Civil War Scenario: Blockade & Airstrike

An introduction to CW Scenario Wargaming

The Siege of Leningrad

Introduction

Whatifalthist, a young commentator (younger than me!) is one of the best geopolitics commentators out there today. He has publicly said he thinks this election cycle will result in a US Civil War, most likely this year… But very likely in the fallout years, same way the election of Abraham Lincoln in Nov 1860 took until April of 1861 for Fort Sumter to be fired upon.

I’m not as aggressive as Whatifalthist, I think there’s a lot of scenarios where a major regional war in the Middle-East occurs, or WW3 begins with Russia (we’ve gotten very close to Nuke launches during the war with Ukraine) as factions in the deep state push for an October surprise if they think Trump might win.

Likewise I think there’s numerous ways where a crisis could happen that results in a minor war or last minute corrupt compromise that lets America limp on to 2028? Maybe 2032?

If you look at the Russian revolution, there was the Russo-Japanese war that was supposed to resolve the Russian Empire’s geopolitical and internal problems, then Russia lost, then the revolution of 1905 occured which left the Tzar in charge with a nominal “Not a Constitution” and a sort-of democratically elected duma… Then it limped on sort-of on and off in a state of low level almost civil war (the Prime minister Stolypin was assassinated right in front of the Tzar and his family at the opera in the period by radical leftists)… And then ww1 happened, and then the february revolution of 1917 happened, and then the October revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power… THEN they had their full on civil war.

So a lot of crazy stuff can happen between even a great war or a Trump assassination and civil war… or We could go zero to civil war in 6 months like in 1860-61… it wouldn’t be the states doing it, but if something suddenly motivated 0.01% of armed Americans to each kill 1 government/or rival political group’s official or burn down 1 government or rival political group’s building in a six month period… That alone would cause a breakdown in government authority across the country and probably a massive streisand effect whereby partisan actors are pressured to condemn and demand insane policies or police responses as a result, and then the “pre-mature” rebellion against tyranny or “tyranny” creates the unambiguous Tyranny that justifies the rebellion and allows the early rebels to start recruiting and conscripting to their movement.

Repeat that on both sides with enough rounds fired and bombs detonated, and you have northern Ireland or South Vietnam… but in a country with more guns than people.

However I want to emphasize: a US civil war is virtually inevitable in the next 10 years… no matter what is done at the federal level or who gains the reigns… The US government’s budgetary situation, the insane and death spiraling levels of dependence on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans benefits, Welfare, Public housing, and food stamps, and the declining US Geopolitical situation and its impact on the world dollar demand (look up “petrodollar”) ensures that the inevitable budget crisis will immediately be felt either in hyper-inflation, hyper-taxation (Read: property confiscation. why do you think they’re pushing “unrealized capital gains”? they’re preparing to take your retirement fund and house in a budget crisis), and cut spending resulting in loss of service, rioting, and collapse.

You can read my deep dive into the budget problems:

The Unfunded Liability Death Trap

BUT that is not what this piece is about… A Second US civil war would be an event bigger than world war 2. Civil Conflicts would almost immediately spill over into Europe, Canada, the Cartels would get involved from Mexico, the Migrant madness would take on a newer more insane dimension (as one or the other faction tries, and probably fails to employ the dregs of the third world against their rivals) any impact on global supply chains would probably cause mass famines and apocalyptic wars throughout Africa, the Middle-East, and Southeast Asia.

The intersection of these two maps is Deathtrap territory. Any country that does not have a export surplus of food, is dependent on artificial fertilizer (Potash has to be shipped in from Canada or Russia), and isn’t rich enough to just triple or quadruple food spending (such as the UK or Japan theoretically could) would starve and probably have 30 years war style apocalyptic conflict if ever international shipping collapses… such as in a world war. (ironically war, even Nuclear War could be MORE devastating to dozens of countries that aren’t nuked than the ones who are, a nuclear exchange would kill a combined 300-400 million north Americans, Europeans, and Russians (~40-50%) but then the collapse of global food systems might kill 3-4 billion in the 3rd world)

But that is also NOT what this piece is about… These are just the basics I feel the need to share every time I talk about the matter to show WHY any of these scenarios result in global cascades of unpredictability, instability, and apocalyptic consequences.

