a lot of spare payload can potentially be armored and can carry more combat power, be that a bunch of combatants with improvised weapons or perhaps a single more traditional heavy weapon. Finally in both contexts, simple, robust machines are likely to be prioritized over custom or exquisite systems: you want something you can repair easily which shares lots of parts with everything else you have.
In that context, the frequent appearance of ‘muscle cars’ and indeed, cars in general, is strange. As you can see, glancing up at the chart there, Mad Max’s own 1973 Ford Falcon is the worst of almost all possible worlds: limited cargo capacity, terrible gas mileage, highly limited range. It does nothing the wasteland warrior cares about well.
So we have a film combat system of war rigs, outrider muscle cars and motorcycles. Except that the war rigs are too large and vulnerable for combat: big enough that they can’t avoid all of the fire they aren’t heavily armored enough to stop. As you can see above, big trucks make sense as pure cargo carriers, but you’d want to keep them out of the fight if at all possible. Meanwhile, motorcycles work as scouts but not as combatants, while outrider muscle cars perform almost no task particularly well, given their cost. If we strip most of the weaponry, beyond perhaps token deterrence protection, from our war rigs (making them pure cargo carriers) and only use motorcycles as scouts and messengers, we’re closer to a system that works, but we lack a primary combatant vehicle, for both combat and combat-transport.
What we actually want is a platform that is robust, easy to repair, fuel efficient when compared to its payload capacity, which can move lots of cargo and people and which can be fitted with heavier weapons.
And behold, providence offered forth the perfect vehicle of its wrath and fury: the Toyota Hilux.8
Technically Speaking
And now, just 5,000 words into this post, we actually get to the meat of it, which is that we can be relatively what sort of combat vehicles a faction or warlord under Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic conditions would use because those tactical and logistical conditions already exist and they resulted in a distinctive kind of military vehicle: the Technical.
‘Technical‘ here is a term for a militarized civilian vehicle, usually a pick-up truck with some sort of heavier weapon mounted on the roof or in the bed, to be operated by a combatant standing on the bed. In this sense, the technical is simply an improvised version of a gun truck. As far as I know, there isn’t a clear consensus on where the term ‘technical’ comes from, but in English it has stuck as the term for this sort of vehicle.
An open-bed pickup truck is reasonable fast and agile and capable of rough-road and off-road (within reason) driving, but at the same time the bed can take payloads of upwards of 1,500lbs. That’s enough to mount not just machine guns (although that is the most common armament), but all sorts of heavier weapons: improvised multiple rocket launchers, anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), autocannons, rotary cannons, mortars, etc. and still be able to carry a small number of ‘dismounts’ either in the cab or the bed. That means a pickup truck technical can be modified – weapons permitting – to function as an unarmored (or very lightly armored) version of basically any of the armored fighting vehicles we discussed back when we talked tanks: it can move troops (like an APC), offer heavy weapon fire-support for infantry (like an IFV), mount heavy direct-fire guns (like a tank) or indirect fire weaponry (like a self-propelled gun), depending on what weaponry is mounted in the bed.
Now of course these platforms are vastly inferior to their specialized military variants. While there certainly are up-armored technicals, that armor – for the reasons we discussed above – is generally very modest. Most remain ‘thin skinned,’ offering no real protection to crew or passengers from even small arms. Moreover, absent stabilizers and sophisticated optics, the weapons on the backs of technicals, aimed using the Mark 1 Eyeball, are going to have limited accuracy – and effectively no accuracy on the move. Like WW2 tanks, technicals need to halt to deliver fire effectively (though fire-on-the-move can still deliver some suppression). Technicals also can’t mount the heaviest and most sophisticated weapons, which is a particular problem against opponents with modern air forces, since there’s basically nothing you can put on a technical that can engage a modern multirole combat jet.9
But in a context where purpose-built military vehicles and combat aircraft are rare – be that a post-apocalypse or simply civil wars in developing countries with limited economies – the technical has some remarkable advantages. Looking above, we can see, in particular, how it solves a lot of the logistical problems our wasteland warlord might otherwise face. As a front-line combat vehicle, it is remarkably fuel-efficient, out-performing even purpose-built military mobility vehicles (like the HMMWV) in terms of delivering combatants and light vehicle-mounted weapons.10 Of course for moving heavy loads and reserve troops, a heavier truck (like the deuce-and-a-half or more modern Medium Tactical Vehicle or a similar modified civilian platform) is going to be even more effective. It’s easy to imagine then front line and escort forces employing technicals, supported by a logistics backbone and mobile reserve in trucks of various kinds – alas, no place for our iconic ‘war rigs.’
The other major advantage the technical offers is maintenance and repair. In the real world, groups using technicals tend to prefer simple, robust, easy-to-maintain models with minimal ‘frills’ – famously the Toyota Hilux and Land Cruisers have often been the models of choice. Remember: modern purpose-built military vehicles are built by and for militaries that sit at the tip of vast industrial systems capable of mass-producing precise, interchangeable spare parts at scale and maintaining expensive, complex, sophisticated systems. Like any group using technicals, our wasteland factions do not have that background: what they cannot scavenge, they must, at best, hand-craft. That means simple and reliable are the watchwords, followed by common: the more common a platform is, the easier it will be to source or scavenge replacement parts as things break or wear out and the easier it will be to find or develop the mechanical expertise necessary to maintain them in the field.
And ho boy are these platforms common. The United States has built, for itself and its allies, some 281,000 vehicles of all models of HMMWV as of 2015 (production started in 1985), just under 10,000 vehicles per year. By contrast, Toyota started making the Hilux in 1968; by 2017 they had sold 17.7 million units, more than 350,000 per year. That is, a popular consumer pickup truck might produce more vehicles in a year as a purpose-built military vehicle might produce in three decades. Now I should note, depending on where you are, the locally available and popular pickup truck might be different: Land Cruisers and Hiluxes dominated in the technical-centric warfare in Africa over the last several decades because they’re popular models there. By contrast, the Hilux isn’t even sold in North America – instead the heavier (and for these purposes, notably less capable) Toyota Tacoma is. But a post-apocalyptic faction isn’t going to get to choose: if your wasteland warlord is operating in Nebraska, the core of his technical fleet is going to be Ford F-Series trucks, simply because they’re the most common in Nebraska (even though a somewhat lighter, more robust and simpler model might be better in some ideal sense). Simply being common makes these vehicles easier to repair and maintain; that they tend to be built to be robust under heavy use is a further advantage.
Technicals of this sort are a standard feature in warfare in parts of the developing world and have even shown up in industrialized peer-warfare (for instance, in the War in Ukraine). Perhaps most famously, in 1986-1987, Chad was able to defeat a Libyan invasion of their country using an army primarily composed of technicals (mostly the Hilux and Land Cruiser, of course), even though the Libyan army had large numbers of conventional military vehicles, including tanks and aircraft, in what has become known as the Great Toyota War. One wonders what Toyota’s PR arm thinks about that. The use of technicals gave the Chadian military a lot of operational and tactical mobility in sparsely populated regions and the Chadians benefited from French air cover which kept Libyan aircraft largely out of the fight. That said, I should note the victory of technicals here was unusual: generally technical-based armies that find themselves fighting conventional armies lose, badly and quickly: technicals are not survivable against modern armored fighting vehicles.
A New Model of Road War
With that, we can return to our original topic: the shape of post-apocalyptic wasteland ‘road war.’ Now I should note that, as is the case with any fictional setting, an author that wants to can tweak the world almost endlessly to produce a specific vision of warfare. If the resources of the wasteland were less concentrated, or its industry more advanced, or less advanced, or the laws of physics altered, we would have a different result. But proceeding with the ‘rules’ of the setting – Mad Max-inspired wastelands – as they are presented, we can posit a more grounded model for ‘road war.’
Wars in this setting are fought over resources – food, water, fuel and ammunition primarily – which are concentrated in very small geographic spaces, linked together by travel routes. Large factions control the resource nodes themselves, while small factions attempt to survive either scavenging over the wasteland or by raiding the routes between the major settlements. That raiding threat in turn requires resource shipments to move in guarded, road-bound convoys. Large factions thus need military force which can both secure the key resource nodes and also guard convoy transit between them, while smaller factions aim simply to raid transit routes.
‘Leg infantry’ is out except as stationary garrison forces on the resource nodes: the expanses of distance and difficult terrain essentially rule out foot-mobile infantry. At the same time, the sharp limits on fuel and spare parts rule out a modern mechanized military, so we would expect to see a force composed of militarized civilian vehicles. We might see motorbikes and motorcycles used in scouting and courier roles and larger trucks used for bulk freight or to move troops, but the front line vehicles are probably going to be armed pickup trucks, because they offer the most favorable combination of reliability, firepower and fuel-efficiency.
For a small, raiding faction, you might imagine a handful of gun-armed technicals to represent the ‘high end’ of their military power, since ammunition is rare in the setting. By contrast, a big time warlord like Dementus or Immortan Joe might have fleets of technicals. Because the technicals themselves are the basic unit of military power, their display becomes an important element of prestige, a way of demonstrating the power of larger warlords. At the same time, it seems like in a lot of these settings proper firearms and ammunition are rare enough (and gasoline-based explosives common enough) that we might also see ‘low end’ combatants using improvised grenades (like the ‘firesticks’ of Furiosa and Fury Road) or flame-throwers as close-combat tools, probably also from the back of militarized pickup trucks.11
So we might imagine a convoy raid conducted ‘to doctrine,’ being a bit of a multi-stage affair, primarily using technicals. Initially, the convoy is spotted in movement by scouts, perhaps using motorbikes, and communicated to a main raiding force, split between higher-end technicals armed with firearms or heavy weapons and low-end vehicles (again, probably also militarized pickups) with combatants armed with those incendiary grenades or flamethrowers. The mobility of the technicals enables the force to reach the convoy and engage it (probably setting up ahead of the convoy on its route). The ‘gun-technicals’ aren’t going to accomplish much firing on the move – they’re almost certainly not fitted with even very basic stabilizers, so they wouldn’t hit anything – so we’d imagine them maneuvering to a firing position and them firing ‘from halt’ and stationary as the convoy passed.
That fire would be intended to take out convoy escorts, but also to ‘suppress’ the convoy – composed of heavy trucks and armed technicals – by forcing it to keep moving, thus greatly reducing the effectiveness of its return fire. Those high-end gun-technicals could also be carrying ‘dismounts’ to both protect the vehicles, but also to dismount and offer additional fire from small arms or crew-served weapons. In that context, you might create enough fire superiority for the low-end vehicles, filled with combatants using cheaper, shorter-range weapons (because you haven’t enough guns or bullets to go around) to close in, force the convoy to halt and seize its vehicles and resources.
Of course a big warlord running those convoys wants to prevent this and one way they might do so is by deploying more threatening escorts. By having more technicals with heavier, longer-ranged weapons, a big warlord might be able to deter such attacks by having enough firepower for their escorts to also halt to fire (remember, no one can hit anything while moving) and proactively engaging opposing vehicles or dismounts. Rather than a gigantic war rig – which is every bit as vulnerable to long-range fire from technical-mounted heavy machine guns as anything else – the fearsome assets of a warlord might be technicals carrying heavy weapons, like recoilless rifles, anti-tank guns, autocannons or mortars which could rapidly destroy enemy technicals even at longer ranges. As noted, I can imagine such a warlord carefully hoarding a small supply of actual purpose-built armored fighting vehicles, but I have to imagine these would be employed rarely, not regularly on convoy duty – they’re too expensive to fuel and maintain to use frequently.
That leaves capturing these key resource nodes. The work of capturing a larger, resource-producing settlement is going to be mostly done by infantry unless the defenses can somehow be compromised, which means the incentive here is for vehicles which can deliver the most infantry and supplies for the minimum of fuel and maintenance costs. Technicals actually square up well here – you can load a lot of armed combatants on the back of a pickup – but I suspect you’d also see larger trucks loaded with as many combatants as they could carry. That said, given that very few of the settlements we see in these settings are fully self-sufficient, a siege approach would also be viable and probably mandatory for factions too small to mount a large clearing operation of a fortified settlement.
All of that is a kind of warfare that actually supports the fractionalization of power, producing the sort of smaller-scale warlordism that the fiction tends to want in these settings. But rather than display their power with massive (but very vulnerable) war rigs, such warlords would likely attempt to overawe foes with impressive displays of their large stock of technicals. And, this being a Mad Max themed setting, by large spikes placed on everything.12
- In part because those are both great movies and this gives me an excuse to rewatch them. Look, you guys made me watch Rings of Power; sometimes I get to have treats.
- Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76
- The big thing missing is ‘spare parts,’ but this too is filled in a bit in the fiction, in that we see The Citadel’s mechanics and machine shops and the use of cannibalized vehicles to supply parts and raw materials for new vehicles. Such reuse couldn’t continue forever, but it might continue for quite a while.
- Note again, in the real world, production would be more dispersed. In particular, the Citadel is simply not big enough to produce enough food to feed all of the people we see in Immortan Joe’s empire (Badlands Crew also indulges in the ‘walled, densely populated stronghold produces its own food trope). But we’re accepting the basic structure of the setting for the sake of argument here.
- There are three main war rigs in these films: in Furiosa there is the initial war rig (captured by Dementus), the ‘bommy-knocker’ rig later in the film, the heavier rig used in the escape in Fury Road. But compared to the war rigs of other factions we see (Dementus’ monster truck and the Buzzard war rig), we should probably also count Immortan Joe’s monster truck and the drum-and-speaker rig of the ‘Coma-Doof Warrior’ (the guy with the guitar) in the broader category of ‘war rigs.’
- Credit here to Furiosa, which shows one of the war boys (the one manning the fantastical rear-end flail weapon) shot fatally through a steel hatch, because a thin steel hatch is not necessarily going to stop a rifle round.
- A few notes: I’ve used the 1973 Ford Falcon – a modified version of which is Mad Max’s famous car – to represent the frequent use of muscle cars in these settings. I pulled its statistics from this page. I opted for the Yamaha and BMW bikes because they were, from what I could find, the most common models used in the two recent Mad Max films. Passenger count for the HMMWV is variable in different configurations; 1 driver, 3 passengers, 1 gunner is a standard configuration. I found correlating attested fuel mileage, tank size and operational range figures for the M2 Bradley very difficult, this the question marks. Finally, I thought I should include a semi-trailer truck here because the tractor cabs of these trucks are often the basis for ‘war rigs,’ but of course actual semi-trucks are very much purpose-built bespoke on-road vehicles that assume a fairly solid surface in their design.
- And also the Land Cruiser and several non-Toyota low-end pickup truck models.
- Helicopters on the other hand, can be engaged by technicals mounting either anti-aircraft guns or fixed mounts using what would otherwise be MANPADs.
- Albeit with significant tradeoffs in all-terrain capability, protection and so on. Again, I am not saying that the military vehicles get nothing for their greater cost: if you can sustain a force of purpose-built military vehicles, that is always the right choice. But if you can’t…
- Please note that whatever the economics of this in the real world, in the setting we see pretty clearly that ‘firesticks’ and other gasoline-based incendiaries are a lot more common and cheaper than actual firearms, the latter of which seem reserved almost entirely for elite individuals.
- Especially their groins. Go back and watch the two recent Mad Max films and notice how the reproductive anxiety of Immortan Joe and the other warlords is expressed by how they tend to put decoration and protective covers over their groins. If that seems unrealistic to you, let me remind you of the early modern armored codpiece; if anything, I thought that sort of behavior and the efforts of some of the warlords to deploy different versions of status-bearing clothing (suits, uniforms, etc) from the older times actually fit quite well with the sort of self-presentation such warlords might engage in.
