How hard and how long would it take to siege the twins if fully garrisoned?

[Mrstrategy]

How hard in terms of manpower and resources and how long would it take to siege the twins if fully garrisoned successfully?

[rotting sea cow]

The main objective of a siege is to break your enemy inside the castle as they run out of food and sickness spread within. The problem with the Twins is that it has a bridge connecting the two castles, with a river in between that cannot be crossed. So, unless you besiege the two of them, a siege is pointless. But even if you are able to cross somewhere and put half of your army at the other side, the other half cannot help them if they run into trouble other than storming the castle. See the Battle of Riverrun.

[Serddar]

1 hour ago, rotting sea cow said:

The main objective of a siege is to break your enemy inside the castle as they run out of food and sickness spread within. The problem with the Twins is that it has a bridge connecting the two castles, with a river in between that cannot be crossed. So, unless you besiege the two of them, a siege is pointless. But even if you are able to cross somewhere and put half of your army at the other side, the other half cannot help them if they run into trouble other than storming the castle. See the Battle of Riverrun.

I don't have anything to add. 

[Trigger Warning]

How long is a piece of string. 

[Loose Bolt]

Another possible problem for anyone who tries to siege Twins is that as long as local garrison has access to any boat they could move either supplies or people by using those boats. Or anyone who tries to do that should either has some kind of fleet patrolling Green Fork or just build dams both north and south of the Twins.

[Universal Sword Donor]

Assuming a garrison of 400** and their other manpower* is neutralized, the second siege of RR is your most comparable scenario. One has:

• Formidable castle
• fresh water access
• multiple avenues of escape

A few thousand men on either side should be more than enough to fence them in and small enough to keep feeding. There would be a fortified camps with palisades like Tywin and Jaime built before their battles. More than likely try to put a boom across the river to keep the Freys from getting fish and feeding your own, but I don't know how practical that is on the Green Fork***. There's also no timber nearby**** so no easy construction of siege engines, which the Freys have to defend their castle.

If one were to starve them out, I'd guess the two years that Daven and Jaime estimated. If one were to bring trebuchets and more men, you could probably physically damage / destroy the bridge and gatehouses with a few weeks of bombardment and maybe storm both sides within a month. That's gonna cost a lot more money in the end though, both from the reduction in commerce and the larger, more complex nature of the siege.

Long shot, maybe destroy the middle tower and pray that's where Lord Frey sleeps.

* They can field 4000 men (3k infantry and 1K mounted)
** That was his wartime garrison
*** Blackfish couldn't find a ford because the GF runs deep and swift north of the twins
**** Robb notes this when he is speaking with his mother about how to get to RR if Frey refused passage

 

[Aebram]

Mr. Strategy's question was about the Twins, plural, so we can assume that both castles are surrounded. It might be Riverlanders on one side, and Northmen on the other.

Being so close to the river, both castles probably have freshwater wells inside their walls. As Universal pointed out, access to the river might allow them to extend their food supply with fish. Cutting off the fish supply would require, not just booms, but nets, one upstream and one down, large enough to stretch from bank to bank and all the way to the river bottom. But with armies on both banks, fishing might be a risky operation.

House Frey has made a lot of enemies, and they probably never did have many friends. So it's possible that this will actually happen in one of the later books. I can imagine a "Scouring of the Shire" -type of ending in which, after the main enemy is defeated, some lesser foes get their long-overdue justice.