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How Nicolae Carpathia might have won the siege of Petra:

First off, a cavalry charge is actually less farfetched than it might sound: the old cities in Europe and the Middle East have plenty of narrow alleys in which a car cannot maneuver, so motorcycles and horses make sense. This is why riot police has mounted units.

However, making this the cornerstone of your tactics makes little sense. I am assuming that by this point Nicolae, indwelt by Satan, has absorbed much of the latter's Bronze Age mindset rather than using the advice of his modern strategists. The hands-on style of leadership seems to line up with that.

The battle of Petra is described as a medieval-style siege, and it is; Team Blue is all inside a walled city, and occasionally makes sorties for supplies; Team Red has a much larger army surrounding the city, and the overhead of keeping it provisioned.

So, what did Carpathia do wrong and what could he have done in order to win?

First off, Carpathia ignored the fact that Petra effectively had infinite provisions (manna and quails, and fresh water) while his army did not. Most sieges in history have been resolved peacefully, in that the city wasn't stormed, because both sides did the math and realied which of the two armies was going to run out of supplies first. This is unusual to say the list; the closest modern parallel is the Berlin Airlift, and that solved in favor of the "besieged". Carpathia, having grown in an Eastern European country, should be acutely aware of that episode as a defeat for the Soviet side - while it's unlikely that he would have learned it in state-controlled Romanian schools, he would've picked it up during his diplomatic studies.

Second, Carpathia ignored the tremendous force multiplier that a modern military force can be. He deploys his artillery only after it stops working due to supernatural interference - knowingly - and makes no use of its beyond-the-horizon capabilities.

Third, Carpathia seems more interested in the PR aspect of the war than in actual operation; he makes grandiouse pronouncements and gets in the way of military operations, and chooses a siege-breaking strategy that is designed to look good to him rather than being effective. Overall, the author gives a good portrait of Carpathia as someone who is in the terminal grip of megalomania. Some parallels may be drawn with the excellent film Das Untergang, with bunker-bound Hitler screaming orders at nonexistent divisions.

Carpathia, as a charismatic leader, is used to at least appearing to lead from the front and gives very broad, unambiguous orders to his generals, much like Hitler did - this effectively forces even competent generals to follow an incompetent plan. However, there was enough wiggle room to allow the Unity Army to win the siege.

Initially, the situation at Petra looked exactly like a medieval siege (as opposed to, say, the siege of Sarajevo in 1995, which the authors in real life and the characters in the story would have been aware of). It is often quipped that generals are always ready to fight the last war; in this case, it would have been an asset, since the history of traditional siege warfare is extremely well documented. One thing that should be clear to a modern general is that barring tactical brilliance or a sudden reversal of fortune, sieges are won or lost at the outset. The breaching assault, if there even is one, is usually the culmination of a period of time dedicated to grinding down the defender's resources faster than one's own; this may be accomplished by simply waiting and foraging in the knowledge that the defenders cannot acquire new supplies, but throughout history many creative ways to force the other team to expend more resources than one's own have been employed. Biological warfare was invented in sieges, by catapulting corpses of the diseased dead humans or cattle; many creative ways to start a fire in the defending cities were devised, from using birds carrying embers to the first attempts at precision rocket artillery.

A competent Unity Army officer would know all this, and use the accumulated experience of millennia to try to break the defendants long before the final charge. A shrewd Unity Army officer would also realize that the higher-ups are not thinking straight, and operate in a mode of seeking forgiveness for what got done rather than permission for what is yet to do.

The siege of Petra lasts six months. That is a significant amount of time; on one hand, modern armies take longer to mobilize than ancient ones, it being a much more complicated matter than "grab your sword and fight the horde"; on the other. the besieging army has literally the entire world's remaining military infrastructure at its disposal.

Proper recon (by drone, which was already an option in the mid-90s in Israel as they were the first adopters of the technology and by now Israel has largely been invaded, occupied, and pacified - or by conventional aircraft if that is not an option) would make it obvious that Petra is effectively self-sufficient; Yahweh has organized His own Berlin airlift by means of a water source, manna and small birds. It's not specified how electricity and the Internet is stil in place, but presumably the Unity Army is allowing that infrastructure to remain connected to the larger grid as a way to gain intel, given that the Petra inhabitants seem pretty open with sharing photos online. This mirrors recent events in which Facebook posts of Daesh militants have been used to help confirm air strikes.

