Versus Match How many Arachnids (Star Ship Troopers (movie)) to cripple the United States?

[JagerIV]

And to go on a completely different scale, I was instead thinking about bug vs Armored Brigade Combat Team, which is probably the most difficult formation for the bugs to deal with.

Roughly 5,000 men, 90 tanks, 150 Bradley's, roughly 20 artillery pieces. Which I assume would mean about 900 infantrymen, assuming full dismounts. Seems to organically have at least a 100 trucks.

This is a withering amount of firepower. The tanker might from some angles be resistant to autocannon fire. But with its average of 20 mm effective armor thickness, not from very many angles. Even if the head got 40 mm effective thickness, autocannons will have no problem penetrating out to about a 1,000 meters. 50 mm effective nominally gets immunity, but legs and abdomen are not going to have that.

And obviously the Bradley's have more armor penetration ability anyways, plus the Abrams exist. I'm not sure the Tanker bugs will be particularly useful outside of ambushes in close terrain, or as clean up duty, melting down armored vehicles taken out some other way so they can't be recovered. That's potentially valuable, and there also may be some situations where a tanker may be able to ambush a Bradley or Abrams, but I'm not sure they would be common enough to plan around.

With this much firepower and armor penetration, I don't think Tanker bugs would be useful against the armored formation outside very specific circumstances.

On to other solutions. The obvious low tech solution is digging. 3-4 meter wide and deep trench should pose a fair challenge to moving forward. This is also conveniently the size of trench needed to move Warrior bugs around on little protected bug trails.

Fully underground would be superior, but that is also much slower: you can only have so many workers digging out the front of a tunnel. A trench however can be excavated along the entire length. This then would be invaluable in such a situation where time is of the essence, and they can be covered as time permits, or as fully underground alternative routs are brought online.

Cool image of ways things can be spread out.

Stopping tanks is going to require a lot of digging. Sticking with the earlier described idea of a landing hive with 5 km dispersion, about an hours walk for warriors. If you needed a 3x3 ditch for your Warriors to move between the two with some protection, that's about 10 cubic meters of dirt you need to remove per meter of trench. 5 km of trench would require excavating 50,000 cubic meters of dirt. It looks like it might take a human between 1-4 hours to dig up that much dirt, I'll go high and assume 4 bug hours of labor per cubic meter mostly workers, though Warriors can add their strength breaking up soil and removing large obstacles. So, about 200,000 bug hours per 5 km of trench.

1,000 workers might be able to dig that then in about 16 days, assuming they could sustain a 12 hour work cycle. This is a pretty long time, especially with how much trench one likely needs: an armored Brigade has about 250 AFVs. At very close spacing of 10 meter per vehicle the formation itself is still 2.5 km wide. More regular spacing closer to a 100 meters per vehicle is a 25 km front for the armored brigade. In a line formation to maximize frontage and immediate firepower at least. So, matching the brigades frontage at least requires 10-20 km of trench. Unless you have a hard choke point, more as armored formations are, well, maneuverable and can go around fortifications fairly easily.

Interestingly, if you do have evenly spread out forces and you connect to the three closest bases, you do naturally get a honeycomb set up, which could set up a very difficult position to attack.

If each of those corners is a minor hive, connected to their three closest other landing site hives with about 5 km to a side, you have a 30 km trench perimeter. Each Hive landing with 1,000 workers if dedicated to trench construction could get that all built in 16 days, since each one only has to build 5 km. Probably better instead to increase worker numbers to 30,000 instead of 6,000. This allows the 30 km of trench lines to be built in 3-4 days, which might be fast enough to have it completed before an armored brigade might be mobilized and deployed in force. Plus there's plenty of other digging that would be good to do.

So, in order to have a force that can build up enough defenses fast enough to resist an Armored brigade, a landing might instead then be about 50,000 bugs for about a 60 km^2 hex area. That might also be enough labor to carry out meaningful counter moves, such as aggressive trench construction to attack or try and flank the brigade.

However, this does dramatically reduce the number of places the humans would need to clear out bugs. Keeping a 5 million number, this reduces bug concentrations to about 100 sites, which is much closer to the number of spots the US military would be capable of dealing with.

Plus, 50k bug concentrations does also start to provide tempting strategic nuke targets, let alone anything smaller. 60 km^2 is still not that dense overall, but 50 k buts would still be getting to close to a 1,000 bugs per km^2. A 100 kton bomb with thermally irrate that large an area to give any with direct exposure 3rd degree burns.

