
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.
Of course, building an army of improved fighting vehicles to rove the wasteland internet searching for resource rich convoys and settlements to plunder doesn’t come cheap, so if you like what you are reading, you can help by sharing it so that we can assemble the largest possible post-apocalyptic road-warrior band. If you really like it, you can help support the project on Patreon. I can’t promise to use your support to mount heavy weapons to the top of my Honda Civic, but I also won’t promise not to do that. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter and Bluesky and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.
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 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