SPOILER ALERT!  If you aren't caught up on the most recent Walking Dead episodes, wave off!  You're about to ruin your life!  Don't read the following!
Ok.  I've already blogged about the Governor's upcoming attack on the Ricktatorshipians at the prison (The Walking Dead: Prison Assault, below).  Or maybe we should be calling them, collectively, the Democratic Republic of Atlanta Survivors, now that Rick has renounced his imperium.  Anyway, if you've read my earlier post you'll know that I consider the assault on the prison to be a fool's errand, from the point of view of the Governor.  He's crazy, so maybe he's not thinking things through clearly, but anyone who puts much thought towards the proposed prison attack can see that there are significant obstacles to success.  Now that we know a little more information, I'd like to stress this point even more that I did before.I've spent a lot of time over the years studying and teaching military history, and one of the things that military historians of antiquity are always interested in is the size of opposing armies.  This is made much more complex by the fact that ancient commentators usually heavily exaggerate the numbers of the losing side, so that historians constantly have try to figure out the truth.  Some people are highly opposed to this, insisting that the figures are accurate.  They spit the derogatory term "revisionist" at those who don't agree with them.  Anyway, I'm a revisionist, I suppose...most enemy armies are highly inflated in surviving chronicles, because those accounts were written by the victors.  Alexander the Great did not fight a quarter million Persians at Gaugamela.  Sorry to burst anyone's bubble, but that figure is not possible.But wait!  For the upcoming prison assault, we actually have decent figures for the opposing sides!  All we have to do is comb through a few of the back episodes, and we learn some very crucial information, if we want to use our historical powers of deduction to predict the future (no, historians are not just interested in the past).  As luck would have it, a conversation between Milton and the Governor provides us with detailed information concerning the size and composition of the Governor's Woodburyite Militia.  According to this conversation, the Militia is made up of the following: 1) the "able-bodied," twenty in number, 2) the not-able-bodied, who suffer from various health problems, six in number, and 3) kids, and yes the Governor's right about adolescence being a modern construct, but you can't undo this simply by saying so...there are six adolescent commandos in the Governor's ranks.  This gives us a total of thirty-five gun-wielding live bodies, of which fifty-seven percent are neither sick nor in the fourth grade.But we have still more information: in the preview of the upcoming final episode, we learn that the Governor is upset over Merle slaughtering eight of his people.  At least eight is the figure my ears heard.  The eight good people were probably not drawn from the Governor's auxilia of grade-schoolers and the aged, but from the cream of the non-health-compromised twenty.  If the Governor did indeed leave Grandma and Timmy at home with the mint julips, the warband he led unknowingly into the crosshairs of Merle was composed of his "best" fighters.  So we should subtract these individuals from the total, leaving the governor twelve decent soldiers, six old and sick individuals, and nine children for cannon fodder.Against them are arrayed the surviving D.R.A.S. citizens: Rick, Daryl, Maggie, Glenn, Beth, Carl, Michonne, Carol and Hershel ().  All of these individuals, even Beth (whom they should develop more as a character, by the way) have been shown to be competent in a fight.  Some of them are extremely capable.  Even crippled Hershel is ready to throw down, and you'll recall from the destruction of his farm that Hershel is capable of becoming a berserker in the right circumstances.  Michonne, Daryl, Rick, Maggie and Glen are all deadly.  Carl is a budding little psychopath whose only toy is a gun.  These people are nasty in a fight.  They're also used to working together, which is crucial for military operations, now as in antiquity.  The Governor's mob is not.  His regiment of decent people got cut up pretty badly by Merle...only one person...who wiped out a goodly chunk of the decent Woodburyites all by his lonesome.  A casualty rate of eight to one in favor of the enemy is not something to be proud of, unless you outnumber your opponents by more than eight to one.  And even then it's really not something to be proud of.  I'm thinking that the morale and the cohesion of the Woodburyite Militia is not particularly noteworthy at this point.  From the point of view of the Militia, they've been attacked twice at the town itself, and then ambushed outside it, with considerable casualties in each encounter.  They've only seen two slain enemies.  Clearly they're not getting the best of the exchange.  And as we lead up to the attack on the prison, we've got to be honest and say that more than fifty percent of the Governor's army is made of shaky conscripts.  Things do not look promising for his future as a post-Apocalyptic Napoleon.