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I have to admit all this reminds me of the LRDG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Desert_Group
At least according to wikipedia: “The LRDG vehicles were mainly two wheel drive, chosen because they were lighter and used less fuel than four wheel drive.”
All sounds very technical.
Pre-war British tank crews were trained to fire on the move, so it’s odd that there wasn’t the testing done to show this wasn’t a great idea, but not entirely surprising.
I wonder at what point crews abandoned it in favour of ‘Brakes! Fire! Move!’ – before that became the official doctrine or not?
Presumably 1931. Because before then, the Vickers Medium Mark 1 had notably weak axles- and despite being a light tank for it’s size heavier ground pressure than competitiors, so more stress on said weak axles than you’d expect- so they broke down regularly enough that they were probably stable enough.
Well, that and as for the Light Tanks, those were only armed with machine guns anyway where accuracy isn’t the point (particularly since they were for reconnaissance and colonial policing, so if they got into a fight with anything more than another light tank they just died) so firing on the move wouldn’t be a problem because the aim is suppressive fire and if there’s one thing the British Empire was generally not short of, it was machine gun ammo.
And interwar tanks where quite slow, the fast ones managed 20mph, the rest 15-10 to as low as 4 mph for the Renault FT.
Walking fire wasn’t very accurate either, but I seem to recall American infantry were trained in it. Suppressive fire. Intended to scare the enemy for a moment, not to kill.
Walking fire wasn’t a terrible idea: bring your suppressive fire with you, so you don’t outrun it, but it turns out that you can suppress targets better if you’re 1) not moving, so your fire is a more credible threat, and 2) not horribly exposed yourself, which means leapfrogging fire teams work much better.
The guns also changed. Machine guns could be manually “stabilised” by the gunner with a shoulder brace — still not that good, but good enough to spray a tank-sized target or a section of enemy trenches with reasonably accurate burst of fire. 2-pounders (40mm) were really pushing it, and by the time the Brits went up to 6-pounders (57mm) it was just a waste of time.
As sstabeler pointed out, a surprising amount of the prewar British tanks had nothing but machine guns. An estimated 1,682 Mk VI light tanks were made between 1936 and 1940 – and those had nothing but a heavy (12.7mm) machine gun and a standard machine gun mount. Even more strangely, they made the insane decision to produce Matilda I – a very thickly armoured tank (by 1930s standards) that could only travel at 13 (!) km/h and again had nothing but a machine gun, altogether making 140 of those things. For comparison, their first gun-armed (and far more poorly protected) tank, the Cruiser I, did not enter service until January 1939, and only 150-200 Cruisers were present in France, in addition to 23 Matilda IIs (even better armour than the first Matilda and they actually had a gun! Albeit still fairly low in caliber and with no explosive shells, but they were fairly close to what one would call a heavy tank at the time).
This is all the more puzzling considering that not only were the Soviets making T-26s equipped with a 45mm gun AND a coaxial machine gun (and later often with an additional machine gun in the useless turret rear mount or somewhat more useful anti-aircraft one) all the way back in 1933 (ultimately producing ~8,000 of them – far too many considering their awful armour, but certainly better than having the same number of Mk VI light tanks), but that T-26 was itself based on the BRITISH Vickers design which the British Army had rejected in early 1930s, yet was eagerly licensed not just by Soviets but also by the Polish, whose 7TP and 9TP were also quite comparable to both the T-26 and the exported Vickers (also purchased by the Finns, who found its components largely interchangeable with the trophy T-26s they got from the Winter War.)
In a sense, Polish tank forces in 1939 were remarkably similar in quality to the British Expeditionary ones in 1940 (both being dominated by largely useless light machine gun-only tankettes/”tanks”, with a couple hundred gun-armed but lightly armoured tanks and a few dozen gun-armed, comparatively well-armoured but very slow tanks), which feels astonishing from today’s vantage point. Poland also happened to pioneer Gundlach Rotary Periscope in those 7TP tanks, which was so useful it ended up copied by literally everyone else as soon as they could get their hand on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Gundlach#Gundlach_Rotary_Periscope
What do you mean by “trained to do that”? American Marines were “trained” to hipfire their MGs…but did not actually do that very much, bc obviously in most situations its kind of stupid.
With the LARGE caveat that no comparison/anaology is every going to be entirely satisfactory…
It seems like many additional insights could be obtained using the model of naval warfare: vehicles that must either carry all their supplies with them, possibly with one or more “tenders” or “bunker” ships, or that must have access to a small number of small or large ports, with varying degrees of defense capacity to keep pirates from looting the ports. The further a ship gets from base, the fewer and more widely dispersed ports are available to restock.
No footsoldiers who can disembark and attack vehicles up close and personal, although in a fantasy scenario, you can invoke Aquaman’s troops or other similarly skilled swimmers. *G* Unlike in land-based combat, Mad Maxworld offers no local foraging other than for whatever the wasteland equivalent is for fish: your supplies have to be brought with you or obtained from a small number of fixed ports where the supplies can be manufactured. Also, you’d have to bring your own repair crews with you, analogous to a sailing ship’s carpenter and bosun or a modern ship’s engineers. They’ll be able to effect a great many repairs in the field, without having to return to a well-equipped shipyard. Without such experts, even relatively small amounts of damage are likely immobilize a vehicle in the long term.
The fighting forces themselves are likely to be the awkward love child of the age of sail (weapons platforms of various sizes, but with no airplanes or equivalently fast ships) and an aircraft carrier task force (a powerful and valuable central ship surrounded and protected by smaller, more mobile but still powerful ships). Motorcyles might take the place of AWACS for scouting, or might emulate PT boats and other “fast assault boats”: not strong enough to take out a significant ship on their own, but enough to sting/harass, particularly if equipped with grenade launchers or shoulder-launched missiles.
I suspect the logistics situation would quickly devolve into edged weapons, crossbows, and horses or camels or bicycles. That is, things that are relatively easy to manufacture or maintain. As you noted several times, feeding modern weapon systems requires a strong and diverse economy, which won’t exist in the Mad Max scenario. It’ll only take a few significant battles before all the fuel and munitions are gone, particularly if most of your troops were trained by watching TV action movies with unlimited ammunition. Survival (i.e., food and water) will then be the priority, since you can’t drink fuel or eat artillery shells even if you can produce them.
Thank you for both confirming a long held assumption of mine that post apoc warlords being able to sustain fleets of gas guzzlers in the near total absence of a global petrochemical industry is highly dubious at best. And for giving me an excuse to shout out Necromunda, where the Ash Waste Nomads gang (at least the modern version) is the one gang that is NOT allowed to take vehicles in campaigns that use them, instead having their “vehicle” need met by giant mutant bug riders with chainsaw lances.
If you are really short on fuel consider the humble bicycle.
John Barnes wrote several “Timeline Wars” novels, with factions of time-travelers trying to change history. The third was “Caesar’s Bicycle”, giving Roman legions bicycles to improve mobility.
While this is speculation, I suspect that for bicycles to really work, you need steel wheels, rubber tires (not pneumatic ones, but rubber-coated), and some kind of paved road.
The Romans had paved roads, but they didn’t have industrial revolution-scale steel production, and absolutely no rubber.
My reasoning is that while wooden wheels work well enough for supporting a load, they’re not great for producing traction. You need something that can grip the road and push off it perpendicular to the normal force. For that you need a hard surface that will stay put, and a wheel that will not only stick to it (as opposed to wood skidding over stones), but can also transfer torque from the axle. That’s not something traditional wooden wheels are equipped to do very well.
You can probably get *something* to work, potentially starting with just a wooden disc, a keyed axle, and perhaps hobnails on the (replaceable?) rim, but the result is going to be heavy, awkward, and may not speed up the rider as much as you think.
Modern “safety bicycles” absolutely require gearing to get decent speeds. Without some kind of gear reduction (gear multiplier?), you need 19th century style high cycles to get any kind of decent speed out of them, but the best materials available to make decent numbers of the things out of are wood, rope and leather. They’re going to need daily maintenance and still break down a lot.
Given that armies march at the speed of the slowest person you didn’t leave behind or load up on a cart or mule, reliability seems rather important.
The mules bring up another point: if you’re going to use bikes to march faster, you’re going to outrun your pack animals, so you either need cargo bikes, or (the bike-mobile part) your army is going to be even more constrained in what it can carry.
The bicycle is, after all, pretty unreliable movement tool, even today, and this has real implications for a bicycle-equipped unit: you need to assume that some bikes are going to have a broken tire, or some other mishap during the march, and this means that the soldier on that bike is left behind. The unit cannot stop to wait for repair.
So, you need to have a procedure for the situation: who are important enough that they get to swap a new bike, leaving someone else by the road? Will his mate also stop, to help with repair and to provide cover? Is there a vehicle with spare bikes or evacuation capacity following? How will the left-behind soldier find their way back to the unit, potentially in a territory that is being contested? And how will the unit function when the SOP calls for people to be left behind?
I am not familiar with the operations of any bicycle military unit but as a bicycle rider I think I have to disagree.
The most common bicycle mechanical problem is a puncture of the inner tube which can be fixed by an experienced rider (which I assume all these soldiers would be trained to be) in less than 5 minutes. The nature of bicycle transport is also very conducive to catching up–if you are a few minutes behind people in the column at a leisurely speed, you could just pedal harder for a tiny bit to close the gap, and then you can relax and pedal leisurely at the back. The punctured inner tube is by far the most common mechanical issue, but even other challenges like a broken chain can be resolved very quickly (via quicklinks). Even broken shifting usually just makes riding more inconvenient but does not stop you from riding overall.
Compared to a motorized vehicle the repairs are much quicker.
Cyclist infantry were a real thing, so clearly it was workable up to a point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_infantry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Cyclist_Corps
Well, Finnish Jaeger platoons and companies clearly managed it during WWII.
https://www.jaegerplatoon.net/FORMATIONS6.htm
> By late 1930’s jaeger units of Finnish Army were jaeger battalions (Jääkäripataljoona), which were bicycle infantry that fought as ski-infantry in wintertime. These were to be type of jaeger troops used in World War 2. As was suitable to status of the term by any standard most of these battalions became elite units of Finnish Army during the war. Especially Continuation War (1941 – 1944) era Jaeger Battalions 2 – 5 forming Jaeger Brigade of Armour Division rank among the best units of Finnish Army at that time, while Jaeger Battalions 1 and 6 serving with Cavalry Brigade didn’t gain exactly shaggy reputation either. To keep up the pace, the supply formations of jaeger battalions tended to be motorised.
> It must also be noted, that jaeger battalions were not the only place where this type of troops existed. Each battalion of infantry regiment and HQ of each infantry regiment had their own jaeger platoon. These platoons created from younger and more selected soldiers served mainly as recon and counter-attack unit. Sometimes jaeger platoons (1 from regimental HQ and 3 from each battalion) were gathered together and used to form the regiment a jaeger company, which had four platoons.
> While jaeger battalions were maybe the best known of light troops of Finnish Army, they were not the only ones. Light detachment (kevyt osasto) was a unit type created from company of cavalry, company of bicycle troops and machinegun platoon. That was the theory, in practice apparently often their both companies were issued with bicycles instead of cavalry squadron getting horses. This unit type was intended for giving each division of Finnish Army a smaller mobile formation, which could be used for purposes of vanguard, rearguard, recon, screening and as a mobile reserve. But due to acute and constant shortage of infantry during Winter War, Light Detachments often ended up being used merely as more of “additional infantry”. Kevyt osasto type units existed also during early Continuation War and apparently they now got more often used for their original intended purposes. Early Continuation War light detachment contained two companies of bicycle troops (jaegers) and machinegun company – and were usually motorised, but depending area where they operated sometimes got their motor vehicles replaced with horses. Grand majority of light detachments was disestablished in year 1942 and this unit type basically disappeared at that time.
So, using trucks for logistics while the rank-and-file rides bicycles seems like an approach which worked historically, at least up to a point. The page even includes a breakdown of the exact vehicle ratio.
> Vehicles and other transport equipment issued for Jaeger Battalion in 1941:
> Battalion HQ: 1 staff (passenger) car, 8 trucks, 3 motorcycles, 69 bicycles and 78 pairs of skis.
> Each Jaeger Company: 4 trucks, 1 motorcycle, 145 bicycles and 154 pairs of skis.
> Machinegun Company: 1 staff (passenger) car, 17 trucks, 1 motorcycle, 117 bicycles and 163 pairs of skis.
> Mortar Company: 1 staff (passenger) car, 4 trucks, 32 bicycles and 57 pairs of skis.
For the “Divisional Light Detachments”, it was:
> Strength: 5 officers + 30 NCO + 160 men
> 10 horses + 10 vehicles + 180 bicycles
As a final touch on their logistics, this is the layout of the supplies platoon of a jaeger battalion.
> Supplies Platoon
> Battalion Sergeant (pistol)
> Clerk (rifle)
> Ammunition Squad
> Ammunition Supply NCO (rifle)
> 2 gunsmiths (rifles)
> 2 truck drivers (rifles + 2 trucks)
> Medical Squad
> Medical NCO (pistol/rifle)
> 8 medics (pistols)
> 2 ambulance drivers (rifles + ambulance)
>Supplies Squad
>Battalion Supplies NCO (rifle)
> Motor vehicle NCO (rifle)
> Bicycle mechanic (rifle)
> Shoemaker (rifle)
> Supplies NCO (rifle)
> 2 provisions men (rifles)
> 2 cooks (rifles)
> 2 drivers for supply trucks (rifles + 2 trucks)
“The bicycle is, after all, pretty unreliable movement tool, even today, and this has real implications for a bicycle-equipped unit:”
All vehicles are unreliable, to the point where the staff officer’s handbook will have a handy little table of Mean Distance Between Failures, so you can look it up and go “I’m moving 16 Chieftains and 42 FV432s along 250km of road, so that means I should expect…. two tanks and three FV432s to break down”. (Imaginary figures, but tracked vehicles in particular break down a lot.) In the days of horse cavalry I’m sure that the FSHB had a similar table for horses. Mean Distance Between Cast Shoes or whatever. Even troops on foot will get injured. It’s just friction – there’s no such thing as a reliable way of moving troops around.
As a cyclist, I’d expect the bicycle to be very reliable by comparison, not to mention easy to fix.
Well, I would consider 5 minutes to be very good time for repairing the style of bike that we used in the military, and the Finnish Army didn’t (and doesn’t) assume everyone could do it. When bike units were a thing, they trained bike mechanics as an actual military job.
I found a public source on the doctrine, so I can write it out without revealing classified info (“Sotilaan käsikirja. Helsinki 1978”): platoon and squad leaders, squad deputy leaders, medics and platoon runners will take the bike of the next man. Everyone else simply waits for the company supply to arrive if they can’t fix the bike easily and gets a functional bike from the vehicle that is following the combat platoons. Then, you catch up with the platoon. (You can easily see that the WWII TOE above had these auxiliary support vehicles for each company.)
Of course, this is just one way to solve the issue. Any military utilising bikes or motorcycles needs to have some solution, though.