There are a number of ways by which the Unity Army can disrupt the airlift. The most obvious is by damaging the water supply; while bringing a tunnel-boring machine to Petra and reaching the source within six months would probably be unviable, the source can be disrupted by other methods. First, seismometers would be deployed around the city, outside the walls, and used to determine the approximate location of the source; then, sapper teams would begin mining under the city in order to reach the source. Since environmental concerns are not an issue and neither is doing damage to the city above -- that would be a bonus, if anything -- the work can proceed swiftly. Once the source is reached, it can be diverted using the mining tunnel as drainage, stoppered, or poisoned by the use of any number of chemical-warfare agents or pathogens.

Disrupting the food supply would be harder, since the manna just appears. The birds can easily be intercepted by setting up targeting radars around Petra and using them as microwave beams to kill or disorient the birds before they can reach the city, but this would only stop Petrans from receiving protein; the besieged could live on manna alone for a few years, although they would be debilitated come the time of the final assault.

Cutting the power in Petra is a fairly obvious option; while Carpathia does not order this before the breaching assault, it would severely limit the Petrans' ability to perform any manufacturing inside the city. Ordinarily, this would considerably lower the quality of life inside the city, maybe even enough to cause at least part of the population to want to capitulate; however, given that the Petrans have unshakable faith in their ultimate victory, the pro-deescalation faction would likely be small and ignored. As it stands, keeping the power and the Net on is probably the better choice, especially considering that the Petrans have enough manpower and too little beginning manufacturing ability to set up any considerable amount of automated defenses that a last-minute power outage might disrupt.

Going back to traditional tactics, while a direct bombardment is shown to be ineffective, it would likely have been attempted; even when there is no bombing campaign planned, mortar shots flying inside cities and fortified bases are a fact of life in a low-intensity conflict, being effective ways to ramp up fear for little expenditure. It would have been noticed quickly by Unity Army field officers that mortar rounds would consistently fail to work. At this point, a competent field officer would at the very least call in the army engineers to analyze the situation; a competent field officer with a competent chain of command to back him or her up would very quickly set up a testing program, at the very least to the extent of throwing things at Petra and seeing what sticks. A few obvious options occur; while a wise field officer would prefer to take the city without a shot, diplomatic options would requrie the approval of a Nicolae Carpathia that has since descended into insanity, and would not be available to the commander of the local forces.

Kinetic bombardment. Inert shells are cheap to produce even on short order, or can be retrofit from high-explosive shells. While this greatly reduces damage inflicted, it guarantees that some damage would be; there is no mechanism inside an inert lump of metal that can fail. Saturation bombardment, even in the miraculous happenstance that it caused no casualties, would eventually destroy enough infrastructure to force the Petrans to sally out. At minimum, inert shells could be used to batter down the walls.
Radiological dispersal. Launching small projectiles designed to open upon landing and release radioactive material is a much simpler project, from an engineering and logistics standpoint, than restarting a nuclear program - and has the advantage of plausible deniability since Carpathia is in control of the media and can report that the swath of sudden deaths in petra is due to natural or even supernatural causes rather than radiation poisoning. Extreme caution would have to be exercised during deployment, of course.
Gas. Petra is described in the book as a tightly walled city, enough so that simply saturating the area inside the walls with chlorine would be a relatively simple feat to achieve - the besiegers would merely have to mount a firefighting package on an AVLB and use it to duct the gas in over the wall, no artillery necessary. The defenders would have no choice between allowing deadly gas in and opening the gates. This method has the advantage of requiring very little R&D effort.
Farenheit 451. A similar method to that described above could be used to vector in crude oil, by constructing an annex to a nearby pipeline if necessary. After that, it would take one spark to flood Petra in flames. This may even appeal to an insane Carpathia if presented as poetic justice. Again, the defenders would have no choice between opening the gates and being flooded with death. The potential effectiveness of this method is documented by the 1991 Kuwait oil well fires, with which both attackers and defenders would be at least familiar. This method likewise has the advantage of requiring very little R&D effort, although it would be quite expensive to implement.
Poisoning the well. A method to do so has been discussed above; another possibility is to "poison the well" less literally, by obtaining a manna sample and devising a chemical that would react with it making it unpalatable or even poisonous; this chemical can then be introduced by any of the above methods. The obvious difficulty here is obtaining a sample, as manna has an extremely limited shelf life.
Blotto Box. Instead of cutting power to Petra, it would be easy for an engineering team to replace the transformers feeding the city in order to increase line voltage; a similar system could be used to send lethal voltages through the phone and net infrastructure. At minimum, this would destroy all alectrical equipment in the city; at best, it would cause random casualties as they touch an appliance whose ground wire has been force-connected to three-phase power. This would only work once, but would be a good way to demoralize the defenders as they would find themselves unable to trust even touching most of their remaining technology.