Then again, bugs working in trenches and all the other underground locations does suggest a relatively small share of the colony might be at risk of line of sight exposure to an air burst at any one point anyways. You might be looking more at a 1 Mton or above to get good effects against most of the colony. But, if there's only a 100 of them, well those are numbers of heavy nukes the US still possesses.

 

[Agent23]

And to go on a completely different scale, I was instead thinking about bug vs Armored Brigade Combat Team, which is probably the most difficult formation for the bugs to deal with.

Roughly 5,000 men, 90 tanks, 150 Bradley's, roughly 20 artillery pieces. Which I assume would mean about 900 infantrymen, assuming full dismounts. Seems to organically have at least a 100 trucks.

This is a withering amount of firepower. The tanker might from some angles be resistant to autocannon fire. But with its average of 20 mm effective armor thickness, not from very many angles. Even if the head got 40 mm effective thickness, autocannons will have no problem penetrating out to about a 1,000 meters. 50 mm effective nominally gets immunity, but legs and abdomen are not going to have that.

And obviously the Bradley's have more armor penetration ability anyways, plus the Abrams exist. I'm not sure the Tanker bugs will be particularly useful outside of ambushes in close terrain, or as clean up duty, melting down armored vehicles taken out some other way so they can't be recovered. That's potentially valuable, and there also may be some situations where a tanker may be able to ambush a Bradley or Abrams, but I'm not sure they would be common enough to plan around.

With this much firepower and armor penetration, I don't think Tanker bugs would be useful against the armored formation outside very specific circumstances.

On to other solutions. The obvious low tech solution is digging. 3-4 meter wide and deep trench should pose a fair challenge to moving forward. This is also conveniently the size of trench needed to move Warrior bugs around on little protected bug trails.

Fully underground would be superior, but that is also much slower: you can only have so many workers digging out the front of a tunnel. A trench however can be excavated along the entire length. This then would be invaluable in such a situation where time is of the essence, and they can be covered as time permits, or as fully underground alternative routs are brought online.

Cool image of ways things can be spread out.

Stopping tanks is going to require a lot of digging. Sticking with the earlier described idea of a landing hive with 5 km dispersion, about an hours walk for warriors. If you needed a 3x3 ditch for your Warriors to move between the two with some protection, that's about 10 cubic meters of dirt you need to remove per meter of trench. 5 km of trench would require excavating 50,000 cubic meters of dirt. It looks like it might take a human between 1-4 hours to dig up that much dirt, I'll go high and assume 4 bug hours of labor per cubic meter mostly workers, though Warriors can add their strength breaking up soil and removing large obstacles. So, about 200,000 bug hours per 5 km of trench.

1,000 workers might be able to dig that then in about 16 days, assuming they could sustain a 12 hour work cycle. This is a pretty long time, especially with how much trench one likely needs: an armored Brigade has about 250 AFVs. At very close spacing of 10 meter per vehicle the formation itself is still 2.5 km wide. More regular spacing closer to a 100 meters per vehicle is a 25 km front for the armored brigade. In a line formation to maximize frontage and immediate firepower at least. So, matching the brigades frontage at least requires 10-20 km of trench. Unless you have a hard choke point, more as armored formations are, well, maneuverable and can go around fortifications fairly easily.

Interestingly, if you do have evenly spread out forces and you connect to the three closest bases, you do naturally get a honeycomb set up, which could set up a very difficult position to attack.

If each of those corners is a minor hive, connected to their three closest other landing site hives with about 5 km to a side, you have a 30 km trench perimeter. Each Hive landing with 1,000 workers if dedicated to trench construction could get that all built in 16 days, since each one only has to build 5 km. Probably better instead to increase worker numbers to 30,000 instead of 6,000. This allows the 30 km of trench lines to be built in 3-4 days, which might be fast enough to have it completed before an armored brigade might be mobilized and deployed in force. Plus there's plenty of other digging that would be good to do.

So, in order to have a force that can build up enough defenses fast enough to resist an Armored brigade, a landing might instead then be about 50,000 bugs for about a 60 km^2 hex area. That might also be enough labor to carry out meaningful counter moves, such as aggressive trench construction to attack or try and flank the brigade.

However, this does dramatically reduce the number of places the humans would need to clear out bugs. Keeping a 5 million number, this reduces bug concentrations to about 100 sites, which is much closer to the number of spots the US military would be capable of dealing with.

