Sure there is. We've been doing it for millennia. Circle the place with a wall and with troops, prevent all incoming and outgoing traffic, bomb the water and power, salt the crops and let disease and starvation 'correct' the problem.

Dig deeper into that link. It's not a rhetorical question, and it's not a solved problem. Star Forts made sieges effectively impossible, which necessitated professional armies, which led to the existence of the middle class in Europe, which led to the Enlightenment and modern history and shit. It's a fairly stunning conclusion with broad implications.

The problem with "bomb them back to the stone age" is the sort of conflict caused by 15m Bangladeshis on the hoof is not the sort you solve by erasing Dhaka from the history books. Clearly, the United States could have lofted the 2nd Bomb Wing over Aleppo for a couple months and solved Syrian Civil War with finality. Or even simpler -call up the 90th Missile Wing and all of Syria could be past tense before your Domino's is ready. But these are not useful solutions to a real problem, which is "millions were at peace and now they are not."

The Strategic Studies Group of the US Army concluded that the US Military does not currently have the capability to conduct successful military operations in a metropolis greater than ten million citizens, nor do we currently have the know-how to develop it. They literally concluded that should Dhaka (for example) go to shit, there is fuckall we can do about it. Literally: we cannot "circle the place with a wall and with troops", we cannot "prevent all incoming and outgoing traffic."

A classic example is for the advancing force to maneuver around a city in order to threaten the defending force’s lines of supply — which are simultaneously targeted with stand-off weapons such as artillery and air strikes. The attacking force also targets the defenders and the civilian population with propaganda and psychological warfare. The U.S. military’s 2003 “shock and awe” campaign towards Baghdad is an example of this strategy, the main exception here being the tank-driven “thunder runs” into the heart of the city as the Iraqi army collapsed.

Megacities totally disrupt this strategy for a load of reasons. “The scale of megacities, in essence, defies the military’s ability to apply historical methods,” the report states. To use one example, Lagos, Nigeria contains more than 20 million people packed into 910 square kilometers of rickety urban sprawl. This environment is so huge, it cannot be feasibly surrounded with any force the U.S. could reasonably expect to deploy. Were the U.S. to intervene in a conflict, it couldn’t realistically control the flow of people, goods or communications — everyone has cell phones. There’s no element of surprise. The military could barely even maneuver inside the city, for the simple fact that there’s too much traffic and many of the streets cannot support heavy logistics vehicles.

“The congestion of ground avenues of approach, combined with the massive size of the megacity environments, makes even getting to an objective from the periphery questionable, let alone achieving an operational effect,” the report states.

We can saturation bomb but we can't even saturation bomb with a reasonable expectation of killing the enemy before he escapes out the periphery. And in doing so, we do not improve our tactical position one iota.