I think you may overstate some of this.\

On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 6:23 PM, C. Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

The difficulty with a siege in higher tech settings is that once you have reliable long-range explosive weapons (artillery and bombs, basically), the besieging troops become sitting ducks. And on the other hand, if the attackers have good long-range explosive weapons, they can knock a hole in any reasonable thickness of walls in a few hours.

Yes. The nature of a siege changes, once you've got weapons that can knock down the walls relatively rapidly.

(This also applies to pretty much every other aspect of warfare- armor and weapons develop more or less in parallel, until weapons overmatch the armor, and then the armor slowly disappears and the nature of the fight changes.)

One way or another, what would have been a months-long siege using medieval tech becomes a quick and decisive engagement, in one direction or the other.

The idea of a decisive engagement is largely a western dream, that very rarely is realized.

It was one of the drivers for the long fights in WW1- that conceit that *this* time, it would work, that *this* would be the engagement that finally broke the opposition's will to fight. Except it never quite worked out like that.

Relatively few forces are willing to stand and fight against a better armed, better equipped foe, unless they absolutely cannot retreat.

You generally only get full engagements when both sides think they can win, or when one side can't retreat, for reasons either logistical or political.

Siege operations are alive and well, particularly in Iraq and other parts of the middle east, even though walled cities have largely disappeared.

The entire point of the second battle of Fallujah was the culmination of a siege operation- get the insurgents to go to Fallujah, throw a cordon around it to *keep* them there, and then grind on through the city.

Or, a little further back, most of the battle of Stalingrad.

It should be noted that long sieges were never common. Both sides could do math -- basically, how long could the attacking force stay in the field (farmers had to get home in time to harvest the crops, for example). versus how long the fortified location could hold out based on its stored food and access to fresh water, combined with the odds and timing of the arrival of a relief force.

This, I would broadly agree with.

If the math favored the defenders, the attackers never started a siege. If it favored the attackers, they typically surrendered quickly to get good terms and avoid senseless bloodshed and property damage.

This largely ignores the politics of the situation, and how the defenders expected to be treated by the attackers.

If the defenders expected to be enslaved or slaughtered if they lost, it was going to be game on, regardless of the odds.

If an active siege did start, everybody re-did that math in real time and changed plans accordingly. A defending force that "should" surrender and didn't do so could expect to be treated very badly when the attackers finally got in. Shakespeare portrays this beautifully in "Henry V" at the siege of Harfleur.

This is also a matter of the discipline and composition of the attacking troops, and, again, politics. There are plenty of examples where the defenders surrendered and were slaughtered, anyway.

It's also a matter of the nature of the target- if you are laying siege to a purely military fortification, or laying siege to a walled town.

"Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine kook." -Alan Morgan