Plus, 50k bug concentrations does also start to provide tempting strategic nuke targets, let alone anything smaller. 60 km^2 is still not that dense overall, but 50 k buts would still be getting to close to a 1,000 bugs per km^2. A 100 kton bomb with thermally irrate that large an area to give any with direct exposure 3rd degree burns.

Then again, bugs working in trenches and all the other underground locations does suggest a relatively small share of the colony might be at risk of line of sight exposure to an air burst at any one point anyways. You might be looking more at a 1 Mton or above to get good effects against most of the colony. But, if there's only a 100 of them, well those are numbers of heavy nukes the US still possesses.

Are you using the latest game as canon?

Because hives/lairs were rether easy to clean out if the bug population was depleted.

Places were rether shallow.

 

[JagerIV]

Are you using the latest game as canon?

Because hives/lairs were rether easy to clean out if the bug population was depleted.

Places were rether shallow.

I have actually started playing terrain Command due to the Starship Troopers itch.

I am leaning on the games a bit to bring in the idea of using the Plasma bugs as anti surface artillery, which I don't think they were used for in the movie, but is a common thing in the games. And I think Roughneck. Otherwise I'm as close as possible going for the bugs in real life.

Which is one reason I figured at least initially you would have trenches, not tunnels. Initially possibly not even that much of a trench, more a bit of a depression with berms. The above picture of an ant trail is probably a good initial example.

Its not a lot, but a lot of weapons are going to be stopped, or at least dramatically reduced in effectiveness, by only a few feet of dirt. A foot of dirt is going to stop almost all rifle fire, I believe most common auto cannon fire is going to be stopped by a meter or so. Tank rounds can penetrate a lot of dirt, but if your using sabot rounds to kill individual warrior bugs, that's probably a losing proposition for the humans. Plus anything bigger than a warrior probably needs a 10+ meter wide trench, which provides plenty of dirt for very wide berms to further protect the trench.

Bugs in trenchs thus nullify a lot of the human firepower advantage, with only a couple of meters of dirt. You don't need a lot of depth to balance the playing field a lot.

Which I guess does also match the games a bit as well, where the Mobile Infantry doesn't generally take out bug hives through firepower, but infantry close combat. I guess placing explosives is what the game implies those troops are going into the hive to do?

A simple trench even limits the effectiveness of JDAM type munitions: with GPS wiki suggests the CEP is about 5 meters. Meanwhile, a trench large enough for Warrior bugs might be only 3 meters wide, so you might not even have a direct hit in the trench, in which case the berms can dramatically reduce the shrapnel risk. So, even a 2,000 lb bombs danger range might be reduced from the 800 meter diameter danger area, which could have a lot of bugs in it, to the about 20 m, maybe 40 meter blast danger area. And if its Warrior bug single file, 40 meters of warrior bug is only about 10 Warrior bugs since they're so big, maybe some more wounded. That's an immense reduction in expected casualty with very simple, open topped, maybe even above ground trenches. And that's assuming your hitting a dense group of bugs in the trenches on every airstrike!

And once proper, hidden underground tunnels can be constructed, human firepower advantage is eroded even more. Even 10 meters underground, especially if the bugs can do any reinforcement of the structure, is going to be very difficult except for some pretty big bombs.

Which is good because water might not allow that deep digging anyways with the water table.

If I'm reading this correctly, then outside the Rockies, the water table is only some 5-10 meters down. This could be a problem building trenches or tunnels to protect anything larger than a Warrior bug, and for any underground hives. I guess it does put extra value in building into hills when possible: puts you potentially a 100 meters or so above the waterline, while still having enough dirt to dig out meaningfully protected hives.

Of course, while all this construction might help to limit bug casualties and reduce the effectiveness of human firepower, hiding in trenches doesn't win wars. Bug offenses require going out of the trenches, exposing them to much more firepower. And all of this trench construction also requires a huge amount of labor as well, tunnels even more so.

If each km of trench requires, say, 50,000 bug hours to dig, doing it in a day requires a commitment of about 5,000 worker bugs. And a km of trench isn't all that much. One million worker bugs is "only" digging about 200 km of trench a day. And each day your million workers spend digging trenches is a day not on the offensive, and another day humans have to build more ammo, mobilize more men, carry out maneuvers, and dig their own fortifications which will make future offensives steadily harder and eventually allow the US to mobilize enough forces to have the initiative and overcome the defenders advantage.

