Classic Military Assault by Hurricane Katrina

NOLA.com has posted a map of the disaster that occured in New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish and it unfolded like a classic military assault.

First Katrina began with an attack on the city's east flank by assaulting a weak point in the defences via the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MR-GO) penetrating deep into enemy territory and disrupting it's lines of mobility in the Lower 9th Ward. Notice the funnel shaped configuration of the protection levees west of Lake Borne. Normally this funnelling effect would be a disadvantage for the attackers as the soldiers would be compacted and more easily
destroyed as opposed to they being spread out and minimizing the affect of fragmentation explosives. In this case, the storm surge acted more like a shaped-charge where the waves were confied to a smaller area and intensified. This is how the RPG's works that is used so widely by terrorist in Iraq.

Second, frontal assaults were made on New Orleans northern defences along Lake Ponchartrain, again pinpointing the city's weak points at the 17th Street Canal and the London Avenue Canal. Once these defences were breached, flood waters were again able to exploit the area's undefended interior and spread unabatted.

This reminds me of France's Maginot Line where in the Blitzkrieg of 1940, German forces concentrated her armies at points along the border where the defences were the weakest (namely the Ardennes Forest along the Belgian border). Once through the barrier, the Germans were able to disrupt French logistics and cause the collapse of the the French army.

Louisiana should look at history when deciding how to defend the state from hurricanes.