BTW, this training film shows nicely how bicycle infantry is supposed to fight: https://elonet.finna.fi/Record/kavi.elonet_elokuva_1366016
My own experience of army bicycle reliability is from the oath march I did in 1998 with 500-1000 other soldiers at the end of the rookie period. We rode 200 kilometers in three days from Sodankylä to Levi and back. In the first two days we did 40 and 50 kilometers over gravel roads and on the third day we rode 110 kilometers on tarmac roads back to garrison. I don’t remember breakages to have been a much of an issue. We carried our standard back bags on the rear rack and wore the combat belts and assault rifles.
Army bicycles can be quite reliable devices. They are simple single-speed bicycles with very sturdy construction. There is very little that can go wrong on the drivetrain compared to a diesel truck, so it should be easy to maintain them to a state where breakages are rare. Sudden tire punctures are likely, but it will take only few minutes to grab a spare wheel from a car or truck following the march. If there bigger issues you can get a replacement bicycle or just load the bike on a truck and ride along.
I bow to your superior experience in this matter: you are an infantryman, I am just an artillery guy, with some rudimentary basics of infantry combat.
And to be honest, I don’t remember any case of a military bicycle breaking.
The other key piece of modern industrial technology you need to keep bikes moving is “ball bearings” – and good luck fabricating those in ancient Rome!
” gearing to get decent speeds.”
But what does “decent speed” mean if the alternative is people walking? 6 MPH can be great if the baseline is 3 MPH.
There’s also cargo capacity; a past post had comments-discussion of the Chinese wheelbarrow and the large loads it could allow someone to push or pull along vs carrying on their back.
Yes, I also found it odd that bicycles had not been mentioned.
I know that my country, Belgium, had historically used bicycle infantry.
They had even played an important role in the Battle of Halen during WWI. Though the cyclists had fought on foot then, I presume.
My favorite scene from Infantry Attacks was the image of a bunch of German soldiers on stolen bicycles speeding down the alps to the attacks.
Riding a bike over anything other than smooth asphalt sucks for long distances. Prepare some spare rims and a lot of spare inner tubes because those you started with are going to break beyond repair on a Roman road. The average breaking point depends on speed and quality of bikes, of course, but the tradeoffs between small improvement over walking speed, adding a complex breakable component to your army and number of punctures per day per soldier (let’s say aiming to keep it below 1) is rather bad. Source: I’ve gone on multi-day bike trips over mixed terrain, limiting the amount of non-asphalt terrain is a big part of route planning.
This eventually got me to find “A Brief, Illustrated History of the Bicycle at War” blog series, which consists of 6 parts and covers the Anglo-Boer War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam and beyond. Highly encouraged reading for everyone in the thread, particularly as its selection of photos alone disproves the idea bicyclists could have only moved on paved roads (which anyone familiar with how The Fall of Singapore occurred would have already known to be untrue.)
https://www.campfirecycling.com/blog/2016/08/08/a-brief-illustrated-history-of-the-bicycle-at-war-part-1-boers-on-bikes
I feel like fuel spoilage is going to be a major issue with all this.
Ammunition can last for decades but diesel fuel has a max shelf life of 2-3 years without going to significant efforts to preserve it and gasoline is worse.
If you aren’t actively pumping and refining oil or running some sort of biodiesel alternative production (which has its own logistical issues), 5 years after the apocalypse the humble horse and bicycle are going to start looking like your only viable option, even if you still have plenty of AR 15s and crew weapons to go around.
And even if you are pumping and refining crude how long can you go before not having an industrial society to supply parts and materials catches up to you?
So I feel like the Fallout scenario of infantry with small arms being common but vehicles in general being rare (and whatever fuel that is available being saved for “high impact” vehicles to be used very sparingly) may actually be more justifiable than the mad max scenario where people are running around throwing molotovs from motorcycles.
Either way though I feel like if you can’t get some kind of industry going you’re going to end up with a mostly medieval system of warfare with only the very rare vehicle or gun being used as basically lostech.
how long does kerosene last? because you can run most diesels off it and even some gasoline engines with the right mods.
though it is notable that all the post-apoc films of the mad max franchise revolve around fuel sources.. in Roadwarrior it’s bandits besieging a small town built around an oil well and (small) oil refinery actively making and stockpiling fuel. and thunder dome’s barter town gets its economic and political power off the methane production plant in the mine underneath the town. (and it is possible they were making some sort of liquified methane fuel to run their vehicles)
then of course in fury road and furiosa, Immortan Joe’s empire has a full pumping and refining industry at Gastown.
Kerosene has a shelf life of 5 years, a bit better than diesel but not much.
The big threat is bacterial and moisture contamination, which again can be prevented with significant effort but it is probably beyond the technical level of non industrial civilization.
So if you aren’t actively pumping or producing fuel vehicles are going to be a no go. Which is going to eliminate vast geographic regions from playing in the vehicle game.
If you do have the ability to produce fuel aI can see it being worth a try, it would be a massive advantage to have even a small vehicle fleet. I just wonder about the sustainability of producing gasoline that is not going to destroy modern ICE engines in short order without having the support of a large scale industrial society behind you. Diesel has an advantage here, but going solely diesel is going to eliminate a massive chunk of your vehicle source and spare parts pool.
This is all setting aside things like tires, electronics, etc that also are needed by modern vehicles (and regardless of whether you may wish you had vehicles of the 40s to 60s that might be easier to use and maintain, the vast majority of vehicles you are going to have to source from are going to be late model civilian vehicles.)
Because of this I feel like any vehicle based warfare is going to be at best transitional for the first couple of decades after the apocalypse. Which in fairness mad max is set within a generation of the apocalypse.
But on longer timelines even in areas with access to crude oil I feel like you are going to either have a societal transition to a non-petroleum based system (horses, bicycles, etc) with vehicles being very limited use, or alternatively you are going to have a more robust recovery of industry and societal organization at which point a lot of the concerns are moot.
I suspect Mad Max gets a pass on this because it really isn’t set that much into the future (from the 70s), and most of what we see is pretty clearly the result of the steady degradation of industrial capacity, getting worse as the films progress. Notably, Mad Max (1979) takes place before the apocalypse even takes place – they’re running low on the fuel that will cause a nuclear war, but it seemingly happens between the events of the first film and Road Warrior. 10-15 years into the future and you get the complete disaster of the wasteland as it exists in Fury Road, with the last vestiges of society falling apart.
The point missing from this analysis is Tires, specifically the rubber needed to make them. Tires have a life expectancy, even if they are left on a rack. To make new tires you need access to rubber trees and Sulphur for vulcanization. Without continental or transcontinental trade there is now way to get sufficient rubber in the environment of the ‘wasteland’. This renders the entire model of the Road War utter nonsense, without the vulcanized rubber for tires their vehicles will not function.
Trains could still run supplies between communities if sufficient wood and metal for rails and ties could be gathered, as long as gastown could produce the fuel. Away from the tracks the ideal form would be mounted infantry relying on camels or horses. If those are not available, leg infantry would have to suffice and zones of control might end up very small.
My understanding is synthetic rubber can be produced primarily from petroleum products and if these factions are making ammunition, they have access to sulphur. Absent the ability to produce or harvest rubber, though, you might expect steel-tracked vehicles.
I haven’t seen the more detailed depiction of it in Furiosa, but the mine at the Bullet Farm is probably strictly a sulfur mine, with all other parts of the bullets it ‘grows’ supplied via recycling. Miller always wanted to show the irony that a post-ecocide wasteland civilization would be thoroughly dependent on recycling.
No, there’s nothing in Furiosa to suggest it produces sulfur. Besides, the comic apparently confirms it was an abandoned lead mine.
https://madmax.fandom.com/wiki/Bullet_Farm
(Of course, in the 20th century, mines generally become abandoned after the industrial equipment can no longer extract enough to make it worth their while – which raises the question of what exactly is left for its post-apocalyptic users. I suppose we must additionally assume it got driven out of business by a glut of cheaper foreign lead before its easily-available stocks were exhausted?)
Mines are often abandoned when the expense of pumping water out of the bottom of the mine has increased to the point of unprofitability. Fury Road shows the global water table has receded dramatically, so perhaps there was mine flooding that has simply dried out. It’s disappointing to find out there’s an explanation though, it’s disappointing tho have all of that extended material attached to Fury Road, it really cuts against the ethos of the series up to there.
Your interpretation of the bullet farm is more sophisticated than mine. My assumption was that they were literally tunneling into the ruins of an old armory and digging up old ammunition.
In fact, it must be noted that it is not only POSSIBLE to produce synthetic rubber, but that its production actually outnumbers that of natural rubber, and that has been the case for quite a long time.
https://marketpublishers.com/lists/23821/news.html
In fact, the gap actually narrowed in recent years – according to the linked graph, synthetic rubber production was 30-50% greater than that of natural rubber in 2000, but as the demand had accelerated and production of both increased, the gap narrowed to ~10% by 2017. (Obviously, that’s not good news for tropical rainforests at all…)
I feel there are a few competing pressures that have not been enunciated in this argument.
1. is the “leftover” resources and how they were moved to the wasteland? If your initial extraction from civilized to “wasteland” is over rough terrain, and vehicles locally are rare, what do you end up with? I feel this has a lot of impact, but no way to know how – each exact scenario would be different
2. durability- a bunch of modern vehicles are designed to crumple- some older vehicles are not. This might lead to choosing “crumple-less” vehicles. Like artic warfare, high temperature, corrosive desert sandstorms etc might impact some materials more than others. The environment kills more than bullets. I am also concerned about the perishability of rubber tires. Perhaps having 2 tires rather than 4 + to maintain is an issue. And maybe with less control over a group, motorbikes, where the vehicle is the responsibility of the owner, rather that the warlord’s. So a bike becomes like a horse to a knight. Anyone can get one, but fuel and bullets are controlled by the warlords. So you give lesser warband members a bit of fuel for their bikes so they can come with you and they have melee or thrown weapons , that they maintain/obtain, with few bullets issued until they have proven themselves loyal.
3. I think another scare resource not identified here is people. You have a lot of motorbikes and car bodies , but not a lot of people. Your population is 100’s or 1000’s not millions. And you have no real way to expand or even sustain if you could expand that population. Your medical treatment is low, your food supplies thin. So you end up with more military resources-per-person.
That said, nice post. My CarWars and Necromunda Wastelands tabletop juices have been revived again. 🙂
> durability- a bunch of modern vehicles are designed to crumple- some older vehicles are not. This might lead to choosing “crumple-less” vehicles.
This might matter for settings where the apocalypse takes place post-1990s, but not for Mad Max – I actually found a list of what are supposedly 43 “most iconic” cars of the 1970s (the last halfway normal decade in that world), and therefore the vehicles you could easily expect to see in the setting. Only a handful are muscle cars, and none seem to feature crumple zones. (Apparently, they already existed, having been invented by Béla Barényi in 1951 and placed into a production car in 1959, but were mostly limited to his employer, the Mercedes Benz.)
https://auto.alot.com/buyers-guide/43-most-iconic-cars-of-the-1970s–15415
> Perhaps having 2 tires rather than 4 + to maintain is an issue. And maybe with less control over a group, motorbikes, where the vehicle is the responsibility of the owner, rather that the warlord’s. So a bike becomes like a horse to a knight. Anyone can get one, but fuel and bullets are controlled by the warlords. So you give lesser warband members a bit of fuel for their bikes so they can come with you and they have melee or thrown weapons, that they maintain/obtain, with few bullets issued until they have proven themselves loyal.
Interesting premise, though I must note you leave out motor oil (or perhaps, treat it interchangeably with “fuel”.) This is actually not a trivial distinction here, as motorcycles, particularly the older ones, tend to have two-stroke engines, which generally have superior power-to-weight and so greater acceleration, but also more abrupt power output and so lower top speed than the four-stroke engines on other bikes and most cars (two-stroke cars existed too, but already by the time of Mad Max, it would have apparently mostly been a Subaru and Trabant thing.) In terms, of maintenance, two-stroke engines are altogether simpler BUT they are also said to break down completely a lot earlier and, perhaps even more importantly, they require oil to be mixed directly into fuel, and so they consume a lot more of it (and also have a much dirtier exhaust as the result, so countries have been banning them from an ever-growing list of applications since the 1980s.) Depending on the warband’s situation, tires might be less of a concern than motor oil, which would disadvantage most of the period’s motorcycles.
Interestingly, the war in Ukraine has started featuring motorcycle units in offensive roles:
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-motorycle-assault-rifle-war-russia-off-road-2025-5?op=1
Largely because both sides are short on artillery shells. FPV drones have a harder time chasing motorcycles with the prospect of wounding only one or two enemies at a time. When the defenders had saved up a reasonable stash of shells, motorcycle attacks tend to be wiped out frighteningly quickly.
It is also often described as the consequence of general troop shortage relative to the contested area, with the front being much more thinly manned than in previous industrialized peer wars.
In fact, I found a 2018 blog post (in Russian) which quotes Russian/Soviet military manuals on what is the recommended troop density while defending (and attacking), and it’s quite revealing.
https://paul-atrydes.livejournal.com/109651.html
The earliest quoted manual, from 1897, calls for one company (generally consisting of three platoons, which consist of 4 squads each – so a minimum of 120 soldiers, and once you add the officers and logistics support/reinforcement (in the 20th century, generally mortar teams at company level) it goes to 150-200) per “two hundred paces” of the front (something like 150 meters), while a battalion (three companies, and additional officers + support) was positioned per four hundred paces – since a third company was meant to be kept in reserve. The last pre-WWI manual is similar – a battalion attacks/defends across half a verst (1.1 km) and a regiment across a whole verst (again, a regiment consists of three battalions + ever-heavier support, so two are attacking/defending, and the third one is in reserve.)
The 1916 “instructions for contesting fortified frontlines” are the first ones to operationalize the key lesson of WWI (at least, in Russian/Soviet military thinking) – that an attacker needs to outnumber a defender at least threefold. It thus makes a distinction between the length of front a whole division (three regiments) occupies when it’s defending (5-10 versts), and when it’s attacking (1-2 versts). In the last pre-invasion Soviet infantry manual of 1940, a company could defend up to 1 km length (and depth) and would attack across no more than 200-500 meters. The 1942 revision shrunk that to 700 meters for defending and 350 meters for attacking.
The Cold War-era manuals called for greater spread (partly because of the expectation nuclear weapons would be used and partly because of the post-war demographic crisis) but even then, the last Soviet manual, from 1982, called for a company to attack across 500 meters if nuclear weapons are not expected and across a kilometer if they are – and to defend an area no wider than 1500 x 1000 m. NOW, it’s widely reported that in Ukraine, a company generally defends an area of 3 km – 2 km on the most heavily defended stretches. With a lot of “infantry companies” personnel actually being drone operators as well, especially on the Ukrainian side, the odds of an attacker being shot at with a gun in that war are lower than they have been in literally centuries, so this encourages the mobility of motorcycles.
In all, very, very different considerations from the scenario discussed above.
There is no way that trend lasts. Once computer-aimed guns become common (my understanding is that all modern combat vehicles already have them), a wave of twenty people on motorcycles can be mowed down at the same speed as someone aimbotting in an FPS game, eg multiple targets per second.
I think maybe the meatwave assaults work (at a staggering cost) because the Ukrainian front is both saturated with low-tech weapons and starved of high-tech platforms? At least it feels like trying the same tactic against the US or Poland would lead to an immediate massacre *and* fail to accomplish any strategic objective.