The point of this piece, what I hope will be the first in a series of Civil War Scenarios, is to wargame out different possible dynamics that could play out in the event of a second civil war, or the equivalent consequent wars that would probably affect your country.

Unlike the Rationalist community or the wider prediction world, the point of these scenarios will NOT be to assign probability likelihoods to given events… but to create detailed hypothetical that will hopefully illustrate dynamic or uncover concerns.

Any given event has a relatively small likelihood of occuring, and even several VERY likely events events with a likelihood of 50%… When stacked, collapse in probability.

Even if you think it’s a 50% chance civil war occurs, and 50% the faction that forms in DC will occupy Virginia, and that having done so it’d be 50% they’d have to patrol the Appalachian Highlands there, and that having done so it’s 50% likely they’d get bogged down in mountain warfare there… then in this hypothetical just taking those probabilities credulously, the odds, from the perspective of today) that mountain warfare erupt there would be only 6.25% likelihood (50% x 50% x 50% x 50%).

From a probabilistic perspective it’s very hard to say ANYTHING definite about the future once you get in the garden of forking paths. Is the crisis of the 2020s going to be Civil War in the US? WW3 against Russia in Europe? A regional war in the Middle-East and America marching on Tehran? A budget crisis and mass civil unrest/weimar style financial social collapse? Or might we get 2 or more of these in a bizarre unpredictable order with odd time delays? (the last one)

Who predicted Hurricane Helene and the abysmal response? Yet if you asked anyone who followed previous events and responses closely, and had some mild subject matter knowledge WHAT would have happened IF a once in 100 year rainfall hit the upper-south/Apalachia… they probably could have predicted how it would play out with a shocking amount of detail.

In planning for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

For that reason in this series I’d like to wargame out some scenarios, focusing less on their likelihood than the dynamics that they reveal.

That hopefully if enough detailed pictures are painted in advance and enough dynamic described, that we’ll guess at some of the details and dynamics that actually occur.

Air Seige

"You know, I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is — you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16. You need something else than just an AR-15”
-Joe Biden

The thing about the famous Joe Biden quote above is… In a hypothetical US civil War, the Government might not really have F-16s (or F-18s, F-22s and F-35s… Whatever the state of the phaseout is (looks like never)).

Aside from the possibility of maintenance supply chains, ground crews, and pilots being potential on the ground targets in a hypothetical frontless insurgency/guerilla conflict as many have suggested, which could seriously degrade the tempo and feasibility of operating much of the US air force… In Between arms shipments Ukraine and Israel the US arsenal is currently incredibly depleted, and a majority of that arsenal must be retained in strategic reserve against the possibility of near peer enemies like Russia and China launching high intensity wars against the US empire.

If we look at Gaza, the population there has endured what might just be the largest aerial bombing campaign in history. 70,000 ton of conventional bombs, more than the ww2 bombing campaigns against Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined, have been dropped on an area 25 miles long by 3.5-7.5 miles wide. 141 square miles.

I don’t have the stats but per square mile this might be the largest conventional bombing campaign in history… potentially beating out, in one year, even the US bombing of the Iron Triangle in the Cu Chi district of Vietnam across 10 years 1965-’75.

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And yet even taking the Lancet’s all cause casualty estimates of 189,000 dead (8.5% of the pre-war population of 2.2 million) ~90% of the people of Gaza are still alive, and Hamas basically has the same, or a SLIGHTLY INCREASED fighting force from 40k pre-war to 30-50k today (they’ve had a lot of volunteers in light of 1 in 10 husbands losing their wife and 1 in 10 fathers losing their child).

Simply put aerial bombardment has NEVER broken the will of a populace to fight, people are driven by MARGINAL incentives… if an old lady is just as likely to be bombed as a bloodthirsty young radical, there’s no incentive not to be a young radical… And a lot to be one (you might get to avenge your grandma, and it’s not like you being a pacifist loser faggot in the eyes of your friends and family will actually grant you any protection from falling explosives).

