How fast can the US military attack...a US city?

Factual Questions
21

You guys raise some good points! I would rule out nuclear strikes on the point that if we launched/detonated, then everyone and their mother from the Kremlin, to Buckingham Palace, Peshawar, New Delhi, Paris, and possibly Tel Aviv would have their hackles raised and would have flipped on the ‘Master Arm’ switch to their own nuclear missiles, and may launch preemptively anyway. I don’t think the President would risk incoming nukes just to launch one or two—if conventional weapons may do the business. Now, if multiple cities were under attack from the “Cloverfield monsters” and the entire nation’s survival were at stake, I think it’d be a different story . . . but just one city, I think he’d weigh the odds and err on the side of nuclear caution.

It seems that the major issue is immediate response—as flyboy88 and Billdo have pointed out, it would take at least hours at least for conventional forces to stand up and mobilize to begin mounting an effective counterstrike. As Really Not All That Bright indicates (and I think correctly), the NYPD would be the ‘first responders’ (as I think everyone would expect in a post 9/11 catastrophe).

So, let’s play this wargame!

[Armchair General]

The first two things we need to know before we can begin responding are A) What is it, and B) where is it? Does the movie provide for how we get that sort of information to the Armchair General in Charge (AGIC)? Is it by a video feed from reporters on the ground (like WNBC-TV?) or by eyewitnesses? How credible are those eyewitnesses?

The next thing: how do we localize it if it’s on the move? Airstrikes to pin it down/disable it? If it’s vulnerable that way, do we flood Manhattan with ground forces?

With the ground forces, assuming we can get them to the New Jersey or Long Island side, how do we get them into the city, and quickly? I would venture that the Marines have this down pat—they’re the specialists in establishing beachheads. The Army does have harbor forces, but would we be able to ferry them across the rivers fast enough? Would bridges and the PATH/Lincoln/other tunnels be safe enough to shuttle initial forces in? As AGIC, I would hesitate to use them except for small groups, such as Special Forces or Recon units—they’re bottlenecks in that you can only get so many people through the tubes so fast, and that they’re targets that can either be dropped if Godzilla smashes the GWB with his tail, or can flood if Mothra somehow drops a cocoon egg on one.

Fourth, from which forces do we draw from? Billdo points out we do have a plethora of airfields to use, and a couple of potential dropzones to land in. Are those viable dropzones? Assuming we have freedom of mobility via the Interstates and the rail lines (to a lesser extend), we could marshall up forces in different rallying points. It seems that just getting them into the city is our biggest challenge.

Alright Battlestaff, get crackin’. . .

[/Armchair General]

I’m not an Airborne guy–are the parks big enough to drop troops into?

And by no means am I trying to reduce or eliminate the importance of the Navy or Air Force! But “the seat of purpose is on the land,” and despite the evidence from the Middle East, the Army does do a good job of kicking down doors and sweeping-and-clearing. This fight will be in the city itself, and will require an occupaton.

Tripler
As you can probably tell, I have today off. :smiley:

22

I imagine a quick phone call from the POTUS to say, “hey, we’re just launching this here ICBM at a 500-foot-tall damp lizard, so no need to get all retaliatory” might convince other countries to keep their fingers off The Buttons.

I’m sure they’ve seen all the same sci-fi movies we have, and everyone knows what happens when you fire nukes at a giant radioactive monster - it gets bigger.

23

Fine. I don’t want to play with your stupid monster anyway. :stuck_out_tongue:

What is a good estimate of the amount of troops from the various organizations we have available within six hours of NYC?

24

I’d love to see a movie where the monster starts rampaging through the “wrong” neighborhood and gang members start opening a can of whoop-ass on it. They’d be the ultimate first responders. Picture Crips and Bloods working together to bring down Godzilla.

25

Could they even re-aim our current missiles to hit NYC from within the continental US?

Those are inter-continental ballistic missiles, after all. They were designed to go between continents. Is a short trip like from North Dakota to NYC even possible?

Also, calling in the military won’t work. It never does in monster movies. Based on past movies, a quick call to the Centers for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta, GA asking them to ship a planeload of standard human germs would be the best way to kill it. Or possibly an attack by a typical selection of neglected homeless NYC street people would bring the monster down.

26

Yup. They can climb vertically and approach a target vertically if necessary.

27

Well, there should be a missile sub in or near Groton, CT, that could hit NYC.

