NationStates Jolt Archive

Milan Pupin, Zapadslavian Defence Secretary, has announced the initiation of a new, lasting, nation-wide defence scheme in the Socialist Unity-Republic.

Prefabricated bunkers are to be installed at strategic and tactical defence positions across the Unity-Republic’s borders and throughout the interior, providing a secure footing for forward and deep defence of the Zapadslav federation.

The small bunkers or pillboxes are being put into mass production, and will appear in a few standardised configurations. Built of concrete or of steel (the latter in at least two sorts, one making use of low-grade iron ore found in some of the republics) and usually sized to accommodate a single soldier or reservist with his rifle or a machinegun, the bunkers are extremely cheap.

“From some it will be possible to fire a machinegun on a steady mounting, or even an anti-tank weapon such as a rocket-propelled grenade... most will be ideal for the rifleman, giving him a pre-prepared and armoured foxhole from which to face our enemies.” Said Pupin, adding, “Many [of the bunkers] will be concealed by turf and other means, and some could allow a sniper to operate to good effect, hiding him and protecting him from counter-fire, while giving him a well planned view of the area.”

The Defence Secretary called the plan a more realistic, affordable, and effective defence than many static defence plans seen in the wider world. Plans that usually call for one supposedly unbreakable line staffed constantly by thousands and bristling with heavy weaponry waiting to be by-passed or disabled while draining a nations resources are a million miles from the Zapadslav plan. The Unity-Republic’s bunkers will not all be constantly manned, most only occasionally examined for need of refurbishment and manned, in event of invasion, by members of the Army Trained Reserve and the Unity Militia.

As work begins on some of the sites chosen to host these defences it is clear that some will be sited in clusters and positioned to cover each other. These are often being provided with small trenches or even crawl-sized earthwork tunnels to connect them, or at least positioned to take advantage of natural cover enabling defenders to move from one to another.

The bunkers do not appear to be much more than pillboxes, and though some are grouped as described above, the scale of the works mobilised does not suggest an intention to underwrite the entire Unity-Republic with defensive tunnels or the like. Nor do the bunkers look likely to resist direct hits be extremely heavy weapons such as cruise missiles or perhaps even tank shells, but they would appear more than sufficient to protect against shell fragments and near misses, or against concentrated small arms fire.

It is intended that tens of thousands of these pillboxes should be installed during the course of President Javoric’s first five-year plan for Zapadslavia, with the eventual total being six or seven figures strong. This in itself will presumably make the use of heavy weapons such as precision air to ground missiles as would be sufficient to disable individual bunkers an uneconomical and inefficient tactic, leaving the bunkers a troublesome barrier to their intended opposition.

The question held silently in many minds tonight is, simply, why, and from where, does President Javoric fear invasion so keenly as to require such an undertaking to be ordered?

“It’s because things are going to get worse.” Proclaimed Professor Davor Pavlicic to the students of his history class at the Slovograd University in the Sloanian Socialist Republic. The professor is widely believed -based on earlier off-the-record comments he is purported to have made- to have been speaking in reference to the long-standing militarism of the powerful Zelenoslavian Socialist Republic, the personality cult growing around President Javoric, and the rise in xenophobic violence in the Unity-Republic. Some fear that 'Javoric's Zelenoslavian goons' are preparing to ethnically cleanse the ten lands of all but the ten native nationalities, a trend already seen in mob-violence (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=381830) directed against Greek and other settlers in Herznia and Albovina especially.

Chairman Plamen Stojakovic was today pictured breaking the ground at one of the bunker sites in Sloania before the largely prefabricated concrete mushroom of a pillbox was lowered into position. The chairman was shown how the one-man bunker was positioned to cover a shallow valley below, and how sites marked for future pillboxes would allow those to protect the first from flanking moves by enemy forces.
Stojakovic was himself invited to shoot a section of concrete said to approximate the strength of the bunker he was helping to install, which he did, awkwardly weilding the 5.56mm M80 assault rifle with none of the skill displayed by the infantryman handing it to him. He was seen to smile and point as the round fired made barely a superficial impression on the slab, before watching a demonstration in which a Zapadslav Unity Army soldier fired from within the newly completed pillbox a training missile from a soft-launch Bumbar anti-tank guided weapon system, which impacted over half a kilometre down the valley. Chairman and cameras alike were finally invited to spot six further pillboxes installed the week previous, said to be located within their line of sight. It took several minutes before one was picked out, and Stojakovic insisted on being taken to the valley floor to see for himself when a ZUA trooper claimed to be indicating the other turf-covered pillboxes that nobody could make-out.

