Surviving an Overwhelming Siege

Question

The evil enemy has us surrounded. They outnumber our forces, they have us outgunned. These helldogs have a trillion dollars/year for their war budget, and they can afford the fanciest toys, numerous mercenaries, the most advanced munitions, have overwhelming air supremacy, and are backed up by years of research and training. They are unlikely to show much restraint (save for not using nuclear weapons, we think their populist leader is allergic to them).

We have the city of Lusom, population 3 million. We have close to 300,000 fighters in the city, and overwhelming support from the population (or at least that's what we think, it's not like we're holding elections, haha). We are absolutely ruthless about crushing dissent, and our troops are fantastically committed. No civilians will get out. We have also had years to prepare, execute spies, dig in, fortify, amass supplies of all kinds.

The vile enemy has one (critical) weakness: a fickle public opinion. If we can but hold out for maybe two years, or cause upwards of 10,000 enemy casualties, we can probably get them to back off and run home. That triumph would cause the political situation around Lusom to change dramatically, as the demoralized allies of the evil enemy will surely collapse like a wet napkin without the big dog backing them.

How do we make sure we can hold out in Lusom for 700 days?

Answer 1

Tunnels. Tunnels under tunnels, under tunnels, under tunnels.

You can never have enough tunnels. And they're so handy. You can keep your water, gas masks, food, ammunition, anti-tank weapons, missiles, sleeping quarters, dig out behind enemy lines and attack them from the rear. Tunnels are great! Tunnels are awesome. Tunnels can have heavy doors to limit blast damage. Tunnels can be built in networks, so you can work around damaged sections while they're being fixed.

Lusom has been one of the world's busiest reinforced concrete consumers in the world in the past few years (and we take construction quality seriously enough to execute contractors who skimp on the irons). Moreover, our long-tunnels are extending many kilometers outside the city to disguised single-use exits, so we can effectively bring supplies in or launch attacks out of nowhere at enemy concentrations from behind their lines. Mortars, and, uh, man-guided bombs will be launched at the enemy when they least expect. Cleared neighborhoods will suddenly have enemy fighters again.

Victims. There is a tunnel entrance/exit under every hospital, creche, school and kindergarten. They're covered in teddy-bears, dolls and there are at least 3 hello kitty-tshirt-bearing young girls standing by every entrance. We have emergency generators everywhere, gas masks for the fighters, camera-enabled cell phones for everyone to record the tragic and needless deaths of civilian women and children (all strategically placed around military objectives) and we have built dedicated underground fiber-optic links to make it past any jamming.

Every enemy strike will feature widows, orphans, lost kittens, the works. This will get blasted onto the enemy's TV screens 24/7 by the opposition channels.

Snipers. We have 50,000 trained snipers and high-quality gear (stolen from our enemies, ironically).

The poor high-tech fools don't stand a chance.

Answer 2

A cunning ruse!

So we know our enemys' only real weakness is public opinion and we can win by killing 10,000 of the enemy... but why go to all that effort? Let's just convince the enemy populace that we killed 10,000 people we didn't!

So we send out our spies to infiltrate enemy media and social networks. When the war begins we seed the news with story after story of deadly sneak attacks and kidnappings of unnamed citizens. We convince the public that any Government statement denying these events is a cover-up to prevent embarrassment and public hysteria.

How can the enemy government fight this tactic? Take down independent news stations? Arrest reporters? Censor social media? Great! The more they try to silence or deny our lies the more it will seem like they really are covering something up! Short of taking a full census every month they could never prove that citizens aren't going missing and even then they'd still have to convince the public the census numbers weren't also fabrications.

If the public aren't convinced, well, we can just kidnap/kill a few celebrities and government officials to "prove" the attacks are real.

This plan is relatively cheap, safe and doesn't require 2 years of hiding in bunkers. It's an awesome plan!

Answer 3

Gather up 10,000 of your least loyal citizens and issue them forged evil empire identification documents and lots of money. Then throw a big party in their honor and send them out the city gates to go join the enemy.

