Gov. Chris Christie: Atlantic City is on its own until at least 7AM tomorrow

[happyslug]

51. Walk where? Thus the shelters

Yes, Atlantic City is small, but the area subject to Sandy is quite large, The General rule of thumb is 3 miles a hour walking, thus after 10 hours you can have gone no further then 30 miles (and most people go at slower pace so a much lower level of travel). Now, with today's fully mechanized army the US Army can travel From Barsa to Baghdad (400 miles) From March 20 to April 9, 2003. 15 day to move 400 miles or just over 26 miles per day. Now the US actually went through the desert, so the actual travel distance was longer (Closer to 600 miles) which would make it 40 miles per day.

These are high numbers, remember I am using AVERAGE miles per day, not what a unit can do, some units could have made the trip in one day, but that means arriving in Baghdad without supplies. It is a lot more difficult to haul the supplies to support an army then to move the actual troops. Thus 40 miles per day is FAST, it beat out the fastest offensive of more then 3 days (thus excluding Desert Storm of 1990) by almost twice the miles moved per day (This was 20 miles per day, the movement of the Red Chinese Army into Korea at the end of 1950 and into 1951, driving the US forces in front of it).

Thus the US has the equipment to move a lot of men, material and supplies, quickly, but it is tied in with the US Military and in New Jersey that is the New Jersey National Guard. I suspect the New Jersey National Guard could have pulled these people out, but that would mean a massive spending of money by Governor Christie, money he does NOT want to spend. Thus the issue is NOT that New Jersey did or did not have the means to evacuate these people, but that it was NOT willing to spend the money.

Side note: Desert Storm beats out the Chinese Intervention in Korea on a mile per day basis, but only if you ignore the build up during Desert Shield, and the six week air war before the ground war AND that the ground war lasted less then 100 hours (Which minimized re-supply and re-fueling requirements). Thus it is a bad comparison to the Chinese advance into Korea (Which also took some weeks to prepare but lasted weeks and months NOT days and hours).

Some maneuvers have also beat out the Chinese advance. The best example is the Soviet Maneuver of about 1986 in Siberia. In that war game the Soviet Red Army went the distance from Berlin to Lisbon in a week. That maneuver show how powerful the Red Army was, as the Soviet Union collapsed around it. The US did similar maneuvers, through NOT on the scale of the Soviet Maneuver. It later came out that the Soviet plans for War included not only a dash to Lisbon, but a the North Sea Attack aimed at Birmingham England, to divide Great Britain in half. By the middle 1990s, the Russian Army was barely able to re-take Moscow during the attempted takeover under Yeltsin, that is how far the mighty had fallen.