28

Well, I’m not sure how useful a carrier would be as a carrier with the number of airbases in the area, including Lakehurst NAS just south of the City, the former Stewart Air Base (now a civil airport and NY ANG base) just north of the City, and McGuire Air Force Base in central New Jersey. However, it could easily be the world’s biggest troop transport, bringing soldiers and Marines up from the Norfolk area or elsewhere on the East Coast. Carriers have come into New York Harbor for Fleet Week, so it shouldn’t be a problem to send one in there loaded with troops and equipment. Nor, for that matter, would it be much of a problem for any other units of the Navy (including the ships used to support amphibious Marine units).

As for Amm. Gen. Tripler’s concern about transportation links into Manhattan, the toughest is from New Jersey across the Hudson, for which we have one bridge (the GWB), two vehicle tunnels (the Holland and the Lincoln) and three rail tunnels (the Amtrak/NJTransit tunnel to Penn Station and two PATH tunnels). From Brooklyn and Queens across the East River we have five bridges (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburgh, 59th Street and Triboro), two vehicle tunnels (Battery and Midtown), 11 rail tunnels (the LIRR/Amtrak tunnel to Penn Station and 10 subway tunnels) and the tramway to Roosevelt Island. Then there are the numerous smaller bridges and tunnels across the Harlem River to the Bronx.

In addition to the bridges and tunnels, we have an extensive ferry network, from water taxis carrying a couple of dozen to Staten Island ferries rated for over a thousand people. Further, I have no doubt that we could press innumerable tourist and excursion boats into service, as well as whatever miscellaneous craft can be rounded up.

Another resource to consider is Naval Weapons Station Earle, in Sandy Hook Bay, across lower New York Harbor. Earle, with its 2 mile long rail-equipped piers, can supply virtually any type of ordinance used by the Navy. (A law school buddy had served on a supply ship based out of Earle, and though he could neither confirm nor deny anything regarding matters nuclear, was highly amused about the then-current public uproar over the proposal to homeport a nuclear carrier in Staten Island considering what was just a few miles south).

29

During World War II it took about an hour for a wing of bombers stationed in Amarillo, Texas, to bomb a small town in the Panhandle of Oklahoma (Boise City, OK). Granted it was an accident, but given our present state of readiness and working on the premise that anything you want to do is more complicated than an accident; it would probably take longer.

30

It’s a common misconception that neutron bombs leave buildings still standing. They have less of a bang than full-out strategic nukes, but they’re still more powerful than the bombs which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and would do a real number on NYC. The purpose of a neutron bomb is not to take over a city from a bunch of corpses; the purpose is to make sure you quickly neutralize large numbers of armored targets like tanks. A tank and its crew could actually continue fighting for some time after getting blasted by a standard nuke (though the crews would probably eventually die from radiation sickness or cancer), so a neutron bomb reaches right through the armor to kill the crews inside.

31

Given the range-to-target parameters and the presumed desire to minimize loss of infrastructure (NYC is right here and we don’t want to blow up the city), I think nuke-armed cruise missiles (whether launched from ships, subs, bombers, or tossed out the back of an AC-130) would be better than any form of long-range missile.

The key point is that we’re trying to take down one organic target, not a whole city or nation. This is largely a sniper’s wet dream turned night terror.

32

Two quick comments from the Air Force side…

1 - Most of the Air Force units in the continental US are either tasked with transport or with perimeter defence of the United States and therefore are Interceptor wings, especially all the Air National Guard wings that haven’t been converted to Air Transport wings. Interceptors are pretty good at shooting down planes, not so good at trying to kill 500ft monsters. Probably your best bet for real air-to-mud capability is from either AC130 gunships or possibly F-16c’s from Hurlburt Field in Florida; there might be F-15e Strike Eagles in Virginia, but I think they’re been moved out IIRC. I think all of the other East Coast fighter wings are air-to-air; there are no bomber wings on the East coast. Air to air missiles and 20mm cannons wouldn’t do much more than piss off your average Godzilla-type monster; air to air missiles wouldn’t probably even be able to be targeted at a ground target. So a couple of hours flight and prep time to get them there; air interceptors stand at +15 alert, which means 15 minutes from the call they’re flying to targets. Air to mud don’t work that way, and it would take time to get them loaded and armed (about 45 min per jet minimum) not counting time to get the pilots together. Add that to flight time (AC-130s are SLOW) and you’re looking at a minimum of 3 hours from call to air strikes if you’re lucky and all the assets are in place; I’d say more like 4 minimum.