“someone aimbotting in an FPS game” by definition does not have to worry about things like recoil or turning speed of the gun – sharply limited by both the power allocated to its motors and the state of its joints. (Even the microchips required for the system to react with the speed you intend without pausing to process what’s going on aren’t that cheap, particularly to be deployed universally.)
Few of such guns in service are good enough to consistently deal with drones – seemingly none that are small enough to be placed onto an actual ground vehicle ready for frontline. (In a February 2025 RUSI report, its British authors note that ” the reprogramming of Remote Weapon Stations (RWS) the easiest immediate means of improving protection” – implying none of those guns have such programming at present. Static emplacements are easier, but are vulnerable to artillery and glide bombs.
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/tactical-developments-during-third-year-russo-ukrainian-war
As somebody else has pointed out above, Russian infantry-based assaults work not because of a shortage of high-tech weapon systems, but due to a shortage of Ukrainian infantry manpower. Individual infantrymen, unlike armoured vehicles, are generally not sufficiently high-value targets to justify engaging them with scarce artillery shells, and if the Russians could deliver enough of them within close-combat distance of Ukrainian lines then they’d usually be able to force the Ukrainians to retreat. As a result, the Ukrainians have resorted to FPV drones to hit them instead, and motorcycles are intended as a partial solution to this since it’s much harder to hit speeding motorcycles than infantrymen on foot with FPV attack drones. This wouldn’t have worked if the Ukrainians weren’t short of artillery shells, which would have massacred both leg and motorcycle infantry, but especially the latter since motorcycles have to take more predictable routes in order to get to their objectives quickly (the classic “high-speed avenues of approach” thing).
Note that both FPV drones and artillery are largely _indirect_ fire devices. Direct-fire devices like sentry guns aren’t likely to change much since they’d have restricted sectors of fire and won’t be able to move as flexibly as real infantry would to counterattack enemy penetrations. They’re not going to provide any real solutions for the shortages in artillery shells and infantry personnel, both of which are arguably “low-tech” but more essential than anything else in the Ukrainian tactical milieu.
Toyota was instantly my thought process as we were going through and im so glad and mused that you touched on it.
Yeah. Motorcycles as the scouts makes alot of sense with it and is alot of fun frankly.
Good stuff, Thank you.
If you have to trade away your worldbuilding plausibility, trade it for something fun like Mad Max.
As a sidenote, while it isn’t necessarily 100% realistic, I think it’s at least partly deliberate how impractical a lot of the warlords’ methods are since they’re trying to awe their populace and soothe their own egos as much as if not more than they’re trying to win wars.
Yes, as Bret noted, the Romans apparently found elephants impractical as weapons (or weapon platforms) given their cost and effectiveness, but warlords in some cultures loved them for prestige reasons.
I don’t think that understanding is really correct; elephants have been highly practical and efficient in a great many military contexts throughout history.
This is the most relevant post (though one should ideally read all three, of course), as it lists the multiple instances where Romans kept beating armies with elephants and stopped recruiting elephant troops even from areas which used to support them.
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/02/collections-war-elephants-part-ii-elephants-against-wolves/
> As I mentioned in the last post, by the Imperial period, the Romans seem to have decided that elephants were not worth the trouble and discontinued their use. Roman military writers routinely disparage elephants (we’ll see why) as weapons of war and despite the fact that Rome absorbed not one but three states which actively used elephants in war (Carthage, the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Kingdoms) – and thus we may assume three sets of capture, training and breeding programs for maintaining the animals – they did not continue their use. It is one thing not to adopt a foreign weapon, it is quite another to inherit the entire production complex and still say, “no, not for me.”
> The last gasp of true Roman war elephants came in 46 B.C., where Julius Caesar defeated a Roman army led by Metellus Scipio which had sixty elephants in it. The elephants lost and one of Caesar’s legions (my personal favorite, Legio V Alaudae (Larks!)) took the elephant as a legionary symbol in commemoration of having beaten them…As Trautmann notes – quite correctly, in my view – the Romans were always more interested in ways to defeat elephants than to use them. Which brings us back to our question: elephants are awesome, Romans are also awesome…so why didn’t the Romans like elephants?
> In Rome’s case, the defeat of Carthage in the Second Punic War resulted in Rome having North African allies who already had elephants. Rome could accept those elephant allied troops, or say ‘no’ and probably get nothing to replace them. In that case – if the choice is between ‘elephants or nothing’ – then you take the elephants. What is telling is that – as Rome was able to exert more control over how these regions were exploited – the elephants vanished, presumably as the Romans dismantled or neglected the systems for capturing and training them (which they now controlled directly)…Rome doesn’t simply fail to build an elephant program. Rome absorbs an elephant program and then lets it die. Why?
>…In peacetime, these elephants have to be fed and maintained, but on campaign the difficulty of supplying these elephants on the march is layered on top of that. We’ve discussed elsewhere the difficulty in supplying an army with food, but large groups of elephants magnify this problem immensely. The 54 elephants the Seleucids brought to Magnesia might have consumed as much food as 1,000 cavalrymen (that’s a rider, a horse and a servant to tend that horse and its rider).
> The Romans obviously made the bet that investing in cavalry or infantry was a better use of time, money and resources than investing in elephants, because they thought elephants were unlikely to win battles. Given Rome’s subsequent spectacular battlefield success, it is hard to avoid the conclusion they were right, at least in the Mediterranean context.
These are all good points, but we know that what actually happened was that the North African Elephant and the Syrian Elephant were hunted to extinction (for ivory and game displays in Roman & Egyptian territory, for war and to protect agriculture in Seleucid lands).
> what actually happened was that the North African Elephant and the Syrian Elephant were hunted to extinction
A nice theory, but it does not match the timeline. The Syrian elephant apparently went extinct around 700 BC – when Rome was still a Kingdom with an extent not much greater than its seven hills. (And about 350 years before the time of Alexander, let alone his Seleucid successors. The ones Seleucids had were imported from India – and if they could afford it, Rome at the peak of its power obviously would have been able to do the same.)
The North African Elephant went extinct sometime during the Empire – well after the Romans stopped using them for warfare as described by our host. It is claimed that the first Emperor, Augustus, had ~3,500 elephants of those elephants killed in the “game displays” to celebrate his ascension. Sure, you allude to that already, but my point is that this number alone is quite alone to sustain a population – and you are not going to be wasting THIS many if you believe they are militarily useful to you!
https://cannundrum.blogspot.com/2016/04/north-african-elephant.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/ancientrome/comments/5c8qyf/4chan_explains_the_second_punic_war/
The ones Seleucids had were imported from India – and if they could afford it, Rome at the peak of its power obviously would have been able to do the same.)
I still think the fact that they had to be imported is relevant here? Investing in elephants for military use (or for labor purposes) is going to be a tradeoff between costs and benefits, and between using the money for elephants versus using it for something else. The rarer that elephants are, or the farther you are from their zone of origin, the more expensive they will be, and the worse the cost/benefit ratio is going to look. In a place where tamable elephants actually live, like South Asia or Southeast Asia, or possibly Ethiopia, the cost/benefit ratio might look different.
In a place where tamable elephants actually live, like South Asia or Southeast Asia, or possibly Ethiopia, the cost/benefit ratio might look different.
Yes, our host has already discussed far more favorable logistics as an important factor (though in his view, still a secondary one to socio-political reasons) behind the significant popularity of war elephants in South Asia.
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/09/collections-war-elephants-part-iii-elephant-memories/
My point was that one cannot argue that the Romans actually would have been using elephants if only they had convenient access to them, because the Seleucids apparently had equally poor access and that did not stop them from deploying elephants. Even if we assume that the logistics of shipping them to core Roman territory would have been prohibitive, nothing would have logically stopped the Romans from replicating the same routes the Seleucids must have made use of to field elephants in Roman Africa if they considered it worthwhile. Quite obviously, they didn’t.
@YARD,
I didn’t agree with everything in the piece (for a start, it’s not true that Rome beat every opponent with elephants that they faced, in the long run- the Parthians and Sassanians had elephants too). There was some interesting food for thought though. One point that Bret didn’t mention- and which could make elephants a particularly significant symbol of state power on the battlefield, separate from their size- is that in addition to heavy labor, another use of the elephant in South and Southeast Asia was for enacting capital punishment. As a literal symbol of the king’s power over life and death, seeing a team of elephants on the battlefield might have even more psychological impact than they would in a culture where elephants didn’t have that connotation.
Great article as always. I just wish that we could have all those measurements in SI units at least additionally. I assume that a lot of your readers are not sitting in a country that has one or another version of an imperial measurement system. Especially in a Science Fiction setting. Imperial is better suited in a fantasy world.
Not on the Great Toyota War, but for comments by Toyota for a similar situation:
“It is not our proudest product placement,” a Toyota spokesman remarked after a photo of Osama bin Laden flanked by Land Cruisers emerged in 2011. “But it shows that the Taliban are looking for the same qualities as any truck buyer: durability and reliability.” – https://www.autoevolution.com/news/toyota-feared-its-most-regrettable-user-the-taliban-would-be-back-167947.html
Apologies if I missed a comment, I’m reading on mobile and indented threads are a vertical string of single letters 😅
To me it seems like the War Rig is more of a fuel tanker than a specific vehicle for war… It just gets a cool name because being cool is very important and having the capacity to return from GasTown with enough fuel to keep the war going is extremely important.
The rest of the vehicles are there to protect it.
Add cool as technicals are, does it make sense to sacrifice their cargo space for scores of gas cans when you have a tanker instead?
Fury Road is an amazing movie and watching it completely isolated from the rest of Mad Max still works, but it was made with the expectation that it’s audience had…access…to Mad Max & Mad Max 2 & Beyond Thunderdome.
The War Rig is shown in Fury Road as entirely a logistical vehicle, explicitly a way to transfer supplies from the Citadel to the other strongholds to hold together the alliance/empire thing Immortan Joe has going. It is not called a “war” rig to describe it’s purpose, it is called that to color in some details for the audience about exactly what *kind* of monster Immortan Joe is. Similarly at least part of it’s external defenses exist just to display War Boys *as decoration* because Immortan Joe is bad and evil. The actual key defensive element in the War Rig is the shotgun stored inside the cab.
Just in case it helps, I have better luck reading comments in landscape mode on my phone!
I wonder if the reason there are so many motorcycles is they are relatively easy to maintain and source parts for. It’s likely easier to frankestein a motorcycle together than a car or truck in many cases, quicker too. Heck I’ve seen some motorcycles built from car parts, creating a hand-me-down approach to spares that keeps the fleet operating.
I can also see them being useful as a disrupting force. Hoard of raider vehicles coming across the dunes, send the cycles out to force them to slow down or turn, either buying time for the convoy to get away, or the heavier escorts to get into position to deal with the raid.
Not saying scouting wouldn’t be important, it would REALLY be important, but the disrupting nature of a motorcycle charge might help when a fight starts. Like how a group of destroyers at sea can break up a capital ship formation.
Motorcycles also have the ability to cross rough, tight terrain. Even a sport bike can hop over a curb easily, and dirt bikes are far more capable. And you could get around the range issue by carrying a 5 gallon gas can or two strapped to the pillion seat.
Given the length of time implied to have passed since the apocalypse in Fury Road (we have not only societies but religions built entirely around the new way of things) my assumption is that all the pickup trucks have already been wrecked beyond repair by the ongoing warfare (having been preferentially used for all the reasons above) and they are now *reduced* to using car chassis rather than doing so preferentially.
This assumption does not work for the original Mad Max films as those are set right at the cusp of societal collapse (Max himself being part of the last generation of law enforcement) but Fury Road does not (to my recollection) date itself so firmly.
Also, if you look at Mad Max 2, Lord Humongous does indeed seem to have based his fighting force largely on pickups. Meanwhile, Max’s Falcon originally made sense for its intended purpose of high speed road pursuits. Perhaps by the time of the Furiosa movies, the supply of pick-ups has run low and they are forced to use less practical, but still simple and easy to maintain, muscle cars.
I sometimes wonder if, at least in the original trilogy, the society that Max left behind is still functional in some form or another. What changed between the first and the second is simply that Max has run into the Forbidden Zone, where the society isn’t able to enforce its law and order, and now we’re seeing what is going on inside that zone.
It was general knowledge for White Australians for all of the 20th Century that Aboriginal Australians shared a religious belief in something called “The Dreamtime.” The genuine facts of native belief in Australia are much more complicated, but for the settler population it was an easily-understood concept that provided context and setting for both real and invented native mythology. The Dreamtime is the time before time, the time before there were distinctions between things (like moments, or everything), but because it is the time before there are distinctions between things it is nonsensical to say it is ‘before’ at all, it isn’t ‘before,’ it’s The Dreamtime.
You can’t put the Mad Max films into a timeline, because they are set in The Dreamtime; just not in the before. That doesn’t mean that some things can’t happen after other things, just that you have to remember that all of the things are kind of all happening simultaneously too.
It should be said that Fury Road is not THAT far off from the original Mad Max – besides Max himself still being alive, obviously, the Immortan Joe’s civilized name is canonically…Colonel Joe Moore, so he was already old enough to make it up through the military ranks (even if we assume accelerated promotion in the “Oil Wars”) before those ranks became meaningless.
https://madmax.fandom.com/wiki/Immortan_Joe
(For that matter, The Bullet Farmer also used to be an Australian military man – Major…Kalashnikov.)
That’s absolutely wild to learn and – unless the man made rank quickly and is now very advanced in years – doesn’t seem to square with the culture presented, which strongly implies several generations of child soldiers raised to worship Immortan Joe and his cult of chrome – not to mention his actual children, all of whom are grown men who are implied to have been conceived post-fallout and bear various mutations because of it.
I think a way to make the timeline of mad max make sense is to assume that a lot of the weirdness of the wasteland started before the world broke down. So the warboys started as a “normal” cult before the world broke down. As they became more isolated and the world fell apart The became weirder and weirder until Joe found them them, took over and twisted their beliefs to suit him
I think mad max makes the most sense if you assume that the weirdness of the wasteland started before the world got totally destroyed. I’d guess that the warboys started as a cult that went into the bush sometime before the first mad max. That gives them some time to develop odd beliefs as the world fall apart until joe finds them and twists them to his will.
It’s worth recalling Miller was never a historian or a sociologist or anything of a kind, and while the series did involve sociopolitical commentary (according to the original films’ screenwriter, they both looked at motorists fighting in queues at the pump during the 1973 Yom Kippur War price shock and wanted to extend this behaviour to its logical conclusion), the fundamental reasons for why it is the way it is are quite simple: 1) Miller was an ER doctor in the Outback who saw a lot of crash victims and 2) a dystopian film means empty locations with few bystanders, and so is much, much easier to manage on a low budget. So, it’s unsurprising his notions of how a culture would develop are quite questionable.
https://deadline.com/2024/04/george-miller-furiosa-mad-max-movies-interview-1235878904/
If anything, the entire notion post-apocalyptic society would have so little continuity with the previous one, with people forgetting all the history they ever learned the year after the bombs fall (let alone a year after “resources run out”) seems cut out of whole cloth. As was already remarked on here (and by the other ancient historians worth their salt), the fall of Rome still involved great cultural continuity – from Christianity, already the official state religion for ~150 years, remaining dominant in the successor states (and monasteries preserving much of the old culture) to the successor rulers themselves generally already holding substantial power before Rome’s fall and adopting pre-existing honorifica and status symbols for themselves rather than inventing brand-new signifiers. (I.e. just about every post-Roman European leader not only called themselves a “King” or the like (with one key exception, “tsar”, reinforcing the point as it directly invokes Roman “Caesar”) but they all swiftly adopted crowns of precious metals to signify their status instead of all the manner of conceivable alternatives.)
