Aliens, supervillains or some other force far more powerful than any real world entity decide they want to invade and conquer the US as effectively and efficiently as possible. They don’t want to conquer a wasteland and want to preserve as many people and resources as possible.
What are the most important targets in the US to occupy or otherwise render harmless?
My list would start with the 10 largest military bases, every capital, the Pentagon and the ICBM fields.
Not that I have any desire to facilitate an invasion of the US or indeed any other country, but:
If your goal is to “occupy or otherwise render harmless”, then yes
are the most logical locations. Doing that without destroying them is a whole other matter.
Or, if you’re not in a hurry, you just co-opt one of the major political parties behind the scenes, use every means fair and foul to get them into key positions of power, and then manipulate them to achieve your agenda and to weaken national defenses and ties to global allies. I know that seems farfetched but it could work.
First, kill all the lawyers.
I’m no military stragist, but first with the nuclear missile sites, followed closely by the various military training camps.
You eliminate the ability to train, and you get a disorganized militia, rather than an army or Marine Corps.
I would assume the same way superpowers like the US invade developing countries.
Destroy the air defenses
Destroy military materiel (planes, tanks, etc)
destroy WMD, ICBMs and missiles
capture all political leaders, or encourage them to defect to turn in others
Encourage soldiers to defect peacefully
However after occupying you’d have to win hearts and minds. They would probably do that with things like:
reducing income inequality and increasing the standard of living
Universal health care that cannot be taken away
Eliminating regulatory capture and the strangehold the rich have on politics and the economy
However as shown in nations like Iraq and Afghanistan, destroying the official military is the easy part. The hard part is the insurgency afterwards.
Nah, I imagine a reasonably sized unit, say division size, could set up perfectly good basic training camps.
I’d think that outside the obvious military targets, I’d hit major rail and highway interchanges and airports.
I mean if you hit the Bailey yard in North Platte, NE and the Argentine yard in Kansas City, you’d snarl rail traffic something fierce. Combined with judicious strikes on major freeway interchanges and airports, that could seriously impair the ability to get stuff around.
Whither that well-organised militia of the 2nd fable?
/
If that was literally happening right now, I wouldn’t be too terribly shocked.
Not really. A military training camp is really nothing more than a set of rickety buildings and a whole bunch of woods. You can train anywhere. In fact, the Continental Army did exactly that, and they defeated the most powerful army in the world because of it.
Don’t attack. Just buy up every cable news outfit in the country and tell Americans you are here to liberate them. If it’s coming from the right news channel we will believe anything.
I’ll likely end up posting this as its own thread but here is a list of targets sorted into military, political and economic categories. Tell me if there is anything I should add, edit or remove.
Well, someone at the FBI will be busy this week.
Capture Disney World, the Ark Encounter and Graceland.
That’ll bring America to its knees.
A lot of those aren’t single point targets. For example, the Port of Houston stretches for like 50 miles down the Houston Ship Channel. And “Galveston Bay” as a refinery is absurd- that could encompass anything from the Exxon refinery in Baytown, to Marathon in Texas City, to Valero in Houston. The closest of those three are 15 miles apart (Baytown & Valero), and Texas City is 20-30 miles south.
Or for that matter, what does “FBI” mean? The HQ building in DC? The branch office in Dallas?
Plus “Largest” isn’t necessarily a good proxy for “most militarily or logistically important”. I mean, sure you could nuke Samsung Austin, but you’d probably be better off nuking Camp Mabry (HQ of the Texas NG) in a military sense if you had to nuke something in Austin.
The OP is vague but I wrote this as an exercise as to how the villains in the Old Man Logan setting could have actually quickly conquered the US. Obviously, the villains are fantastically powerful and capable enough that they wouldn’t have to have 100+ targets for their conquest and occupation to work. I just enjoy exploring the fine details of fantastical scenarios and stories and their aftermath.
1: Most of the targets on the list wouldn’t be destroyed. Large areas like ports would either have their important areas closed off by an impenetrable force field or be occupied (not indefinitely) by superhuman agents (robots, clones, creatures, etc.) provided by different villains that would bring them to a halt. I’m updating the previously posted list to add what would happen to each target. I’ll post it here when I’m finished.
2: It refers to their headquarters. The same goes for the NSA, CIA, etc. I just didn’t feel like writing it out for every single one.
3: The only targets that would be outright destroyed through nuclear weapons or some other fantastical means are virtually all the military targets. They would be destroyed for three reasons. To induce the government to surrender, demonstrate the villains’ power and ruthlessness to the civilian population to dissuade them from resisting and eliminate possible sources of resistance in the subsequent occupation in one fell swoop. There would still be resistance from civilians and any remaining heroes but it would be a very effective measure nonetheless.
It is workimg.
Here is the final update list with descriptions and details.