During the party, serve each of them a slow acting poison which will kill them a few weeks later. Just before the poison starts to take effect, announce on public radio that your spies have successfully poisoned the enemy water supply and that civilian casualties counts are expected to reach hundreds of thousands.

Watch patiently as popular opinion turns against the war and the wet napkin retreat begins.

Answer 4

Do it the way they did in the past, without the flaw

The biggest problem in history when it came to sieges was lack of resources. Either you ran out and had to surrender or the enemy ran out and had to retreat. Assuming that you have enough resources, all you need to do is hide and wait, after a few years, like you said, they'll quit.

An example of this was the Conquest of Rome, the biggest flaw they felt was when their aqueducts were destroyed. Without water they had to surrender, but you have a benefits. You know the siege is coming and you can prepare, all you need to do is store food and water in your super bunker for 3 million people for 700 days, while this is going to be hard, it is possible with rationing.

Answer 5

Terror

Send 10 000 of your most loyal citizens in Evil Empire. Give them spy training, documents and whatever they need to not arise suspicion. When war will begin they should start terror strikes: shoot up the schools, blow up the hospitals, spread poisonous chemicals in public transit hubs...

They should leave evidence pointing to reason for their strikes is Evil Empire attacking our homeland. Preferably they should do this in the way so it would be impossible for goverment to suppress information.

Strikes should be made en masse: 1000 per day is fine. You do not want to spread them too much to avoid EE uncovering your agents before attacks.

If each agent kills at least one person, it would already accomplish your goals. Everything else is a bonus helping in swaying public opinion faster.

Answer 6

Propaganda

Fickle public opinion can only be maintained through a free press, which means that their public opinion can be manipulated. You're going to need a lot of pale grey makeup a half demolished school or hospital and lots of small volunteers to lie under sheets while being filmed. Just don't use the same school every time. Eventually the massacre of the little children will have an effect on your aggressor. Asymmetric warfare never looks good in the press when the children are dying.

Break the siege

A good siege requires a lot of people on the ground and you probably don't need to kill as many of their troops as you think. The first thing you need is intelligence on their supply lines and to get some troops outside the siege line. Mine their main supply corridor until they can only move by air without losing people on the ground, then roaming antiaircraft teams on the approach route to take down planes until they can only move by road. Planes going down are also really bad for public opinion. Rinse and repeat.

Answer 7

One needs to make certain assumptions about the behaviour of the enemy.

At the moment, it is looking bleak for the people of Lusom: If the enemy truly has them surrounded, they cannot escape. If the enemy truly has technological and financial superiority, they would have no troubles destroying Lusom utterly.

If the enemy truly intended to wipe out Lusom, they would. And as a last resort, they could. However, Big Dog is only willing to get involved if, and only if, this will be an easy win.

I am led to the conclusion that it is important for your enemy not only to quell the aggressors within Lusom, but also either to a) keep Lusom civilian casualties to a minimum; and/or b) preserve Lusom infrastructure.

With that in mind, even though this is clearly a popular display of power by Big Dog, it is not a popular seige. Furthermore, the presence of mercenaries in a vast and capable army suggests an attempt to intimidate; Mercenaries would not risk their own lives on the front line except for considerable financial compensation, in which case state soldiers would suffice, and be cheaper.

Next, we should aim to understand the role of the allies of Big Dog. These are your political and geographical rivals. They have invited a force, far superior to their own, to fight on their behalf. Maybe they want you truly dead. Maybe they're already talking about how they're going to carve up the spoils of war.

If anybody is going to end up on the front lines against you, it is your rivals. Big Dog would not risk his own soldiers first, it is not his quarrel. He is no mercenary. He is a Lion amongst Hyenas. Or, a big dog type thing amongst several smaller dog type things.

So with these considerations in place, I'd consider these resolutions to the following scenarios.

S1 & S2) Prepare for Defence:

S1) Big Dog wants you dead, and doesn't need to send armed personelle into Lusom. R1) You're screwed. (Napalm, Drones, Missiles, AC130s, etc, or Destroying literally all your resources and then just sitting there for 2 years so that when they eventually go home you've got nothing going on).

