2×4 re: Red Dawn said:

So the bad guys nuke the cities and take the rest.

The first part, probably. The second part–won’t happen. Red Dawn would happen.

And guess who wrote the definitive manual for fighting such insurgencies? Yup. Kinda smarts, doesn’t it?

Like was always pointed out to the Liberals screaming about “No blood for oil…” or whatever in Iraq. If we had wanted the oil and only the oil, we would have bypassed the cities and taken the oil fields, sucked them dry via Basra and moved on. There is not reason the same cannot be done in the NA area.

And as chaos reigns after the mushroom clouds clear, who is to say that they could not install some sort of puppet regime? And believe me, they will be not as nice in the battlespace as the US armed forces.

Going back to the “Enders Game” analogy:
SO the bad guys deploy their equivalent of the “Little Doctor” = Molecular Disruptor or MD – hence the name, and just wipe out the non-compliant. (BTW, that was the only way humanity could defeat the Formics, get close enough to the mother world and deploy the ultimate solution – MD = Xenocide) And since they have convinced the world that Americans are universally hated, there will not be much of a complaint from anyone. It also serves as a warning to those contemplating other insurgencies.