a) Thank you for your extensive and helpful response b) In the (certainly plausible) story line you're drawing here, I agree that the current circumstances of U.S. military strategy as well as military strength offer no chance at a positive result in, say, Lagos. Also holy shit, I didn't know there were that many people in Lagos. God damn. Yet, it's not Dresden, fine... now it's Operation Market Garden. Now it's Napoleon and Garibaldi marching on a target and creating, wait for it, the aforementioned full-scale war, nation against nation, the United States against the Nigerian people unified by perfectly justifiable anti-U.S. sentiments. So-- and don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to refute or disagree with what you're saying because I think we're coming to the same page-- by the end of your story we end up with an equal or greater military opposition and we now have no regard for civilian protection because we've made them all take arms against us. So just going off modern history here, we massacre and exterminate a population for defending itself and/or protecting its interests and we say something like- oh I don't know- "It was for the greater good." It seems to all come back around is all I'm saying. (To clarify again, I am veering away from the topic of numbers and going back to the point regarding dresden.) I don't think anything would, hypothetically, be stopping us from making the exact same mistakes and committing the exact same atrocities we have in all the wars of our past. Globalization and the U.N. will pressure us to ensure the protection of human rights/prosecute our war crimes? Come on, the Allies were tight back in WW2 too.
I think I didn't quite understand your question. Perhaps it comes down to this problem: Do you want to fight a war in Lagos? Or a war against Lagos? The premise of urban warfare is that you can conduct a military action within an urbanized area without reducing that urbanized area to a paintball arena. People lived in Sarajevo while Serbs and Croats were busily settling the score for 200 years of history, and continue to do so. A lot of it is still pretty shot up and it'll never be the same, but it's a long way from The Blitz. The argument of the paper is that above a certain point, "Sarajevo" is wishful thinking and "the Blitz" is the end result. Basically, you're going to quagmire above a certain population level regardless of your actions. It's interesting to me because architecture has far more of an impact on military strategy than a lot of people realize. Geoffrey Parker claims that the invention of the Star Fort effectively created the professional army and, therefore, the modern middle class. This is the US Military arguing, essentially, that above a certain size, cities cannot be held. That's almost a parallel conclusion to the military assessments of Star Forts: above a certain level of fortification, cities cannot be sieged. That's the true conclusion of the article: we no longer really know how to conduct the battles we can expect to fight. I don't know nearly enough to question whether this conclusion is correct, but it's a pretty stunning one to make. You're talking about a substantial percentage of the modern military-industrial complex being spent on tactics and armaments that will not, in fact, be useful.