True, their damage potential is limited relative to a conventional blitz, but Papers Please was long ago; Fortify hadn't even been nerfed at that point. And Arrgh survived that war along with I don't even know how many other wars.
Extorting is even better than turreting, sure, but turreting is awesome and that's a fact
This kind of thing has been suggested before, and the primary problem is that national approval doesn't have a cap, so anyone that's been through a good global war either has upwards of +400% or below -800% approval rating and that doesn't even make sense. Basically, we'd have to rejigger the way approval works first.