So if Hamas and Gaza haven’t been broken after 500 TONS of explosive have been dropped PER SQUARE MILE on perhaps the most densely populated areas in the world (more than 15,000 people per square mile, 33 pounds per person, or 780lbs per acre)… What could the US do against say… Dallas-Fort Worth. With conventional weapons.

The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is 3,281 /Sq-Miles. 23x Larger than the entire Gaza Strip.

To achieve a similar saturation it’d take 1.6 million tons of conventional bombs…

Or about 1 fifth to 1 quarter the 7.5 million tons the US managed to drop on Vietnam in 10 years…

Now what happens if more than one city is in rebellion?

Houston is 10,000 Sq-Miles. Miami-Ft Lauderdale 6,000. Metro Atlanta 8,000.

Virginia Beach alone is 497 Sq-Miles… 3 Gaza Strips.

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Put simply, the US military, faced with even fairly small 5-10% of the country in rebellion, and given nearly complete carte blanche with proclamations that there are “no innocent civilians in Florida”… the Military would quickly be faced with the reality that between artillery ammunition given to Ukraine, 2000lb bombs given to Israel, and the fact that 60-70% of the stockpile can simply NOT be used against domestic enemies unless and until they threaten the survival of the US government, and must be held in reserve against China and Russia unless “The rules based international order” should lose Taiwan or Eastern Europe… once you take all that into account there actually aren’t that many conventional explosives for bombing their domestic enemies.

This is beyond the fact that America seemingly cannot expand production of conventional munitions to save it’s life.

It’ll take til 2025 for the US to reach 100,000 artillery shells per month… Meanwhile Russia is already producing 250,000.

BTW find it hilarious and disgusting Heritage just assumes It’s America’s to replenish Israel’s stockpiles.

Take all that into consideration, then consider:

Everywhere the US has employed widespread bombing in the past it has had concentrated enemies in regions the size of small countries (Germany, Japan) , years to saturate up the large volumes of fire we see (Vietnam), or dense Flammable pre-war Wood construction that could be firebombed to produce incendiary energy release, or firestorm ( See Dresden, and Tokyo).

Combine that with spread out American suburban Construction to modern fire codes.

All that across a continent sized country where individual states rival the small countries America has bombed in the past.

Add in the fact that hypothetical insurgents would be able to attack the Manufacturing and supply chain of US conventional weapons production…

Add all that up and airstrikes, and even artillery, could get very thin, very fast, in the event of any widespread rebellion in the US.

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Sure there are the nukes… But they have their own limitations (a 500 kiloton warhead is simply not the same as being able to select where 500,000 tons of conventional explosive lands… It’s worse in every way, not least that half that energy is wasted going upwards and all of it has to be used at once overkilling one location… 50 10-kiloton warheads would be better) in addition to very complex strategic implications (Iran won’t hold off on building nukes if the US uses them domestically, nor would Russia or China feel bound to any of their strategic arms limitation treaties… indeed every country capable would start building as fast as possible… Germany, Argentina Brazil, Canada, Turkey, Japan, Mexico and a dozen others would be rushing to get nukes… And most of them could do it pretty fast) But that’s another piece.

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So how do you get around this problem? How do you maximally impact your enemy population when you don’t actually have the explosives to “carpet bomb” them "back to the stone age?

Well what did Saudi Arabia do to the Houthis? With US backing. What did Israel do to Gaza in the first days? With US backing. What was the US accused of doing during the Invasion of Iraq?

They targeted the life-support systems of the civilian population.

“Diseases run Rampant in Gaza as Clean Water Runs out”

The 3rd and 4th Horsemen

At no point in Gaza are you ever more than 3 miles from either an international border with a UN member state, Israel or Egypt, or international waters.

In Spite of this Humanitarian aid is heavily and according to the 4th Geneva Convention, criminally, blockaded (the US pays Egypt billions a year in foreign Aid to maintain Israel’s blockade of goods entering the strip, just as it seemingly pays FEMA billions to blockade Aid going to the Carolinas and Victims of Helene).

