Okay, lemme 'splain. Let's say we're gonna take Lagos, Nigeria, shall we? After all, Boko Haram, Goodluck Jonathan, social inequality of Dickensian proportions and shit-tons of oil. Lagos is my huckleberry.

It also has a population of 21 million (more than New York State) spread across a very New Orleans-like floodplain over an area roughly a quarter the size of Rhode Island - coincidentally, about 10% bigger than New Orleans. New Orleans proper? 400,000 people. Lagos proper? 18 million people. Let's assume one in a hundred of those people means you harm: there would therefore be half as many INSURGENTS in Lagos as there are PEOPLE in NoLA. And, for effect, they're hiding amongst double the population of NYC.

Awright, but 66,000 active duty "personnel" in the SF. Figure roughly 1/4 of them are actual on-the-ground shock troops (more discussion here). That's okay, you're mostly going to use them to take out command and control targets so that the precision bombers can come through. And let's just pretend - for the sake of fun'n'games - that we can get 200,000 active duty marines into the harbor in one fell swoop and get them offloaded. I'm already in an environment owned by the enemy. person-for-person they're at parity. It's their city and I'm in the harbor.

Meanwhile I've got major highways I can roadblock but we already know that's ineffective in a city the size of Fallujah. We're currently invading Manhattan with 200,000 ground troops. If I want tanks, I have to get them on the streets... and even a Bradley weighs more than a lot of bridges can take (fun fact: Soviet tanks and Soviet bridges were designed to be about 40% lighter than NATO armor for the explicit purpose of mobility - the Soviets could cross rivers, NATO couldn't). And I'm attempting to do all these things in such a way that the undecideds out there in that city of 21 million want to side with me, not their friends and neighbors that said the Imperialists were coming with bombs and tanks.

Fast forward a few days. Yeah, I can start rolling C5s full of troops and IFVs into the airport but this city is surrounded by jungle and 170 million people. The North is essentially lawless. I've just become law'n'order for the whole place because the cops are either going to be useless or insurgents (been there, done that, got the war debt). And they're all chatting with each other via cell phone (or semaphore flag, or notes passed by kids) and for every "insurgent" I feel like taking out, I'm shooting up someone's playground. Remember: 250,000:1 bullet-to-kill ratio in Iraq (see previous link). How long before Muqtada al Sadr rises up to lead the city against the Infidel? If every "insurgent" convinces one of his buddies to join the cause, the "enemy combatants" outnumber my ground troops 2:1. And I don't even have to worry about my enemies: I have to worry about the shopkeeper that looks the other way when somebody plants an IED in the road because his daughter had her arm burned off by white phosphorus. I have to worry about the beat cop who says nothing about the SA-7 he saw going up the stairs because a stray bomb took out his mother's house (and his mother, and his three brothers).

Fast forward a month. I've been attempting law an order in a city where I'm outnumbered 100:1 where I've also been shooting people regularly. And while there's now a carrier group parked in the bay and UCAVs circle incessantly, I've effectively militarized the population against me. I'm resupplying through the airport and the harbor; they're resupplying through the porous perimeter I can't hold worth a shit because it's a hundred miles long and I don't live here. I've concentrated my supply lines into two or three crucial choke points. My enemy has saturated the ground I claim to hold but I've effectively turned a functional city into a war zone. The locals are settling scores; Dad remembers Biafra. The water isn't potable so I've got newscasts of big-eyed children dying of cholera on Al Jazeera. I can wander anywhere I want unopposed so long as I'm in an up-armored Humvee because the heavy weaponry is concentrated around the airport and highways where we've now adopted a shoot-on-sight policy.

Meanwhile, whatever conflict I intended to prevent has traipsed out to the parts of the country I don't control. Why was I here again? I'm no longer publicizing body counts because they're bordering on genocidal and I'm exercising a press blackout against all but my embedded reporters because holy fuck, we thought baghdad was bad...

Take Mogadishu. Multiply by 20. Replace street-level drug crime with Islamic fundamentalism and you've got Lagos.

And that, dear Pablo, is why we don't have the numbers.

"You will kill ten of us. We will kill one of you. But in the end, you will tire of it first."

- Ho Chi Minh