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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Urban areas have supply routes running through rural areas, but those supply routes need to route through urban areas to function properly(eg highway interchanges). The overall picture still benefits the reds but it’s much more complicated than you make it seem.

Of course nothing in a conflict of this type is simple, but what I’m pointing out is that there are a lot of thing that go in favor of the rural areas and make the kind of fighting that the military would do a bit more complicated. Yes you could field a very large army in rural areas, but if you don’t know who’s fighting and who’s not, or where the IED is or drone strike or attack on infrastructure will come from. And trying to be everywhere isn’t easy, even the biggest military in the world is still finite and can’t control everything.

In a war that’s more a guerrilla conflict with unexpected attacks by small groups who blend in with the locals and have lots of wilderness areas to hide in, it’s going to be really hard for a conventional military to gain and maintain control over the territory and to protect the supply lines to several large cities at the same time. The Blues would have the major disadvantage of having to protect itself and its political leadership in the theater of war. We haven’t had to do so since 1865. And even then, the South was too genteel to try things like starving a city (Maryland surrounds DC and thus cutting off DC would have been possible even back then had they tried to invade). The problem for the military will be fighting an insurgent conflict with most of its tools prevented by the fact that the people doing it are Americans and thus you can’t do things like bomb the strongholds of the insurgents or go house to house collecting weapons.