By March, 6 months into the siege, young, disabled and/or orphaned children were dying of diseases caused by famine or simple straight starvation… Likewise those old enough or disabled enough they couldn’t fend for themselves.

For Newborns and toddlers it’s not clear to what extent mothers are able to breastfeed from lack of food themselves.

And by summer 2024 persistent malnourishment, even amongst those who could scrounge up calories was taking a major toll.

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Now for our American hypothetical…

Food, as any American can tell you, can get extremely calorie dense and can be preserved for extremely long stretches of time… I’ve seen items in American supermarkets that hurt my brain at the sheer calorie to weight ratio… Light muffins with 1000 calories, making me wonder how it is possible within the laws of thermodynamics to confine so many calories in such a light package, given a lb of pure human fat is 3500 calories… Many American foods seemingly reach calorie densities beyond that and are comparable with gasoline and other petro-chemicals in terms of energy density (Remember a calorie is a unit of heat/energy, don’t eat petro-chemicals).

Americans under blockade or bombardment could certainly be rendered “Malnourished”, the average 400 lb American already sort of is from lack of vitamins… but given in Gaza, under a near perfect blockade (in terms of control, some food aid Israel and Egypt have been forced to allow in), non-disabled adolescents to adults have been able to feed themselves sufficiently to keep 90% of the population alive so far.

But Almost nowhere in the US is as easily blockadable as Gaza, America’s food is vastly more processed and therefore calorie dense/non-expiring, and America has an incredible amount of wild animal life that can be consumed granting any besieged population additional months worth of calories.

Taking our example of Florida (one of the far more easily blockaded state): there are over 1 million Alligators in the state. I did an airboat tour of a river, and the guide was telling us every year in the annual cull they kill 10,000 of them just to stop them from getting aggressive or venturing into human areas in search of food. And they’re quite edible. That’s ONE form of animal life, in one state (The entire gulf has more alligators). Look across the US and you can find dozens, maybe hundreds of types hunted animals in shocking abundance that are CURRENTLY being eaten… this is before we get into medieval starvation fare like Boiled Seagull or Rat-on-a-stick.

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No the real vulnerability is water.

The number of calories you need in a day, if you’re really eating processed crap, can be squeezed into one calorie dense, non-perishable canned or vacuum sealed pound of object. Sure you’ll get nutrient deficiencies and horrible complications if you survive off nothing but that for months… but it’ll keep you alive for those months. By contrast there is no such thing as hydration dense water. a liter of water always weighs 1 Kg (2.2 lbs)

You need to consume a minimum 3-4 liters of water per day (about a US Gallon), and Unicef puts the recommended emergency standard requirements for clean water per day averaged across a population (including hygiene, cooking, washroom, medical, etc.) at 15 liters per person per day.

In Gaza currently this has fallen to 2-9 liters per person per day depending on area.

For reference an old style (Ie. Functional) toilet uses 13 liters per flush… and a low flow toilet uses 6-7 liters, or 13 after you’re forced to flush twice. Wide sections of Gaza are surviving on less than a single low flow toilet flush of water per day, for all uses, in the worst hit areas they’re down to less than a third of that: 2 liters… just over 2 quarts, for all uses.

And again, I feel the need to emphasize, none of these people are more than 3 miles from either the border of a functional country receiving billions annually in US foreign aid, or the ocean… where humanitarian flotillas and ship are regularly fired upon. To give you a feel for how intentional these conditions are.

Indeed one of the recurring elements of the war in Gaza has been just how regularly Airstrikes have hit water facilities, desalination plants, the elctrical facilities it takes to run them and other vital infrastructure and hospitals… Often with not even a fig leaf of a military purpose.

Just as was done to the Houthis by Saudi Arabia with US backing in Yemen via blockade and bombardment of civil infrastructure.

“Ok” You might think “But it rains. Gaza is semi-arid, but it’s not high desert. It still gets rainfall, you can see in photos just how much water they get some rains. And for our hypothetical, the US midwest, the south, Appalachia… They all get vastly more rainfall. Surely outside of the really arid southwest, it’s not possible to waterstarve American cities, even if the government strikes. Everything’s too wet!”

