We're At War!

Well, not us, safe up north.  But the simmering border dispute between the states of Tennessee and Georgia is about to boil over.  (Seriously:  this is a real thing.)

Fortunately, Danger Room's Andrew Exum has performed a tactical assessment.  It's a long read, full of maps and military jargon, but worth a look.  Exum, a former Army Ranger, born in Tennessee, envisions .50 caliber machine guns aimed down I-75 near the Eastgate Mall, and mortar positions near near Sir Goony's Family Fun Center.  Still, he knows it will be a long, hard slog to victory:

Two problems immediately come to mind, though. Even if Georgia is only able to mobilize half the residents of Atlanta, that’s still a lot of SUVs to stop. We can’t count on all of them to stop at the Cracker Barrel in Dalton and lose interest. That means we’ll soon run low on ammunition and be forced to retreat to Hixson. 

The other problem is that the University of Tennessee’s performance against the University of Georgia last year — in which Tennessee’s defense tackled like a bunch of Pop Warner 8-year-olds — doesn’t fill one with a lot of confidence about our state’s ability to stop much of anything coming out of Georgia. Indeed, the best we could hope for in this course of action is that the Georgians bring a Varsity franchise along with their invading army.

We also like his close:

The wars of the 9/11 era have demonstrated the perils of fighting heavily armed religious fundamentalists on their own soil. We Tennessee Presbyterians are a little like the Taliban — only certainly better armed and probably less tolerant of the Roman Catholic Church. Still, if Georgia wants to invade and occupy East Tennessee, it is welcome to try. Getting in should be easy. Getting out, however, is another matter entirely.