Let’s say that every other nation that has an army that is worth a damn suddenly decided to collectively attack the U.S. How much of a fight could the U.S. put up. Would it possibly survive? How long would the US. last? Assume that the majority of our citizens are actively for us winning the war. What would the results be in Nukes are involved?
I think the United States would survive indefinitely. It would take a long time for other countries to catch up to our aviation technology, and without the skies there is no invasion. Plus, I think the US Navy would dominate the seas for the foreseeable future. Eventually they would have to pull back to coastal waters, but again, I don’t see them being beaten. If the World declared war on the U.S. I would expect that we would quickly take over Canada, Mexico, and Central America down to the Panama Canal. Attacking across the 100 miles or so would be nearly impossible, and since the U.S. controls the air and sea, no water landing could take place.
If nukes were involved everyone dies.
I understand that the US militay spending is more than the rest of the world combined. That should give you a starting point.
The nations invading the US? zero chance.
I will assume that trying to expand would be a bad move (see Iraq)
The question then is, how long could the US survive a siege?
The US would survive but it wouldnt be pretty. The trade embargo that would be place would be more damaging than the military attacks…so much of what we depend on is built overseas.
I mean…what the hell would we do without coffee…Kona is too damn expensive. We’d have to invade mexico just to get coffee.
Well…
I have over 1000 pounds of coffee saved back, but the rest of you people will just have to sleep more.
Well, in a siege, you will not be getting any oil or gas from outside.
Given that US domestic oil production has been in decline for the past thirty years, and Canada/Mexico production is close to peaking, I forsee problems. Time to build CANDU reactors from the plans you acquired when you captured Ottawa, and electrify your transportation system. At the same time, you can switch your farming to organic, and implement a closed field-to-table-to-compost-to-field nutrient cycle.
That will allow you to stop importing oil and stop using natural gas for fertilizer, and thus reserve your oil and gas for your military needs.
Maybe we could just pretend theres a siege…
It makes sense in so many different ways, it’s scary!
A LONG time. The advantages of geography and the state of the US armed forces (the largest airforce in the world is the USAF, the second largest is the US Navy…
Though IMO “indefinitely” is probably a stretch. In really protacted "total war"eventually the industrial might and population size of the rest of the world would take it toll just as it did in other conflicts.
That depends on how ruthless we are willing to be. If we can imagine a world where all nations agree to attack us without using nukes (or bioweapons, let’s say,) we can imagine a world where we are willing to kill the entire population rather than merely take over the enemy’s territory.
It would be severely unethical (unless of course every single foreign person, rather than just every nation, were against us,) but we would indeed be able to slowly expand our control of the land southward and northward - there’s only so many places to hide millions of people.
yes but where do you get the people to control these lands? If you take, say, Mexico and wipe the entire population, what have you gained?. Even assuming that most of your population dedicated to commerce and service can be “repurposed” to production (and good luck with that), there is only so much extra land you can take over. I don’t believe there is enough time for the population to grow to meet the demand for new workers. Heck, even to re-educate them we might be short of time.
And the minute you invade Mexico, the siege becomes an invasion. Troops would start massing in Canada and Central America and then it is all out 300 million vs 6 billion.
Even with the US superiority to control air and sea (which we might be overestimating), the numbers are not looking pretty and even if we “won” the American lifestyle would be gone for good.
How do troops mass in Canada and Central America?
The troops would have to get their either by sea or by air. Air transport would be incredibly expensive and airliners are easily shot down by US fighters. Sea transports can carry a lot more, but are also vulnerable to submarines and surface naval forces.
There is no chance of landing an invasion force even in Central America or Canada until achieving near total air superiority and naval superiority. That’s not going to happen any time soon. And even if the invaders could land troops how can they keep them supplied? How long is it going to take them to march from Costa Rica to Texas?
An interesting question would be, "What happens when the American (and the quickly controlled Canadian) farm sector is removed from the global food supply?”
One more thing.
These “who would win in a war between X and Y?” threads are often meaningless, because there is no reasonable scenario describing why the war would occur, and what the war aims of the various nations are.
So, who would win in a war between the United States and Iraq? It depends on what you mean by “win”. What do we hope to accomplish by starting a war with Iraq? What does Iraq hope to accomplish by starting a war agains the US?
If your scenario pretty much requires the entire population of the world to have alien mind-control slugs implanted at the base of their brain to get them to fight each other it’s not exactly a realistic scenario.
So why in the world do Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China, and Canada declare war on America? If we’re talking about a future scenario with a hypothetical fascist America being premptively attacked by a democratic Eurasian Union, or a bastion of democracy United States as the last holdout to a fascist Eurasian Empire there’s no way to answer the question because the world economy and world global relations will be transformed long before open war breaks out.
We’d have to ask ourselves, how did this fascist Eurasian Empire come about? How does it control the population? What internal contradictions does it have? Or, how does America become fascist? Would this be possible without destroying the American economy, either as a precursor to fascism or as a result of fascism?