So, all this talk of trenches and bug defense might be leaning me to a insufficiently aggressive for optimal effect.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

I have actually started playing terrain Command due to the Starship Troopers itch.

I am leaning on the games a bit to bring in the idea of using the Plasma bugs as anti surface artillery, which I don't think they were used for in the movie, but is a common thing in the games. And I think Roughneck. Otherwise I'm as close as possible going for the bugs in real life.

Which is one reason I figured at least initially you would have trenches, not tunnels. Initially possibly not even that much of a trench, more a bit of a depression with berms. The above picture of an ant trail is probably a good initial example.

Its not a lot, but a lot of weapons are going to be stopped, or at least dramatically reduced in effectiveness, by only a few feet of dirt. A foot of dirt is going to stop almost all rifle fire, I believe most common auto cannon fire is going to be stopped by a meter or so. Tank rounds can penetrate a lot of dirt, but if your using sabot rounds to kill individual warrior bugs, that's probably a losing proposition for the humans. Plus anything bigger than a warrior probably needs a 10+ meter wide trench, which provides plenty of dirt for very wide berms to further protect the trench.

Bugs in trenchs thus nullify a lot of the human firepower advantage, with only a couple of meters of dirt. You don't need a lot of depth to balance the playing field a lot.

Which I guess does also match the games a bit as well, where the Mobile Infantry doesn't generally take out bug hives through firepower, but infantry close combat. I guess placing explosives is what the game implies those troops are going into the hive to do?

A simple trench even limits the effectiveness of JDAM type munitions: with GPS wiki suggests the CEP is about 5 meters. Meanwhile, a trench large enough for Warrior bugs might be only 3 meters wide, so you might not even have a direct hit in the trench, in which case the berms can dramatically reduce the shrapnel risk. So, even a 2,000 lb bombs danger range might be reduced from the 800 meter diameter danger area, which could have a lot of bugs in it, to the about 20 m, maybe 40 meter blast danger area. And if its Warrior bug single file, 40 meters of warrior bug is only about 10 Warrior bugs since they're so big, maybe some more wounded. That's an immense reduction in expected casualty with very simple, open topped, maybe even above ground trenches. And that's assuming your hitting a dense group of bugs in the trenches on every airstrike!

And once proper, hidden underground tunnels can be constructed, human firepower advantage is eroded even more. Even 10 meters underground, especially if the bugs can do any reinforcement of the structure, is going to be very difficult except for some pretty big bombs.

Which is good because water might not allow that deep digging anyways with the water table.

If I'm reading this correctly, then outside the Rockies, the water table is only some 5-10 meters down. This could be a problem building trenches or tunnels to protect anything larger than a Warrior bug, and for any underground hives. I guess it does put extra value in building into hills when possible: puts you potentially a 100 meters or so above the waterline, while still having enough dirt to dig out meaningfully protected hives.

Of course, while all this construction might help to limit bug casualties and reduce the effectiveness of human firepower, hiding in trenches doesn't win wars. Bug offenses require going out of the trenches, exposing them to much more firepower. And all of this trench construction also requires a huge amount of labor as well, tunnels even more so.

If each km of trench requires, say, 50,000 bug hours to dig, doing it in a day requires a commitment of about 5,000 worker bugs. And a km of trench isn't all that much. One million worker bugs is "only" digging about 200 km of trench a day. And each day your million workers spend digging trenches is a day not on the offensive, and another day humans have to build more ammo, mobilize more men, carry out maneuvers, and dig their own fortifications which will make future offensives steadily harder and eventually allow the US to mobilize enough forces to have the initiative and overcome the defenders advantage.

So, all this talk of trenches and bug defense might be leaning me to a insufficiently aggressive for optimal effect.

Open topped trenches are virtually worthless in the modern battlefield.

Every piece of artillery, including mortars have methods for air-bursting fragmentation. The trench then acts as a magnifier for the blast and fragmentation effects.

Tank round don't need APFSDS to penetrate. You just need a standard HEAP round to penetrate a meter of soil/dirt before the round explodes. And it's fairly simple to set the round up to respond to a specific amount of pressure and time to get it to explode in the standard Bug trench.

America also has the precision to make sure those rounds hit where they need them to. If we can put a 2,000 lb JDAM through a specific window we can hit a trench that's going to be at least 5-10 feet across.