In contrast, factions in much of post-apocalyptic fiction are either aggressively divorced from the past or parody it in a way that appeals to the author/reader but would be alienating in-universe. Often, it’s because the creators specifically desire “escapism” from the day-to-day divisions by abstracting them away, but it also renders such works as little more than fantasy with guns and motorbikes instead of spells and elves instead of anything predictive.
P.S. That second consideration (an empty location is easier to manage and begets a narrative justification for it) also tends to be massively amplified in video games. In a typical combat-oriented game, NPCs (not counting party members under player control) who do not fight the player or sell them stuff are practically dead weight; only a handful may have developed dialogues and extended narrative significance while the vast majority just mill around with one or two endlessly looping lines. A few “open-world” games attempt to set a whole timetable for them, but that is rare and doesn’t tend to shift copies all that much.
Consequently, cutting that dead weight out and reducing everything to enemies and merchants makes commercial sense for the game’s creator – and thus, it drives the popularity of post-apocalyptic narratives on the creator side. Dark Souls did exactly that, eliminating almost all peacefuls to divert resources into more varied and complex enemies and explaining that with its cycle of decay – and it became basically the single most-influential video game series of 2010s. (Stunningly, the remake of Doom, the most influential video game of 1990s, had 50% fewer launch-day players on Steam than Dark Souls III did when it launched the previous month.)
The same consideration also applies to the once-popular “walking simulator” games – empty locations where everyone died and the player just reads the notes left behind them are so much easier to make than those which actually have people going around their lives, and require so much less code and animations to manage. While all of this is understandable on a case-by-case basis, I do wonder about the implications when on the aggregate, most (visual) fiction depicts the future (and more recently, alternate worlds too) as hostile, dying and depopulated, and then this is by necessity has to be internalized by the consumers of said media. While the relationship may not always be that neatly linear (i.e. psychological studies generally failing to find a link between violence in media and violent behaviour), the topic still appears rather under-explored.
Which explains Max’s 1973 Ford Falcon.
It’s “the last of the V-8 Interceptors”- in other words, it was one of a fleet of police cars bought with the assumption that it would be operating mainly on paved roads with the backing of an industrial society.
Then, because of either collapse or shifting priorities, that fleet stopped being maintained. The line can either mean that Max’s car was the last one they bought, or the only one still operating.
Also someone on mastodon linked this article about the Toyota Hilux in war that claimed to explain the origin of the term “technical” https://www.newsweek.com/why-rebel-groups-love-toyota-hilux-74195
“if your wasteland warlord is operating in Nebraska, the core of his technical fleet is going to be Ford F-Series trucks, simply because they’re the most common in Nebraska ”
I’ve read that actual rural farmers of America are hoarding, endlessly repairing and importing old fashioned pickup trucks made before the plague of modern “trucks”. Given how useless and prone to breaking F-150s and their ilk are I expect it wouldn’t take too long for the actual working vehicles to become the only things on the road. Minivans are also quite common on American streets and are far better cargo vehicles then a modern “truck”. Most hatchbacks could also be cut open to make an eratz pickup.
“That said, I should note the victory of technicals here was unusual”
There was some amazing footage out of Syria where we saw rebel technicals route Syrian army tanks. Obviously it’s a morale issue but one can imagine a lot of morale issues in the post apocolypse.
My understanding is that the issue in the Chad vs Libya war was not primarily morale (The Libyans had an excellent logistics service and were well supplied, so initial morale should have been good), but troop capability.
The Chad forces were able to adopt a robust raiding/skirmishing tradition to technical warfare, applying long standing knowledge of traditional tactics to a motorized version. Meanwhile, the Libyan army was equipped for Society-style doctrine but did not remotely have the training and coordination to pull it of. Likely in-part because Gaddafi was more interested in coup proofing than combat effectiveness, but also because like many dictators he spent on fancy hardware but neglected the training needed to make it fully effective.
A properly trained and employed Soviet-style tank or motor rifle force would probably have won, but in this case a theoretically well-equipped army that simply did not have the training and coordination to perform its intended doctrine got absolutely corn-cobbed by a force that turned down offers of tanks from foreign backers in favor of equipment (Technicals) that matched the tactics and combat styles they were well practiced in.
This is a remarkable comment, though I am concerned readers who know nothing else of that conflict may walk away with the impression it was a fairly straightforward and even morally-pleasing tale of a free(er), cohesive society (can one say Fremen?) triumphing over the army of a corrupt, disunited dictatorship. (The post itself doesn’t help, treating the “Toyota War” in fairly clinical terms and even joking about Toyota’s brand concerns – quite different from the way civil war in Syria was treated in the chemical weapons post, where we got a paragraph-long aside condemning barrel bombs and Assad.)
The reality, though, is that by just about every metric available, Hissène Habré’s Chad was far more oppressive and authoritarian than Gaddafi’s Libya. Even as a rebel leader, one of Habré’s major acts was to kidnap a European doctor, archeologist and aid worker for ransom (dramatized in 1990 film, Captive of the Desert). Once he ascended to power he did all the greatest hits like establishing a secret police which tortured and executed tens of thousands. THIS was the nation whose force had “benefited from French air cover which kept Libyan aircraft largely out of the fight” – and yet, its victory in that war ended up quite pyrrhic for its leader – just two years after expelling Libyan troops from the country, Habré had to flee LIBYAN-supported Idriss Déby.*
In 2016, Habré ended up receiving a life sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity from an African Union court. This was itself a remarkable development, since before that, African leaders were reluctant to try their own and most other convictions of former state leaders were by Europeans in the Hague (Yahya Jammeh, the former leader of The Gambia who himself had to go into exile, nevertheless touched a nerve when he described International Criminal Court as “white people’s court”). The trial also made history through his conviction for rape (though eventually dismissed on procedural grounds.) By 2021, he died of Covid.
https://humanrights.berkeley.edu/publications/rape-and-president-remarkable-trial-and-partial-acquittal-hissene-habre/
In short, another reminder, if needed, that “good guys” don’t always win – and underdogs aren’t necessarily good guys either.
*Déby himself proceeded to rule for over 30 years, until in 2021 he literally headed to the frontline to rally the troops putting down a rebellion against him, and ended up killed in that battle. Power was immediately handed over to his son fairly smoothly – thousands of people protested, of course, but France’s Macron, the leader of their former colonial power, thought their silly notions are irrelevant and backed him to the hilt. (Much like when Macron also opted to support General Haftar’s campaign to seize power in Libya alongside Russia, in return for smooth oil exports and migrant interception from the territory he controls.)
I have no idea how you got any of that from my post.
I had an autocorrect error where Soviet became “Society” but I think it was clear that I was talking about military effectiveness.
I was attempting to mirror Dr. Deveraux’s own writings regarding professional soldiers (which the Libyan forces were, even if inadequately drained for the doctrine they were attempting) and non-professional forces drawing their cohesion from other social structures.
Those other structures were, in this case tribal, and as you say, probably pretty oppressive and unpleasant. But the were effective at providing military cohesion and doctrinal grounding.
Why do you feel that there’s some inherent moral message attached to an assessment of military effectiveness? I certainly had so such thing on mind.
> I was attempting to mirror Dr. Deveraux’s own writings regarding professional soldiers (which the Libyan forces were, even if inadequately drained for the doctrine they were attempting) and non-professional forces drawing their cohesion from other social structures.
I saw that parallel – though, as we both know, his example contrasts the (poorly) professionalized and obviously villainous Uruk-Hai with the levied, tightly socially bonded and heroic Men of Rohan, so if anything, being aware of his example but not the history of those two nations actually risks playing into the potential misapprehension.
Still, what I wrote was less in response to your comment, and more to contrast the difference between the way a reference to a real-world, fairly recent war was handled in the post here, with the post on chemical weapons.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/
Simply put, I don’t see a logical reason why a post on the (in)effectiveness of chemical weapons and barrel bombs required a condemnation of Assad, but a post discussing the relative effectiveness of technicals can clinically describe the war as “Chad was able to defeat a Libyan invasion of their country” and proceed without a condemnation of Habré. Even if you chalk it down to Assad still being in power in 2020, the very fact the ruler who won the Toyota War was so hated he was almost immediately kicked out by a faction of his countrymen which received explicit support from the war’s losers (and that Libyan-supported ruler was then able to easily outlast him, implying substantially deeper popular support) places that historical aside in a VERY different light.
Really, the post jumps from the War in Ukraine in one sentence to Chad and Libya in the next, connecting the two in readers’ minds. Yet, if we are to use it as a parallel, the Toyota War would be as if Zelenskyy had been able to kick out all Russian troops out of the country and restore the 1991 borders (perhaps after receiving no-fly zone from NATO, if we are to extend the analogy – though, the equipment losses from “Operation Rough Rider” in Yemen, in addition to the outcome of the recent India-Pakistan clash and the unexceptional performance of Ukrainian F-16s all raise notable questions if it would have ever worked anywhere near as well as its boosters once claimed) – only for him to purge Zaluzhny sometime before the end of the war, causing the latter to flee to Russia and then re-emerge two years after the war with their support (and Western acquiescence) and seize power in the country with little resistance. The history of that conflict is just so different to what a reader is likely to assume without investigating further, that I don’t think it’s right to treat it so cursorily.
I would have expected morale on the Chadian side to be worse, in fact. This was a few years before the Libyan invasion , but the president in the first half of the 1970s had been imposing ethnocentric cultural policies, including initiation rituals, with special focus on the government and military. That seems like the kind of thing that would be very damaging to morale (like, as though the US military required you to convert to evangelical Christianity to get promoted).
https://worldhistoryedu.com/life-and-political-career-of-francois-tombalbaye-1918-1975-the-first-president-of-chad/
” Minivans are also quite common on American streets and are far better cargo vehicles then a modern “truck”.”
They also have the benefit of a weather-proof area. I did a lot of field geology in the past, and I remember being rather offended the first time I got a minivan. But with stow-and-go seating and sliding side doors it was Heaven. I could pull up to my site, set up my equipment, hop back into an air-conditioned or heated and dry area, and do all my work in comfort. Put a gun instead of a YSI water quality meter in there and you’ve got a firing platform that can operate in weather that would stop a truck-based technical cold!
The one drawback is that minivans have low clearance, but that’s something that can be fixed given the right incentives.
I’d also point out that the Op. Range listed is more an absolute max ferry range. Now if the convoy included spare fuel and could safely stop to refuel) the practical range obvious increases.
But assuming you can’t refuel mid mission then even in a convoy situation, where you’re relying on being able to refuel at the far end, you likely wouldn’t want to plan on a journey more than likely 75% of that range.
And if you’re making a raid the usable operational radius is probably no more than 1/3rd the listed range.
Also those ranges (at least for the civilian vehicles) are going to be assuming good roads with fairly light loads. Carry more weight (like armor) and fuel economy goes down. And if you don’t have good roads, and have to use gravel or dirt tracks fuel economy drops (even a good gravel road might result in 25% lower fuel economy) and having to go actually off road can dramatically cut fuel economy — and thus range.
A couple of contexts where I think motorbikes (especially lighter dirt bikes) might have better prospects than depicted in Mad Max:
1. In a post-apocalyptic city, rather than a wasteland. If the roads between buildings are choked with abandoned cars and debris, there’s a very strong argument for a vehicle that can not only mount kerbs and footpaths with ease, but can also go up and down stairs or even be picked up and carried over obstructions.
2. In the wild, for traversing steep hills and mountain terrain. Again, having something that can ascend a near-vertical slope using only footpaths or animal trails will be extremely useful, as putting people up high makes them a natural vehicle choice for…
3. Snipers. The low fire rate makes them an attractive choice for societies with limited ammo production, provided you can keep the guns (and scopes!) in reasonable order. The Mad Max films focus on mobile war, but I imagine that, absent the traditional solutions to snipers like artillery, armoured vehicles, aircraft and large bodies of men, a handful of mounted snipers in a ruined city or wilderness would be able to harass or effectively control a huge area, proportional to the resources needed to sustain them. APCs or technicals dumping infantry near their last known location might flush one out (if you can even get a 4-wheeled vehicle close), but a single bullet through the engine block or radiator before they leg it back to their motorbike would leave a bunch of your guys stranded with no effective means to pursue or retreat, and potentially under fire themselves from another sniper nearby.
Motorcycle mounted snipers is exactly how the people of The Green Place fight in the two recent flicks.
I was thinking similarly for motorbikes, and I think the assessment made is a little unfair to them (though not that unfair, seeing as we’ve seen technicals in real life but very rarely have seen motorcycle troops).
For one, motorbikes are fast. Much, much faster than a pickup, especially over rough ground. They can also readily carry two people (or a person and a big man-portable gun), plus one or two big jerry cans of fuel. They’re also significantly cheaper than a pickup truck in all respects (though whether that would stay that way in the economics of the wasteland is another matter).
I could easily see them being used in a similar dragoon-like way to the technical, but trading carrying capacity for even more mobility. You’d want to shuttle them about in a truck over distance, but for the actual combat they may well be fairly useful (provided the whole ‘manpower is cheap’ aspect of Mad Max holds fast).
Ride up at speed (preferably over rough terrain that the opponent wouldn’t be expecting a rapid assault from). Come to a dead-stop quickly. Crack off a few aimed shots (either from your single big gun, or from a pair of small arms). Ride off again, hopefully faster than they can respond effectively.
Potentially something that would only really be truly effective in a combined-arms approach (you’d want your opponents attention to be focussed away from the noise of your approach), but you can probably get closer to a proper modern warfare ‘overwhelm them with pings’ approach with 45 bike-teams than you could with 20 technicals.
I’d also posit something like my old GS500 as an ideal bike for this. They made them for yonks and sold loads so they’re fairly ubiquitous. Dead simple design (air cooled too so no need to waste precious water for coolant). Big fuel tank (4.5 US gallons) and 56mpg US so an operational range of 252 miles. Can take 484lbs in payload (including rider), so plenty for a pillion plus 2 long-arms (or one big one) and 9 more gallons of fuel. It’s not the fastest bike, but off-road it’s not particularly the power or top speed that are the limiting factor beyond a certain point, and it’d handily outpace a pickup on any terrain. It’s not exactly a dirt-bike either, but is rugged enough to do the job ok and would be much more comfortable over distance (and still light enough to be carried over impassable obstacles if there’s two of you).
Really, any cheap 500 would do very nicely. Good balance of all those attributes.
I suppose it becomes more viable if you have a surplus of firearms compared to everything else, and wanted to put more of them onto the field using a cheaper mobility platform.
> They can also readily carry two people (or a person and a big man-portable gun)
There are few real-world examples where people found it to be a good idea. The closest is probably Volkssturm on bicycles, who could have two Panzerfausts or a submachine gun strapped to the frame (the latter version even improbably managed to fit an anti-tank mine in the empty space in the center of the frame.) However, if this was actually viable, the Reich would have attempted this with regular troops and not Volkssturm – Beevor in Downfall, for one, basically dismisses it as a ridiculous propaganda-driven gambit with little value. More recently, there was reporting about some Ukrainian Javelin operators going on electric bikes, but that was from an earlier phase of the war and I don’t recall hearing much follow-up. (Not to mention that outside of places with Soviet-style militaries, any remotely advanced anti-tank weapons are going to be highly prized and rarely-deployed possessions in the post-apocalypse.)