S2) Big Dog really really wants you dead, and needs to send armed personelle into Lusom. R2) Guerilla warfare is your best bet. 300,000 soldiers among 3,000,000 civs. Provided you can protect your supplies. Just make it strategically exhausting for them.

S3 & S4) Incite discontent:

S3) Big Dog doesn't really want you dead. R3) Demoralise all factions of the enemy. Target mercenaries, so they will leave. Target the rival powers forces, so they will implore Big Dog to fight for them. This would affect public support.

S4) Big Dog just wants to intimidate you. R4) Continue for as long as possible as though nothing is happening. Incite skirmishes from the enemy, make them unfavourable.

S5 & S6) Modify the Elements of Risk/Reward.

S5) Big Dog wants your town, doesn't care about you. R5) Shoot yourself in the foot. Irradiate the place with uranium or something.

S6) Big Dog is just trying to maintain the power balance. R6) Convince Big Dog that they would be better off with you as an ally, as opposed to your political rivals, who are now extremely vulnerable because of your combined military presence.

One possibility which occurs to me, is a kind of reverse trojan horse scenario, where you can incite the enemy to send an investigatory force into the city, and you take hostages. If the hostages are valuable, you might be able to dissuade Big Dog from doing anything too insane to the city, like chemical weapons.

I also might possibly suggest that you declare your super bunker to be an incredibly large nuclear weapon which you'd be prepared to set off as soon as you've taken too many casualties, and which will blow up if it sustains too much damage.

Answer 8

I suggest that as long as your competing factions are as isolated as they are, a simple biological weapon, perhaps as simple as an antibiotic-resistant cholera, or other water or food born pathogen would do the trick...you of course have the antidote. Save your ammunition and provisions, Wait for the dark of the moon ( if you have one) Infect, incubate a few days then attack sans mercy. Sick soldiers don't fight well. Repeat, repeat, and spread rumors that a specific "curse" is upon them, known to have mercy only on your population. - Just a thought.

Answer 9

The best defence is a good offence, and in facing an overwhleming enemy, the best offence is guerrilla warfare.

Considering you lack air superiority, using conventional launch sites aren't going to work well as they'll be identified and bombed easily. Instead you need mobile (either personal or smaller vehicle) launch devices that fire rockets towards the enemy. Choose your targets to be either enemy positions involved in the seige of your city, or directly hit nearby airfields/towns/cities of the enemy.

Tunnels tunnels tunnels. Besides being the technique used to store the rockets stated above (and the method to quickly pop up with launch vehicles and then hide again), these tunnels can also venture outside of the city and can be used to launch counter-offensive against the superior enemy. Hide, strike quickly, and hide again.

Hit supply lines. All vehicles require fuel, all fuel is going to have to be hauled up to the front line. Finding out how the enemy is transporting this and where they are transporting this makes ideal targets. Normally with Guerrilla warfare, you are trying to cost the enemy money for as little cost to you, however in this case you are going for casualty counts. Hit the truck drivers and cause your casualties there.

Answer 10

We have also had years to prepare, execute spies, dig in, fortify, amass supplies of all kinds.

You have had years of forewarning. You have had years of experience ferreting out spies (hopefully some of them were actually spies). I suggest you take what you have learnt from these spies on what and what not to do to get caught and ...go spy on your enemies.

Your fighters are totally committed to your cause, you will be able to easily convince them of the necessity to live and work in the heathen helldog's luxury world (they have a trillion dollar a year war fund...they have got to be super rich). Your fighter's will cherish the chance to be able to provide Mosu...sorry, Lusom with the information required to survive.

I suggest to you get your spies to focus on getting their hands on Top secret mission plans. This way you can stockpile all the necessary supplies (it would be a drag not to have that one key resource that would be the difference between surviving and being annilated...giant fans are a must!) and not be fooled by the enemies Propoganda and Misinformation machine.