 

[JagerIV]

Open topped trenches are virtually worthless in the modern battlefield.

Every piece of artillery, including mortars have methods for air-bursting fragmentation. The trench then acts as a magnifier for the blast and fragmentation effects.

Tank round don't need APFSDS to penetrate. You just need a standard HEAP round to penetrate a meter of soil/dirt before the round explodes. And it's fairly simple to set the round up to respond to a specific amount of pressure and time to get it to explode in the standard Bug trench.

America also has the precision to make sure those rounds hit where they need them to. If we can put a 2,000 lb JDAM through a specific window we can hit a trench that's going to be at least 5-10 feet across.

Eh, this I think overstates things a lot, like claiming tanks are virtually worthless on a modern battlefield. Which I think is well disproved by what we see on the modern battlefield.

Even if it did nothing else, it reduces the effectiveness of 90-99% of other weaponry. If for example your trench was thick enough to stop everything but Tank rounds, the stored kills of a gun line of an Armored brigade is reduced to 90*40=3,600 hits, compared to the 150,000 potential kills in the Bradley autocannons, and the 20,000+ kills in the machine guns. That is something like a 97% reduction in the kill ability of the Brigade.

Tanks can penetrate more than 1 meter of dirt, but if your digging trenches for things like Warriors and Tankers, your talking about 5-10 meters of dirt, which I believe will stop most tank rounds.

And of course even with weapons the trench doesn't nullify, it still protects via concealment. If you have 10 km of trench that forward observes can't see into, accuracy of shooting into the trench is much reduced. And even if you do air bursts, the trench still limits the potential effectiveness of the air burst simply by reducing line of site.

 

[JagerIV]

Open topped trenches are virtually worthless in the modern battlefield.

Every piece of artillery, including mortars have methods for air-bursting fragmentation. The trench then acts as a magnifier for the blast and fragmentation effects.

Tank round don't need APFSDS to penetrate. You just need a standard HEAP round to penetrate a meter of soil/dirt before the round explodes. And it's fairly simple to set the round up to respond to a specific amount of pressure and time to get it to explode in the standard Bug trench.

America also has the precision to make sure those rounds hit where they need them to. If we can put a 2,000 lb JDAM through a specific window we can hit a trench that's going to be at least 5-10 feet across.

Not to overstate my point that we don't have extremely effective weapondry. Its just I think trenches are so effective at reducing the effect of firepower that even a 10x more effectiveness from smart bombs takes you from, say, a 99% reduction to a 90% reduction.

We are somewhat used to the idea that a 2,000 lb bomb might in a successful attack kill 1-10 people, that we forget how much more killing power these weapons can have against an enemy without cover or dispersion. Trenches impose both cover and dispersion.

I also wonder if at least some of it might have a sniper effect. Snipers can be very accurate and very deadly, but you can't really have very many of them, and they thus can't really hold or take a line, and also can't really account for overall that many casualties.

Like, take the JDAM against bugs in an open trench. We might have the planes to sustain something like 2,000 bombs a day, between the number of planes to drop the bombs and recon assets to pinpoint targets. Its quite possible we don't actually have enough recon to do that within the limits of the control loop. I've heard a reaper drone with all the intelligence assets and other support included can have about a 100 personnel committed per drone.

If each strike is well aimed enough against points of bug trench with 10 Warriors, then you could with full commitment kill about 20,000 Warriors a day. I could see it being less, and maybe not dramatically more. I don't see a bug invasion possibly working without at least a million Warrior Bugs, to achieve at least parity with the US army. 20,000 would be about 2% of the force. Which isn't trivial, but not devastating either. If your planes were the main killing instrument, it would mean ground forces have to hold out for 1-2 months of assaults protecting the airfields from getting overrun.

If you had the million bugs out in the open undispersed, you might legitimately be able to get a 100 Warriors a day per plane, then on day one you might kill 200,000 bugs with the air force, which is a very significant portion of the force.

Covered would of course be even better. Ideally (for the bugs) most time not doing something either moving to the battlefield or preparing for it, would be spent under covered shelters.

That is a lot more time and effort through, so will take a bit more time to be ready, at least if a pre-existing covered shelter isn't available.

 

[Scooby Doo]

I would think a million would be sufficient, the comics show they can asexually reproduce without a Queen so yeah. The Military now that it gave nearly all its munition reserves to Ukraine so the bugs with a million would overrun the population.

