“We live in a time when the strong grows weak because of his scruples, and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.”
- Prince Otto Von Bismarck
Interesting. Like the video presentation says it probably won’t be possible to avoid fighting battles, whether small or large, in major cities. There will be so many megacities and they will cover vast areas of land and seacoast. It will often be impossible to evacuate the populace. Taking a city "intact” so that you may make use of it and preserve it for civilization is very manpower intensive. You will need lot of well trained infantry. Expect to suffer to suffer lot of casualties as the enemy will be able to attack from many directions and defend from fortified positions. Our modern insurgent adversaries will often use the civilian populace as a human shield against the firepower of a modern conventional army. Modern precision guided munitions give conventional armies a greater capability to destroy insurgent forces in close proximity to civilians without harming the civilians. This gives modern conventional armies ways to avoid and minimize collateral damage that were not possible in the past. Still one must expect a lot of collateral damage despite one’s best efforts to avoid it, simply because the enemy will work to thwart your efforts. Finally there are still nuclear weapons. As Machiavelli said often the most efficacious way to deal with rebellious cities is to lay waste to them.
Leaked Army video shows a future of urban hellscapes
A megacity could be surrounded and cut off from supplies and it six weeks it would be hell. Especially if you could control the water supply.
the Mongols would make a deathtrap out of a megacity in two days—and wouldn't even need guns to do to us.
“All who surrender will be spared. Whoever does not surrender but opposes with struggle and dissension will be annihilated.” - Genghis Khan
“Our horses are swift, our arrows sharp, our swords like thunderbolts, our hearts are as hard as the mountains, our soldiers as numerous as the sand.” - Hulegu Khan
“Kind-hearted people might....think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst.” - Karl Von Clausewitz, On War, 1834.
Good point James. The textbook example of the way that the Mongols would handle a megacity was of course the siege of Baghdad in 1258 by Hulegu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan. It just shows you that subduing a megacity, or any other objective, is as much a matter of will as of weaponry. The tactics you will be willing to use are a measure of your will and determination to win as well. The main problem the US military faces is that our political leaders are squeamish and possess no will to win. Our enemies have figured that out by now. The neocons are eager in intervene in other countries, but then they lose their nerve when it becomes evident that the only way for our forces to prevail in the situation they have been placed in is to "win ugly" (like the Mongols). So the paradox is that USA has a military that cannot be beaten and yet cannot win.
“Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.” -Winston Churchill
My favorite Mongol act was when they held a feast for the Caliph and taunted him for spending money on things rather than men, then sewed him up in tapestries with his family and rode out of town over them!