Any question that requires mass mind control (like, “What would happen if every country in the world decided to attack the United States?”) isn’t really answerable, since if you’ve got mass mind control why aren’t you using your mind control rays/parasites against the enemy instead of conventional weapons?
You silly, we will have invented gene therapy that prevents Americans from falling victim to 1920’s-style “Mind Control Rays.”
The entire rest of the world vs. the US? A billion Chinese, and a billion Indians backed by Japanese and Europen technology? The invasion would be pretty messy, but they can just keep throwing people at us. If the rest of the world is fully mobilized, I don’t see how the US could last more than a few years.
It’s the occupation that would be a bitch. We get cranky when our rights are infringed, and everyone has a gun.
As stated our armed forces are vast, but how quick could we pull back our army? A large and very important part of our army is stationed overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, around the Middle-East, Korea and I believe we still have a presence in Europe. We would need to reactivated all our retired military and institute a massive draft ASAP. Our Navy and Air Force however would defend our shores and borders from any large scale attack for a very long time. Long enough in my opinion to re-industrialize WWII style.
I think we might. I question if Canada would ever truly go against us or try to maintain neutrality. I have the same thought for the UK and Oz. I think the largest threat is from of course Nuke/Bio, but if we put this aside, then terrorism. We can stop armies and invasions, but how do we stop a stream of terrorist and spies from causing massive damage? This might be our greatest challenge.
We have the ability to feed our people. We have plenty of resources. We have no shortages except oil. I think we could last until the world built up a strong enough military to overwhelm us. As a key feature of our military is the incredibly strong Air Craft Carrier fleets, we could continually assault any dry docks building Navy units and go pretty far inland against Air Craft builders. We have the most eyes in the sky and could probably open the defense by knocking out all other satellites from orbit.
Many nations would begin to starve without our excess grain and if we concentrate on ending shipping around the world, the numbers grow to scary proportions. In conventional warfare, I think the US might be able to win.
BTW: we can roll back out six or more Super Carriers quicker than the rest of the world could build them. We can also roll the BBs and many smaller ships back into duty.
**The end of the world! ** There are too many nukes and too many biological weapons. It would be your basic end of civilization scenario. We could not stop an all out attack and if we retaliated, we would take out most of the world.
Jim
Question: Granted that US dominates the sea and air, but how large are our fuel stocks to maintain that dominance?
I recall reading back in the '90s after the end of the Cold War that our troops only had supplies (fuel, ammo, food, etc.) to last 30 days if a full-scale war had broken out with the Soviet Union. Neither side had the resources for a full-blown invasion, just enough to counterattack and establish a front. Then it would have been a race to see who could ramp up military production the fastest (though if nukes were involved, that wouldn’t matter much.) Has that figure changed much since then?
And our economy is so oil-dependant now, that if the US devoted enough of its production to military use to maintain its superiority, it seems likely that it would cripple the rest of the economy. Things would get ugly quick on the domestic front if everyones car became a giant paperweight overnight.
[QUOTE=Smooth Jack]
The entire rest of the world vs. the US? A billion Chinese, and a billion Indians backed by Japanese and Europen technology? The invasion would be pretty messy, but they can just keep throwing people at us. If the rest of the world is fully mobilized, I don’t see how the US could last more than a few years.
[QUOTE]
Those billion Chinese can’t get across the 100 or so miles of the Taiwan Straits to take on those 20 million taiwanese…
No it wouldn’t. Half of them can even bother to vote (unless you’re talking about American Idol). I’ll bet you could invade the USA and 1/3 of the people wouldn’t even know about it (or care that much if they did).
Just provide cheap gas and make sure the malls are open. A mass propaganda campain would also do wonders. Turn the war into a reality TV show and they’ll be glued to the TV instead of out fighting.
People in the US talk loud and proud, but the bulk of them would fall in line as long as they got something out of it or it didn’t effect them directly.
Of course, that figure is heavily affected by the price index of goods and labour in the United States. An American soldier is paid many times more than most nations’ soldiers. Spending doesn’t precisely map to capability.
If the world were to devolve into some cold war, World vs. USA, and you gave the world some time to build up its forces, of course they’re going to win. At present it would be hard to affect a successful invasion of the USA because the distances are just so great and nobody has a navy that big, but given time it’s preposterous to suggest it can’t be done.
If things go nuclear, well, of course, everyone loses. The U.S. cannot prevent a nuclear holocaust and the rest of the world can’t prevent a retaliation.
Seven:
This is the second or third time I’ve seen this claimed recently, and it strikes me as being remarkably stupid. No offense, but you’re making the mistake, as others have, of presuming that Americans are fundamentally different from other people. They are not.
The reason Americans are relatively apathetic now is because they have little reason not to be; life in the U.S. is sweet, and for all the Bush administration’s baloney, few people really feel threatened. If bombs started falling everywhere and people felt threatened, their attitudes and behaviour would change, because they would no longer have reason to be apathetic.
Besides, what popular uprising has ever had half the people take up arms? If five percent of the U.S. population actively opposed an occupation, the situation would be out of control in three days.