Yes but notice the operative word when we’re discussing this: CLEAN water.

If you are in even a relatively small city of a few 100,000… All of those people defecating basically every day. Applying the math above, with normal functioning sewage systems this takes millions of liters of water every day. If the water plants that service these cities are taken out or electrical plants needed to run those plants are taken out, or the sewage treatment plants needed to process that sewage is taken out… Where does the sewage go?

When your toilet doesn’t work what happens?

Deer Island sewage treatment plant, Boston.

Some waterside cities, when their systems go down dump raw sewage into waterways, resulting in algae plumes and other hazards. Such as Montreal and Boston have this century… however when the system is right down, and even those final diversionary measures don’t work, or you don’t have access to a major waterway… it just accumulates in the immediate environment. In the streets, sitting ponds, storm drains, ruined fields… And this spreads diseases… the most common of which is Diarrhea.

What is a minor inconvenience in normal life can quickly become deadly in survival situations at scale… Suddenly you need twice or triple the amount of water to just keep yourself alive, since what you drink passes right through you… And your diseased fecal matter is now not only doubled in volume, but liquid and more mobile… When plumbing works this doesn’t matter, but when hundreds of thousands of people are forced to defecate outside, suddenly this means that all water which touches the ground anywhere downstream very quickly becomes unsafe to consume. Thus you can have massive rainfalls, and if there’s nowhere for it to go, or no means to efficiently gather it before it hits the ground, it becomes not a lifesaving boon but another disease vector.

Remember this is how the majority of SOLDIERS (Grown healthy men) died in wars, camps, and besieged fortresses and towns historically, from disease, not the enemy… Or rather from conditions for disease their enemies (and allies) create.

As this escalates besieged populations start facing escalating disease of sanitation like Dysentery, Cholera, typhoid, intestinal worms, polio, and cascading infections of skin and wounds that just do not occur in hygienic first world conditions with antibiotics widely available.

This is a major reason cities in the past were so much smaller than today… Outside of cities like Rome that developed complex plumbing systems across centuries, its just not really possible to maintain much above a few 10s or 100s of thousands of people without modern plumbing or some alternative.

Recently I visited Chicago… I was shocked that along the shore downtown the water of lake Michigan was almost perfectly Bahamas blue and clear… it looked like a massive swimming pool… I wouldn’t drink it… but the wildlife looked healthy, the swimmers and kayakers were fine, and it looked like it’d be quick and trivial to make it safe… Don’t expect that that would last long in any actual conflict. Any water source that isn’t coming from an unpopulated mountain or immediately captured rain will quickly degrade to Urban India quality, and you’d need to be ready for that, and expect the energy and resource expenditure associated with purifying that contaminated water.

From a prepping perspective:

The amount you have to do to water to make it safe varies by source…

If it’s visually clear and has no smell, color or sentiment, you can generally just boil it, use a water filter, or chemicals like Chlorine or bleach to render it safe… However the worse it looks or the more you expect it might have been exposed to, such as gasoline or petrochemicals, or the residue of destroyed buildings, industrial or post industrial runoff, or heaven help you, Depleted Uranium particulate or fallout… The more cautious you have to be, and the more hard thinking and research you’ll have to do.

Your requirements will vary heavily by area, from needing ways to store/collect large amounts of water in the desert where rain might be months apart… to potentially needing a lot of purification and desalination equipment if you’re in the Bayou and dealing with brackish water… to wanting easily storable but plentiful ways to quickly pull and store water from your tap BEFORE an emergency if you live in an apartment in a major city and that tap is basically all you have.

But my biggest advice is to have 10x more than you think you need, and lots of redundancy in types of methods, incase one method is rendered unusable for some reason. Remember, millions if not billions of people have been besieged, blockaded, or subjected to apocalyptic famine and drought, in just the past 200 years. If it’s worth preparing for, it’s worth preparing for it to last 2+ years… Powdered chlorine and bleach are cheap.

Remember, statistically this is far more likely to kill you than the actual violence of a conflict, and whether or not you’re clean and healthy or filthy and sick of Dysentery is the kind of thing that can determine whether you make a full recovery from a violent injury, or whether it turns into an infection and you die.