 

[Husky_Khan]

it doesn't even need to overrun the population, just weaken the United States enough that it won't be able to engage in serious military misadventures abroad for a decade. I'm not sure the standard of that, but Vietnam sorta did it I would reckon. The US was still abroad and doing stuff but from 1973 to either 1982 (Lebanon) or 1983 (Granada) the US wasn't really going into huge misadventures abroad, just minor ones like Desert One in Iran or the Mayaguez Incident in Cambodia or arming Afghans.

A million might be too much, but the corollary of underinvestment is boosting the US military so much that it's not weakened but actually strengthened militarily and thus making foreign misadventures more likely.

 

[Scooby Doo]

it doesn't even need to overrun the population, just weaken the United States enough that it won't be able to engage in serious military misadventures abroad for a decade. I'm not sure the standard of that, but Vietnam sorta did it I would reckon. The US was still abroad and doing stuff but from 1973 to either 1982 (Lebanon) or 1983 (Granada) the US wasn't really going into huge misadventures abroad, just minor ones like Desert One in Iran or the Mayaguez Incident in Cambodia or arming Afghans.

A million might be too much, but the corollary of underinvestment is boosting the US military so much that it's not weakened but actually strengthened militarily and thus making foreign misadventures more likely.

Tbh considering the Migrant Crisis you could probably have the Arachnids take over America with 100k, the Democrats would demand us accepting ALL illegal aliens even the Bugs.


😂

 

[JagerIV]

I would think a million would be sufficient, the comics show they can asexually reproduce without a Queen so yeah. The Military now that it gave nearly all its munition reserves to Ukraine so the bugs with a million would overrun the population.

Million I definitely agree could do a lot of damage. Even ignoring the asexual reproduction thing.

Men with rifles in the open might lose at a 1-1 numerical ratio: M-16 terminal ballistics seems to suggest that rifle can penetrate about 4 mm of steel at 100 meters, so with the Warrior bug having an average of 5 mm of armor equivalent per my guessing, which suggests 5.56-7.62 might not realistically be even particularly damaging past a 100 meters against Warriors, especially without hitting specific weak points. And even closing in might not have much stopping power with fairly shallow penetration post exoskeleton penetration: a 5.56 seems to "only" have about 36 cm of penetration in balistic gel, with much of the damage concentrated in the 20 cm/8 inch range. This is of course catastrophic for a human, but not necessarily for a 3 meter 1 ton bug.

If the armor reduces flesh penetration by, say, 80%, you only have about 4 cm/1.5 inch of penetration into the bug flesh, which is probably just lodging into a muscle, maybe causing some internal bleeding. Not comfortable to the bug, but also probably not enough stopping power to stop a charging Warrior.

And if the effective range of the rifle is sub 100 meters, 50 kmh charging speed covers about 14 m/s, so a 100 meters can be closed in 7 seconds. 7 aimed shots might not actually stop the bug from closing into melee. 7 seconds might even be pushing the time to mag dump and reload. If the Warriors can do a 100 kmh sprint, also within biological plausibility, your down to 4 seconds to shoot before melee.

Thus, if you had a 9 man infantry squad, it seems like it might be plausible that 10 Warrior bugs could take them out. If only a couple get into close combat, that seems likely to net a squad wipe.

Though, obviously, US infantry should be operating with a bit more firepower than their rifles. If nothing else you could do an underslung shotgun with slugs for proper elephant gun charging Warrior stopping power to get the full Mobile infantry kit.

Still, it might hold more true for militia forces, which due to the limited size of the US military would probably need to do most of the initial line holding.

Crash mobilization to, say, 10% of the population in the self defense militia however would still be 33 million people with 5.56-7.62 equivalent guns, and the US should have enough people with some practice with those weapons to quickly draw on a pre-existing stockpile of skill and equipment to do mobilization on the short, and if there's any level of entrenchment, the ratio gets worse.

Even if the Warrior bugs on their own traded 1-1 with the militia army, maybe 800,000 militia members and 200,000 US soldiers, that's more grievous battlefield losses than the US has suffered, well, ever. Maybe you have 1-3 million additional civilian casualties for about 1% overall US casualties.

Which is worse casualties than the US has ever suffered from a conflict, but I'm not sure it would be crippling. As I think your hinting at @Husky_Khan , the US military isn't crippled if casualties it suffers are less than what the 6 month+12 month mobilization is going to boost the military to.

