nitrates

NITRATES
One of the unintended consequences of living the life of Riley through the Oil Age is that your perceptions of reality are altered in such a way that you are blinded from reality and live full time in Fantasyland. Almost everything that you think about has been altered by an abundance of energy. That was an unnatural state of affairs that is in the process of unwinding. As I never tire of telling you, one bit of reality that you ignore at your own peril is the abundance of ammunition. Ammunition is as plentiful or as scarce as the energy supply. If we are headed towards a future of less energy, the supply of ammunition will reflect that. After your stockpiled ammunition is gone, it is game over. Oh, we will have the knowledge to manufacture smokeless powder. It is still the same as black powder, less charcoal and created differently chemically. The know how is not the problem. The problem is that we won’t have carbon fuels as feed stocks to produce chemicals on an industrial scale anymore.
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Historically, those nations that controlled an extra source of nitrates had the military advantage. Everyone was forcing farms to set aside manure for nitrate beds. That of course brought up problems with adequate crop fertilizer, but the same process that gave you extra nitrates also got you extra crops. Namely, colonization. Europe got crowded enough that defeating your neighbors wasn’t enough to survive ( stealing their resources ). That created the pressure needed to create the process of overseas conquest. You killed off the natives with smallpox and other barnyard flu’s and mined the land of nutrients to feed the folks back home. And those that conquered an island inhabited by birds for centuries had a military advantage. A concentrated source of nitrates to be used in the manufacture of gunpowder.
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So naturally the question for your brave new world after the apocalypse is, do you have a concentrated source of nitrates? If you don’t, forget about being strong enough to preserve your freedoms. Or being strong enough to steal what you need to survive. Logistics are far more important than strategy or tactics. Logistics should lead them both. You need a source of fuel to make your gunpowder. It is a whole other problem as far as smokeless powder or black powder, primer material and the clash between two armies with differing levels of technology. Without that basic stockpile to supply an army with anything other than bladed weapons, you must have an excess of nitrates. More than you need to farm with. What you need to supply an army with. If you don’t, consider the advisability of conquering a nearby supply immediately. Before the average idiot realized that his stockpile of .223 won’t last forever of semi-auto mode. Use modern ammunition to conquer and hold your future, less modern ammunition supply. And get over old fashion notions of peacefully living alongside other tribes. You need to be aggressive and attack to get what you need for future survival.
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