2 - Yes, you can fire an ICBM over a much shorter distance, but it’s no trivial thing to re-direct one. The target packages are quite tricky things to work out, not something you just type in a grid square and expect to hit. Rather than firing an ICBM, the bulk of which are de-commissioned anyways, I would think it would be either dusting off a gravity-dropped bomb like the B-61 (unless they’ve been totally de-commisioned, which I don’t recall off-hand) or firing a nuclear-tipped cruise missile, which could be either the USAF from B-52s or B-2s or B-1s from a variety of locations (Minot AFB North Dakota or Whiteman in Missouri has BUFFs with Tomahawks with nukes; Whiteman has B-2 and B-1 bombers as well). Both weapons are much larger than tactical warheads and would level Manhattan fairly efficiently. Again, doable, but we don’t have nukes on ready alert anymore (haven’t had since 1991) so it would be take out the nuke(s), load them, launch the aircraft, fly to target, then drop - say 8 hours minimum (loading nukes takes a long time - I know from personal experience as a load crew member in the USAFE). Add to that CinC time for the President to give the order and have that confirmed, and you’re looking at more like 12-18 hours.

So say 4 hours from ‘go’ for conventional air-to-mud, 12-14 hours for nuclear, and you’d have a ball park figure on how long before we could be dropping bombs on Mr Big-Bad Monster in NYC (or any other major US city)

But I would say it wouldn’t be that easy or fast for the rest of the US military, outside the US Air Force, to organise to attack a US city. 2 hours would be pretty ludicrous, for reasons already stated; most active duty units, where all the kit and people are all together in one place, have 24 hour deployment promises for light Airborne troops at best. The Guard wouldn’t be able to do that much better. Deployment of troops takes a hell of a lot longer than just sending in the Zoomies, unless as previously posted you just want to send them in with light weapons and company-level tactics; deploying say a full armoured brigade, with organic artillery and their tanks, would take a hell of a lot more than 24 hours, and there are no tank parking lots in NYC. Texas, yes, but not in NYC :slight_smile:

Sorry, it just don’t work that way - you need a decent amount of forward delta-V to get a cruise missle to work, you can’t just air-drop one like that. The MOAB (mother of all bombs - 15,000 lbs dumb bomb) however does work exactly like that - it’s a pallet you push out the back of a C-130. That might do the trick nicely, if Mr Monster wasn’t moving too quickly.

33

Your best bet would be to scramble fighters from the carrier(s) or Naval Air Station in Norfolk, as well as USAF aircraft designated to protect D.C., and send them northward. The 108th Tanker Task Force could deploy from New Jersey, and scramble in an AWACS or Joint STARS from either Massachussetts or Norfolk to provide targeting and air battle management. Immediately get the guys at Hurlburt Field in Florida to send an AC-130 gunship north, and in the meantime pull A-10s from wherever you can get them. Also, call out to Edwards AFB and scramble the Airborne Laser, just in case.

You get bullets and air-to-ground missiles within an hour, and a second shift of the same within two or three. By the eight-hour-mark you have a gunship that can effectively target the eyes, and a megawatt-class laser that can burn tens or hundreds of meters through the skin, possibly severing an artery or worse.

A 100,000-ton monster is not going to be hard to find. I haven’t seen the movie so I don’t know what kind of armor it has, but that shouldn’t matter. You could make great use of Durandal runway-buster bombs. In concrete and hard-pack, it makes a 16m-diameter crater – I imagine it would do almost as well accelerating through blubber or tortoise-shell. GBU-28s (the Gulf War’s famous “bunker buster”) will go through 6m of concrete; I bet that would leave a mark. In a pinch you could use Maverick missiles, too. It’s not likely to have pupils that can contract quickly (since it lives so deep underwater it’s a marvel that it can see at all), so buzzing it and dropping flares will probably be quite effective at keeping it disoriented. Pilots should use best judgment to decide whether its reactions (possibly “sprinting” away from the light source) are helping or hurting, however.

As a last resort, a handful of pilots could be ordered to report to JFK Airport, pick up fully-fueled 777s, and fly them into the monster’s head at top speed. A B-52 pilot could do the same thing on a smaller scale and conceivably eject safely. It might be interesting to have him initiate a dive, open the bomb bays, and then immediately eject, peppering the monster with 500 or 1000lb bombs as the fully-fueled BUFF slams into it. Not sure where the closest conventional B-52 wing is, but I think there’s one in Lousiana that could do the trick.