What DID occur quite often to mount comparatively heavy weapons on bikes is the use of sidecars. (Maybe that’s what you implied, but it didn’t seem like it.) People mostly associate it with the Germans nowadays, but everyone else had their own versions. The gallery below shows the variety of subtly different designs.
https://gomotoriders.com/amazing-motorcycle-sidecars-from-the-world-war-ii/
Agreed, especially the bit about ‘no-one in the real world seems to have done it’. That is fairly damning.
I would, however, argue that the real world hasn’t really seen a military environment quite like that seen in Mad Max (even if it was injected with a bit more realism). It seems to be an environment where infantry aren’t really used at all (though we’re not sure why), the heaviest weapons available are something like a bren gun (and they’re not that common), and there seems to be quite a high proportion of vehicles compared to the number of firearms (again, we’re not sure why). You’re also extremely unlikely to come across anything heavier than a tactical.
I think it’s the odd lack of infantry that tips the balance. In the real world, bike teams would be hideously vulnerable to infantry platoons, even if you could field 100 of them for every tank. They’re an odd mix of the vulnerabilities of both motorised assault vehicles and infantry. They’re not as cheap as infantry so you can’t get as many of them, but they’re just as vulnerable as infantry to small arms.
Take the infantry out of the mix, and suddenly they have a lot more leeway to operate as a cheaper alternative to tacticals that trades logistical range for speed and flexibility. Take the tanks out of the mix too and you suddenly don’t have an option that is protected against small arms, so that vulnerability doesn’t really exist compared to the alternatives.
I hadn’t thought about sidecars actually, but that’s definitely a useful addition. It would limit their ability to traverse truly rough terrain, but would certainly expand their logistical envelope significantly. I’ve found a couple of sidecars that state a load capacity of ~275lbs. So we’re up to around 775lbs of payload capacity for our bike (including riders). Fuel economy will undoubtedly take a hit, but that would be more than made up for by the ability to carry extra food, water, fuel and/or a third combatant (and the fuel efficiency of the tactical would likewise be reduced with added payload). You might even be able to use a sidecar like a rocket booster, discarding it or stashing it somewhere once you’ve reached your operating theatre and need to pick up the mobility/flexibility.
I can see another context where bikes could be useful- patrolling/policing/extorting allied or subjugated settlements, in a scenario where there actually are outlying settlements or farms. I can see a scenario like the game Fallout New Vegas, where small settlements are built over small springs or seasonal streams.
In that situation, small gangs of bikes could be commonly used as reminders that the warlord is watching, make sure everything is operating smoothly, intimidate the locals, maybe even act as local law.
Of course this is getting away from the Furiosa setting, whether everybody except for a few raiders seem to be concentrated in three settlements.
That sherman tank data is based on well trained troops, using good ammo and good barrels.
If the training and ammo and barrels are all of much lower quality, then your unlikely to hit anything at long range, whether you are stationary or moving. Ranges inevitably shrink.
Thus the gap in relative accuracy of firing from motion and firing stationary shrinks. If all your shots are wildly inaccurate, moving doesn’t make it much worse.
And at such short range, combat is fast paced. A brief pause to fire more aimed shots gives the enemy time to get within range and chuck an incendiary. Or to cut you off.
There is a reason that horse archers didn’t come to a stop.
Also, motorbikes have a big advantage of being a small target. In a world where ammo is scarce, and armor is rare, you probably don’t need and can’t afford big guns. A single rifle round can destroy a truck, if it hits the right place.
Imagine a fight between 1 truck containing 20 people (each with a rifle) vs 20 people on motorbikes. The 20 people on the motorbikes are sufficiently dispersed that fire at any one of them is unlikely to hit another. So the people on the truck must chose a target, and so the truck receives about 20x the volume of fire compared to the average motorcycle. Combined with that, the truck is a bigger and less maneuverable target. It’s easier to achieve a mobility kill against the truck, there is just more truck to hit.
I’d imagine the vast majority of combat in “the wastes” wouldn’t be meeting engagements, but rather would consist of ambushes where one side simply lies in wait while dismounted, and then opens fire on the other’s convoy and slaughters them. The ideal weapons for this are going to be belt-fed machine guns and improvised explosive devices, though a bunch of even with semi-automatic rifles will probably work in a pinch too.
In this situation, the technical are going to be far more effective for a raiding crew. If you have 20 guys, you can divide that up between three or four technical and two or three motorbikes, which gives you enough space to carry enough food and water and extra fuel for everyone for a week in the field. The main use of the motorcycles is really going to be in scouting in front of your convoy so that you don’t drive into an ambush, and scouting for the other guys’ convoys so you can prepare your ambushes.
Also, even if your gang of 20 or so guys on motorcycles carries out a successful ambush, you’re not going to be able to carry away any of the loot if you’ve rendered the other guys’ trucks inoperable.
If you are going for a mobility kill, you can avoid using any bullets at all and just unroll something spiked in front of that truck – and that pretty much requires something with a decent trunk, so some form of a car. It doesn’t even need to be particularly fast – merely faster than a truck. Given the truck’s limited mobility and limited-to-non-existent off-road capability, you could even unroll your improvised spike strip well outside of the effective gunfire range – which, as you have already noted, is very short in this universe.
If anything, the greatest advantage of bikes in this setting is probably in the fact they are the hardest to immobilize with spike strips, as you both need much more thorough spike coverage due to their narrow wheels and ability to exploit much tighter gaps AND they can temporarily turn away from the road to the curb to avoid the spike strip your battle hatchbacks can drop (assuming pickups are reserved for actual technicals with heavy weapons) far, FAR easier than any car, let alone truck. Thus, a PREREQUISITE to wielding any sort of a war rig is probably a screen of bikes (likely carried on the back of the war rig/some other support truck during peaceful travel) whose main goal is to take out spike-dropping cars. The bikers/their passengers would probably seek to wield sawn-offs, since those don’t need to be accurate to hit SOMETHING when driving up close to the target.
The other approach is to attach a sidecar to your motorcycle – most (in)famously done by the Germans in WWII, but basically everyone else in that war did something similar as soon as they could. When such a sidecar mounted a machine gun, it could apparently achieve acceptable accuracy. Granted, that clearly slows your motorcycle down a bit, increases its fuel consumption further and reduces some of its other advantages (it being harder to hit with guns and being less likely to trigger spike strips) – but probably nowhere near enough to outweigh the advantages such an arrangement has. Plus, according to Wikipedia, a sidecar actually makes the motorcycle much more offroad-capable by stabilizing it (and probably reducing its overall ground pressure) – to the point it can go across ground too muddy for regular motorcycles.
https://ww2db.com/vehicle_spec.php?q=467
You probably can’t get a mobility kill with spike strips; the driver will brake and not drive over the spike strips. Then they will dismount troops to clear the obstruction. This does give you an opportunity to attack them with a superior force, but you’re not getting out of needing bullets.
A fair point, but it could be a lot more achievable vs. certain vehicles. According the graphic below, a fully-loaded semi (i.e. our war rig) travelling at 100 km/h will take almost 200m of braking before it can come to a complete halt on a dry road. (Braking time goes up to ~275m on a wet road, but it apparently never rains in Mad Max-like settings, so I guess we can disregard it. In a way, it’s ironic many now use that setting as a proxy for climate change, generally unaware that it increases average rainfall, if not in places like Australia or Southern Europe.) Even for 70 km/h, its braking distance is still slightly larger than 100m – on a dry road.
https://cdn.nrspp.org.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2017/03/25153807/NRSPP_infograp_Truck-Stopping-Distance-2021.pdf
To be fair, spike strip users would most likely need to have a much greater headstart than 200m to deploy it successfully. (Since a vehicle travelling at 100 km/h will apparently pass that distance in about 8 seconds.) On the other hand, post-apocalyptic brakes may not be all that great – and besides, if you can force a fast-moving war rig to brake suddenly, then let’s just say I would NOT want to be any of those guys on its roof!
Moreover, even if the war rig was able to stop without anyone flying off and rapidly slamming the tarmac, the mere fact it is now stationary, and its fighters are dismounted, makes it a lot easier to shoot at them accurately and so expend less precious ammunition. (In an universe where explosives and, somehow, seemingly petrol-based incendiaries are cheaper than bullets, those ought to work better too if you can hit the dismounts next to the strip – while dismounts could benefit a lot from dispersion when confronting those weapons, I doubt they can disperse too far away from the rig.)
I’d suggest the wet-road distances are probably more relevant considering the lack of smooth paved surfaces and the prevalence of hard-packed dirt which will undoubtedly have a loose granular top-surface.
“The other approach is to attach a sidecar to your motorcycle – most (in)famously done by the Germans in WWII, but basically everyone else in that war did something similar as soon as they could. When such a sidecar mounted a machine gun, it could apparently achieve acceptable accuracy”
I would be very surprised indeed if sidecar-mounted weapons were ever fired on the move. Motorcycle troops didn’t fight from their bikes, they dismounted and fought like dragoons, as infantry. There are very few photos of these things in use (and it seems to be almost entirely the Germans who used motorcycle-sidecars; I’ve found one photo of a British combination) and all of them show the vehicle at a halt.
Hardly just the Germans; I linked to a gallery of British, Soviet, Japanese, French and even Dutch sidecars in an earlier comment. Here’s a contemporary photo of a Soviet parade featuring a large number of these motorcycles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1941_IMZ_M-72_Formation.jpg
Some sources in Russian also claim it could have been used on the move, but I’ll admit the amount of evidence I could immediately find isn’t as solid as I would have liked.
Spike strips wouldn’t work against a vehicle with run-flat tyres, which I would put on my war rig, did I own one.
This assumes you can get those in the first place. Run-flat tires are another of those technologies which apparently did not become even remotely widespread until after the world of Mad Max would have collapsed. The first adopters in the 1970s were apparently sedans like Rover P6 – it’s unclear when the first truck-sized version emerged, let alone semi-sized. (And that’s not to mention older run-flats wore out comparatively quickly.)
https://www.thedrive.com/cars-101/40488/what-are-run-flat-tires-and-are-they-any-good
Granted, solid rubber tires would be even more immune to punctures than run-flats, and those were widely used on WWII armoured cars, towed guns, etc. Things like mining dump trucks still use them, apparently, but I have no idea if the wheels they use are interchangeable with those on war wheels. (WWII ones definitely would not be, even assuming their rubber lasted that long.) And then there’s the minor matter of ride comfort – or the lack thereof. Construction equipment isn’t exactly intended to take part in high-speed chases.
I would imagine access to one or more heavily armored military vehicles like a tank could be a highly useful weapon multiplier in a situation where you would want to force an enemy strongpoint.
Obviously, you wouldn’t actually drive the tank where you’re going. Rather, you’d use a tank transporter – i.e., a flatbed semi-trailer pulled by a semi-truck, and then disembark the tank only for the last mile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_transporter
An interestin real-life example of some of what our host has been discussing. Note the motorcycles then the APCs.
https://youtu.be/r6LpFkwwDWI
On the problem of firing on the move, would a Steadicam stabilised camera rig work if you bolt an M-16 on instead of a camera? Australia has a reasonably sized film/TV industry, maybe some warlord could scavenge a few rigs and get at least a few technicals with shooters who can fire accurately on the move.
Modern-day Australia has a reasonably-sized film/TV industry for sure (I try to do my part seeing our comparatively few wide theatrical releases myself, as you could see in my (rather out-of-date) profile link.) Thing is, the original Mad Max was released in 1979. Now, it was said to take place in the “near-future”, but “near” happened to be the operative word. By the time the so-called “Main Force Patrol” in the original film was founded, Australia was clearly already half-collapsed – and that founding is one of the few events with a concrete date in the lore. That date is 1983, meaning the 1970s were already disastrous for Australia.
https://madmax.fandom.com/wiki/The_Fall
Now, in the real world, the first Steadicam appeared on the market in 1975. How many would have made it across to Australia in this timeline?
” would a Steadicam stabilised camera rig work if you bolt an M-16 on instead of a camera? ”
The “smart guns” in Aliens were, IIRC, MG42s attached to Steadicam rigs. Like much of the kit in that film, they looked cool enough* that 12-year-old me did not feel inclined to question their actual practicality.
*A support weapon that you can only fire from the hip while standing up, making it impossible to use from cover? An armoured personnel carrier with a plain glass windscreen and about six inches ground clearance? An interstellar spacecraft with zero crew, so you just have to leave it unattended during your opposed landing? A forklift with completely unnecessary legs and an attached blowtorch in case you’re halfway through lifting a pallet of Space MREs and suddenly realise it needs a bit of a weld?
At least the body armour met the ACOUP standard…
To be fair, at least some of those issues fit the concept of the expedition being delivered by a dysfunctional far-future corporation. I can absolutely believe Weyland-Yutani skimping on bulletproof glass and a full crew compliment on ‘shareholder profit maximisation’ grounds. “Well, only 10% of our APCs ever see combat, so we can save costs through only providing 10% of them with bulletproof glass”.
The full-width panoramic glass windscreen and wildly unnecessary blowtorch-on-a-forklift might be trickier to explain. Perhaps the Executive in charge of those particular contracts had shares in glassmaking and pyrotechnic companies…
The mention of warlords with a small fleet of carefully-hoarded purpose-built IFVs reminds me of the scene in *The Wind-Up Girl* by Paolo Bacigalupi where we know that the midden has truly hit the windmill when the military deploys a tank (a relic of the time before the collapse) rather than the genetically-engineered war elephants we have previously seen them use.
Following up on the conclusion: What would a siege look like in this technical-dominated setting? Raiding to target relief columns, or would there be different elements?
I’m here to point out that, with access to motorbike engines, aluminium tubing, canvas, and some welding kit, your desert-dwellers have all the materials to make ultralight aircraft (if not the knowledge).
They could do it, but it would be insanely dangerous even by Mad Maxian standards. Bikers can and do crash fatally (to the point a truism amongst medics is that the best time to be needing an organ transplant is at the peak of bikers’ season), but controlling their steeds is still a lot easier than airframes, and I believe braking is much more effective and more likely to save the rider (and the vehicle) – especially if the rider has uncommon amount of sense for that universe and actually wears a helmet and all the leather and padding they could hope to find.
Military pilots require hundreds of flight hours for a reason – even in WWII, Americans required ~350 flight hours, Germans ~450 and Japanese went all the way to 700 (producing notoriously elite pilots and equally notoriously crippling their ability to sustain this quality in the long run). Shortcutting these times had clear costs; interwar RAF pilots were certified after ~200 hours (early war even less) and this was probably not unrelated to the outcome of the Battle of Britain, where ~1.5 times more British fighters were lost than their German counterparts (Germans still lost more planes because of all the destroyed bombers) in spite of operating on home ground, with full fuel tanks and the support of radar and (primitive) air defences. Interwar Soviet pilots had between 60 and 180 flight hours – and in 1940, one Soviet military aircraft crashed every day on average. Now imagine what it’s going to take to have any degree of confidence that whoever will be flying these bike-derived aircraft will avoid pancaking. The warlord would effectively have to already start off possessing certified pre-collapse pilots in their retinue and then either gamble their lives on these completely unproven aircraft, or set aside a ton of fuel to give them a hope of training successors.
