Getting a hold of Texas is a lot easier than getting a hold on pretty much anyplace in the MidWest. That's for sure.

But it's irrelevant in modern warfare anyway. The right play is to just flatten most of our states outright. You don't fight hot wars with amphibious landings anymore.

Hot wars between major powers would be over in a matter of hours these days.

Cities are beside the point. Occupying Texas (or admittedly the Midwest) would be like occupying Afghanistan or Iraq except the insurgents would have even more technicals and many of them would have US military training.

I mean, as I said, the planet's great powers don't plan wars with other great powers around the idea of an occupation. But as far as ease of implementation, it's obviously easier to conquer Texas because of the ginormous warm water coastline. Multimodal landings are not even possible in a place like Minnesota. You'd have to fight just to get there, and just like Russia, you'd likely freeze to death trying to take the place. Fighting is infinitely more easy in places like Texas or the south in general, than it would be in, say, Minnesota or North Dakota, with 4 to 6 months of bitter, far northern winter per annum.

But again, completely irrelevant anyway, because total war means total war.

If it weren't for the fact that most of them would be dead at the time, I'd argue that people who think in terms of occupations would be disagreeably surprised after the next war between great powers. A pretty common mistake in military thought has always been "fighting the last war" so to speak.

Texas has coastlines, bayous, deserts, hills, and wide-open plains. It’s entirely possible to make that amphibious landing, sure, but then you’re in wetlands. If you’re hand waving an adversary capable of amphibious operations on the Gulf Coast, they could just use helicopters to insert into Minnesota, too.

But my point is that even if you allow, for the sake of argument, that the “great power” phase of the war entails a two-week blitzkrieg, that still doesn’t get you out of the counterinsurgency business. And Texas is land that an enemy would definitely want to hold just for natural resources and logistics.

As for fighting the last war, the last great-power war had blitzkriegs that resolved themselves within weeks, protracted operations along broad fronts, irregular partisan warfare, and every other form of conflict one could envision. The Battle of France is just as much “the last war” as the Eastern Front was. I think the only sure thing is that we don’t know what the next great power war will look like, unless it’s merely a catastrophic nuclear exchange.

>* unless it’s merely a catastrophic nuclear exchange.*

That's exactly what the next great war will look like, because you just nuke enemy formations and flotillas. Then you move on to nuking their cities when you realize they did the same to you and you no longer have an army or navy to fight with. Like I said, maybe a matter of hours. Days if we get lucky. No way it would last 2 weeks though.

That's kind of why our entire discussion is irrelevant. It would never happen. You don't really fight against nukes, you just die.

But for the sake of our hypothetical discussion:

As far as sending helicopters to Minnesota, those better be fairly long range helicopters. And then what's your attrition getting there? That's on top of the attrition getting enough helicopters for an invasion force into position to even be launched. Texas, you just take the attrition getting into position, but the beaches you can hit easily and with everything at your disposal without taking much additional attrition.

Minnesota, North Dakota, all that northern stuff is just bad business. Take the coastlines, and starve the midwest out, that's the best course of action. Going to Minnesota to fight through to Washington is just really bad business. If you can't even handle Texas, Minnesota will literally freeze you to death.

> As far as sending helicopters to Minnesota, those better be fairly long range helicopters.

The range needed to fly helicopters from the Gulf of Mexico to Minnesota is fairly comparable to the range needed to fly helicopters from the Arabian Sea to Afghanistan, which has been done. This would require air supremacy and effective SEAD, but so would an amphibious landing in Texas (though admittedly, you need air supremacy and SEAD over a smaller area if you're only invading Texas). You might even end up using helicopters even for your "amphibious landing" in Texas; landing in boats like Normandy these days can be a dubious notion. Even so, you have the exact same set of questions re. landing craft that you do re. helicopters.

I dunno about Minnesota, but an enemy would occupy North Dakota for the same reason they would occupy Texas and the Gulf Coast: to secure the oil and gas supply. Even if Washington has already surrendered, The Bad Guys would need oil, and that means they would need Bad Guys on the ground to secure it. But they would need a lot of Bad Guys, because there are a lot of Texans with the inclination and ability to fight back.