modern effective militaries dont demolish cities they use missile strikes to destroy power and water supplies and hit communication centers then the siege does the rest as your recon forces call in strikes on known and spotted enemy positions . The russians only level cities because tbh they fucking suck
Dude what are you talking about, modern armies can't easily follow your way to expel the enemy from the city.
Cutting off the water supply makes no sense, and judging by Mariupol, the defense can prepare plenty of bottled drinking water to solve this problem.
As for communication, it is a rather special case in Ukraine, where Ukrainians use social media like discord and telegram to communicate and use small starlinkl to complete data transfer. How would you like to destroy this decentralized communication system? By firing missiles at the Starlink control center or discord server on the US mainland?
The army can still accomplish its mission even when communications are suppressed, especially this defensive mission, such as holding on to the red roof building until 2100 before retreating, using flares to communicate, etc.
Firing weapons at all enemy positions found is essentially the same as firing at all buildings in the city in Ukraine. This is because holding out in a Soviet-era concrete building is a better guarantee of survival than digging foxholes in a park. Not to mention the fact that the Ukrainians would blast the tall building in retreat to prevent it from falling into Russian hands.
I wouldn't be surprised if China demolishes Taipei in a future attack on Taiwan, the ROC's defense would have been to hide their troops in residential areas, if you google maps you will see that they have basically all kinds of civilian schools next to important military facilities like the Ministry of Defense; Also in military exercises they were hiding their tanks under viaducts and camouflage in garbage dumps. The ROC will certainly have learned from the Ukraine war as well and will be more likely to choose to defend in populated areas to stall for time.
If you want to say NATO could have done better, I don't think so. They bombed the SRJ by firing on all the parts of the city that kept it running, power stations, water plants, hospitals, radio and TV stations, etc. They destroyed the SRJ's cities functions in another form of destorying the city to force the SRJ to surrender. And it is worth noting that they failed to destroy the SRJ army.