And all of that would be for a level of performance sharply capped at Wright Brothers-WWI levels. While one of the first mass-produced aircraft, Curtiss Model D (interestingly, Wright Brothers themselves never managed to scale up the production of anything they made, essentially forever going from a prototype to prototype until they got bought out by Curtiss in 1929) could work with just a 40 HP engine, just about everything which fought in WWI with any success was at least double that (the 80 HP engines on the initial models of German Fokker and French Nieuport – some of the very first fighter planes in the world), with many >100 HP or even >150 HP. For comparison, 1970s most capable motorcycles were apparently between 67 HP (BMW R90S) and 105 HP (Honda CBX1000 – as an aside, Harley Davidsons at the time had “just” 82 HP).
https://www.webbikeworld.com/the-best-motorcycles-of-the-1970s/
Granted, actual aircraft, even if operating at WWI levels with <200 km/h top speeds are still going to have far better performance next to the paragliders we see in Furiosa, which still had to be attached to bikes. On the other hand, such glider-bikes can at least be loaded into a large truck, as described in the post, whereas doing that with any kind of an airframe without damaging something important is a dicey proposition. Worse, WWI aircraft with such small engines could stay in the air for about 2-3 hours, so even if you know how to make them, you are unlikely to be using them often. Air reconnaissance would probably be prohibitively expensive, and with their tiny payloads (+ the difficulty of hitting anything on the ground while in motion – see numbers in the post and recall those things struggle to lift anything more than 1 or 2 machine guns at best), the combat utility would mostly be morale-based.
P.S. In case you are wondering, the plane in Beyond the Thunderdome was not just a real agricultural plane from 1960s (Transavia PL-12 Airtruk), but it also had an engine of 300 HP, that is 3-4 times more capable than what any of the motorbike conversions are going to have. (Unless I suppose the wasteland smiths intend to really push their luck with multiple-engine airframes.)
“Military pilots require hundreds of flight hours for a reason”
Interesting numbers about flight training, and the whole idea reminds me of the novel _The Miocene Arrow_, where a post-apoc Colorado is feudal/manorial, with pilots of small biodiesel airplanes in the role of knights, and fuel-hungry airplanes in the role of grain-hungry horses.
“Air reconnaissance would probably be prohibitively expensive”
My impression is that air recon is really really valuable (especially in combination with legacy binoculars), probably worth the cost. Might also depend on how many working radios you have access to (e.g. whether motorcycle scouts can report from the field or have to drive in). Even if you can’t afford to have a constant screen of air scouts in all directions, pre-combat intelligence from the sky seems killer.
As for fuel, I’d wonder if motor gliders would be feasible: fly up on engine, coast on thermals as much as you can.
Also on fuel-hungry air recon, there’s hot air balloons, though I’d guess it matters how many powerful rifles your opponents have.
As ajay pointed out below, ultralights appear a lot more manageable in the air (and from the operational perspective) than I assumed they would be. Apparently, a trike-style ultralight like the one described below (first produced in 1996, but I doubt anything about its technology would be inherently out of reach in the 1980s), operating on an engine with exactly the kind of power (80 HP) 1970s bikes had, could fly with the cruise speed of 97 km/h and a max speed of 145 km/h. While the linked page sadly fails to specify its operational endurance, another one claims ultralights often manage 4-6 hours, which is a lot better than the WWI aircraft I used for reference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_Quantum
Even if a pseudo-Quantum in particular would happen to a significantly lower endurance than the stated 4-6 hours, its apparent 100 kg capacity implies that you could potentially triple its 49L fuel tank size if you really needed to. Otherwise, though, that weight is sufficient fit a passenger with the binoculars and a map to do some quality spotting and even more crucially, the note-taking. (Perhaps some aerial photography too, though it’s not exactly the easiest thing in the world, and exposes the precious aircraft to more risk if you attempt to directly overfly hostiles who might happen to have guns on them.)
In theory, those 100 kg also allow the pilot to carry a machine gun or two and/or a few light bombs, but in practice it’s almost bound to be so inaccurate as to be a total waste. (Though a lot of warlords would probably decide the Rule of Cool/psychological factor is more important and do it anyway.)
Additionally, a trike design actually does appear to be something which could be carried on a sufficiently large truck with little risk of damage (presumably you would seek to pad it with whatever cloth and cushioning there is to spare just in case), so that could be another way of extending its operational range.
And as for hot air balloons, I wonder if an ultralight could tow one, to help with mobility? (Launch a hot air balloon to patrol an area for many hours, then if/when you need to rapidly bring it home, get the ultralight to tow it back to the closest settlement/large truck?) In theory, you might as well just do a hot air blimp to achieve the same…though apparently, the first one of those to take flight did so in 1973, so there might be some non-obvious technological barriers there preventing the warlords from utilizing this trick successfully.
Military pilots require hundreds of flight hours training for a reason and that reason is “flying and fighting in military aircraft is very complicated and demanding”. But we’re talking here about ultralight aircraft. You can get an ultralight licence with 25 hours flight, including ten hours solo.
Shortcutting these times had clear costs; interwar RAF pilots were certified after ~200 hours (early war even less) and this was probably not unrelated to the outcome of the Battle of Britain, where ~1.5 times more British fighters were lost than their German counterparts (Germans still lost more planes because of all the destroyed bombers)
This is a really odd deduction to draw, because of course British fighters were deliberately trying to target bombers, not fighters (source: any history of the Battle), so you’d expect the Germans not to lose as many fighters as the British, regardless of relative skill levels.
I’d also think that “how many hours had the average pilot actually flown by the time of the Battle” is a more relevant number than “what was the minimum number of hours required to qualify as a pilot”. Yes, the RAF cut time at OTU to well below the minimum, but you wouldn’t go straight from OTU to Manston or Biggin Hill! You’d be posted to a Sqn in a quiet part of the country, like 13 Gp, first, and finish your training there.
OK, you (and I guess the OP) are right about ultralights – I didn’t realize the requirements for them (and autogyros, for that matter) are so much lower, but given the limitations on their performance (cruise speed <100 km/h, etc.) I suppose that makes sense.
of course British fighters were deliberately trying to target bombers, not fighters (source: any history of the Battle), so you’d expect the Germans not to lose as many fighters as the British, regardless of relative skill levels.
Again, the British fighters were “only” threatened by the German fighters (in theory German bomber defensive fire too, though it’s unclear how often – if ever – they actually managed to claim a fighter), while both kinds of the German aircraft also had to contend with the British anti-aircraft artillery. Not only that, but the Bf 109s could only spend about 10 minutes in the air over Britain before having to turn back. (The external fuel tanks apparently did not become available for them until October 1940, when the Battle was nearly over anyway.) Now, the Luftwaffe did have the advantage of a considerably greater size, but given these structural disadvantages, I don’t think you can look at the outcome of the Battle without considering the disparities in training as well.
I’d also think that “how many hours had the average pilot actually flown by the time of the Battle” is a more relevant number than “what was the minimum number of hours required to qualify as a pilot”. Yes, the RAF cut time at OTU to well below the minimum, but you wouldn’t go straight from OTU to Manston or Biggin Hill! You’d be posted to a Sqn in a quiet part of the country, like 13 Gp, first, and finish your training there.
I’m not sure if this is consistent with the way Imperial War Museums describes it.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/listen-to-raf-pilots-tell-the-story-of-the-battle-of-britain
> The heavy losses were compounded by the continuing need for more pilots and the deployment of men with minimal training in the aircraft they were going to be flying. They were often very young, too: the average age of an RAF fighter pilot in 1940 was just 20 years. Of those killed, the average age was 22. As the battle wore on, RAF Fighter Command had ever fewer reserves of experienced pilots to draw on and men were sent into combat after only a few hours of training. By mid-August the shortage became acute and had both military and political leaders worried. Alan Deere served with No. 54 Squadron and recalls the eventual fate of two inexperienced pilots in this sound extract.
> “We were desperately short of pilots. At that stage in the Battle of Britain, August into September, the aircraft had started coming in again and we were having them flown in. But we were short of pilots. We were getting pilots who had not been on Spitfires because there were no conversion units at that time. They came straight to a squadron from their training establishments. Some of them did have a few hours on the Hurricanes, a monoplane experience, but not on the Spitfire. For example, we got two young New Zealanders into my flight. Chatting to them I found they’d been six weeks at sea coming over. They were trained on some very outdated aircraft, I can’t remember, out in NZ. They were given I think two trips or something in a Hurricane, something of that sort of order and they arrived at the squadron. We were pretty busy and so we gave them what was known as a cockpit check. We had by that time a monoplane and we’d give them one trip in that. One of the pilots would take them up to see the handling and brief them on the Spitfire. Then they’d go off for one solo flight and circuit, and then they were into battle. The answer is of course that they didn’t last. Those two lasted two trips and they both finished up in Dover Hospital, strangely enough. One was pulled out of the Channel. One landed by parachute.”
> The lack of any real pause in the battle meant that there just wasn’t the time to devote to properly training men, not only to fly – but to fight. Combat skills could only be picked up from real experience over time, but time was of the essence. Jimmy Corbin joined No. 66 Squadron in August 1940 with very little experience – he had had just 29 hours’ flying time in the Spitfire. He went on to earn a Distinguished Flying Cross, but at the start of his flying career he remembered being very naïve.
> “Any pilot that wasn’t fairly experienced was called a sprog, because you weren’t one of the boys. Anyway then you, after a bit you’d done a few hours flying and done a bit of formation flying either with two or three or maybe more and then eventually with the squadron and then they called you operational: that meant you were fit to be killed! The first aerobatics I did was in a Spitfire. Told by squadron commander, ‘Corbin! There’s your aircraft, go and do one hour’s aerobatic flying.’ I thought, ‘Christ almighty! I’ve never done any aerobatic flying.’ So I thought the loop must be the easiest thing. Of course, in my bloody ignorance and stupidity I went up in this loop and I stalled the bloody thing at the top through going around too fast, it spun out the top…! That was my first experience.”
I think your figures may be a bit exaggerated as well. Most of the sources I can find give around 1000 RAF Fighter Command losses of all types to all causes during the Battle, vs about 850 Luftwaffe fighter losses – not quite a 1.5:1 ratio, but rather closer to parity. And, also, the question that matters is not “how well trained was the least experienced pilot” but “how well trained was the average pilot”.
Bomber defensive guns weren’t great but they weren’t useless – from 10 July to 11 August the RAF lost 115 aircraft in combat, of which 13 were shot down by bombers. (And another three by British anti-aircraft fire.)
You mention limited endurance as a disadvantage for the German fighters, and of course that was true, and very important from the point of view of the outcome of the battle – but it is irrelevant if we are trying to compare fighter losses on each side and reach a conclusion about whose fighter pilots were better trained. If a 109 can only hang around for ten minutes, then that limits its chances of shooting down a Spitfire – but it also limits the Spitfire’s chances of shooting down a 109, because the 109s aren’t around for very long!
And there were other disadvantages for the RAF as well. Most obviously, they didn’t get to set the pace of the battle, because they were defending – so they had to maintain high readiness every day. They were losing aircraft on the ground to bombs – that goes into the total losses, but it’s no reflection of pilot skill. Higher operational tempo meant more losses to non-combat causes such as mechanical failure – a third of RAF fighter losses were non-combat, and not all of those would be due to lack of pilot training.
I do not know why Al Deere was saying that in August and September there were no functioning Spitfire conversion units (at the time known as OTUs; OCU is the postwar name). This is not the case.
” In practice, these fighting positions would be of limited utility: those car shells are almost certainly not thick enough to stop small arms fire, so a single stationary machine gun along the route could sweep the top of the vehicle and disable most of the defenders.”
I feel like you answer most of this question yourself when you point out that firearms, or more likely their ammunition, are very rare in this environment. The Citadel forces have them, because they have the Bullet Farm. But the bandit groups don’t – they use HME charges which they throw like grenades, they use crossbows and other similar weapons, and they grapple and board. The only other group that we see using firearms are the Vuvalini and they have virtually no contact with the Citadel. So the Citadel uses fighting positions that aren’t thick enough to stop small arms fire because they are expecting never to have to fight enemies who have small arms.
Seeing as how mad max is set in Australia you might see a lot of technicals based on various forms of Utes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_(vehicle)
Mad Max characters and early settlers of Colorado: both worried about being attacked by Ute war parties
(I’d only ever seen the latter written down and had always thought it was “oo-tay” but apparently it is pronounced like the Australian vehicle)
Indeed! Though, I think that for Mad Max specifically, we need to recall that if Max’s own vehicle was a 1973 Ford Falcon, then the ute you would be most likely to see is going to be Holden Belmont HQ. Let’s just say these models look…rather less impressive than a Hilux, and you would need to do quite a lot to them to make them fit the series’ usual aesthetics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HQ_Holden_Belmont_-_1.jpg
Shared for obvious reasons: https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2025/05/26/redneck-science-guy-builds-unstoppable-semi-truck-of-ultimate-destruction/
Ok, so at a few times shortages of spare parts and stabilizers had been mentioned; this made me wonder what if the setting was based after an apocalypse taking place today instead of in the 20th century. Then 3D printers would be available which could produce spare parts and stabilizers, whilst those being made from plastics would be inferior to the real thing it would still be better than nothing. Furthermore, there have also been people who made such things as bicycles purely from 3D printed parts. I wonder how would that influence the setting, from logistics to tactics*.
Though, it is a bit off topic I suppose.
* How good would 3D printed stabilizers be in allowing outriders/technicals/war rigs to accurately fire when moving? I haven’t got the faintest idea…
The issue then becomes availability of 3D printer feedstock…
I doubt 3D printing would be an easier option post-apocalypse. They require specialized plastics, or with metal sintering you need special metal alloy dust and lasers.
On the other you can manufacture all the spare parts you need by cutting a block from some steel beam of a building and putting a man with a drill and a file to work. It’s lot of slow work and the result may be crude, but it should produce a functional spare part.
As an example you can search YouTube with “asian/india/pakistan mechanic repair” to see videos of small Asian workshops repairing trucks and heavy equipment with basic tools. Immortan Joe’s toolshop is at least as well equipped as those.
Another YouTube search you can do is “Khyber Pass” to see what kind of weapons small Pakistan workshops are capable of producing.
> I could thus see a raiding party loading a bunch of motorcycles on the back of a truck precisely to be able to use them as scouts and flankers, particularly if they can communicate back to the main force via radio (thus allowing for over-the-horizon scouting).
“Giant truck that launches fleets of motorcycle raiders like a land-based aircraft carrier” should absolutely be a faction in the next Mad Max.
Assuming there WILL be the next Mad Max anytime soon, that is. The first might have been the most profitable film ever made (until the Blair Witch Project); after that, the series had seen diminishing returns, going from a big hit, to a decent hit, to barely-profitable, to the 2nd-worst flop of 2024. Now, studios can sometimes gamble on a franchise even if it fails time and time again (witness the history of Terminator films, which started to flop with Salvation, yet studios funded two more spins at the roulette wheel after that), but I’m not sure this is one of such cases.
P.S. I was going to say maybe the next Mad Max will be another video game – but it turns the 2015 one didn’t perform well either. (You can probably tell from the blog post alone, considering that our host managed to name-drop Rage 2 from the same studio and even an indie vehicle builder but not that actual Mad Max game.) Though, at least its developers (mostly known for Just Cause, the aforementioned Rage 2 and a generic robo-apocalypse thing Generation Zero) can plausibly blame the decision to go head-to-head with the final Metal Gear Solid for their woes – as indeed, they already have.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/george-miller-criticizes-2015s-mad-max-game-developer-responds-with-heated-messages/
At the same time, Miller decided to rub salt in the wound last year and said he would have rather just seen Kojima do the game instead of them in the first place. He’s well within his right to share his opinion, of course, but I doubt that’ll look very motivational for them or any other developer who might receive an offer to do another Mad Max game.