I want to remind you: All of this has already happened. Both in early modern sieges, the wars of the middle east, and WW2.

Mohne Dam post breach.

Maybe the most influential classic WW2 movie, the one that inspired Star Wars, 1955’s The Dam Busters is about British Operation Chastise, an operation to blow up civilian water dams, which killed 1600 civilians in the subsequent deluge crippled production on a significant stretch of farmland, and crippled power generation from the plants.

The US and its allies have long targeted such “Dual Purpose” infrastructure. And in any civil conflict that devolves into conventional war, arial campaigns, and sieges, they will stretch the definition of “dual purpose” to the limit to cripple Hydrological, electrical, water, sewage, and very possibly hospital and medical resources (as we saw in Gaza) so as to exert preassure on the enemy civillian population that the increasingly thin US air arsenal probably would not be able to exert against ordinary military targets.

And this would cut both ways. If you look at memes, or the prepper community, or the militia world… It’s not even a barely concealed meme that they expect if the US government (assumed in these scenarios to side with the left) were to start targeting dissidents and the American right, or exerting martial law, that a reverse land based guerilla campaign against electrical substation, infrastructure, water, and the rest would take place to pressure populations in blue cities.

Because neither side, neither the US government with all of its military assets, illegals, and federal agents, nor some hypothetical alliance of defector military, right wing state National Guard, and rapidly organizing militias and paramilitaries… even if they could get a few million under arms, neither are anywhere near the amount of firepower, personel, and human capital in terms of skill and will, that’d it’d take to capture and hold even 20-30% dead set against being occupied with anything resembling conventional tactics.

They’d have to use sieges: starvation, dehydration, plagues, hygeine collapse, and the persistent denial of functional systems of life… lasting years.

Whatifalthist said he thinks we’re at the start of an era like the 30 years war… and there really are the ingredients for a return to the types of apocalyptic siege warfare seen in that era… indeed we’ve already seen about a dozen premonitions of it, with everything from Cu Chi in Vietnam, to Advikka in Ukraine, to now Yemen, Gaza, and Lebanon.

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But in the US this would take on a really dark dimension… because it almost certainly wouldn’t work.

Attritional Logic in a Nation of Demographic Decay

Isolated, orphaned, or disabled young children, disabled adults, and the elderly could possibly starve, and many would certainly die of diseases not seen in the first world in 80 years in the event of such things happening in the US. But the US really varies from Gaza or Yemen in that the US, in some respects, is more vulnerable given just how many disabled and elderly the country has.

there are 65 million medicare recipients in the US (people over 65 receiving state financed health insurance) 8 million officially disabled, 89 million receiving Medicaid (state financed HealthCare for continuous conditions for low income Americans), 22 million severely obese (100 million total obese), and just under 4 million intravenous drug users… and somewhere between 15-40 million illegal immigrants who vary from productive economically integrated people to completely dysfunctional, dependent, and unable to fend for themselves.

Many people overlap 2-3 of the above. Now granted none of these are a perfect proxy for ability to fend for yourself or material ability to support yourself… but we can safely say that between all of these there are 50-100 million adults in America who largely cannot survive unassisted and unsubsidized currently, and certainly could not survive without extraordinary assistance under a siege or breakdown of infrastructure.

Beyond that there are 18 million Americans under the age of 5, who are wholly dependent upon parents or caregivers and who’s survivability drops massively, should they lose those parents in such a siege scenario.

Note the much larger subset of 60 million children under 15 is far less vulnerable… the sad reality is orphaned children age 5-15 have survived in countless war-zones often better than large segments of adults, however that age difference isn’t magic… the first people to starve or die of illness in sieges, blockades, and wars are the youngest and most vulnerable children the second their family isn’t present or can’t provide… but there isn’t a magic cutoff at age 5 or 8 or even 10, and as any sane person would tell you children are just not as equipped to survive as adults, not least because they aren’t positioned to integrate into any of the economic systems that keep besieged or wartorn populations alive. Thus in countless wars you find children and adolescents turning to prostitution or forming gangs to raid food and resources from adults, often armed adults, and in countless theaters across history you’ve seen “police” units dedicated to hunt them down with lethal force.

