Alien Invasions: An Objective Analysis

I recently saw "Battle: Los Angeles" (which is pure military porn and I love it), and one aspect of the movie struck me as odd: Why the fuck would aliens (B:LA ones referred to as "ants" hereinafter), who've traversed probably millions of light years, who can drop out of lightspeed on command, and can drop on any general gridsquare wanna invade LA via Santa Monica?

Damn good reason to invade California, though. Hehe..."invade".

So, being the well-adjusted, mild-mannered adult I am, I fired up Google Earth and Wikipedia and went to town on the Battle of Los Angeles (the fictional one). After some researching and analysis, I have to give it to the ants: Santa Monica is the PERFECT place to establish a good beachhead: To the north is Topanga State Park (including several smaller ones) and just to the south of Santa Monica is LAX (a flat piece of land with little cover outside of the terminals). This gives them the cover of environment to the north and a nice flat nothing to the south. To demonstrate:

Good thing they didn't try to come in through Compton or Oakland...

As anyone who's ever read about or studied warfare will tell you, the most important aspect of an amphibious invasion such as this is establishing a beachhead. That means getting a hold of land to get resupplied, reinforced and to push further inland. A real-life example is the Normandy beach landings: without those beaches, there wouldn't had been an Allied advance, period.

Another aspect of the movie that seemed to bother a lot of people was, "Why is it so important to hold Los Angeles?" This ties into what I said before, the need to establish a beachhead. The marines were trying to stall the ants long enough so that Santa Monica could be leveled by the airforce, thereby rendering that particular invasion void. 

Though, for the sake of "the hell of it", let's look at another alien invasion: Independence Day!

This man stopped an alien invasion, with a Macbook...and he punched the president in the face...

This invasion was largely dependent on air superiority, as the aliens ("husks" hereinafter") never set foot on Earth themselves, it was all done with giant city-ships, each with a contingent of a gazillion fighters and frigates (all operated by a ship the size of a small planet). While it sounds good in theory, it's an awful freaking idea: namely because you can blast the everloving shit out the surface, but people find a way to hide and mess shit up when you're not looking.

Not to mention their rather idiotic target selection strategy. I mean...why would you blow up the White House? It holds no strategic value (militarily), as the president could be replaced by the veep who'll be in his own jet, ready to command troops if necessary (to learn more, wiki "Nightwatch"). A more sensible target would be Joint Base Andrews Naval Air Facility (that's a mouthful, innit?), or Langley Air Force Base...seeing as it has, oh, I dunno...planes that make shit go "boom".

B61 tactical nuclear bombs tend to fuck up people's days.

This post is getting rather lengthy and I'm only two fictional alien invasions in! Therefore, I'll be splitting this into several segments. Some candidates are: The Combine from Half-Life 2, the tripods from The War of the Worlds,and the Covenant from the Halo series. If anyone has any suggestions for an alien invasion to be analysed, drop me a line in the comments! Only thing is that it HAS to be an invasion (not an infiltration), and it CAN'T be Battlefield: Earth. Please...don't do that to me.

- Cee