Thats why I was asking what kind of war this hypothetical army would be fighting ;)

e.g. wars like Vietnam/Iraq aren't meant to be "won" (they're just meant to perpetuate like in 1984), so obliterating cities, or pulling out and funding local militias, or engineering a nano-bot-virus that perfectly eliminates all of your enemies, etc, are all out of the question, even if they're possible ways of "winning".
For this kind of war you want men on the ground keeping your presence felt.

On the other hand, if you're fighting Hitler, it doesn't matter if you have men on the ground or not, all you want to do is push your borders close enough for you to strike at him from the air. These days, with the technology to strike anywhere on earth from the air (even places 1km underground), there'd be no need for ground invasions against a "new hitler".

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Original post by Storyyeller I don't think we'll ever see forcefields, at least as we think of them. It's simply not feasible from an engineering point of view.

The "forcefields" I mentioned earlier work by detecting incoming ordinance and emitting an extremely powerful sonic pulse that triggers the detonator, casing it to blow up before it strikes your armour, doing significantly less damage. They're no sci-fi magic wall, but still pretty cool.
Another cool "modern day sci fi" weapon is the plasma rail-gun. How cool are flying balls of highly volatile matter!?

Cities are important. Yes, you could kill the people and then move your overpopulation there, but, what's cheaper? Nowadays you must think on that a lot. You would need a lot of fuel to move a mass of people to another city in another country, and then a lot more of organization to make the basic services (power, water, garbage) to start working. If you are just a despot who doesn't care ofcourse you could just send'em to the filthy slum, but still you need a lot of organization and time to make'em start collection the precious resourses. If you kept the pop alive the infraestructure services would still exist, and most of the organization is already done, so is cheaper and faster this way.

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Original post by klefebz If you are just a despot who doesn't care ofcourse you could just send'em to the filthy slum, but still you need a lot of organization and time to make'em start collection the precious resourses. If you kept the pop alive the infraestructure services would still exist, and most of the organization is already done, so is cheaper and faster this way.

You specifically mentioned 'land' as a resource, and a need for land implies overpopulation, in which case the last thing you want is another few million people on your hands, most of them hostile. You mention it being cheaper and faster to preserve the current population, but cheaper and faster for *what* exactly?

But beyond that I echo my earlier point: why do I need the cities if all I want is resources? The cities don't have any resources (apart from population), and they don't help me gain resources - instead they consume food, fuel, etc.

Furthermore, cities are one of the worst environments to wage war in: you have to avoid civilian casualties, the defenders can use guerilla tactics, and you end up with a mess like the current situation in Baghdad.

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Let's put it in more concrete terms: if I desperately need American resources, should I spend millions of troops in capturing and occupying the Eastern Seaboard (Boston, New York, Washington DC, etc.), or should I just go capture the Alaskan and Gulf-sea oilfields and extract the resources directly?

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I agree with Hodgman here, this discussion can't really go anywhere unless you specify the exact setting you want to brainstorm. What scale of warfare, what economic and technological setting, etc.

But population is the most important resource! What use is an oil rig with no skilled workers to run it?


Plus cities have tons of valuable infrastructure and buisness.

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Original post by Storyyeller But population is the most important resource! What use is an oil rig with no skilled workers to run it?

If population pressure is a problem, I can recruit plenty from my own population. And by eliminating the city, I eliminate several million competitors for the same resource.

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Plus cities have tons of valuable infrastructure and buisness.

Like what, exactly? I would go so far as to say that 99% of a city's infrastructure is dedicated to maintaining the city itself. Similarly, 90% of businesses are there to supply the wants and needs of the city and its population.

Unless you are in one of the few cities that still retains a manufacturing base, most city wealth is in the corporate/financial sectors, and that type of paper-based wealth tends to go down the drain quickly in wartime.

All right, this is kinda stuck. When I said "land" I was enumerating things that had been fought about, I shouldn't put that in a discussion about future wars. About the setting, when I said any setting it's like say "I think there will be X technology in the future that will be used Y way".
If someone start one of those wars of mass democide above mentioned, at certain point, population will run so low that it will become the most valuable resourse.