34

No, you don’t. You get bullets from the air to air fighters, but get nothing like air to mud for quite some time; we don’t keep air to mud on ready alert. All of the figher-bombers / bombers would either need to be fully loaded with air to mud, or in the case of B-52s would need to be flown with armed weapons from their alert stations in Afghanistan or Iraq; we’re talking hours before we’d have viable air to ground capability over the Eastern Seaboard, not minutes.

Assuming none are deployed elsewhere (which I think they ALL are just now) then we’ve got (according to wikipedia):
Fighters with air to ground capabililty:
F-22s at Langley (DC),
F-15e at Seymour Johnson (NC),
F-16c at Shaw (SC),
A-10’s at Pope (NC),
Each would take a minimum of 1 hour per jet to load, arm, and take off, then flying time from home base to NYC

AC-130s at Hurlburt Field, FL
Takes a minimum of 4 hours to fully load and prep for combat missions; once ready, takes a minimum of several hours to fly from FL to NY

Bombers:
Whiteman AFB, MO has B-2s
Barksdale AFB, LA has B-52s
Minot AFB, SD has B-52s
B-52s take up to 6 hours to fully load with conventional weapons; B-2s take up to 3. Again, add in flying time and you’re looking at 8 hours before we can start saturation bombing NYC. Nukes would take even longer - say 4 hours to get the weapons transported to the aircraft (we don’t keep them side by side), followed by 8 hours of loading, followed by 4 hours for CandC to make the call and get it verified, followed by 4-5 hours flight time, and you’ve got 12 hours before we can attack.

1st AF HQ at Tyndall has CandC for all of the Air National Guard Wings tasked with Air Defence of the United States, but those are nearly all air to air superiority wings flying either F-15Cs or older-model F-16As which do not have air to mud capability.

People just don’t realise that we’ve got a ton of air to ground capability, but the vast majority is either based elsewhere (Spangdahlem AFB in German is a hive of fighter bomber activity) or else is deployed elsewhere; we don’t generally keep them in the US gathering dust.

I’m not disagreeing with your overall plan and your weapons load-out is probably spot on (although I’d toss in some GBUs and armor piercing CBUs for kicks), just the initial timeframe - an hour from ‘GO!’ to air to mud ain’t gonna happen. So it’s spitwads for the first four hours along with limited deployment of ground troops, then we can get the big guns to bear.

35

Obviously, it’d be a last-ditch hail mary. Not much about Independence Day was real, but I think there was some accuracy portraying how difficult a choice it’d be to nuke a U.S. city, and just how bad the day has to be to authorize it.

Also, I never did think about the AC-130. That thing would be the perfect response for this scenario. It’s mobile, has a very long onstation time, and can deliver some major sustained, pinpoint firepower. You may lose a high rise here and there, but better than all of Manhattan Island.

36

If he invaded Yancy Street, he’d wish he hadn’t. Ya don’t wanna mess with those Yancy Streeters. :stuck_out_tongue:

37

AC-130 would take down a monster fairly handily, it wouldn’t knock down buildings, just bust a lot of windows. It’s got the following loadout, none of which would knock over a skyscraper.

38

I was using the carrier as a refueling and rearming base for Navy and Marine planes (only Army and Air Force helos can land on one of these and be good for use afterwards.) And the carrier needs a lot of sea room to launch and recover planes. IIRC, you need 20 knots of wind across the bow of the ship to safely launch a jet. You’re not going to get that kind of wind speed in NYC harbor.

I was on the USS Eisenhower when we delivered the 10th Mountain Battalion to Port-Au-Prince Haiti back in the '90s. We were out in the VaCapes with an airwing or two embarked, and ordered to return to Norfolk immediately. It took us a day to get back into port, dump the airwing, and another two days to load up the Army before we left port again, working 48 hours straight through to get the ship loaded. When we got to Haiti, we were anchored out in the harbor, so we could only use their helos to transfer equipment to shore (we could, and did, use the liberty boats to move small amounts of Soldiers at a time to shore, but there was no was to use those little boats to move jeeps and trucks.)

So using a carrier as a troop transport is possible, but very impractical. The e Navy has much better ships for that purpose. Amphibious assault ships can load and unload troops much faster and better than using a carrier - you need cranes and a lot of helos that way. They were designed specifically to dump a large group of armed combatants and their gear onshore quickly.

39

Then there is the related question: After you manage to kill the thing…then what? 100,000 tons of quickly rotting meat will render Manhattan uninhabitable for quite a while (well, what’s left of it). Exactly how do you get rid of the organic debris?

40

Blow it up? Whale explosion

OK, maybe not :smiley: