BATTLE: LOS ANGELES Part 3

Steven Petrick writes:

Some more comments about Battle: Los Angeles.

One of the things we do not know is how the alien landers work. We can be fairly certain that they have a heavy braking mechanism from the shock rings we saw as they plunged into the sea off the coast. But are they "one way" vehicles? What is their capability to lift off? Can they maneuver underwater or, once landed, are they immobile?

The reason this comes up is the decision (on the part of the invaders) of what to do at Los Angeles. The air support is gone, and if there is no way to replace it, what orders do they give the troops there.

Strategically, the troops at Los Angeles (even if there wwere a means to extract them) might be ordered to simply hold out as long as they can. This would be an effort to tie down the forces attacking them, preventing these forces from being re-deployed to strengthen the attacks on other "beachheads." Without air cover, this would essentially mean writing off not just the beachhead, but all of the troops in it. The troops would need to be told to destroy anything that might be of value to us, but there are going to be problems with that. We might be able to reverse engineer their rocket launchers and the heavy weapons on their attack drones because they may not be able to recover or effectively destroy all samples. We are obviously going to have more bodies to "dissect", and will learn more about their small arms because we'll have, either way, a failed beachhead to examine.

Alternatively, except for a rear guard, the bulk of the troops might be withdrawn back into the landers (if they are able to lift off) and moved to reinforce other beachheads. But if the landers are too vulnerable to air attack, that might not be an option.

We do not know what the alien's logistics are like. Are later landings supposed to be made to reinforce the existing beachheads? You might look at the Normandy landings as an example here. All of the troops we needed to win the war in Europe did not land on day one, and supplies were landed daily (across the beach, later on the mulberries . . . mulberry after one was destroyed by a storm . . . and still later through captured harbors).

From what we have seen so far, canceling the invasion does not seem possible. (The landers seem to be one way, and their approach to the planet does not seem to indicate that it was possible to turn their invasion craft around.) So they are going to keep coming for a while at least. And obviously a follow-on wave would have to have another command ship (there has to be some limit over how much territory a command ship can control drones, so as the front line expanded they would need more command ships to cover the added sectors).

So when will the next wave arrive at Los Angeles? No matter when it does, we now know we have to get the command ship before it can hide. So how effectively can we target it?

Seriously, it has been reported that the invasion consists of 30 million alien infantry divided between 20 invasion sites, giving 1.5 million infantry per site, and we are still talking about invading a planet with a population of over six billion. Even if you assume only one-twentieth of that population can be used as troops, that is still ten to one odds versus the alien landing force. So they need more troops somewhere.