If The bugs invaded in 2024, inflicted 3 million casualties, but the defensive operations and mobilizations wrap up most of the bug threat in 6-12 months, leaving the US with a 10 million man army post mobilization in 2026, the US might be more willing to engage in foreign involvement than they were in 2023.

 

[JagerIV]

The prompt does invite at least a bit of thought on the theory of crippling the US.

Obviously, killing everyone would cripple the US ability to respond. If the Federation asked for troops, or Iran decided now was a good time to formally invade Iran, the US can't credibly threaten to to send a million man army, something on the scale of the Gulf War involvement, if there are not a million Americans left.

So, the bugs following a "kill them all" strategy would work. However, as discussed earlier, while militia and armed civilians might man for man be less dangerous to the bugs than fully equipped and supported US soldiers, there's a lot of humans who can shoot rifles in the US, and especially from a defensive position can potentially inflict heavy casualties. 100 million armed men in 20,000 or so strong points will require a lot of bugs to take by storm, and if done by siege still requires a very large force to tie that many locations down, and a lot of firepower and time to reduce those.

Simultaneously attacking every town then would likely require something like 20 million Warrior bugs, plus support. That is a very large number of bugs, thinly distributed, who might not even be able to take their targets.

And even if a lot of people are killed, that doesn't necessarily cripple the US either. US had half the population in 1950, but was obviously capable of raising and equipping a huge army.

Thus, simply killing lots of Americans is not only going to be expensive in bug lives expended, but also no guarantee of success. Achieving the goal with a force smaller than 30 or so million Warrior bugs requires some theory of triggering a systemic collapse, where causing some damage now triggers death spirals causing further damage down the line, preventing future recovery.

Some initial thoughts on systems to target for collapse:

1) Military collapse: the military is the hardest target to directly destroy, but if the current military could be crippled, future attempts to grow the military would be greatly hindered, and much of it would have to be done from a lower level: building military formations from scratch is a much more difficult project than reinforcing existing formations, and inflicting a lot of attrition on the military will force accelerated training regimes with less material support per soldier, making inflicting further casualties on the newer raised formations, until at some point you might collapse the militaries ability to raise troops and act in an aggressive or coherent manner.

Fragmented local defense militias are obviously not capable of launching expeditionary campaigns. If such is achieved, then the bugs can then resort to a form of castle occupation: Bug hives hold strong points hindering human cooperation and mutual support, but also allows the bugs to avoid the costly and time intensive need to assault every fortified location, at the likely high cost such operations bring. Military collapse can further be used to help trigger:

2) Political Collapse. If the Central US military is reduced to no long being able to raise and control troops centrally, more military power will flow into national and militia forces. And political power flows from the barrel of a gun, so as military power is decentralized locally, many political powers are likewise too. A Texas governor who leaves the Arachnid invasion with a battle hardened national Guard of 200,000 who he's been personally leading, with another 1,000,000 local militia forces, also battle hardened and organized under their own local leaders is a very different political situation than pre-invasion.

Just the political shift in the balances of power from certain areas mobilizing, being destroyed, key figures and institutions being raised in status or destroyed is likely enough to trigger some level of political instability even if the Federal government survives post war, which alone is likely to make future military adventures less likely. If however a political vacuum can be created, such as destroying Washington DC and the military removing enough of the Federal Bureaucracy to limit their ability to reconstitute, and leadership of the US can be made to look up for grabs, either foreign or domestic, well that might trigger WWIII, or at least an American Civil War.

Collapse of centralized political and military authority can then further allow for potentially crippling

3) Economic collapse. People need to eat. Many people don't live near food. As long as centralized authority exists, such issues can be coordinated around. Evacuations can be organized, emergency supplies can be pushed through where needed, people can be forced to do work that needs to be done. If the US military can't secure roads however, the Dollar collapses so the government can't buy food overseas, nor even have the governance infrastructure to know where needed food how badly, then many places with problems that could be fixed, aren't.

This may be especially difficult for inland cities: Denver for example might be big enough to fortify itself against attack, but any supplies it needs from an overseas source is a 2,000 km truck route. There are thousands of km of roads that need defended to keep supplies able to come into the city, something the town militia is going to have trouble raising and organizing the forces needed to do so. And with attacks on satellites and various surface infrastructure, communication might get legitimately difficult without a broader authority able to reach out and repair downed nodes in the internet.