You will now have all the resources stockpiled to counter all the different possible ways they had planned on attacking you with. You can sit back and watch them waste 2 trillion dollars.

I also suggest you invest wisely, taking into account where the military spending will be (and won't be in two years). Make a buck off the enemies spending to help fund your own defence!

Answer 11

If the enemy you are facing is sensitive to the fickle tides of public opinion, you can discredit their capable leaders and wear away the morale of their forces. Having their leaders depicted as child-molesters, serial-adulterers and wife-beaters tend to erode the confidence and loyalty of their troops.

You have had years to prepare, you probably have detailed files on all of their high ranking military officers. Have your spies subtly inject all the dirt you have managed to dig out (or invent, if needs be) to the scandal-hungry media who will run with it and possibly dig out ever more dirt with their resources.

If their high-tech weapons are dependent (common these days) on skilled civilian contractors to keep things running - especially newer systems not yet fully integrated into the military machine - target the tech companies that supply the crucial spare parts, skills and support services required to run their sophisticated weapons with industrial sabotage and attempt to put them into bankruptcy or out of business. Many of the character assassination techniques long used in politics work just as well on business leaders.

Answer 12

Their only weakness is their fickle publick opinion?

This part isnt an answer, skip down a bit further for that. I do feel that this part is revelent

But you want to hold out for 700 days, why make things hard on yourself and your citizens?

Hit their weakness with as much sorrowful images/videos as possible. Show old/young defenceless people being mericlessly cut down, show a dying person and their family trying to save them, show a single person saving (or trying to) a child from a hail of bullets, show the strength of your people, have them singing and having a good time despite the harsh times(if you can get footage of these people being gunned down in cold blood then that is even better).

Now to explain this:

Your enemy is stronger, bigger and better equiped, sure you can bunker down for 700 days and hope that their public opinion changes and they leave you alone, but you forget, 2 years is a long time and public opinion in you can also change (regardless of how loyal your soliders were/are). If you can show the enemy's public a person screaming for their mother or father that will invoke a lot of emotions of anyone who hasn't seen something like it before (Saving private Ryan, Medic Wade when he is gunned down and screams for his mother, this is the closest refence I could find)

If you can show a someone saving someone else from a dangerous area the public will feel happy as they dont see the "enemy" as an enemy they just see another person saving someone from almost certain death and that would make people feel relieved. If the person dies trying to save the person then all the enemy's public see is a person dying trying to do the right thing.

Showing the strength of your people will affect both public opinion and to an extent military opinion, if you show that your people will not break underpresure, they will fight to the last man and do all in their power to drive you out of their city that has an impact, the enemy's public see that you are doing all you can so save your home and will (consciously or not) reflect that in their own life and think if they would do the same. The military more often than not dont like to throw their soliders life away, if every citizen of yours can kill at least 1 solider then that will become 3,000,000 million deaths of them, not a figure they would like to see and explain even less so.

That would be the optimal route to follow and could end the war after a couple of months depending on hwo good your coverage is of the war.

Now to answer your question

We have also had years to prepare, execute spies, dig in, fortify, amass supplies of all kinds

First of all make your city appear deserted, set up traps at entrance points, the enemy will likely send in a small platoon to inspect the city to make sure its safe, once you have killed the people stripe them of their gear/clothes and hang their remains outsite of the city walls, signs saying, "We may lose but this will be you", will make the infantry less than happy about attacking you. On the off chance the enemy send in all of their force, make sure they can only getting from one entrance, flank them on both sides (you will take casualties but they will be worse off) and then do the above still.

If you can capture a commander or anyone above the rank of a common solider then extract as much information out of them as possible, radio (or the equivalent of) frequences, resource routes, where his higher ups are stationed and weaknesses in their bases defences. Take it with a pinch of salt and he may have lied to you (pretty much 100% chance) but you can send a couple of civilians (dont waste good soliders) and see if the captor was right, if it was then hit the target so they cannot attack as efficently.

