I have a feeling a bunch of the people on the "restoration" program will be calling the early birds like us the bad guys, one reason I am sitting out to see what players emerge.

I like the idea of having the resources of an entire state on resistance, but a lot of those states have very little in the way of resources. Some "isolated" parts of Northern California are more of a state than the entire state of Wyoming.

NorCal/Southern Oregon "State of Jefferson" has usable ports, good land, decent trade routes and fairly steady weather. What I don't have are any good landing pad enclave contacts there which are recent. Some growers from over ten years ago, nobody recent.

Both Washington and Oregon are really different states when you go east of the second row of north/south mountain ranges, but that gets into shitty land too. Bad for economic sustainability, and easy for the feds to turn into a bombing range except that there are some areas where people could make a stand and fight in terrain where the high tech big military loses a lot of advantages. We would also be gambling that the central government is unwilling to bring heavy ordinance to bear for fear of military loyalty issues, and any holdout force is only going to be fighting an "elite" that was mainly recruited in the Spetsnaz pattern of "political reliability" then trained to high levels, not high end pros who are fighting for what they believe in.

Waste a few of those arrogant dickheads and then see whether or not the remainder thinks the $15K per month is worth it if they may not live to spend it, and can't operate with the regular military for fear of getting fragged. That's what can get the heavy weapons out of the picture and give early rebel forces a fighting chance.

That's the rub though, we just don't know how a hand picked elite of highly paid "politically reliable" shock troops who are accustomed to winning every battle on home turf will react to taking casualties in the kinds of volume common to actual military conflict. We are talking about people who win 97% of the time by threatening or initiating armed conflict, but usually having such a high level of maneuver and initiative advantage that they win without firing a shot, and rarely get shots fired at them by actual capable opponents.

There is next to zero active resistance at this point so neither side really knows how the other will roll, except that when pro gun people are killed or taken down one by one, any substantive response has been minimal, reprisal killings virtually non existent. It is going to be a guessing game to see who has the guts to start, and then who has the guts to stay in the game once it is started, then whether or not a peace can be negotiated quickly before the scale of things grows larger than what can be settled through peace table negotiation.