comment from Ol' Remus at woodpile report.com...

John at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise has posted an update to his series, Civil War Weather Report. Beware, once you start reading it you can't stop and next thing you know yer coffee's cold or yer beer's warm, which ev-ver, and when yer done you'll have a panicky urge to inventory yer preps and there goes yer evening.

It includes a amusing meme playing off Ol' Remus's Most Excellent and Inviolable Rule One for Survival: Stay away from crowds. It was one of those ahah! moments for me, I'd not thought about it quite like that.

In the spirit of adding my two cents: in a civil war the notion of taking out highways around the cities has tactical merit, but cities could be adequately supplied by rail with existing infrastructure except for the "last mile". It doesn't seem obvious because it happens pretty much out of sight, unlike the semis we dodge on the four lanes. If you're looking for tipoffs that the slide toward a hot civil war is accelerating, look at what tacticians have looked at since the civil war of the 1860s. The railroads.

Consider the numbers. One Hicube boxcar has about three times the capacity of a semi-trailer. Even more efficient are double-stack railcars which typically carry fifty-three-foot semi-trailer containers. Notice how comparatively little motive power is on the front of long double-stack trains. A real expert could tell me the numbers with all the "ifs and buts", but as a general rule it's about one locomotive per fifty double-stack railcars, which is a hundred containers. Divide 4000 hp by a hundred and the efficiency jumps out at you. Each loaded semi-trailer container is being started and moved at seventy miles an hour by about one tenth the horsepower of a medium size pickup truck. This is the "why" of it.

The highway equivalent to an ordinary train of a hundred double-stack rail cars is two hundred tractor trailer trucks. Imagine the chaos on the highways if rail traffic were disrupted. Preventing passage of a mere ten such trains into a city means an additional two thousand tractor trailers on the highways. Every day, both ways, and all the support that goes with it including thousands of additional drivers. Bump that up to the real number of trains into the city every day and you see the futility of highways as an alternative to rail.

Now go to your satellite map and look at New York City. Every rail route into the metropolitan region has to cross bridges. Now zoom out a few miles and count the bridges to get to those bridges. Then consider the resources it would take to defend every one of 'em from a Deplorable with thermite and a sparkler. There are ways other than taking down bridges, many other ways. This is the tactical part.

The strategic part asks the question: how does it benefit a hostile force in a civil war to starve the cities? The forces necessary to keep them in the cities rather than ravaging the countryside could more profitably be deployed elsewhere. Garrison duty and static defense are hardly 4GW. Selco's experience says it can be done, but the strategic question remains: what is the benefit?

RTWT, If you have a fresh cup:) https://wilderwealthywise.com/civil-war-weather-report-3-violence-china-and-lots-of-links/