Note that most of the tactics showcased above constitute war crimes in their own right; given that this article assumes that we are siding with the Antichrist, this should not be an issue. Arguably, an ethical Unity Army local commander could implement many of these measures reasoning that every Petran dead goes directly to Heaven, at least until prophecy is successfully derailed, but the ethics of fighting for the preservation of humanity against an angry God are best discussed elsewhere. However, an ethical Unity Army officer may choose to puruse a different tactic altogether.

Riot Control. The Unity Army has a variety of nonlethal weapons available, from nauseant agents (which can be deployed as the lethal agents would in the stratagems above) to dazzling lasers and cloud-piercing spotlights to large speakers. While the LRAD system was still in development when the Rapture is supposed to have happened, and would likely not have come into operation by the siege of Petra, quantity can substitute for quantity -- large conventional speakers can be assembled, mounted on vehicles, and used to blast dischords at the besieged until exhaustion sets in. Flamethrower guitars are, of course, optional but highly recommended. This tactic would be known to Unity Army and Petrans alike to be effective after the Waco incident of 1994, and has the definite advantage of being usable for PR purposes, since it would allow Carpathia to treat the siege as a riot or a standoff rather than a war. Furthermore, it remains a relatively nonviolent way of bringing the war to a close; the Petrans do, in a sense, want an epic last stand, and containment and harassment has the side benefit of denying them it.

Assuming a sane Carpathia, his best option would be to de-escalate the matter diplomatically; the supposed man of peace could put on his older hat and show up at the gates of Petra with a blanket pardon and perhaps even a stipulation indicating that the Remnant may have any one major city of their own choosing, or remain in Petra and enjoy a land grant of some territory around the city. This tactic would, of course, benefit from cutting Petran power and internet a few weeks prior, maybe deploy the riot control assets and use them once or twice to make the point that they are an option, and then finally make the offer once the Petrans have had time to resent pre-modern living conditions.

It would allow Carpathia to remain in control of most of the world, derail prophecy, and possibly even enlist Christian Remnant help in recovering from the events of the Apocalypse; the offer should be genuine, and the Unity Army demobilized back to where a hypothetical Petran land grant would end (or demobilized entirely and deployed for civil protection duties). This all but guarantees Carpathia a major PR victory; if the Petrans accept, he has traded the safety of Earth and his own rule of it for what is likely to remain an insignificant enclave in the middle of a culture focused on reconstruction, and asset at best, and a curiosity at worst. If the Petrans refuse, he can come across to his own people - and by any objective measure - as the more reasonable party, with the added bonus that the Remnant enclave would remain in an area that is already more or less fortified and under control.

Taking the long view, short of extreme cultural models prevailing, most historians would have to admit that a force fighting with Biblical plagues that slayed millions and destroyed an ecosystem, and a force fighting with riot control systems intended to minimize casualties, are most assuredly not on the same moral standing - another PR coup for a sane Carpathia.

In conclusion, the siege of Petra was almost entirely Carpathia's to lose - Carpathia's inability to derail prophecy is in good part due to his own arrogance; his stated aim was always to follow the prophecies and then derail them at the last minute, but he failed to do the necessary prep work to do so, spent time and resources grandstanding rather than advancing his goal, and much like every losing general in a guerrilla fight, allowed himself to believe that conventional tactics would win an unconventional war. Fancying himself Caesar in Gaul, and forgetting that Caesar's victories were largely due to finesse rather than overwhelming forces, he ended up Nixon in Viet Nam. Carpathia loses because he is dumb, not because he is evil, and I credit LaHaye and Jenkins for making this point in a nuanced way.

From a story standpoint, another interesting question is, what might Carpathia do AFTER winning, assuming any one of these strategies worked?

An insane, Bronze-Age mindset Carpathia would likely allow the situation to degenerate into warlordism; Jesus might still come back at any time, or the chain of Biblical prophecies might be broken; Carpathia may be in charge of the world, but it's a dying world - starvation has reared its ugly head again, the ecosystem is compromised, and what modern facilities remain would not last very long. Before long, Carpathia might find himself nominally in charge of a Mad Max style wasteland, with little effective power beyond the armed reach of his personal guard. At least, if his field commander had chosen the "nonlethal" stratagem to open up Petra, Carpathia would have a speaker truck to rally his warband with.

A sane Carpathia would funnel all the remaining Unity Army resources into reconstruction. By the end of his lifespan - let's say the late 2030s - the world would be unified, well on the way to recovery, and quite possibly operated by an efficient secular government if Carpathia's initial promises are to be believed; humanity would trade some freedom of religion for a technological utopia. (This might be a good prologue to the Underground Zealot series, actually).