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I learned last weak that a friend of mine had never seen Independence Day. Heresy! So, I invited him over and we watched it. He had a lot to say afterward about how stupid the alien's strategy was. What would you have done differently, in this age of ICBMs and drones?

Blown those * out of the sky with some good old fashioned nuclear weapons.

Shields mate, gotta infect their computers first ...

Obviously any 3rd World government with a computer would try hacking them first. The NSA would begin a cyberwar with the Chinese to seize control of their computer mainframes; I doubt a single shot would be fired.

I think the movie's plan is sound.

We need to remember the situation;

1.) Each of their HUNDREDS of city-sized dreadnoughts is protected by a very strong shield. How strong? It can withstand a nuclear blast. Or several. They tried, remember?
2.) The Aliens have taken over the entire satellite network.
3.) They are extremely advanced, far beyond any terrestrial technology
4.) They are not conquering us, they are destroying us.
5.) They came here in a Mothership that is 550 KILOMETERS in diameter.

Remember that in the movie, the shields were taken down by a powerful virus and each ship was destroyed by nuclear weapons, including the mothership. ICBM's existed.

With the satellite network down, hacking remotely is an impossibility.

They are not deploying ground forces, only the occasional aircraft; as such, capturing technology is limited to the aircraft we can shoot down and recover. In the movie, one aircraft was recovered in the Roswell incident. With enough research, 50 years is more than enough time to figure out how this ship works, repair it, and adapt it for human piloting. Same for the OS; it could be figured out in that time.

The aliens obviously do not expect the humans to have their technology in a workable state, and thus they have an element of surprise. The ship can easily slip into the mothership, compromise the systems, then get out.

Now that you mention it, I've never seen Independence Day either.
Maybe I should sometime.

In the Independence Day scenario, the US and possibly other major powers would have reverse-engineered the alien technology by 2014 to the point where considering they know of their existance and are probably preparing for more aliens, mass deployment of XCOM-EU-Firestorm-like fighters would be realistic. Fighter warfare is thus no longer a major problem, and getting the payload to the ships is not a massive issue. As for the virus operation, with current-day electronics, and reverse-engineered Alien computers and comms systems, it could be possible to insert the virus through their communications into the network, making it unneccessary to fly into space and infiltrate their capship. At that point, the only issue there is left is to nuke the city destroyers. I say we could stop the invasion before each mothership destroys more than two cities. That is, one city for the initial wave and a second one for the reaction time of launching such a large operation.

So, go full XCOM?

Knock out a few fighters (possible; as demonstrated by Will 'Welcome to Urf' Smith), pick them apart, slap some of the newly reverse-engineered tech on our own fighters, start putting holes in alien ships and/or nuking the mothership.

Oh, and after they're defeated, watch the oceans veeeeeery carefully.

Ah yes, we don't want the Terror from the Deep sequel, do we?

Or a battleship parody.


These movies always interest me more in what happens for the cleanup, Massive alien spaceships don't just go away when you blow them up and the scientists will be hoarding the walls to get to the junk anyway.