One thing that’s not mentioned in this is something that has been covered here before: Legitimacy. The biggest threat to a warband leader is not necessarily another warband, but an internal rebellion, making maintaining control over their subordinates a very high priority. Having vehicles that aren’t the most practical, but are flashy and impressive, allows a leader to visibly reward loyalty and create an elite inner circle. And of course, the war rigs are the biggest, flashiest, most impressive pieces of equipment around, and are a visible reminder of the leader’s power and importance.
At which point the flaw becomes an asset.
If you give me a war rig you’re telling me you trust me and value me and whatnot, sure. But you’re also giving me a big, huge, giant, impossible to defend and nearly impossible to maintain piece of hardware I NEED to keep running and use in order to maintain the loyalty of MY underlings. And I can’t refuse it without you taking it as an insult, ensuring my total destruction.
Best-case scenario is that this diverts resources and manpower from directions that are more effective militarily but less effective psychologically. I’m now reliant upon you to maintain my legitimacy, because if I can’t keep the war rig running (and you’re not stupid, you’ll keep key resources and personnel to yourself) my underlings will take it as a sign that they can, and should, rebel against me. And every plan I make that includes the war rig ties me more and more to your aims, because it makes me rely more and more on your resources to survive. I also need to be both daring and cautious in battle. Daring, because I need a LOT of resources to keep this thing running. Cautious because if it gets destroyed my underlings will take it as a sign that they can, and should, rebel against me. Both set powerful constraints on my behavior.
Worst-case scenario, you have a clear target and easily-calculated firing solution in case of me rebelling. Probably not going to end well for me.
In a low-trust environment this sort of thing would be valuable. The gift is both a compliment and a constraint, a way to limit my capacity to rebel while making me thank you for the limits. We don’t need to trust each other, the gift by its very nature imposes obligations on both parties (but mostly me, because these are warlords not saints).
This isn’t without historic precedent. Giving someone an elephant was something like this–a huge compliment, but also a huge burden. In Europe the king visiting was also like this–it was a tremendous honor, but an expense on the order of a major loss in war or a plague, because you had to feed the king and his entire household (in fact, there are records of people claiming to have plague in their city to avoid royal visits).
It’s an example of how something can be practical when you look at the society as a whole, even if it’s not necessarily the best option for the role it’s ostensibly used in.
This post reminds me of the game Shadow Empire, a strategy game set in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi future where you basically play as a warlord trying to re-conquer a planet. Amazingly detailed logistical simulation, though it probably really lowballs the amount of gas needed to sustain a logistical network. Your early forces are mostly infantry since gas, ammo, metals, and industry are precious. There’s a “biker” unit that I almost never use since it’s, as you say, not particularly combat effective and only good for scouting. But once you do get the resources to build and supply some light armor or mechanized infantry boy do you cut through just about everything lower down on the food chain. Might be worth you checking out if you haven’t already!
I was concerned for a second that in a sci-fi game, “mechanized infantry” would refer to mecha suits (completely useless outside of anime for reasons including the virtual impossibility of armoring such dimensions effectively and their horrific ground pressure), but no, it actually understands enough to use the terms “motorized” and “mechanized” accurately!
https://shadowempire.fandom.com/wiki/Formations
(Judging by the list above, the game is not perfect; i.e. something like a “Heavy MG infantry” with a 50% machinegunner/rifleman split does not appear to be a formation used in real life much, if at all, with nations generally stopping machine gun saturation at 1 per squad and then pouring production capacity into things like mortars, anti-tank rifles and eventually RPGs/ATGMs. It appears to generally simplify away the distinction between mortars and proper artillery the way it does the same for the APC/IFV distinction. You are also extremely unlikely to have infantry operating next to tanks with just rifles and no machine guns of their own. Conversely, APC-mounted infantry may rely on those machine guns that are already mounted on the vehicles. However, those are such minor points compared to an average video game.)
A far more major point, though, would be “Motorized” means trucks have been added to the formation to increase mobility. This comes at the cost of the formation requiring twice as many soldiers, and some fuel will be required for movement.
The big issue here is that the above seems to assume non-motorized/mechanized infantry can just lug everything they need on the soldiers’ backs?! This is not accurate, to put it mildly.
https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/
Historically, motorization happened to significantly reduce military formations’ head count, because the first thing trucks were used for was not for transporting troops – it was to transport all kinds of supplies that used to be hauled in horse carriages, requiring a much larger number of horse drivers than truck drivers + a lot more grooms, veterinarians, etc. then the comparatively low number of mechanics for vehicles!
Now, looking at the trailer and the manual, it appears that the “planetary classes” available attempt to realistically approximate the usual planet – i.e. a barren or mostly barren rock much less welcoming than the Earth, some of which apparently require domes to produce any food. To wit:
Seth Class- Named after the God of the desert. Desert Planets. Their key characteristic is that they do not have a drop of liquid water on their surface. It is rare, but possible they host an alien biology with non water-based type of life.
Boreas Class- Named after the god of the wind from the north. Icy desert Planets. Their key characteristic is that they have water in usually sizeable amounts, but they have too low temperatures for most of it to be liquid. It is rare but possible they host an alien biology, usually with a non water-based type of life.
Siwa Class These are Planets that are quite similar to Earth, but the amount of liquid water they have is limited. Hence only a small part of these Planets has open water, life and rainfall. Siwa Class Planets always have either Terran biology
or a Terran-compatible alien type of biology.
Limos Class – Named after the god of starvation. Not quite desert Planets, but not much better either. They have some amount of liquid water, but they are always void of life. If they were to have life they would be classed either Siwa Class
or Medusa Class.
Medusa Class – Named after the mythological snake-haired creature. Similar to a Siwa Class Planet, so some liquid water and rain is present, as well as some deserts. A key characteristic is that these planets have a hostile alien biology.
Cerberus Class -Named after the mythological three-headed dog guarding the entrance to the underworld. Lava Planets. Their key characteristic is that they are usually hot, without water and quite young. These Planets have a very active
geology and often have numerous permanent volcanoes. They can even have
Rivers and lakes of magma.
Planetoid Class – A very small Planet that could have been a Moon Class if it would have found itself close to a larger gravitational body. Never had life or sufficient atmosphere. Usually quite boring places, but they can provide for quick and confrontational games.
Moon Class Even smaller than the Planetoid Class. But even more suited for quick action and short games.
Consequently, I presume the developer(s) didn’t want to include horses (or alien/GMO equivalents) because they presume pack horses forage and almost none of those planets are suitable for that. But if that’s the case, then the non-motorized army formations would need to include a massive number of human porters, and motorization would represent an even more drastic reduction in headcount! To be fair, the manual does include “Design Compromises” section talking about things like distances (each hex is 200 km-sized) and timescales (a turn is 2 Earth months) – though not the absence of horses!
Yeah, the military formations still have a lot of video game jank that doesn’t really line up with reality. MG/Rifelmen/MPATS units make little sense on the scale it’s trying to work on. As for the logistics each unit has an ability to lug some supplies with them, but are primarily supplied by your logistics network which reaches a set distance away from your roads/railheads that presumably operates via some sort of vehicles. The motorized/mechanized refers solely to the tactical movement method for the troops not their logistical chain, and one of the wargame weaknesses is that aside from directly occupying road tiles or destroying logistics generating buildings there’s no good way to interdict enemy logistics on a tactical scale. Plus late game it does have all the ludicrously impractical sci-fi trope units like jetpack troops, mechs, and oversized nuclear powered mega-tanks.
Still a lot of fun though, and the bits that really distinguish it for me are not so much the tactical combat but how it blends that with a civ-esque exploration/city building system, a Crusader Kings/deckbuilder government system, all atop a really detailed planetgen/apocalypse simulator that lets the game environment range from an inhospitable moon where you have puny resources and population in a highly constrained harsh environment to a ruined ecuminopolis. Definitely a diamond in the rough if you ask me, though it absolutely has it’s very rough edges.
Another thing to consider is that one of the scarcest resources in the Wasteland is manpower. Joe has a little less than a thousand men and that’s enough to make him a major power. So if twenty men are killed in a battle over a convoy that is a noticeable percentage of his forces done. Similarly if a group of thirty raiders loose fifteen of their men seizing a convoy they are in serious trouble no matter what they manage steal. And the men will likely have serious questions for the warlord who led them into such a bloodbath.
With that all in mind it is likely that Road War would center around the preservation of men and war fighting material. So less continual guns blazing and bomb throwing and more pot shots and hit and run attacks, until one side breaks off and disengages. Pressing the attack home would likely be a last resort given the high casualty potential for the attackers if the defenders decide to fight it out instead of retreating.
Bret,
What do you make of Furiosa’s comment at the end of Fury Road, that their motorbikes have “enough supplies to ride for 60 days” over barren salt flats?
Not mentioned here: an attacking force going after a tanker may well be in a position where failure to get the fuel means insufficient fuel for the force to return home. In other words, the destruction of a tanker or even sufficient damage to it to spill a large portion of the fuel means the raid didn’t just fail, the raiders are finished as a threat.
Under such circumstances, firing weapons at a war rig may simply not be an option because attackers cannot risk hitting the tank. So placing defenders top the tank itself offers them protection from incoming fire, while allowing them to fire at least somewhat freely because they are unlikely to shoot the tank immediately below them by firing outwards.
One thing I think wasn’t touched on enough is the volatility of the convoy cargos.
There’s an in-built defense that the “Fury Road” War-Rig has- nobody wants to damage the fuel tank, because then the resource you’re fighting over GOES AWAY. In longer term strategic jockeying, this could potentially be a positive, but in short-term ‘capture the resource being transported’ it makes it so that you DON’T WANT to shoot at the big transport vehicle, making it actually a pretty good platform for deterrent firepower. This might be similar with ammunition and water vehicles- you don’t want your score to go up in flames or leak all over the wasteland, so you’ll avoid puncturing attacks. For water convoys this means you want to use fire as much as possible. Food convoys want you to use bullets and avoid fire. Gas and Ammunition both want to avoid bullets AND fire, and so ‘melee’ would be the way to go. And I think the films showcase this pretty well. Consider that for the use of spears, melee weapons, boarding actions, and ‘kill the people but capture the cargo and vehicles’ raiding you want high maneuverability and close-range, I think the use of motorcycles as primary combat vehicles isn’t crazy.
And muscle cars have a lower profile and high top speeds that allow for maneuvering- Max’s car is called “The Interceptor”, not “The Siegemobile”- being able to catch up to, escape from, and position yourself around enemy convoys would be a big benefit.
The Technical IS still the best option here, but I can absolutely see the use-cases for the smaller, lighter vehicles, and the heaviest vehicles, in combat roles.
> One wonders what Toyota’s PR arm thinks about that.
Toyota’s PR department has gone through quite a bit of effort to try and convince the world that they do not sell directly to armed groups, but I recall when one of their marketing VPs was asked directly about what he thinks about Toyotas being used in armed conflicts across the world, and he said something along the lines that this is further proof of the reliability and flexibility of the Toyota lineup. His way of turning lemons into lemonade I suppose.
Something that pops into my mind every time I consider warfare logistics in the context of Mad Max’s world is wind power. Not for combat purposes, of course, but in what I guess you’d call the strategic lift sense, or as support for a less resource-dependent form of nomadism. A semi-tractor fitted with a vertical axis wind turbine instead of or in addition to its engine probably wouldn’t move around very quickly, but it would be doing so almost for free, and a scaled up version could move even a mining haul truck. Cut up the latter’s bed to convert into an improvised armor belt, replace the boarding stairs with drawbridges or the equivalent, and you have something very challenging to assault for any opponent who doesn’t have access to high-velocity firearms, but which retains its full original load capacity. Hundreds of tons that can carry not only living quarters and supplies, but machine shops capable of maintaining even those monsters, or water treatment facilities, or greenhouses. Imagine a dozen mobile buildings, creeping across the desert day and night at a walking pace, making their way from one water source to another, cooking up biodiesel for their reserves the whole way…
But of course given Mad Max’s world, being the one who had the water or scrap they needed to replenish when they arrived could become very exciting, even if trade would probably be preferable for both parties.
I suppose it’s worth noting that the beginning of the breakdown of society and Fury Road presumably happen within 15 years, presumably with the water wars, and more importantly, tri-nation nuclear war (mentioned in Furiosa) almost certainly taking place AFTER the first film (where neither appears to have occurred yet). The timescale comes from a rough estimation of Max’s age – whilst Mel Gibson’s version was significantly younger than Tom Hardy’s, they still did the recasting because the real-life ageing of George Millers kids took longer than the intervening time (that’s apparently why Miller left Mad-Max alone for 30 years, because he was too busy making Babe, and other films more appropriate for his personal younger audience).
At any rate, it does explain why they’re still cannibalising equipment, and why it does seem to be degrading over time – they’ve probably not had long enough (or enough resources, before the local biker gang leadership was so heavily consolidated as in Fury Road) to set up new mining and production facilities in a sparsely inhabited part of the world apparently rather freshly cut off from national government and trade (presumably up until at least the tri-nation nuclear war, it was cheaper to import vehicles, because we’ve not had a nuclear war and that is indeed how the Australian auto-industry works).
With regards to the war rigs, it’s worth noting that according to the creators, one of the aesthetics they wanted to go for with regards to Joe and his top men was “conspicuous consumption.” That is to say, everyone else is begging just for water, and Joe is carting around things that’d make him seem like a rich man even in our time, much less the post-apocalypse. A particular point is his personal vehicle, the Gigahorse, which is four 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVilles mashed together, and the fact that all the guns he uses in the film are incredibly shiny.
So I think it’s not unlikely that while technicals would definitely be preferred, those kinds of crazy custom rigs might still have a place as a status symbol for the powerful and those looking to show off, similar to the arguments this blog has made about war elephants.
Love that you mentioned Fallen Earth as a touchpoint for this. I was so into that game at release and love that its still around in some form.
> One wonders what Toyota’s PR arm thinks about that.
Well, since 2014 some of Hillux model codes are called “GUN Platform” so…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toyota_model_codes#AN
The truly all important question is: given it has basically been designed for this and nothing else useful, how well would the Tesla Cybertruck fare?
(my guess is: it breaks six months in, spares are impossible to find, it gets stripped down for scrap)
I would love for you to write a similar review of warhammer fantasy.
What is now called warhammer old world.
Pick any faction, lizardmen, dark elves etc. And tell what works, what does not work for them. Which would see it collpase etc.
Now I want to see a “realistic” Mad Max type movie that shows Technicals instead of Outriders, and these Technicals make up the vast majority of the vehicles in the film. Ideally, the film’s motor pool bought genuine Technicals second-hand for such purposes.
> One wonders what Toyota’s PR arm thinks about that.
Well, I dunno about Toyota, but this poor Ford Trunk driver found out that bad PR due to Technical use can cause many problems indeed:
https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/14/us/terror-truck-lawsuit
Summary: Man sells his used truck because he is upgrading to a better one. Used car dealerships says they will remove his decals (advertising his business), but don’t. Truck ends up in hands of terrorists, who are then filmed by journalists, with the decals still visible. Man receives thousands of angry calls from people who saw the decals and thought he might be associated with terrorists.