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Tag

The Danmarc Construction Company (a DanCo subsidiary) is very interested in the progress your nation is making defensively. We would be so inclined to offer our assistance in building these pillboxes, in exchange that your nation would be willing to share its technology and blueprints for this defense system. Please contact my nation privately if interested, and we can negotiate.

President Javoric and Defence Secretary Pupin had been searching their minds for ideas on how to use the Danmarcian approach to their advantage, but were struggling somewhat. Much of the construction was fairly low-tech and labour intensive, and was proving a useful avenue for public works to keep people at least partially employed. Bringing in foreign, capitalist contractors would probably just create more unemployment and resentment of the new federal government, and wouldn't play well with the recent anti-foreign sentiment running through the ten lands. Of course, that last part couldn't really be talked about with foreigners.

The technology was nothing special, and the Danmarcians would probably soon realise that any backwater could do what Javoric was doing- he had stolen the idea from Enver Hoxha's crumbling Albania, after all, and if they could do it, any idiot could. Still, it was a potentially effective system that, sadly, had basically no return unless the country was actually invaded, so Zapadslavia was really keen to milk any potential spin-off benefits at all.

The office of the President sent to Danmarc offering to dispatch experts, along with a number of pre-fabricated pillboxes, to that nation for a demonstration in small-scale wargames. In truth, the Zapadslavians were keen to root out any curable flaws in their system before the outside grew wise to Javoric's internal policies. The pillboxes, if the approach was accepted, would be installed in a field or some such area, perhaps up to a dozen of them, and a single infantry platoon would be invited to staff them and face a larger, perhaps company sized force trying to move through without good prior knowledge of the area, as may be the case with a foreign invader. Hopefully, the defenders would be able to wait for the attackers to come in, then hit them with chosen shots from hidden little mushrooms of steel and concrete, costing just a few thousand dollars each, at most.

The hope was that Danmarcian interest would be at least sufficient to place a small order with existing Zapadslav factories to acquire a middling number of bunkers for trial deployment, perhaps. A little capital injection such as that would probably be spent importing a few high-technology items from Danmarc, which would themselves later be copied to a lower standard for cheap Zapadslav use.

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((Up we go))

Foreign satellite reconnaissance indicates Zapadslav bunkers now exist, "in the tens of millions" analysts say!

The little concrete (and sometimes iron or steel) toadstools now spot the ten Socialist Republics that constitute the Zelenoslav-lead federation like a plague, leaving none untouched.

"Zapadslavians must by now be experiencing a real siege mentality" says one foreign commentator, a university professor specialising in the world's more reclusive and extreme states. "It [Javoric's bunker defence plan] may now be so extreme that for every Zapadslav household there is one of these little bunkers- people must not be able to go out to... pick up some milk without being confronted by static defences on all sides, it is really remarkable."

Though there may be for every five or so Zapadslavian one bunker, the odd little pre-fabs do not, apparently, afford shelter such as could be used by a family unit in the event of bombing raids, for example. They appear to be purely military items to be staffed by fighters resisting an invasion of the Unity-Republic. The subject of most common consideration now is the psychological impact of this programme on the so recently united peoples of Zapadslavia, especially when juxtaposed with the erection of giant seventy-foot statues of President Bojan Javoric in the old, low-rise capital, and other monuments to the Union's leadership and Javoric's trilateral philosophy.

Meanwhile, the nation's industrial progress has raged on under the first five year plan, with some reports indicating the use of forced labour to gouge-out a canal network connecting the ten lands of the SSRZ in a lasting and reliable fashion, while industrial plants and deep mines contribute to previously unseen levels of internal economic activity. The JaSlo-6 Seva (Skylark) has been seen making supersonic test flights over the strange empire of Javoric's construction as below the level of ethnic violence continues to contribute to an exodus of peoples belonging to any race beyond the ten deemed native to Zapadslavia's constituent Republics.

Zapadslavia is clearly spiralling towards something, but whether it is collapse, genocide, conquest, or the progress that the leadership promises remains almost impossible to guess from without.

(Oh, so our mass-produced concrete mushrooms don't impress you, eh? Perhaps if we put go-faster stripes on some...)

(I thought I'd bump this and the constitution thread (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=382449) once more, as I'm about to do something new, and think it best if people can easily see a bit of background. If you've read this far, please feel free to comment on a nation with little to no outside interaction before this point!)