And in a hypothetical American siege you’d see the same.

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But the thing is, the structure of this vulnerable population is WHY such sieges would fail.

Gaza with an average age below 18, all else being equal, was much less vulnerable to starvation and disease at the individual level… but much more strategically vulnerable to starvation…

If a severely disabled or elderly adult dies of starvation… sure it’s tragic, but they were severely disabled or elderly… By the most ruthless calculus they’re a cost center, a liability. Your nana isn’t going to become an angry horny 18 year old in a decade or so and start fighting or breeding up more potential fighters. By contrast when a 4 year old starves to death, sure on the human level it’s vastly more tragic, but on the strategic level also. That 4 year old represents a significant investment of parental and societal resources that won’t pay off now, and which cannot be remade at any price. It takes 18 years and 9 months to make a 18 year old, and no amount of investment will produce one sooner if your society is short on them. When children start dying gaps form in the demographics of a society that can’t be fixed at any price… the society ages.

In Gaza the political unit gets weaker and loses every time a 2 or 3 year old dies of preventable siege illnesses or starvation… their average age increases ever so much, and the culture becomes just that much more tired and lethargic per capita, long term less productive in absolute terms, and has fewer potential fighters both in the next immediate generation, and every subsequent one.

By contrast in the US the average age is 38.5, and the aged/sickly population of the US is 4-8x larger than population of those highly dependent children under 5.

As a siege kills off the vulnerable the population of a besieged US city, the population would get YOUNGER and MORE WARLIKE.

The society that remained would increasingly resemble the Palestinian population not just in their suffering, but their willingness to continue suffering, and continue using violence so long as they thought some victory was possible.

Hamas might have MORE fighters now than on Oct 7th, because in the interim so many more volunteers have come forward than have died over the past year…

Even doing everything to stretch the effects of what airstrikes or terror attacks can be done… The US military or insurgent infrastructure attackers would only make their enemy younger, angrier, and more resolved to fight it out on the ground… Just as was the case in Britain, Germany, Vietnam, and Gaza today, under arial bombardment and siege.

Far from being an alternative to high casualty ground war… such a campaign might quickly raise temperature to allow for one that’d be unthinkable otherwise.

Indeed the only country to surrender under arial siege is Japan (ironically when you consider almost no organized Japanese military formation ever surrendered in the field), and many commentators insist Hiroshima and Nagasaki had little to no effect on their intent to surrender, rather they chose surrender when the Soviet Union declared war.

In Conclusion

this has been the first of what will hopefully be several CIVIL WAR SCENARIOS

American preppers should be paying close attention to Gaza, the conflicts in the Middle-East, sieges that we’ve seen in Ukraine and elsewhere… and understand how the setting of a US civil war or war in your own country would differ heavily from those conflicts.

I think such a concentration of conventional airstrikes in such a narrow and heavily populated space will probably never happen again… Which is extremely relevant because that means nearly all the considerations you have to take into account from airstrikes, and how those airstrikes can be stretched to induce famine, disease, dehydration, and exposure, are all visible in Gaza RIGHT NOW.

By contrast the effects of siege can get significantly worse. Gaza has been Walled In for close to 2 decades now, and this specific siege has lasted over a year now… many full on sieges have lasted a decade on their own.

Leningrad last over 2 years and killed over 2 million…

But the thing is, for a First world person with access to modern supply lines… it is entirely possible to be prepared for such events. You are much better positioned than a pre-oct 7th Gazan, you can just bulk buy the necessities for water purification.

In an emergency, a 10 dollar gallon of bleach purifies 1000 gallons of water. at 20 liters a day of water that’s over 100 days of seige water per person, per $10 gallon…. though the discerning prepper would probably want to invest in better filtration and water gathering methods than just bleaching nasty street water… You should 100% be thinking in terms of being prepared to purify thousands or tens of thousands of gallons of water…. and how to survive a hostile air force attempting to remove your means of survival for years on end.

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