Set up traps throughout the city, lethal traps, mundan traps/joke traps and trapping traps, lethal traps so you can kill the would-be invader and instill fear into them. Mundan/joke traps (a party popper will go off or something silly like that) so they become paranoid of even taking a step forward, and can see if someone set off a trap and will begin to doubt even their own squad. Trapping traps so they waste time trying to save the person and increase their chances of being attacked, bear traps are good for that kind of stuff.

As for keeping as many people alive for the 700 days, your answer sums it up perfectly

If the enemy attacks with a ranged assault (or relises that a frontal assault is bad) then take to underground, get as close as you can to the artilary and sabotage it, if possible take some of the shells to set up anti tank traps (or really messy anti personal trap).

tl;dr - If the enemy attacks from the front do a hit-and-run tatics and show them the result, if they attack from afar then take the fight to them and then take their supplies back to your home base. Disrupt their flow of supplies and command as best as possible as well so they are left with no or few orders to take.

Answer 13

A nuclear weapon/reactor at the centre of your city with a fail-deadly trigger. Your high command have to enter a code every 24 hours into a computer (that is not connected to the internet, does not have usb ports, or a keyboard, running a custom OS with no features such as access to the operating system, which is encased in a foot of solid steel with no doors) or the bomb goes off.

Answer 14

The territory of Kamarg from Michael Moorcock's The History of the Runestaff survived a siege by having insane defensive power in the form of war towers that shot flame. They were able to sit tight for a very long time despite almost the entire rest of the continent being taken over.

I believe they eventually used a magic artefact to temporarily transport the place to another plane of existence. If you have magic, there is always such an option too.

Answer 15

Send your most loyal soldiers as "refugees" from the crazy dictator. Injure them if necessary to be convincing. As soon as they are taken in, they can begin to sow seeds of discontent up to and including attacks on the populous. It is kind of like a Trojan horse only instead of playing on their pride, prey on their pity.

If they don't take the bait, media blitz on how inhumane your oppressors are for the PR win. Bonus points for getting it on tape.

Answer 16

Get the hell out of Dodge.

I liked @Revolver_Ocelot's answer about terrorism. But why not take it further? Why doesn't everyone leave? Then only one in thirty needs to kill someone, and 100% wipe-out by destroying the city becomes irrelevant: we can return to the Promised Land later.

Answer 17

The answer is distraction. Get your city's leader (or a representative) to leave the city walls and publicly speak about the war. Meanwhile, get a large percentage of the children in the city and gather them in two tunnels near each other with 5000 good fighters behind each group.While the leader (or rep) is speaking, have the children disperse and run in a frenzy, saying they escaped (each should be wearing tattered clothing) while on ANOTHER side of the army, women and sick-looking men crawl out of tunnels with the same amount of fighters behind them. The enemy should spread out to go to each group. Take this time to send a good 100,000 troops out of as many tunnels as possible on the fourth side. While they open fire on the enemy, the enemy will split to attack your fighters, probably leaving the groups of refugees relatively unguarded, but being helped by the medics. When the two sides are engaged on the main side, have the fighters in the tunnels behind all the women and children (they're still hidden so far) come out and plant bombs in the groups of 'refugees' and detonate them. Thousands of the enemy will die, many will be injured. Have soldiers retreat on the main front and close the tunnels as they go. Finally, while the enemy runs to help their comrades in the groups of refugees, have explosives set under the areas where the most troops are injured. When the most of the enemy is grouped up, detonate the explosives underneath them. Over the next few weeks, engage in guerrilla warfare and detonate bombs intermittently throughout the camps, especially when aid arrives to the fighting. The enemy should be sufficiently scared so as to not retaliate in large numbers, thereby allowing you to get away with the guerrilla warfare. The result: Most of your children and women will be dead. Many times more enemies will be dead and the rest of the army won't be willing to help each other out or group up for fear of bombs. The media will need to find a way to explain why the army is skittish and unwilling to assist each other. The citizens and soldiers will also be portrayed as merciless barbarians, which will help them to be left alone for longer after the war. In conclusion: bad publicity for the war and many dead soldiers. They won't be attacked again for a very long time.